From Midnight to Guntown: True Crime Stories from a Federal Prosecutor in Mississippi

Preface

xiii Preface The idea for this book came from a good source: singer/songwriter Willie Nelson. Several years ago, I was attending a seminar in Austin, Texas, when my old friend and fellow prosecutor, James Tucker, said, “Meet me at the back door of the hotel at precisely 6:00 p.m., and don’t tell anyone where we’re going.” The second part was easy—I had no idea where we were going. At the appointed hour, James ushered me into his rental car with two other old friends: Lee Radek, chief of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, and Marshall Jarrett, head of the Office of Professional Responsibility, the dreaded ethics watchdog of DOJ. Was I in trouble? Somehow I didn’t think so. James said, “We’re headed to Willie Nelson’s ranch for a barbecue. My daughter married Willie’s nephew.” It was a memorable evening. Willie and his nephew played speed chess on a lighted board while we ate barbecue under the stars and his sister and his wife and their two little boys kept things lively. One thing did worry me at first: How would Willie Nelson feel about being surrounded by Feds after his well-publicized troubles with the IRS? Turns out it was no problem. We began swapping courtroom war stories . Willie liked my stories about incompetent bank robbers like the one whose getaway car wouldn’t start and the one who wrote his demand note on the back of his personal check. The next day, as we were leaving, Willie told James, “That fellow from Mississippi who tells those stories. Bring him back. He should write a book.” That comment got me started. I began to keep records of our more interesting cases—not only the bank robbers, but the scam artists, hit men, protected witnesses, colorful informants, defendants with funny nicknames, over-the-top investigators, and those defendants who had a certain roguish charm. Civic clubs and book clubs began to invite me xiv Preface to tell them war stories. By the time I retired in 2007, I had more than thirty-five boxes of files full of trial stories—some funny, some tragic, all unique in a Faulknerian way. Several of the characters have since had whole books written about them like Dickie Scruggs, Emmett Till, Chicago gang leader Jeff Fort and Paddy Mitchell, leader of the most successful bank robbery gang of the twentieth century, the guys who wore rubber masks of ex-presidents like Mitchell in the Nixon mask proclaiming during a robbery, “I am not a crook.” That part of their act was portrayed in the movie Point Break with Patrick Swayze. I first started telling bank robber stories earlier when Bill Ferris, director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at Ole Miss, asked me to give a talk on them. For a title I suggested “Bank Robbers I’ve Known.” Bill said, “Oh, no, no. It has to be academic-sounding.” He said, tongue-in-cheek, “They think we are a serious University department , you know.” The next day I proposed, “Prologomena to a Cultural Study of the Southern Bank Robber.” He liked it. Bill loves stories and is himself a great storyteller which led to his being named Director of the National Endowment for the Humanities. From that post, he gave great support to my first book, a biography of Thomas Jefferson and his love of fine wines. The basic thesis for the Southern Culture lecture was to contrast northern and southern bank robbers, a takeoff on President Kennedy ’s famous remark about Washington, D.C., being a combination of “southern efficiency and northern charm.” In my experience, the typical northern bank robber would enter a bank, rudely cut in line, curse the tellers, and threaten to kill anyone who resisted. He would then successfully escape with the loot. The typical southern bank robber, by contrast , would walk calmly into the bank; wait politely in line; say, “Please give me all your money”; thank the teller; leave quietly; and get into his old broken-down getaway car—which wouldn’t start. Variations on that theme are recounted throughout this book. The title From Midnight to Guntown came to me in 1989 when the Justice Department assigned me the task of writing a history of our office for a volume commemorating the two hundredth anniversary of the U.S. District Attorneys. In compiling the history, I was...