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When Good Men Do Nothing
The Assassination of Albert Patterson
By Alan Grady The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 2003 The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8996-3
CHAPTER 1
Albert Patterson and Phenix City
Gamblers and other desperate men, here find security from their numbers ... [the] people hold them in terror, yet dare not refuse them a hiding place.
Tyrone Power, 1833
Shortly before 9:00 on the night of June 18, 1954, Albert Patterson left his law office in Phenix City's Coulter Building and headed home. Before turning the lights off, the sixty-year-old attorney had laid a stack of signed thank-you notes on his secretary's typewriter. In the letters, about seventy-five in number, Patterson expressed his appreciation to key supporters across the state for their help in his recent nomination as Alabama attorney general. These formalities should have marked the end of a particularly hard-fought campaign, but Patterson knew better. The real battle was just beginning.
Partially crippled by a World War I injury that rendered his right leg practically useless, Patterson limped down the stairs. After reaching the screen door that opened to Fifth Avenue, he turned left toward his car, which was parked in the adjoining alley. Within moments, gunshots rang out from the direction of Patterson's car, startling passersby. Those familiar with Patterson's deliberate gait were surprised to see him reeling from the alley a few seconds later without his ever-present cane. After stumbling a few steps back toward his office, he collapsed on the sidewalk and died.
Phenix City, Alabama, was out of control in 1954. Although gambling and prostitution were illegal throughout the state, these very attractions drew thousands to the east Alabama town, primarily U.S. Army trainees who made the short hop across the Chattahoochee River from Fort Benning, Georgia. In Phenix City: The Wickedest City in America, Edwin Strickland and Gene Wortsman described the town as "an unending series of night clubs, honky tonks, clip joints, B-girl bars, whorehouses, and gambling casinos. Every highway leading into the city was lined with the institutions, and they were scattered throughout the residential districts. You could climb a tall tree, spit in any direction, and where the wind wafted the splutter, there you would find organized crime, corruption, sex and human depravity." While some laughed at the dramatic description, no one, by the time the book was published in March 1955, doubted its accuracy.
Phenix City's problems had been in the making even before the area came under the authority of the United States. When Columbus, Georgia, was established in 1828, the west bank of the Chattahoochee remained part of Indian Territory. Because neither the United States nor the state of Georgia had jurisdiction in the Creek Nation, it was literally a separate country, a sanctuary for a different kind of pioneer, one on the run. From the beginning, law in Phenix City was defined by might.
The village that sprang up across from Columbus had an official name, Girard, in honor of the wealthy Philadelphia philanthropist and slave dealer Stephen Girard. In late 1832, nine months after the Creeks ceded the area, the Alabama Legislature created Russell County, named after the famous Indian fighter Colonel Gilbert Christian Russell, with Girard as the first county seat. As early as 1833, it was referred to by a more biblical name: Sodom. In that year, visiting Irish actor Tyrone Power gave this impression of the area: "On the Alabama side we found ourselves within a wild-looking village, scattered through the edge of the forest, bearing the unattractive name of Sodom; few of its denizens were yet stirring; they are composed chiefly of 'minions o' the moon, outlaws from the neighboring States. Gamblers and other desperate men, here find security from their numbers, and from the vicinity of a thinly inhabited Indian country, where people hold them in terror, yet dare not refuse them a hiding place."
Girard lost its status as county seat in 1839 when it was transferred to Crocketsville (present-day Crawford). The county officials and lawyers left town, taking with them much of the impetus for Phenix City's early reform movement. Girard was doomed not only to retarded growth — it would not incorporate until 1890 — but also to retaining its original reputation as a sin city.
In 1866 the state legislature created Lee County out of the northern part of Russell County, splitting Girard as it did so. People called Girard's northern part Brownville, incorporated in 1883, but postal authorities rejected the town's application for a post office because there was already a town by that name in Tuscaloosa County. For a few years, townspeople opted for the name Lively because of the boisterous saloons frequented by the Alabama textile workers on their way home from the Columbus mills. In 1889 the legislature officially changed Lively's name to Phenix City.
Unlike the more industrialized Columbus, Girard — and indeed all of Russell County — relied on farming and liquor as its principal sources of income. At the turn of the century, Girard was home to two major whiskey warehouses, shipping their stock throughout the Southeast and as far away as New York and Boston. But the whiskey interests met increasing political opposition from prohibitionists, who by 1909 were in the forefront of a move to dry up Alabama. In 1914 they gained control of the legislature, and soon afterward they passed a law prohibiting the sale of alcohol. For Girard and Russell County businessmen, this meant ignoring the law or losing everything they had.
They chose the former. Aware of the tremendous unpopularity of the law, local officials reached an unspoken agreement with the whiskey interests. Russell County grand juries routinely indicted violators, who would then pay bond. When the accused failed to show for trial, the county would pocket the forfeited surety. It seemed like a reasonable arrangement, but technically it qualified as political corruption. Whatever it was called, it was the beginning of a long history of selective law enforcement in Girard and Russell County.
Unfortunately for the Russell County distributors, local option was not an option. By the summer of 1916, prohibitionist groups were demanding state intervention in east Alabama, and the first great Russell County cleanup was under way. At the direction of the Alabama Supreme Court, Circuit Judge A. H. Alston of Clayton and the state attorney general, Logan Martin, went to Seale, the county seat since 1868, and took over the local judiciary. On August 8, Alston impaneled a new grand jury and instructed it to destroy "for once and all time" lawlessness in Russell County and to investigate collusion between bootleggers and local officials.
The resulting court proceedings were swift, merciless, and judicially questionable. Those indicted were brought to trial as soon as the grand jury voted a true bill, usually less than three hours. After the first two indictees received a hefty $2,500 fine, many of the others fled, hoping for a better day to appear before the bar. Alston declared them fugitives and confiscated their holdings.
State militia entered Girard on August 10 and began hauling out bottles, kegs, and casks from the warehouses and anywhere else they could be found; these they assembled at the intersection of Seale Road and Broad Street. All day long, militiamen, special deputy sheriffs, and hired laborers destroyed some eight hundred casks of beer and an equal number of barrels of whiskey. Some workers fainted from the fumes, which could be smelled in eastern Columbus, two miles away. Eventually, more than a quarter of a million dollars' worth of illegal alcohol was destroyed during the cleanup, and several prominent citizens were ruined in the process. And as a result of the grand jury's investigation into political corruption, almost every city and county official resigned his office.
The 1916 cleanup might have been longer lived had it not been for the establishment two years later of Fort Benning, the U.S. Army infantry-training school just outside Columbus. Even as the recruits were moving into the tents and thrown-together buildings, bootleg liquor was again flowing freely in Girard. Arriving doughboys quickly learned that a good time could be found on the Alabama side and crossed the Chattahoochee in droves. By the time the Roaring Twenties arrived, Martin's cleanup had completely unraveled and Girard was once again living down to its reputation.
Local reformers hit upon a new idea to smooth out Girard's rough edges. They proposed to the legislature that the town be merged with Phenix City, which had grown more civilized and subdued in the half century since it was cut off from Girard. The legislature complied, and the tainted name of Girard disappeared. In 1935 a local referendum mandated that the county seat be moved from Seale to Phenix City, which now held over half the county's population. Instead of cleaning up Girard, however, the merger fouled Phenix City. And the relocation had another unintended effect. There was now no distance between the corruption of the city and county governments. The illegal operations occurred within sight of not only city hall but the county courthouse as well.
The 1930s saw another step in the consolidation of Phenix City graft and corruption. Faced with bankruptcy during the Great Depression, the city fathers, headed by Commissioner (and soon-to-be mayor) Homer D. Cobb, effected a policy of compromise with the gangsters. Confronted on the one hand by righteous citizens, who were outraged by the outright bribery of local officials, and on the other hand by Phenix City gamblers, who represented one of the few industries operating in the black, Cobb sought to keep both sides happy. To soothe the reformers, city hall routinely brought cases against the gambling establishments and brothels. The lawbreakers would either be heavily fined or, if they declined to show up in court, forfeit a hefty bond to the city. Licenses were rarely revoked outright, but if they were the standard period was only thirty days. This arrangement allowed local officials to deny that they were allowing the rackets to operate, but at the same time, it permitted the establishments to operate within a predictable system of fines and fees. In effect, the city had reached an agreement with local gangsters in which gambling, prostitution, and liquor laws would be selectively enforced in exchange for contributions to the local treasury — essentially a duplication of the system in Girard before the 1916 cleanup. Cobb's tenure also saw the establishment of the Phenix City political machine, which, having squelched his earlier runs for sheriff, now supported him for commissioner. After that, he never lost another election. Nor did anyone else who played ball.
By the mid-1930s, Phenix City corruption was institutionalized. Newspapers or local reformers would occasionally make waves, but no serious scrutiny occurred on the state level. Vice continued to flourish, partly because the gangsters were shrewd businessmen who knew how to beat a retreat when the heat was turned up. When a reporter published an exposé, or when the grand jury met, or possibly during election time, the city police or the county sheriff would raid an establishment, make a few arrests, and confiscate gambling paraphernalia. Those arrested, usually warned well in advance, paid their fine or forfeited their bond. If public scrutiny was particularly intense, an establishment might even be shut down, in which case the proprietor would set up shop elsewhere, sometimes just down the street. The gambling equipment which authorities confiscated and destroyed with great fanfare was usually worn out and no longer serviceable. Oftentimes, the slot machines hauled into the city's vacant lot had been cannibalized for parts and were only ornate metal shells. The police never seemed to notice. For the reformers, this system contributed to the false impression of action. Local authorities could rightly claim they took action against gamblers whenever it was brought to their attention, and the gamblers gained a convenient way to get rid of their old equipment.
Nor did the Phenix City machine have to worry about reform groups outside the county. Nationally, Prohibition had failed, and the watchdog groups that had instigated the 1916 cleanup were gone. The indifference of state authorities was demonstrated in April 1938 when an overflow crowd caused the collapse of the Ritz Café during an "Old Reliable" lottery drawing, killing twenty-four and injuring eighty-three. Governor Bibb Graves sent a detachment of National Guard troops to help keep order but took no other action, even though it was clear that Phenix City had returned to its old ways.
With the outbreak of World War II, the number of recruits at Fort Benning mushroomed to nearly eighty thousand. Across the river, Phenix City's income grew proportionally. Fort Benning officials, concerned with the systematic fleecing of young infantrymen, estimated that about 80 percent of its personnel frequented Phenix City, spending more than half their pay there. Authors Strickland and Wortsman found it ironic that "the toughest soldiers in the world were trained at Fort Benning and taken for suckers in the clip joints of Phenix." Secretary of War Henry Stimson termed Phenix City the "Wickedest City in America." Another military official who confronted Phenix City was General George Patton, who, while assigned to the 2nd Armored Division at Fort Benning in 1940, proposed a drastic remedy to the problem of Phenix City: razing the town with armored weaponry.
Although the flood of dollars increased the economic and political strength of the gangsters, Mayor Cobb was able to retain control of the situation and never let them forget who was boss. After Cobb, however, it was the gangsters, not the elected officials, who ran the local machine. Years later, Strickland and Wortsman would claim the influence of the Phenix City machine was "like the tentacles of a giant octopus, reach[ing] into other counties as well as the marbled halls of state office buildings in Montgomery." Despite obvious exaggeration, there is a kernel of truth here. The authors imply that Phenix City and Russell County enjoyed a political sway on state politics disproportionate to that of other local governments, but that is not a complete picture. Most states had either a two-party system or, lacking party discipline, political factions centered on single personalities, as was the case in Louisiana and Virginia. Alabama, with its monolithic Democratic Party and constitutional prohibitions against immediate succession in most political offices, had neither. As a result, the county political organizations held the real power in statewide elections. Inevitably, candidates came to the county courthouses, hat in hand, to win the blessing and influence of the local political leader. As such, Russell County was only one of sixty-seven political machines with which statewide candidates had to negotiate.
Another erroneous assumption in regard to Phenix City politics is that the state government refused to interfere in Phenix City because the local political machine, primarily through vote fraud, delivered the local vote to winning gubernatorial candidates. Vote fraud was not uncommon in Alabama politics: in the 1954 Democratic primary alone, public charges of vote fraud were made in at least eleven counties, with resulting grand jury investigations in Blount, St. Clair, Escambia, and Lawrence, as well as Russell and Jefferson Counties. The concentration of political influence at the local level, precisely at the point where votes were counted and the integrity of the ballot was policed, provided an almost irresistible temptation to manipulate ballots at almost every election throughout the state, and with only the threat of a misdemeanor charge on those rare occasions where officials were caught. In addition, Russell County "voted right" only four times in the nine Democratic Party primaries for governor held from 1918 to 1954, hardly enough to maintain a consistently grateful statehouse. This is not to say that Phenix City officials didn't commit vote fraud on behalf of their chosen candidates for governor — they most certainly did — but only that they weren't very good at it.
What set the Russell County political community apart from the rest of Alabama was who was in charge. In most of the state's sixty-seven counties it was the popularly elected probate judge who headed the local political organization, but in Russell County the real power was John Hoyt Shepherd, the undisputed chief of Phenix City's gambling establishment. A product of the Georgia cotton mills, Shepherd had no formal schooling yet possessed a high degree of intelligence and business acumen. Over the years Shepherd and his English-born business partner, Jimmy Matthews, made a fortune running the largest of the six main lotteries in Phenix City. They also operated the famous Bama Club, one of the few gambling establishments where the games were not fixed. Unlike most of the sucker joints in Phenix City, the Bama Club was for high rollers. One was as likely to see dice throwers from New York, Chicago, Miami, and Boston as visitors from Birmingham, Montgomery, and Dothan. The Shepherd/Matthews empire also relied heavily on slot machines, and by 1951 they owned the machines in most of Phenix City's better establishments as well as those scattered among gas stations, grocery stores, cafés, and various nightspots. For fifteen years, Shepherd ruled Phenix City like a godfather. The extent of his influence became known to the general public only in July 1954, when an anonymous source sent Phenix City reformers and reporters 214 recordings of Shepherd's telephone conversations with Russell County and Phenix City officials. In them, Shepherd could be heard choosing candidates for political office, fixing juries and grand juries, and expressing concern about competing gangsters.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from When Good Men Do Nothing by Alan Grady. Copyright © 2003 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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