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BULLETS, BOMBS AND FAST TALK
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OF FBI WAR STORIES
By James Botting
Potomac Books, Inc.
Copyright © 2008 Potomac Books, Inc.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59797-244-4
Chapter One
"JUST A GODDAMN YANKEE"
It was 1971, one of those miserable, humid, Mississippi days in August when the mosquitoes get up early and the sweat trickles down the middle of your back before you even pull out of the driveway in the morning. I was a rookie FBI agent assigned to the Resident Agency in Oxford, in the northwestern part of the state. A fellow agent, Ken Hughes, and I were sitting in the kitchen of the county sheriff's office discussing our plans for the day. In this county, you stopped by the sheriff's office to say hello and tell him what you were planning to do. That's the way it was in Mississippi back then even if you were the FBI. You didn't mess with the county sheriff.
The sheriff offered us breakfast, but I could never eat anything in a jail thinking about what the trustees in the kitchen could put in it. And the smell of burned bacon was starting to make me nauseous. Every sheriff's office in Mississippi always smelled like burned bacon.
As a huge black trustee with ripples in the back of his neck brought us a second cup of coffee, the sheriff turned to Ken. He was short and muscular, about as wide as he was tall, and when he shook your hand he stared you in the eye and squeezed it like he was trying to force blood out of your eyes. If you relaxed your grip he'd laugh and clamp on tighter.
"Ah, Ken, we got us a prisoner out back I'd like you to help us interview."
Ken eyed the sheriff cautiously, "Oh yeah?"
"Yeah, he says he's a traveling preacher man, but, ah, we don't think so 'cause he's got a shit load of them girlie books in the trunk of his car."
We all laughed.
"When did you pick him up?"
"'Bout a week ago," the sheriff said. "Passed out drunk in his car in the back parking lot of the Jitney Jungle." The Jitney Jungle was a local grocery chain primarily patronized by blacks. "Now what the hell would a cracker like him be doing over there?"
A week ago? He hadn't been interviewed or charged with a crime or even gone to court yet? My Mississippi education was beginning.
"What'd you arrest him for?"
The sheriff grinned and hesitated. Then after a few seconds, he snorted. "J.D.L.R."
Both he and Ken laughed. Ken looked at me, "Know what he means?"
I racked my brain trying to remember my legal training in the FBI Academy but was embarrassed to admit that I couldn't recall. I shook my head, trying not to feel stupid.
They both laughed again.
"Another goddamn Yankee, Ken," the sheriff said, looking at me and shaking his head. "At least he ain't a Jew boy from New York like the last one you brought around." He grinned at me, pleased with himself. Years of chewing Red Man had done its job and he needed some serious dental work. His breath could have started a fire.
"J.D.L.R.," he chuckled again. He looked from Ken to me with small blue pig eyes rimmed in red. I suspected he could be meaner than a snake.
"Okay, what's 'J.D.L.R.'?"
He hesitated, looked over at Ken and then back at me, and suddenly spit it out.
"Jes' Doan' Look Right."
We all laughed, although I couldn't believe his prisoner had been in the county jail for a week just because he didn't "look right." After Ken and I stopped laughing, we waited for a while for the sheriff to stop.
For several minutes, the sheriff tried to convince Ken that the prisoner had probably transported pornography interstate, which would be a federal crime and could justify the FBI getting involved. But Ken was wary of becoming involved in local jurisdiction cases, especially those with questionable arrests, interrogations, and searches. He politely but firmly refused to get involved and the sheriff finally relented.
"Okay, what the hell, then we'll just charge him with disorderly conduct or somethin'," he said. "Get the judge in here, Leonard," he called to the trustee. "We'll throw his perverted ass outta the county."
With that Leonard walked out to the front porch of the office and woke up a wizened old man in bib overalls sleeping in a rocker under a tired sign that read "Sheriff's Office." With caution and obvious respect, the huge black trustee awakened the Justice of the Peace gently and spoke a few words to him. The old man opened his eyes, focused his vision, straightened his hat, and began to slide out of the rocker. With great effort but refusing assistance from the trustee, he stood erect, gradually turned around, and shuffled into the office.
Leonard set up the courtroom. He spun a large desk around in the hallway, pushed an upright chair with a pillow on the seat behind the desk, placed a Mississippi flag on one side, and an American flag on the other. With a flair suggesting that he had done this before, he produced a gavel from inside the desk and wiped it off on his striped pants. At the conclusion of these preparations, he ushered the judge into his seat. Ken and I took our seats in the front row of the courtroom by turning our chairs around in the kitchen.
The sheriff then treated the judge to a detailed briefing of the prisoner, the crime, and the investigation, all of which lasted about a minute. The judge nodded, rubbed each eye methodically for several minutes, readjusted his glasses, and assumed a regal bearing.
"Bring me the prisoner."
A few minutes later, Leonard returned with a disheveled white guy about forty-five years old, alcoholic-skinny, wearing green Sears work pants, a dirty white t-shirt, five or six days of beard, and shoes with no laces. He was handcuffed with his hands in front and he shuffled in the shoes to keep them on. He was a classic Joe Shit the Ragman, the kind of drunk that opens the bar at eight in the morning, drinks draft beer and double shots of Wild Turkey, and sleeps in the back seat of his car three or four nights a week. Just this side of homeless. He looked like he'd had been arrested about twice a week since he was fifteen and as guilty as homemade sin. He oozed a life as wasted and used up as an old mattress lying alongside the freeway.
Leonard marched him up in front of the judge and stood behind him. The judge spoke.
"All right now, boy, I understand you been up to no good around here. The sheriff has advised me that you been peddling them girlie books and smut to the children of this here fine county, pervertin' their young minds. Your kind is what's wrong with America. Now we're also sick and tired of you stinkin' up our county jail."
The guy stood there, weaving back and forth.
"So we're going to offer you a deal, son. You can plead guilty to disorderly conduct right here and now, and your plea will be accepted by the court. Most likely you will be sentenced to five days in the county jail, which you done now, and so, of course, we'd be giving you credit for your time served. A stipulation of your plea will be that you will be required to leave the county. Forthwith!" The judge seemed to enjoy the sound and legality of "Forthwith."
"Now, of course, if you ain't interested in this here deal, which I personally consider to be very magnanimous on my part, you can plead not guilty, in which case you will be returned to your cell here to wait for the arrival of the circuit judge, who will conduct a trial. Now it's incumbent upon me to advise you that the circuit judge, ah, he comes by 'bout every month or two, and he come by just last week, so now it may be a while."
Joe Shit the Ragman tried to focus on the judge. The mental fog created in a Mississippi county jail was beginning to clear. I noticed that he had brought an aroma into the room that made my eyes burn and felt like something infectious that was going to stick to my clothes.
"What's it gonna be, boy?" The judge sounded aggravated having to wait for an answer.
At this point, the sheriff jumped in. "Judge, I do believe this dumb shit is too goddamn stupid to understand the gift you're offering to him. What's the matter with you, boy?" He moved towards him and I thought for sure he was going to slap him upside the head.
The prisoner finally spoke. "I'll take the deal."
"You guilty now, right, boy?" asked the sheriff, suddenly sounding like he needed to be convinced.
"Yeah, I guess so." he muttered. It was the shortest confession I was to hear in my entire career.
Bam! The judge slammed his gavel down on the desk.
"Guilty of disorderly conduct. The court accepts the defendant's plea. Five days custody, time served. And you are hereby ordered to depart the county. Forthwith!" The fourteen dollars in the prisoner's brown paper bag held by Leonard would be used to pay "court costs."
The sheriff smiled at Ken and me as if he had just solved the crime of the century.
Leonard escorted the prisoner down the hall and sent him out the door. My guess is he hustled out of the county without once looking over his shoulder or worrying about who now had possession of his "girlie books."
I couldn't believe what I had just seen. Mississippi justice. This was the Twilight Zone. It was 1971 and J. Edgar Hoover had sentenced me to a year in Mississippi. Having been born and raised in Michigan, I wasn't a Southerner. I was "nothin' but a goddamn Yankee."
"Y'all just don't understand. You're a goddamn Yankee, boy." I was to hear it a hundred times that year. Rarely used to embarrass, it was more often used to explain why I just didn't understand the Mississippi interpretation of racial issues. Race permeated everything in Mississippi from police brutality to discrimination in housing, from voter fraud to indentured servants, from segregated schools to white and black drinking fountains, and to Ku Klux Klansmen.
It was another year before I was able to escape to Los Angeles, but the Mississippi memories would be seared into my personal history forever.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from BULLETS, BOMBS AND FAST TALK by James Botting Copyright © 2008 by Potomac Books, Inc.. Excerpted by permission.
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