Fat, dusty news clip files told how corrosive corruption had infiltrated and collapsed Governor Blanton’s administration like the swarms of country termites he’d known as a child. Blanton grew up the son of a sharecropper in rural Hardin County along the border with McNairy, where legendary sheriff Buford Pusser fought his one-man war on moonshiners and backwoods pimps, not far from the Shiloh battlefield, one of the turning points of the Civil War. Blanton’s family was so poor they kept egg-laying hens under the floorboards of their cabin. They worked their hardscrabble land with a mule-drawn plow.
Ambitious and arrogant, Blanton discovered politics as a ticket out of poverty. He worked as a schoolteacher and a state road construction contractor before serving three terms in Congress and then winning election as governor in 1974. He would go down as the most corrupt governor in Tennessee history—known to this day as the “Hillbilly Nixon.”
Selling inmate pardons and paroles was just one of several rackets. Blanton’s administration also engaged in bid-rigging, selling liquor licenses, and passing surplus state cars to political cronies. When the investigations ended, more than a dozen people in the governor’s inner circle went to prison, including his brother, his legal counsel, and his special assistant over regulatory boards. Blanton, a Democrat, served twenty-two months in federal prison for his role in a liquor license–selling scheme. To the very end, he blamed everyone but himself: The FBI—they were out to get him. The media. They smeared him. The public. They didn’t understand.
“They are stupid,” Blanton coldly told reporters near the height of his troubles in 1977, “and you haven’t done your homework.”2
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THE FBI’S NASHVILLE office first opened its case file on the Clemency for Cash probe in September 1976 after Marie Ragghianti, the bold, dark-haired chairwoman of the Tennessee Pardons and Paroles Board, came forward with some sensational allegations. She told a local district attorney she suspected someone within the administration—maybe Blanton’s legal counsel, Thomas Edward “Eddie” Sisk, maybe even Blanton himself—might be selling executive clemency. When her account made it to the desk of Hank Hillin, the hard-charging if moralistic FBI agent assigned to the case, he soon fleshed out a half-dozen examples in which money or politics seemed to have influenced a reduction in a prison sentence or helped gain other leniencies.
One case involved Roger Humphreys, convicted of murdering his ex-wife and her lover. He was sentenced to twenty to forty years for killing the couple. He did it by firing eighteen bullets from a two-shot Derringer, a horrific assault that required him to stop shooting and reload eight times. Within months of his imprisonment, however, Humphreys, the son of a leading Blanton supporter, was transferred to work release—assigned as a photographer to the Tennessee tourism department where he received a hundred dollars a month, a state car, and a credit card for assignments that included shooting pictures at ceremonies in the governor’s mansion.3
Another inmate, Eddie Dallas “Rusty” Denton, shot and killed a man in a barroom gun battle waged over a botched drug deal. In the melee, Denton’s partner in the affair, Jackie Layman, shot and killed two others. Convicted of roles in three murders, Denton received sixty years, yet quickly secured a transfer to medium security and began receiving weekend furloughs. Ineligible for parole until he served at least ten years, Denton nonetheless won favor with the Pardons and Paroles Board, which after eighteen months recommended that his sentence be reduced to time served. Agent Hillin later wrote that Denton boasted to fellow inmates that “his people” had paid $85,000 in exchange for his release from prison.*1
Hillin found the going rough as he tried to build a solid, provable case of quid pro quo—money paid directly in exchange for an official action. It came, he believed, in the case of Billy Gene Cole, a large, bearded man convicted of robbing a Red Star grocery in Chattanooga. Under an offer of immunity, he told an incredible story.
Sentenced in January 1974 to twenty-five years, Cole wasn’t eligible for parole until 1984. Yet he was released in October 1975—after just twenty-one months. As Hillin dug, he found Cole had received a visit at the state prison in Nashville in May 1975 from Bill Thompson, a reputed gambler and bootlegger with dark, slicked-back hair and bushy, Elvis-style sideburns.
Thompson had ties to the governor’s office.
He was friends with Eddie Sisk, the governor’s former campaign coordinator and current legal counsel in charge of reviewing all applications for executive clemency. Thompson told Cole he could get him out of prison—for $10,000. Cole’s wife took out a bank loan and paid $5,000. Suddenly, that August, Cole’s sentence was cut from twenty-five to ten years. Cole then paid another $5,000. Nine days later, on October 17, 1975, Cole walked away from prison on parole.
Hillin traced the scheme right back to Sisk. It happened when a second convict, Tommy Prater, said he, too, had been paying Thompson. This time there were witnesses. One watched as Thompson allegedly handed Sisk $3,000—all in hundred-dollar bills stuffed into a white envelope—at a motel directly across the street from the stern-faced lawyer’s state office.4
By the summer of 1977, Hillin, who’d amassed stacks of evidence in large files labeled Operation TennPar—shorthand for Operation Tennessee Pardons and Paroles—believed he’d cracked the case.
“I was ready for the next step, which, I felt, would be indictments,” he later wrote.5
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BUT THEN IT all caved in. That July, Blanton publicly attacked the FBI. With narrowed eyes, he told reporters the probe amounted to a political “witch hunt” orchestrated by one man—agent Hank Hillin. Days later, Hillin received a visit from a high-ranking supervisor—the investigation had been held “in abeyance.” Then, after months of delays, the Justice Department’s public integrity section in Washington decided a conviction couldn’t be sustained. “Hank, the case is dead,” Justice Department attorney Andy Reich informed Hillin in January 1978.6
Despite a DOJ review later requested by Hillin, the case imploded. That March, Reich called Hillin again.
“I’ve got bad news again and this time it’s final,” he said. On April 11, 1978, the Justice Department sent a letter to Sisk’s attorney. “Please be advised that this matter is no longer under active investigation,” it read. “Absent the receipt of additional information, we have determined that no further evidence will be presented to the grand jury.”7
Hillin would later learn that Blanton had personally spoken by telephone on three occasions the previous fall with President Jimmy Carter’s attorney general, Griffin Bell. Among other things, Blanton asked if he had any personal criminal exposure or if any of his staff members—specifically Sisk—might be facing charges. Additionally, attorneys representing Sisk had met in Washington with the Justice Department’s public integrity unit. They said Sisk had an excellent reputation and even displayed family photos of Sisk with his wife and young son.
“I never felt so cynical about politics in my life,” Hillin would later write. “We were foolish to think we could indict the lawyer for the Democratic governor, with a Democratic president in the White House.”8
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THE FBI’S CLEMENCY for Cash case almost certainly would have died on the vine if not for two men: state liquor agent Ernest Withers and strip club owner Art Baldwin. It’s a story overlooked or underplayed in the official accounts of Tennessee’s pardon-selling scandal. It’s buried in a mound of FBI paperwork, in the memories of a few prosecutors and Bureau agents, and on the voice recordings of covert wiretaps sealed away in FBI vaults collecting decades of dust.
It’s the real story of how Ray Blanton was toppled.9
Around the time Blanton and Sisk reached out from their state offices in Nashville for help from the Carter administration in Washington, Baldwin sought help, too. Two hundred miles to the west in Memphis, the once-swaggering businessman was desperately working a deal with prosecutors to stay out o
f jail. On August 22, 1977, Baldwin was convicted in federal court of cocaine distribution following a sensational trial that revealed how he’d regularly shot dice with police monitoring his clubs and plied others with booze, dance girls, even dinner certificates he passed out at Christmas. Now Baldwin faced serious trouble. Already convicted in Seattle of income tax evasion, as a second-time offender, Baldwin expected to be sentenced to as many as eighteen years. On the advice of counsel, he struck a deal. He agreed to tell federal prosecutors what he knew of official corruption in Memphis.
In a series of secret meetings that autumn, high in the eleven-story federal building overlooking the Mississippi River harbor in downtown Memphis, Baldwin spilled his story to lanky Mike Cody, the newly appointed United States attorney, and his stocky, bulldogish assistant prosecutor, W. Hickman Ewing. Under oath, with a court reporter taking down his every word, Baldwin told how he’d funneled large amounts of unrecorded cash campaign donations to Juvenile Court judge Kenneth Turner, who was running for mayor, and how he’d cosigned a home mortgage for financially struggling county commissioner Minerva Johnican.*2 He gave at least $800 cash to a young, cocky state senator named John Ford.10
Several of Baldwin’s accounts revolved around a mustachioed, slick-talking hustler named John Paul “Speedy” Murrell, known to political insiders as J.P. An African American businessman who owned a liquor store and ran a gambling operation on the side, J. P. Murrell funneled under-the-table cash to white politicians and helped deliver Memphis’s large black vote to Blanton, landing him in the governor’s mansion. Blanton, in turn, put J.P. on his patronage team, a statewide network of advisory committees—one in each of the state’s ninety-five counties—set up to screen applicants for state jobs. Each and every adviser on these committees was a Democrat. Murrell wielded exceptional power in Shelby County. Anyone in Memphis’s African American community who wanted a state job came through him.
“J.P. is as big a man as there is in Memphis as far as the governor is concerned,” Baldwin said.11
As Baldwin spoke of Murrell, his story meandered to Withers. He told the prosecutors how Murrell and Withers once offered to secure his release from the county penal farm. He declined. Another time, he gave the pair cash—as much as $5,000, he thought, he couldn’t recall the exact amount—when they visited his Raines Road strip club. The two were inseparable, he said. Baldwin said Withers often even worked the cash register at Murrell’s liquor store on Crump Boulevard near the Mississippi River bridge.12
He knew, too, of gatherings that a prominent wholesale liquor distributor hosted at his plush offices, where he mixed business and pleasure with a pool table and a wet bar. Guests included agents with the state Alcoholic Beverages Commission, the agency that regulated his businesses. One was Ernest Withers. At first, Baldwin’s stories seemed to go right past the prosecutors. They knew Withers, the affable news photographer. But they didn’t realize he’d hung up his cameras to work for the ABC.
“You remember Ernest Withers being there?” Ewing asked with seeming astonishment.
“Yes,” Baldwin replied without hesitation. “He is J.P.’s bag man now, on the ABC payroll.”
“He is on the ABC payroll?”
“Um-hmm. But he spends all of his time running errands for J.P.,” Baldwin said. In fact, he said, Withers acts almost as if he is Murrell’s secretary, deciding who meets with him and who doesn’t. “Withers is screening everybody for J.P.”13
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SIX MONTHS LATER, the FBI’s notoriously slow-moving public corruption unit began investigating Withers. In April 1978, just weeks after the Justice Department shut down agent Hillin’s clemency probe out of Nashville, agents in Memphis strapped a wire on Baldwin.*3 Soon, with a hidden FBI recorder rolling, Withers demanded three cases of liquor from Baldwin for a political rally Murrell was hosting. The impact resonated immediately with agents monitoring the conversation: here was a state policeman soliciting alcohol from a man whose nightclubs he was assigned to regulate. It would get much worse.
When Baldwin baited Withers by seeking his help releasing a young friend named Steve Hamilton from prison, the photographer-turned-cop didn’t hesitate.
“Let me go to Nashville and talk to my people,” Withers said.14
Now, the FBI intensified its investigation. It put Withers under photographic surveillance—an odd image considering what Jim had said about him shooting pictures for the FBI during the ’60s. Agents wired Baldwin with a bulky Nagra body recorder strapped under his shirt and sent him after the photographer-cop. The Bureau even obtained a limousine to increase Baldwin’s allure as a man of substance and supplied an undercover agent to pose as his chauffeur. The tape-recorded conversations mounted:
Withers and Baldwin plotted to let others out of prison and even joked about the killing they could make. As their rapport grew, Withers let Baldwin in on a secret: his contact in Nashville in the Clemency for Cash schemes was Fred Taylor, a pudgy highway patrolman assigned as the personal driver for the governor’s brother, Gene Blanton.15
Now the FBI was getting hot. Withers’s schemes ran right back to the governor’s office.
At the urging of the FBI, Baldwin pushed Withers to arrange a face-to-face meeting with Taylor. On a hot, sticky Labor Day weekend, Taylor flew to Memphis. Baldwin’s undercover chauffeur picked him up and took him to a local strip club and then, at Withers’s instructions, to room 523 of the tony Hilton Inn. Agents listened in from the room next door. When the conversation turned to Steve Hamilton, the young inmate Baldwin was trying to free as part of the FBI’s sting, Taylor and Baldwin agreed on a price: $15,000. The Hamilton family would pay the money. Baldwin said he wanted to keep $5,000 for himself. Taylor said that was fine as long as an associate—someone he called “my man” in Nashville—got the rest.16
Baldwin got Withers to set up a second meeting with Taylor, this one in a hotel near the airport.
“The greatest potential for a major breakthrough in these matters currently exists,” the FBI’s Memphis office wrote*4 in an ecstatic Teletype to headquarters that trumpeted the anticipation.17
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DRESSED IN A three-piece suit, Taylor flew in from Nashville, oblivious to the FBI agent who boarded the plane alongside him and who later watched as Taylor climbed into Baldwin’s limo and arrived at the motel. As FBI agents watched live via closed-circuit TV in the next room, Taylor and Baldwin sipped Chivas Regal and Jack Daniel’s and began to negotiate.
“We’ll put him on a work-release program down here,” Taylor said as an FBI video recorder rolled, “…with guaranteed parole.” As special agent Hillin describes it in his book, FBI Codename TennPar, Baldwin pulled a wad of cash from his wallet and peeled off $2,000—all in hundred-dollar bills supplied by headquarters in Washington. It was a down payment, good-faith money to get Taylor moving on the deal. The two men then watched The Newlywed Game on the television before Taylor scooped up the $2,000 from a table and retired for the night.18
Tarnished by months of scandal, Blanton opted not to run for reelection. Republican gubernatorial candidate Lamar Alexander won a huge victory at the polls that November. Details trickling back to the FBI had it that Blanton planned to pardon multiple inmates before leaving office. In fact, on November 13, his legal counsel, Eddie Sisk, prepared a list of thirteen inmates considered appropriate for executive clemency. Among them were Steve Hamilton and a second inmate whose release Baldwin and Taylor had begun negotiating.
In a final push to break the case, the FBI gave Baldwin $50,000 in marked hundred-dollar bills—“show money”—that he flashed to Taylor in a November 28 meeting in another Memphis hotel room. The money was his if he’d release yet another inmate, a convicted robber named Larry Ed Hacker. Baldwin sweetened the pot by telling Taylor he’d pay another $20,000 for the release of two additional inmates. When they met again on December 13, Baldwin handed Taylor $10,000 in an envelope toward the release of the pai
r.19
On December 15, 1978, as Blanton’s extradition officer Charles Benson walked through the Nashville airport on his way to Memphis with a briefcase containing executive clemency papers, FBI agents surrounded him.
“Charlie,” long-suffering agent Hillin said with satisfaction as Benson turned around. “You’re under arrest.”
In Benson’s wallet, agents found thirty-three hundred-dollar bills with serial numbers that matched the cash Baldwin had given Taylor.*5 Serving a search warrant, agents also arrested Sisk in his Capitol Hill office. They found thirteen hundred-dollar bills in his pocket—twelve with serial numbers matching the Baldwin cash.20
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ROLLING FOG HUGGED the black loam around Maxwell Air Force Base Federal Prison Camp in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 13, 1979, the
day Withers was ordered to begin serving his term. Twenty-three years earlier that very month, not ten miles away in downtown Montgomery, Withers had taken his famous photo of Martin Luther King, Jr., riding one of the first integrated buses. Now he returned, a felon.21
“I ain’t been no angel,” Withers said years later, reflecting on his life.
Still, he was fortunate. Sentenced to a year in prison—with six months suspended—he could have faced years behind bars. Named as an unindicted co-conspirator, Withers was caught on a phone tap soliciting bribes to release a convicted murderer. Evidence implicated him in two other Clemency for Cash deals as well.*6 In the end, he served just five months, thanks to good behavior and an incredibly generous deal with prosecutors in which he agreed to testify in two trials.22
Nothing in the official court record indicates Withers got any leniency for serving, as Jim had claimed, as a 1960s civil rights informant. In return for his testimony, Withers wasn’t charged in the Clemency for Cash prosecutions. Instead, he pled guilty in a spin-off investigation—he and J. P. Murrell had extorted $8,500 in payoffs from a nightclub owner. At Murrell’s trial, Withers told how the patronage chief got him the fateful job as a state liquor agent and how he became ensnared in the most notorious episode of corruption in Tennessee history.23
A Spy in Canaan Page 7
