Tag: Roscoe Dixon

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Roscoe Dixon, Former Legislator, Dead at 71

Roscoe Dixon photo by Jackson Baker

Roscoe Dixon, a longtime member of the General Assembly from Memphis and one of several legislators ensnared in the Justice Department’s “Tennessee Waltz” sting in 2005, died Thursday night, according to family members. He was 71.

Dixon  was convicted of taking a bribe from a fictitious computer organization operated by the FBI that  sought to purchase his vote. He  was convicted in federal court in 2006 and spent several years in prison. At the time he was arrested, he had left the legislature, where he had served both on the House of Representatives and the Senate,  and was working as an aide to then-Shelby County Mayor A C Wharton.

Though the bribe Dixon accepted was considerably less than the amount received by several other lawmakers entrapped  in the sting, his  sentence was longer than many of theirs, essentially because he insisted on a defense in court, pleading not guilty.

After his release, Dixon worked hard at rehabilitation and often appeared before the Memphis City Council and Shelby County Commission on behalf of goals of the NAACP. He was a principal of the Memphis Health Center and CAAP, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center.

Dixon was remembered fondly by many of his former colleagues in government. The Senate Democratic Caucus released this statement: “Senator Dixon was born in the tiny of town of Gilmore, Arkansas and he rose to the highest levels of government in his chosen home state of Tennessee. Just as he served his country in the Army and his state in the Tennessee Army National Guard, Dixon was deeply committed to serving his community. Sen. Dixon had kindness and duty in his heart. We wish his family and loved ones peace at this time.”

Several members of the state House of Representatives also offered testimonials. That of State Rep. Karen Camper, House Minority Leader, was typical: ““I learned from him here in the Legislature and from when we both served on the Memphis NAACP board. Roscoe Dixon was dedicated to community service and was a consummate servant to the people. He will be missed.”

Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland also reacted: “Sorry to hear that former state Senator Roscoe Dixon has passed. He was always gracious and encouraging to me, including two years ago when I knocked on his door campaigning. He invited us in for 30 minutes of reminiscing — a great memory today.”

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News The Fly-By

What Henri Brooks Was Doing in 1993

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

To be sure, it was 21 years ago — the spring of 1993 — and much has altered in the political sphere, in Memphis and also in Nashville, where the picture that accompanies this article was shot with the trusty 35 mm. camera I was using at the time.

Yes, those of you who thought the person on the left looked more than usually familiar are correct. That is indeed one Henri Brooks, the Shelby County Commissioner of today but a generation younger then, in the middle of her very first year as a state representative in Nashville. And she is doing a very credible and animated version of the Memphis bop.

Jackson Baker

Henri Brooks and Tim Joyce in 1993

Rep. Brooks’ dancing partner was another state rep from Memphis, Tim Joyce.

Joyce had some rhythm, too. He and Brooks constituted one of several fun couples who took advantage of a break in proceedings to shake a little after-hours booty, midway in the spring 1993 legislative session. It was an affair put together— live band and all — by the Legislative Plaza lobbying corps.

Others who took part included the late House Speaker Pro Tem Lois DeBerry, more than able on the dance floor as on the dais, and state Rep. Bret Thompson, a first-termer like Brooks, who not only danced, but sang from the stage in an R&B style that owed something to the erstwhile “Philosopher of Soul,” Johnnie Taylor.

Probably none of the several score of people who juked at that rare event are still on the scene in the legislature. DeBerry, as beloved a figure across party lines as there was in the General Assembly, died only last year, after a multi-year battle with cancer. Joyce was beaten, as I recall, in the next election by a fellow Republican.

Thompson took a shot at an open state Senate seat but was beaten by fellow state Rep. Roscoe Dixon. Both would run into some trouble with the fates — or their own inner demons (Dixon via the FBI’s Tennessee Waltz sting). Thompson, a lawyer, took a fall for misconduct with a client’s funds and was disbarred. These days, he’s a behind-the-scenes figure in Democratic politics in Shelby County.

And Brooks — we know what she’s been doing, don’t we? Simultaneously running for Juvenile Court Clerk and hoping to escape the consequences of three separate public controversies. These had to do with brow-beating an Hispanic witness before the commission; picking up an assault charge for brawling over a parking space with another woman; and apparently not residing in the district that elected her, which could result in criminal prosecution.

She would have issues in the legislature, too — notably her refusal to rise and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Both there and later on the commission, Brooks developed a reputation for — well, dancing to her own tune as a largely self-appointed spokesperson for the African-American community.

Back in 1993, however, in a legislative environment that was unusually open-minded by race and by party and by gender, Henri Brooks could follow the music. She’s changed a good bit since then, but so has the General Assembly, ruled these days according to the rigid orthodoxies of the Far Right and as disinclined toward compromise in its way as Henri Brooks is in hers.

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Politics Politics Feature

Blasts From the Past

Yes, that smaller image is who you think it is.

In her candidacy for the state House of Representatives seat made vacant by the death this summer of longtime incumbent Lois DeBerry, Kemba Ford called on a once-familiar political presence for backup.

In her basic campaign handout, Ford used a background image of her father, former state senator John Ford, and she proudly cited his name in campaign speeches. During a recent forum, candidate Ford told the audience, “I have a direct line to someone who walks the walk and talks the talk.”

She went on to invoke not only the name of her father but that of his brother, former U.S. representative Harold Ford Sr., to reinforce her connection to the well-known Ford political clan.

Opinions differ as to whether John Ford, a major presence in the Tennessee General Assembly before his conviction in the Justice Department’s Tennessee Waltz bribery sting, is prohibited from restoring his rights to run for office again or was grandfathered in before the passage of post-scandal legislation that would bar such activity.

In any case, the former state senator, who is now employed at his brother Edmund Ford‘s funeral home, professed in a recent conversation to have no such ambitions. He was, however, pleased to do what he could to help the electoral efforts of his daughter. That meant, among other things, telephoning friends and allies and asking them to assist, financially and otherwise.

As it happens, John Ford is not the only former senator to play a role in the just-concluded special election campaign. Former state senator Roscoe Dixon — who, like ex-Senator Ford, was caught up in the Tennessee Waltz scandal and, like him, recently was released from prison — was an active campaigner for candidate Joshua Forbes.

Dixon, who is active in the NAACP and often appears before local legislative bodies in support of that organization’s goals, made an effort to be a substitute panelist for the absent Forbes at an earlier candidate forum sponsored by Democratic members of the state legislature but was forced to withdraw when candidate Terica Lamb complained.

Nor is Dixon’s volunteer activity his only involvement with the public realm. He is a principal in CAATS, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center which recently received $1 million in funding from the Memphis City Council for capital improvements in its treatment facility.

Yet another former state senator convicted in the Tennessee Waltz affair, Kathryn Bowers, has taken an active part in several political campaigns and has volunteered on a few civic projects since her own release.

One more Tennessee Waltz figure, former Memphis City Schools board member Michael Hooks Jr., has made a full reentry into the mainstream. Hooks operates a construction management and consulting company that provides assistance on capital improvement projects locally, including several funded by city government.

Hooks has also been involved in several local political campaigns, figuring prominently in the 2011 reelection campaign of Mayor A C Wharton. And he is an active member of the Memphis Rotary Club.

All of these Tennessee Waltz figures — having, as the saying goes, paid their debt to society — have recovered some degree of their former influence and seem determined to resume some gainful place in the social and civic mainstream.

Time will tell to what degree they succeed, but they all have their well-wishers.

(See “Political Beat Blog” for a rundown on the aforementioned special House District 91 Democratic primary, which concluded on Tuesday.)

• State senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown) has evidently, like Ernest Hemingway before him, some sense of what the snows of Kilimanjaro are like. In a recent email to supporters, he conveyed news of “a 5-day hike to the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro, which at 19,341 feet, is the tallest mountain in Africa.”

Kelsey went on to posit a moral to this story: “The lesson it taught me in persistence is one that will prove helpful in continuing the fight for opportunity scholarships for low-income children in Tennessee.”

What are called “opportunity scholarships” in Kelsey’s lexicon are referred to as “school vouchers” by others, particularly the opponents of the senator’s several bills over the years to extend public education funds to private institutions. In his newsletters, Kelsey refers to such opponents in Tennessee as “those who view the local school district as an employment agency rather than an education agency.”

Governor Bill Haslam, the head of state government and the titular head in Tennessee of Kelsey’s party, would not ordinarily be classified that way, and Kelsey presumably didn’t mean to be referring to Haslam in the aforementioned description of his legislative adversaries.

Yet it was Haslam who pointedly obstructed Kelsey’s last effort to pass a voucher bill. Early in the 2013 session of the General Assembly, the governor had approved a modest pilot effort toward establishing a voucher system, one that would provide modest-sized vouchers for 5,000 low-income students currently enrolled in schools certified by the state as failing.

That was not enough for Kelsey, who counterposed a bill that would have greatly expanded the amount of vouchers and made them available to children in families making as much as $75,000 a year.

Finding Kelsey unwilling to compromise, and with time running out on the session, Haslam made it clear that he did not want alternate voucher legislation of the scope proposed by Kelsey put forward.

The co-sponsor of the Kelsey bill, state senator Dolores Gresham (R-Somerville), got the message and professed a willingness to back off, as did Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey, who had preferred a stronger voucher bill. Kelsey, however, remained intent on going forward.

The result was that the governor put his foot down and called for his own measure to be withdrawn, while announcing it was too late to work out any other version, and the session ended with no voucher bill at all.

In the newsletter, Kelsey finds inspiration in his struggle up Kilimanjaro: “Persistence pays off! Over and over during my hike up Kilimanjaro, my guide repeated, ‘po-le, po-le,’ which means ‘slowly, slowly’ in Swahili. He knew that climbing the mountain too fast would lead to altitude sickness and would leave me short of my goal. …

“Persistence pays off! Once I finally reached the top of Mt. Kilimanjaro, the views from above the clouds made all the hard work worthwhile. I hope that I will have a similar experience with opportunity scholarships in 2014.”

The senator concludes his account with these lines from Hemingway’s classic “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”:

“There, ahead, all he could see, as wide as all the world, great, high, and unbelievably white in the sun, was the square top of Kilimanjaro. And then he knew that there was where he was going.”

There’s a problem with the analogy, though: Mt. Kilimanjaro figures in the Hemingway story as the unachieved goal of the character Harry Street, who lies dying at the foot of the mountain and, at the end of the story, perishes without having attained his goal. Indeed, Kilimanjaro is treated as the very symbol of the unattainable.

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Opinion

John Ford Could Be Home This Year

John Ford and Michael Scholl

  • John Ford and Michael Scholl

John Ford could be released to a halfway house as early as late 2011, said Michael Scholl, the Memphis attorney who represented him in Ford’s bribery case in Operation Tennessee Waltz.

Ford got a 66-month sentence in that case, plus another 14 years for a later conviction in a separate federal case in Nashville. But a three-judge panel of the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the Nashville conviction this week because the federal court did not have jurisdiction.

“They’re basically saying ‘that’s it,'” said Scholl, who did not represent Ford in Nashville. Ford was represented by a federal public defender.

Scholl said he was “a little bit surprised” about the jurisdictional ruling. Such issues are usually raised and argued in pretrial motions or at trial.

The appeals court also overruled, with the consent of prosecutors, two other counts against Ford based on “honest services” statutes that the Supreme Court has ruled only apply in bribery and kickbacks cases. Ford was convicted of failing to disclose a financial arrangement with a company that did business with TennCare while he was a state senator.

“I was very excited,” said Scholl. “I have not talked to John but I’m happy for him.”

He expects Ford, 68, to be released to a halfway house in late 2011 or early 2012.

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Cover Feature News

The Last Waltz

CREDIT: Trey Harrison

Prosecutor Procedural

If there is a sub-genre of that literary favorite, the police procedural, it might be called the prosecutor procedural, and Operation Tennessee Waltz would be a bestseller.

The final chapter was written last week when Michael Hooks Jr. was sentenced to 30 days in jail. Hooks’ attorney, Glen Reid, said his client was not part of Tennessee Waltz, and prosecutor Tim DiScenza agreed. But Hooks had the misfortune to be part of a small-time corruption case involving bogus invoices to Shelby County Juvenile Court, which led, through his partners Tim Willis and Barry Myers, to Roscoe Dixon, John Ford, and the FBI undercover operation that came to be known as Tennessee Waltz.

Like any good novel, that story had money, deception, corrupt power, famous names, bag men, lucky breaks, moral ambiguity, courtroom suspense, and the threat of physical violence. It began late in 2002 and consumed the resources of the FBI, federal courts, prosecutors, and the media for more than five years. The timeline that follows is based on trial testimony, transcripts of taped conversations, and interviews with prosecutors, investigators, and defense attorneys conducted after the investigation became public on May 26, 2005.

2000-2001: Tim Willis and Barry Myers, politically ambitious young men, meet while working on a campaign. Myers, a Roscoe Dixon protégé wise to the ways of state legislators, tells him, “You need to be able to take care of people.” Two more young men on the make, Shelby County administrator Calvin Williams and Darrell Catron, get Myers a job at Juvenile Court. Catron and Willis devise an embezzlement scheme involving bogus invoices.

2002: The FBI and agent Brian Burns begin an investigation of Juvenile Court. Federal agencies, while not without their own politics, are considered, by unwritten agreement, less political than elected district attorney generals such as Shelby County D.A. Bill Gibbons. Willis, who already has a Mississippi conviction for credit-card fraud, compounds his problems by lying to the grand jury.

January and February 2003: Willis and Catron agree to cooperate with the government. Catron pleads guilty to embezzlement, but his sentencing is postponed. Willis is not charged but instead tells investigators about corruption in local and state government. His information is deemed credible, and the FBI pays him $34,000 in 2003 to tape conversations with public officials. He records incriminating conversations with Myers and Williams about Dixon, John Ford, Kathryn Bowers, Michael Hooks Sr., and others.

Summer 2003: The FBI’s interest shifts from Juvenile Court to the state legislature in Nashville. Agents entrust Willis to offer Dixon a payoff for influencing a children’s dental contract. As is the case with all undercover witnesses, they are gambling that he will not betray them. They are especially worried about Ford, who is believed to have connections nearly everywhere. Local FBI agents come up with the name Tennessee Waltz. The proposal is vetted in Washington, D.C., with the FBI’s public corruption unit, which must approve undercovers, and the U.S. Attorney General’s Office, which must approve wiretaps. A deputy of Attorney General John Ashcroft, a Republican from Missouri, gives the approval.

Fall 2003: The FBI designates retired agent Joe Carroll and a young African-American undercover specialist known as L.C. McNeil to set up a fake company called E-Cycle Management to try to get legislation helping it do business in Tennessee.

2004: Willis, now making $77,000 a year plus expenses, tells state lawmakers he is lobbying for E-Cycle and has “a little discretionary money to take care of folks.” In February, he makes a videotaped payment to Dixon. Willis introduces lawmakers to Carroll, who is using the fake name Joe Carson. Ironically, “Joe Carson” has done previous well-publicized FBI undercovers of public corruption in other states within the last 10 years. By May, Dixon is suspicious of the large amounts of money E-Cycle is throwing around but apparently does not Google “Joe Carson” and “FBI agent.” McNeil, meanwhile, is getting a wealth of incriminating information from taped conversations with the talkative Myers. Near the end of the legislative session, E-Cycle has Dixon withdraw its bill.

January 2005: Carson is working hard on Chattanooga senator Ward Crutchfield and his bag man, Charles Love, while McNeil has forged a friendship with Ford. McNeil is also taping Michael Hooks Sr., who is eager to make money off of Shelby County contracts. Dixon, meanwhile, has quit the legislature to take a full-time job as a top assistant to Shelby County mayor A C Wharton, whose past campaigns he managed. This opens new doors but also complicates matters for the FBI.

Spring 2005: Ford is taped several times taking payoffs from McNeil. In a meeting at his office in Memphis, a suspicious Ford threatens to shoot Willis, who is terrified. Prosecutors and the FBI decide they must wrap up the investigation for two reasons. One, they fear it will be exposed and someone will get hurt; two, they can’t allow E-Cycle’s legislation to come to a floor vote and they are running out of excuses. On May 13th, agent Mark Jackson gives Dixon a last chance to confess, but he sticks to his lies. A few days later, prosecutors and the FBI set a date of May 26th for top-secret indictments of Dixon, Ford, Myers, Bowers, Chris Newton, Crutchfield, and Love. On May 25th, they get one last surprise: Harold Ford Jr. announces he is running for Senate, throwing an unintended political theme and Ford angle into the story, which will get national media attention.

Summer and Fall 2005: The dominoes begin to fall. Newton, Myers, and Love plead guilty. Myers will provide key testimony against Dixon and Bowers. Love will incriminate Crutchfield. Williams, who is not named in the May indictment, insists that he is writing a tell-all book about Willis and political corruption in Shelby County.

2006: Dixon goes on trial in June. Jurors hear several hours of tapes and testimony on the stand from Myers and Willis, whose credibility is not shaken by Dixon’s attorney. Dixon himself testifies and admits that he took payments. His alibi is destroyed by Tim DiScenza, whose courtroom presentation spares none of the dirty details on the tapes. Dixon is convicted and sentenced to 63 months in prison. The government sends a message that it is willing, even eager, to take more cases to trial. In August, Michael Hooks Sr. pleads guilty to bribery, leaving an arsenal of incriminating tapes forever out of the public view. The nephew of civil rights legend Dr. Benjamin Hooks is sentenced to 26 months in prison.

January 2007: Williams goes to trial. Willis testifies against him. Like Dixon, Williams takes the stand in his own defense. And, like Dixon, he is convicted of extortion in connection with a grant for a community program in Memphis. He is sentenced to 33 months in prison.

June 2007: Ford goes to trial. The key witnesses against him are Willis and his old “friend” McNeil. But Ford’s biggest problem is the collection of videotapes that show him taking a series of clandestine $10,000 payments. He is convicted on one count of extortion and sentenced to 66 months in prison. Later in 2007, Crutchfield and Bowers change their pleas to guilty.

Epilogue 2008: Michael Hooks Jr. is expected to serve his 30 days, probably in a halfway house, later this year. His father is in the federal prison in Montgomery, Alabama. Ford is supposed to report to prison in Texas on April 28th. Dixon is in a federal prison in Louisiana. Myers is in prison in Yazoo City, Mississippi. Williams is in prison in Forrest City, Arkansas. Bowers will begin serving her 16-month prison term in June. Crutchfield received home confinement instead of prison time due to health considerations. Newton has served his prison sentence. Catron did not testify at any trials and received probation.

FBI agent Brian Burns was reassigned to Buffalo, New York. His partner, Mark Jackson, was reassigned to Los Angeles. The government says “McNeil” is working on another undercover assignment at an undisclosed location. The government will not say where Willis is or what he is doing.

— John Branston

No Robin Hoods Here

On the night in December 2006 before he was arrested and charged with felonious graft in relation to his service as a Memphis city councilman, Rickey Peete was hanging out with a tableful of reporters and fellow pols in the Hard Rock Café on Beale Street. There had been a show-and-tell featuring Mayor Willie Herenton and Joe Frazier, the former heavyweight champ who was Herenton’s scheduled “opponent” in the next night’s charity boxing match.

A mayor’s race would be coming up within months, and, at Peete’s table, the subject easily elided from one species of contenders into another. The councilman began confiding his sense of what he saw as virtually unlimited political prospects not only for himself but for members of his family.

“Just my last name alone is practically a guarantee of victory in Memphis,” the genial Peete said, his infectious Cheshire grin expanding to Brobdingnabian proportions.

Wrong.

Within hours, Peete would be in handcuffs, charged with vote-selling and bribery and on his way to being a two-time loser in federal court, his good name and political career (both painfully rehabilitated after an 1988 bust for extorting money from a developer) ruined anew, and with his very liberty soon to expire.

The federal sting that nailed Peete was called Operation Main Street Sweeper. It was something like a second cousin to the more ballyhooed Tennessee Waltz operation that not long before had baited an assortment of corruptible officials with offers of swag, thereby sweeping in political offenders across the breadth of the state.

One of those had been Kathryn Bowers, who, at the time she was nabbed by the FBI — mid-session in Nashville in May 2005 — was a freshly elected state senator who doubled as chairman of the Shelby County Democratic Party. Less than a month before her arrest, she had been gloating on her triumph over party adversaries and the enlarged prospects that had come with her elevation from the state House of Representatives to the more elite senior body.

Within two years, Bowers was an emotional and physical wreck, under a doctor’s care and forced to cop a plea after initial protestations of innocence. “I ask for forgiveness of my bad decisions of receiving money in an inappropriate manner” was the awkward, curiously euphemistic mea culpa she managed to sputter out in February of this year, when she was being sentenced by U.S. district judge Daniel Breen to a 16-month prison term, followed by two years’ probation.

With the possible exception of former state senator John Ford, a millionaire who was already beleaguered on a number of graft fronts at the time that the Tennessee Waltz trap was sprung, the other sting victims (if that’s the right noun) were — by their own lights at least — riding high at the time they were busted.

Roscoe Dixon, the former state senator whose seat Bowers had filled, had vacated it to take a well-paying job as an assistant to Shelby County mayor A C Wharton. And he had spent much of the spring of 2005 in near-successful efforts to get the Shelby County Commission to appoint his erstwhile legislative aide-de-camp, one Barry Myers, to either the state Senate or the state House of Representatives.

The hard-working chairman of that selfsame County Commission for the 2004-’05 term was Michael Hooks Sr. Honorably rehabbed from a drug offense some years back, Hooks had just been a legitimate ballot contender himself for the state Senate seat won by Bowers. His son, Michael Hooks Jr., a respected member of the Memphis school board, was an aspiring actor who, in that same spring of 2005, appeared in a climactic speaking role in the surprise Indie hit Hustle & Flow.

All of the above hopefuls, along with the long revered state senator Ward Crutchfield of Chattanooga and assorted other members of state and local government, would end up under arrest and subject to trial. Most would cop pleas, and all would receive sentences of one kind or another. Those who, like Senator Ford and the hapless Dixon, dared to brazen it out and actually stand trial ended up as big-time losers, getting significant time.

With the exceptions of state representative Chris Newton, a Newport Republican widely regarded by his GOP mates in the legislature as a Democratic fellow traveler, all of those nabbed in the various stings orchestrated by the FBI and the local U.S. Attorney’s Office from 2005 to 2007 were either nominal or highly active Democrats.

A late exception was former county commissioner Bruce Thompson, a Republican who came under investigation in late 2007 for improprieties connected with his brokering a school construction contract. The case against Thompson, however, was not based on a sting per se. The crime, such as it was, had sprung from Thompson’s own machinations, and that fact, as much as his political persuasion, made the ex-commissioner’s legal situation unique.

Numerous local Democrats profess to smell a fish regarding these operations, but it’s difficult to get any, save the indicted themselves, to go on record with their suspicions.

In all fairness, testimony at several of the Tennessee Waltz trials indicated at least perfunctory attempts to recruit Republican legislators. And the audio and video introduced in evidence seemed to confirm that the FBI agents posing as computer entrepreneurs from a company called “E-Cycle” invited GOP members to the “receptions” that were, in reality, fishing expeditions.

To be sure, one or two Republicans got close enough at least to sniff from the bucketloads of cash made available to high-class helpers. State senator Jeff Miller of Knoxville opted out of reelection and decided to add “former” to his title not long after he belatedly declared $1,000 worth of E-Cycle cash as a “campaign contribution.” (And two indictees in recent years — former County Commission administrator Calvin Williams and ex-Juvenile Court aide Darrell Catron — were once regarded by the Shelby County Republican Party as prize recruits from the African-American community.)

The fact remains that the chief indictees of the Tennessee Waltz investigation were disproportionately Democratic, disproportionately black, and disproportionately from Memphis. They also seemed to be disproportionately from that part of the traditional Democratic apparatus known loosely as the “Ford organization.”

There are several ways to construe this fact, but, for comparison’s sake, two of them may be stated as: 1) Such folk were more corruptible than others involved with the trade of politics; or 2) pure and simply, they were targeted. Both these scenarios have their believers. And neither, alas, is subject to definite proof.

It is a fact, attributable to pure coincidence perhaps, that there was a lengthy hiatus in prosecutions of this sort, at least locally, during the two terms of Bill Clinton’s presidency. But during the Republican administrations that came immediately before and, as we have seen, immediately after, prominent Democrats were on the mark statewide.

No doubt, Knoxville bankers Jake and C.H. Butcher were shady operators back in 1983. They were also important components of the Tennessee Democrats’ party-building efforts. Ditto with Memphis congressman Harold Ford (“Senior,” as he has come to be known following the celebrity of his namesake son and congressional successor). Call it another coincidence, but Ford and several fellow defendants who had been connected with the Butchers were acquitted of bank fraud by a rural West Tennessee jury in the first year of the Clinton administration. Did Dan Clancy, the holdover prosecutor and a self-declared Democrat, let up on the throttle (even if only unconsciously), or had the government’s case always been as shockingly weak as it seemed to be? This, too, is a case of you-flips-your-coin-and-you-takes-your-choice.

But even if political bias, at least of the conscious variety, is discarded as a motive in the prosecution of politicians these last several years, there is another factor at work: Most of those indicted and convicted of accepting money for votes or for otherwise boondoggling the public trust (Crutchfield, the Butchers, and Thompson are clear exceptions) stem from working-class origins.

These were not the high-flying and well-protected financial scammers whose schemes, toting up in the stratospheric millions, are often too Byzantine for the public or juries or prosecutors even to comprehend, much less punish. These are basically blue-collar criminals doing low-level, white-collar crimes.

Most, before achieving office, were unused to the ways and mores of legitimately acquired wealth but came to occupy positions that exposed them on a daily basis to influential and privileged people or institutions on whose behalf they were routinely asked to intercede. Familiarity can breed, besides contempt, simple covetousness.

The truly sad fact is that many of those netted in the stings of recent years went down for what, in the scheme of things, amounted to nickels and dimes. But the sadder reality — the bottom line, as it were — is that nobody made them do it. And none of them answered to the name of Robin Hood.

— Jackson Baker

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Cover Feature News

School For Scandal

High school civics and Political Science 101 were never like this.

“You know, and that just how it works, I mean you don’t come out, out of the Senate with 17, yo’ shit don’t fly. If you don’t come out of the House with 51, yo’ shit don’t fly.”

That’s Barry “Bag Man” Myers lecturing to undercover FBI agent L.C. McNeil on the arithmetic of passing legislation in the 99-member House and 33-member Senate in Nashville. Crude, you might say, but accurate. At the Tennessee School For Scandal (TSFS), we cut through the s*** and get to the f****** point!

Tired of paying $5,000 or more each year in college tuition? Bored with pompous professors droning on about the separation of powers and a bunch of dead dudes? Looking for something more than football games and beer parties? Would you like to, in the words of adjunct instructor Myers, “make some f****** money”?

Then consider enrolling in correspondence courses at the elite U.S.-government-inspected TSFS and learn the art of the semi-hustle, the false statement, the concealed microphone, the rigged stock offering, the big juice, the sneaky non-entrapment, and the do’s and don’ts of taking a payoff. Our instructors are the best bag men, political crooks, and undercover snitches in the business. Enroll now, because when they get certified, they’ll be leaving TSFS for some of our most exclusive, uh, federal institutions, and their office hours will be sort of restricted, if you get our drift.

At TSFS, our graduates know how to get ahead. Myers learned from one of the best, former state senator Roscoe Dixon, who graduated from TSFS to land a $100,000 a year job with the Shelby County Mayor’s Office! (The former senator, unfortunately, will not be teaching this session, but his lessons are available in a special boxed set of tapes.) Want to go grad school? John Ford and Ward Crutchfield will show you how to make lots more than $100,000.

At TSFS, all of our lessons in the politics of the hustle are available on audiotape, and if you enroll now, you can even get a free black-and-white videotape of an actual payoff shot by master cinematographer Tim “Tape Recorder” Willis! Meanwhile, here’s a sample of our latest offerings.

Methods of Political Upward Mobility 101:

Students will get an overview of opportunities in the public and private sector. No experience required. Instructors Barry Myers and L.C. McNeil of E-Cycle Management demonstrate basic techniques in this snippet from May 2004.

Myers: “Oh man. I wish I could come on y’all’s payroll, but see, like I say, the only thing is that, in three months, I mean this shit’ll be over with and I’ll be a public official, and I couldn’t be on nobody’s payroll and shit. But then, I figure like this. I still be able serve ya’ll some good, ’cause if I’m the senator, hell, I still can introduce the same shit that Roscoe’s on, you know, carry on.”

McNeil: “Right. That’s where it, that’s where it gets lovely for everyone because, you know, you get this thing flowin’ like a fine-tuned machine.”

introduction to government work 101:

Introduction to Government Work 101: You can’t eat your way to prosperity. Sure, there are lots of parties and free food, but being a legislator has a downside too, as we see in this session with Roscoe Dixon and L.C. McNeil in August 2004.

Dixon: “I don’t know. I just need to get in the big leagues, man. You know we knock around, you know legislators, we don’t make no money, man.”

McNeil: “Really?”

Dixon: “Sixteen thousand.”

McNeil: “How you make it off of that?”

Dixon: “I don’t know. It must be the man upstairs. You put your office allowance in there, you might get to 23. Per diem, may get to 27. You got to spend most of that per diem, you know, hotels and stuff like that … Man, you be lucky you can clear 30.”

McNeil: “Right.”

Dixon: “Ah, everybody, everybody got some semi-hustle, ah, goin’ and, ah, this would be a hell of a opportunity, ah, cause really you’d be controllin’, ah, county government, I mean operatin’ and runnin’ it.”

McNeil: “Okay, explain it to me ’cause I get, I get lost in the shuffle. I’m thinkin’, you know, unless you goin’ to be governor you can’t get no better than bein’ senator, right?”

Dixon: “Of yeah, you can get better. People don’t know that ’cause this will be operational, I mean you be operational, I mean, physical documents coming across your desk.”

McNeil: “Okay.”

Dixon: “Well, let’s see where we gon’ built this road. Let’s see if we gon’, ah, ah, get this contract, do this, or modify contracts.”

McNeil: “Right.”

Dixon: “I mean it’s administrative, ah, it, the position A C had talked to me about was the deputy CAO.”

(Four months later, Dixon was named deputy CAO by Mayor A C Wharton. After Dixon was indicted in May 2005, Wharton forced him to resign.)

Advanced Government Work 501:

Yes, rigging road contracts is lucrative, but the hours and paperwork can be a bitch. If you’re a lawyer, TSFS will show you how to parlay that into big money. Listen in as Chattanooga bag man and school board member Charles Love tells undercover FBI agent Joe Carson about 78-year-old senator Ward Crutchfield of Chattanooga aboard a yacht in Miami in December 2004.

Carson: “Let me ask you the other thing. I was curious. On Ward, he gets $150,000 a year from the school board? You’ve got to be kidding me. The school board has got that kind of money? Does he have that much work?”

Love: “I’m telling you, man, we spent … Let me tell you how much we spent on attorneys outside of Ward Crutchfield last year as a school district: about $500,000.”

Carson: “Why would you need to go outside of Ward if you are paying him that much?”

Love: “He doesn’t have the expertise. For example, if somebody sues the school district, which we have been sued, we get sued every month on something.”

Carson: “Oh, I’m sure.”

Love: “At one point the board is saying, why don’t we get rid of this guy?”

Carson: “Crutchfield?”

Love: “Yeah. I said why don’t you do it. I ain’t doing it.”

Carson: “I agree with that.”

Love: “Political suicide. Everybody said, well, political reasons, nobody is saying it, but it’s implied. It’s worth the $150,000 to keep him because he does go to Nashville and he has a direct link to the school board to take to Nashville to tell them Hamilton County needs this, Hamilton County needs that. It’s more of a support advocate than an attorney. Now, he will ask for an opinion, maybe every four or five months, ask for an opinion. He’s been doing that for 20 years.”

Carson: “You are kidding me? He could make a pretty good living just doing that.”

Love: “Ward Crutchfield is the kind of attorney that, if he’s your attorney and he goes into court, ain’t a whole lot of discussion, and he usually wins. You know what I’m saying? Ward has gotten guys off for murder, you know what I’m saying? They may get 10 years for first-degree murder because of who he is. He knows all the damn judges, he knows all the people in the courthouse.”

Carson: “I guess $150,000 buys a lot.”

Love: “Buying his influence more than you are buying his legal expertise.”

Carson: “That’s what we are doing basically, isn’t it?”

Love: “That’s what you are doing.”

Carson: “I guess it technically would be a conflict for him to be a state senator?”

Love: “It is. If somebody pushed it, it would be.”

Carson: “And votes on appropriations for schools.”

Love: “Uh huh.”

Carson: “Geez. You know what? Everybody has got their own thing. Good for Ward.”

Love: “Everybody has got their deal.”

Bag Man for Beginners:

This introductory course is for risk-takers who are undecided about their major. Some graduates go from politics to the FBI and the United States Attorney’s Office. And some go both ways! Feds love bag men because they’re truth tellers. Without a client, they’re nothing. As assistant U.S. attorney Tim Discenza told a jury recently, “Do you think Barry Myers would come in and lie and say he was doing something for Roscoe Dixon just to get himself convicted of a felony?” This May 14, 2004, exchange is between Myers and L.C. McNeil.

McNeil: “But see, that’s my thing. I don’t want, I like to deal with folks like yourself that are careful. I don’t want a lot of folks that’s talkin’.”

Myers: “Right.”

McNeil: “And shit like that, ’cause I don’t talk about my business. You know, the fewer the people that are involved the better. You know, when Tim first said to hook up with Barry, I’s like, well, you know, I kicked it with Barry, but is Barry cool, is he down? He’s like, Barry is cool.”

Myers: “Oh yeah. I mean I’m very loyal, man. My thing is, I’m going to protect the senator and the other legislators. That’s my job and stuff.”

McNeil: “Cool.”

Myers: “That’s jus’ the way I’m gon’ do it, because I been operatin’, carryin’ Roscoe’s money long before you and Tim come along. I was toting the money for them. Whenever somebody wants to do something they would come to me.”

Advanced Bag Man 301:

A follow-up to our introductory course, this one’s offered at our Chattanooga campus, with a special field trip to Miami! In December 2004, Charles Love discusses Ward Crutchfield with Joe Carson.

Carson: “Okay. We’ve given Senator Crutchfield, what, three or four thousand dollars?”

Love: “Three thousand dollars.”

Carson: “Three thousand dollars and other than him saying, yeah, I’ll support it, co-sponsor it, he hasn’t … I would like to see him insert that as opposed to Senator Ford.”

Love: “Okay.”

Carson: “Okay? I don’t think that’s unreasonable, do you?”

Love: “No.”

Carson: “And you can tell him, hey, for some reason it got dropped out, if it was there originally. If it wasn’t there, that’s one of our four things and you have those bullets that I sent you on why we have the … So that’s it with that.”

Love: “Okay.”

Carson: “But if you’ll talk to him as soon as you get back in, if he agrees to do it and will do it, call me and I’ll just call him and wish him a Merry Christmas, and thank him for adding that for us. Okay? I want to stay in touch with these guys.”

Stock Market Stings 301:

Instructors L.C. McNeil, Tim Willis, and Joe Carson. Learn how to talk about fake companies and snare unsuspecting lawmakers by putting dollar signs in their eyes. Plus some cool stuff about the stock market and stock offerings, as you’ll hear in this 2004 conversation between Myers and McNeil.

Myers: “So y’all thinkin’ y’all could possibly make $10 or $20 million off this deal?”

McNeil: “I’m explain to you how this works. When you start a company, if your company starts off and it has legal precedence, meaning there’s legal, there’s legislation that regulates the way business is to be done. Then, after that, you have contracts with certain individuals and certain companies that guarantee you’re gonna do a certain amount of business. Then you can go public. And once you go public, there’s so much interest in your company because, one, it’s a legalized, how do I say, business interest.”

Myers: “Okay.”

McNeil: “Then you take it a step further and you already have contracts, and it’s like a no lose. It’s like people are mandated to have to use your services. So it drives the stock prices up. You can start off with, ah, maybe anywhere from, you know, what they call a penny stock. I’ve never done like the penny stocks side. I’ve gone anywhere from 10 to 50 cents a share. Almost up to a dollar a share.”

Myers: “Okay.”

McNeil: “When I did the dot-com business, ah, music business, I did two of them. The first one was at 10 cents, the second was at 50 cents. First one, when I finished and when we pulled out of it, and it basically, I mean, it went under because all this stuff was being stolen off the Internet.”

Myers: “Stolen off the Internet, yeah.”

McNeil: “You know what I’m sayin’? But a 10 cent stock, it went to almost $15 a share. You see how much we make?”

Myers: “I don’t need to become a state senator. Shit, y’all makin’ the real money.”

Undercover Operatives 701:

An advanced course by invitation only. Students must show strong background in acting and criminal behavior. In February 2004, instructor Tim Willis demonstrates his stutter step as he tells Roscoe Dixon that E-Cycle wants “first call” on used computers. Note how carefully Willis walks the line on entrapment. Notice who suggests working through regular channels and who brings up the subject of money first! Fooled you, huh? A master at work. Or as prosecutors like to say, today’s defendant is tomorrow’s witness.

Dixon: “I mean, why do you want to be up there?”

Willis: “Oh, so they can have first dibs on all of this.”

Dixon: “You takin’ all this.”

Willis: “Right.”

Dixon: “Ain’t one or two computers comin’ outta’ here on that, first thing. I mean folks just don’t want ’em.”

Willis: “Right, I, I, I see, I see what you’re sayin’. But then what else is, you, you see what they, their, their whole intention is. The, if they can show that they have a contract with the state of Tennessee, to, to take in this, this, this is a sizeable amount. Just imagine all across the state. They could say they have a contact with the state of Tennessee where they have first.”

Dixon: “But they hadn’t, they hadn’t talked to the state of Tennessee. If you see what I’m sayin’?”

Willis: “Naw. I talked to somebody in an office that …”

Dixon: “You talked to General Services?”

Willis: “Naw.”

Dixon: “In other words, they don’t know what they’re doin’. They, they as lost as a man in the moon.”

Willis: “Uh huh.”

Dixon: “There needs to be some conversation with people who are over this … You have an orderly process. Basically, now what you can do is put a offer on the table, this is what we’d like to do. What do you think about it? And they’ll tell ya’ yea, nay, or let’s modify type of thing.”

(Dixon makes a phone call, and the conversation resumes a few minutes later.)

Dixon: “I mean, how old is the company?”

Willis: “This, this, this is a new branch of an older company. This is a offshoot. So this has only been up and runnin’, man, maybe two years. Something like that.”

Dixon: “Are they tryin’ to be national?”

Willis: “Yeah, they, they actually tryin’ to go public. They tryin’ to take this, this part of the company public. And by doing, what they been instructed they need to do is to have contracts with major, large companies, large corporations and recycling their computers. They looked around and said, well, hell, let’s go after state. Nobody’s goin’ after state contracts.”

Dixon: “Uh huh.”

Willis: “Let’s go after that. We get two states, we definitely can take this thing public, you know? And so that’s their goal. Their goal is to take that company public inside of five years.”

Dixon: “Uh huh.”

Willis: “Do whatever they have to do to take it public. They don’t, they don’t, whatever, ’cause once they take it public they all multi-millionaires.”

Perjury 201:

Students will learn the difference between perjury, making false statements (or what the feds call “Section 1001’s”), and having sudden memory loss in front of a grand jury. Former Memphis City School Board member Michael Hooks Jr. was charged last week with making a false statement. But Roscoe Dixon wasn’t, even after this session with the FBI two weeks before he was indicted in May 2005. TSFS graduates know when to say no — and that’s no lie!

FBI: “So I just wondered if in 2004 you never took money from Tim Willis.”

Dixon: “No.”

FBI: “Okay, no you didn’t. And he never gave you money in an office, in that office.”

Dixon: “No. No.”

FBI: “Okay.”

Dixon: “Not to my knowledge. Not to me anyway, to my knowledge. Let me, let me just research my memory. He took us to dinner.”

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

The Race Factor

We all saw the demonstrators in the plaza in front of the federal building last week, their signs and shouts accusing the government of both racial and political bias in its prosecution of Roscoe Dixon.

Racial, in that former state senator Dixon and most of the others accused in the Tennessee Waltz scandal are African Americans. Political, in that most of them are Democrats. And a little conversation with one of the protesters, a friendly enough gentleman, fused those two categories together into a third: Ford Democrats.

The idea was based on the fact that Dixon, state senator Kathryn Bowers, and (to say the least) Dixon’s former Senate colleague John Ford were prominent among those caught in the FBI sting. These were all members of the diminished but still influential political constellation that was brought into being 30-odd years ago by former Congressman Harold Ford Sr., who now resides in Florida and intervenes in local affairs only once in a while.

One of those occasions, under way as we speak, is that of his son and political heir, Harold Ford Jr., squeaky-clean and scandal-free and currently attempting a U.S. Senate race from the springboard of the 9th District congressional seat he inherited from his father back in 1996.

Though there is still a rough cleavage in inner-city Memphis politics between forces loyal to the Fords and those partial to Memphis mayor Willie Herenton, the old rivalry lacks the fire. It is well understood that Harold Jr. aspires to national prominence, not local, and that even a defeat in the Senate race would not consign him to mucking about in the trenches of local ward politics.

Yes, there are members of the extended Ford family in this or that political office, and a new generation of hopefuls running for yet others, but the simple truth is that “Ford Democrats,” pending the outcome of that Senate race, are not so much a political force as they are a faction — one of three more or less co-equal ones — in the Shelby County Democratic Party of today.

It is doubtful that the FBI, or the U.S. attorney’s office, either, is interested in mixing it up with the Del Gills of the world to determine the pecking order of that embattled satrapy.

To what, then, do we owe the preponderance of Ford-faction African-American Memphis Democrats in the ranks of Tennessee Waltz indictees? Racism? Innate disposition? Political targeting?

Answer: none of the above. One need look no further than Barry Myers, the Dixon factotum whose motor-mouthed extravagance in the FBI’s surveillance recordings — even more than his testimonies, past- and future-tense, for the government — is crucial to the shaping of the Tennessee Waltz’s cast of characters.

When “L.C. McNeil,” the pseudonymous FBI agent posing as vice president of the bogus electronics firm E-Cycle Management, asks the counsel of Myers, an early contact, about likely collaborators in pushing the firm’s legislation in return for payoffs, it is Myers, not the FBI or the TBI or the U.S. attorney’s office, who determines the identity of the eventual stingees.

He scornfully advises the agent to stay away from “the white boys” when several white legislators, mainly Republican ones, are mentioned. But he’s an equal-opportunity excluder; he also steers the agents away from the likes of Joe Towns, an independent-minded black Memphis Democrat, whom he dismisses as a “nonentity.”

Myers is insistent that “E-Cycle” confine the spread of its lucre to a relatively small group of legislative intimates. These, he assures the presumed E-Cycle executives, are the “niggas” you can trust. It’s our thing, he tells the agents, or, as one would say in Italian, cosa nostra.

There, rather than through some imagined predatory scheme of the federal government’s, is the likely explanation of how the subjects of the Tennessee Waltz sting ended up being profiled. There may be further organized protests, but the most effective appeals on these defendants’ behalf are more likely to be heard in courtrooms than in public plazas.

Categories
Opinion

Dialogue in Black and White

“Beautiful day in Memphis, isn’t it?”

“Man, it’s so humid I feel like I been skin divin’ for the Sultana.”

“Not the weather. The Roscoe Dixon trial. Justice prevailed. The feds are cleaning up the town. Surely you heard all about it?”

“Another brother goin’ to jail, you wanna throw a parade. Treatin’ Roscoe like he’s public enemy number one. There’s cracker supervisors all over Tennessee and Mississippi with more than $9,500 in county bulldozer blades in their garage.”

“Dixon himself said he’s going to take some time to see where he went wrong.”

“Yeah, like four to six years. Roscoe’s all over the map on tapes, on the stand, in front of the damn microphones. Man don’t know where he stands at 56 has got a problem.”

“Not if he flips on John Ford.”

“That’d really make your day, wouldn’t it? Who do you think keeps brothers like John and Roscoe in business? Only time you white boys come calling is when you need something. And then we’re supposed to be the ones with our hands out.”

“Whites and blacks working together can change this city.”

“Ain’t four white boys in the Memphis FBI could find Roscoe’s people or the Hamilton Community Development Center with a GPS. The gap between haves and have-nots in this town is wider than the friggin’ Grand Canyon.”

“Must you use that sort of language?”

“Put an FBI bug on your ass at the country club for 24 hours, see how you sound.”

“What about Roscoe’s good friend A C Wharton. He’s been awfully quiet since the trial.”

“Habits die hard. The man was a defense lawyer for 30 years. And unlike you, he doesn’t pile on, especially with friends. Plenty of time to say somethin’ later on.”

“He better. It’s an election year and he hired Roscoe last year as assistant CAO. What happened to the ‘skeletons in the closet’ question?”

“Friendship? Don’t ask, don’t tell? Careless? I don’t know. But brothers didn’t invent it. Anyway, when Roscoe signed on at the county, he was working under a former fed, John Fowlkes, the CAO.”

“Surely you aren’t suggesting they got a heads up on the Tennessee Waltz?”

“Who knows? Fowlkes ain’t a fool. Maybe he had his suspicions but let Roscoe count paper clips for a few months while he collected paychecks. Maybe he even let Tim Willis, the human tape recorder, come by and see if he could help his new friends at the FBI fill out their dance card.”

“I still say it was a bad hire.”

“That’s cuz you’re a white boy. Like Roscoe said, everybody got some semi-hustle. Your granddaddy had enough sense to buy his insurance from Boss Crump. These phony E-Cycle dudes weren’t playing with public money. It was chips in a casino. You’re such a Boy Scout you never threw a dealer a chip at the table? Well, Roscoe was dealin’.”

“Dealing in illegality.”

“Put another zero or two on that $9,500 and they’d call it investment banking and make him a vice president.”

“I prefer to call it public service. At least the fear factor will keep our public officials honest from now on.”

“Just more careful. Long as you got guitars and lobbyists in Nashville, you got corruption.”

“Perhaps we should pay our lawmakers a full-time salary.”

“Like that college president at UT in Knoxville who got canned or the one over here at the medical school with the plasma TVs? The salary ain’t ever enough.”

“Then maybe we should enlist more rich businessmen like our governor, who has so much money he doesn’t need a salary.”

“Always with the white boys. Bredesen made his nut in health care and the stock market. Bet he’d a been on Roscoe’s speed dial if he been here 15 years ago.”

“Goodness, I hope I’m never as cynical as you are. I think I need to take a bath.”

“I wish you would. And I hope I’m never as hypocritical as you are.”

“So I guess that’s it, we’re stuck with each other.”

“You got a better idea?”

Categories
News

Roscoe Dixon Guilty on All Counts!

Former state senator Roscoe Dixon was convicted Thursday on all five counts in his bribery and conspiracy trial in federal court. The early-afternoon verdict was returned within an hour after jurors had returned from their Thursday lunch break.

The jury — composed of seven whites and five blacks and with the same seven-to-five preponderance of women to men – had deliberated a day and a half before delivering its verdict Thursday afternoon. There was no visible emotional response from either the prosecution or the defense side or from spectators in the courtroom as the verdict was read by a female juror in a matter-of-fact voice from a microphone stand facing presiding judge Jon McCalla.

Assistant U.S. attorney Tim DiScenza nodded politely to Dixon, who will remain free pending a September 8th sentencing, as the two of them departed almost simultaneously through the wooden gate dividing the trial-area proper from the spectator seats.

On his way out of the courtroom, Dixon gave hugs to his wife, Gloria Dobbins, and city council member TaJuan Stout-Mitchell, who had sat by Dobbins holding her hand before the verdict was read. “It’s all right,” Dixon said quietly to each.

The former state senator, who had held influential committee posts before resigning early in 2005 to become an aide to Shelby County Mayor A C Wharton, was the first Memphis defendant to have gone to trial in Operation Tennessee Waltz and the first major legislative figure to be tried for a plea of Not Guilty.

The jurors had listened to five days of testimony including several hours of video and audio tapes secretly recorded by the FBI. On Wednesday, the first full day of deliberations, they had sent questions to Judge McCalla asking for elaboration on the concepts of “predication” (the process whereby a defendant’s prior conduct is considered to have predisposed him toward commission of a crime) and “entrapment.”

That circumstance may have offered some encouragement to Dixon, his supporters, and his defense team. Dixon’s lead attorney, Coleman Garrett, had argued that his client was the victim of a conspiracy orchestrated by the government itself.. But the defendant’s fate was probably sealed when, under both direct examination and cross-examination Tuesday, he had conceded taking sums from the FBI’s undercover team, who purported to be representatives of “E-Cycle,” a computer recycling company seeking legislative favors.

U.S. Attorney David Kustoff issued a statement after the verdict thanking the jury and praising the prosecution team and the FBI for their efforts. Pointedly, his statement contained the following paragraph:

”Operation Tennessee Waltz is an ongoing, active, continuing investigation. The people of Tennessee and their elected officials need to understand that where the public trust has been violated, the United States Attorney’s Office will prosecute. This office will continue to aggressively pursue those elected officials who engage in public corruption.

That, plus the 90-day wait for sentencing, fueled speculation that Dixon may feel pressure not only to take part as a government witness in subsequent Tennessee Waltz trials but possible to offer new information about further colleagues that could result in charges against them.

The former senator was asked about that possibility during a post-conviction press conference outside the federal building, and both he and attorney Garrett declined to comment on the possibility. Instead, Garrett reiterated his belief in the entrapment defense which jurors had ultimately rejected.

Dixon himself fluctuated between acceptance of his fate, saying he was in the “big boys’ league” and could “take his medicine,” and continued defiance, insisting that the charges against him were part of a concerted effort to undermine a Memphis “power base” and to “steamroller a generation of black leadership in Memphis.” He praised Garrett and said he was “glad” he decided to testify. He encouraged other defendants in Tennessee Waltz to go to trial so people can “see how the government acted.”

Garrett also encouraged other defendants to fight. “I believe in the final analysis if everyone will stand up on their hind legs and fight back, this thing can still be turned around,” he said.

Categories
Opinion

“Big Dog on the Porch”

Superficially, Roscoe Dixon is the most sympathetic of the E-Cycle cast of characters, which may have been a factor in his decision to testify. In their undercover roles, E-Cycle bigwigs “L.C” was a jive-talking dot-com millionaire looking to make another score if E-Cycle became a public company and “Joe Carson” was a befuddled “whatever-it-takes” chief executive. What they knew about legislative process, the environment, or computer recycling you could write on the head of a pin.

On tape, Dixon protégé and bagman Barry Myers came across as a foul-mouthed hustler. Expletives are no longer deleted in trial transcripts, and jurors got a full week of Myers employing the F-word in all its variants, as in, “I want to make some f***in’ money!” Cooperating witness Tim Willis learned or had the gift of being able to fake sincerity. So well, in fact, you wondered if he was acting or speaking from the heart when he played the part of the free-spending lobbyist who longed to “be a player.”

The Dixon the jury saw on tape was an amalgam of political godfather, long-suffering (and in his mind underpaid) soldier with ambitions to become a general, and corrupt politico with a conscience. He didn’t cuss, at least not much. He initially took E-Cycle seriously and made sincere inquiries for them through proper government channels. The financial favors he asked “for Barry” were piddling compared to the $30 million and $250,000 paydays in stock-market funny money envisioned by L.C., Carson, and Willis if Dixon came through. When he took money, he left some on the table, literally, and shared it with family and friends. He had his hand in the cookie jar, but Team E-Cycle was bidding for the jar, the major appliances, the whole kitchen. On the stand and under the gentle questioning of his attorney, he was good old Roscoe, son of Whitehaven, Army soldier, National Guardsman, married to the same woman 25 years.

But jurors also saw, again and again, a sinister side to Dixon that suggested where Myers learned the ropes. Dixon was “predicated” on the entirely real issue of dental care for Tennessee children, which he could influence as head of the TennCare oversight committee. The contortions he went through to distance himself from bribes — Myers called him “scared of his [expletive] shadow” — made him look conniving as well as guilty. He lied to himself and others, including FBI agents, in a taped interview two weeks before he was indicted.

If Dixon learned a few things about trial preparation and the potential benefits of testifying from Harold Ford Sr., the government has learned a few things too. Prosecutor Tim DiScenza was thorough and methodical. Instead of hitting the jury with details at the start of the trial, as prosecutors did in the Ford trial, he brought out his big guns — Myers, Willis, Carson, and L.C. — right away. Then he produced the phone records and bank records and closed all the legal loopholes. Finally, in case jurors had forgotten anything, he called an FBI agent to the witness stand to present a chronological summary of the case. (At Flyer press time, he was cross-examining Dixon.)

What was chilling about the tapes was how much worse it could have been if Willis and Myers had not turned and the government had not acted. Myers was planning to succeed Dixon in the state legislature and even said he had his mentor’s office copy of the state seal. None of that Mr. Smith Goes to Washington idealism for Myers. His moral compass was his little black book of dirt on various “niggas” and “white boys.” Dixon dreamed of being mayor of Memphis or, to come down a peg, General Sessions Court clerk, with an empire of appointed employees and credit cards. In 2005, he was hired as assistant chief administrative officer by Shelby County mayor A C Wharton, described by Dixon as part of “the network” with him and Ford. As a “big dog on the porch,” Dixon had influence over contracts and the dirt on his “big juice” pals, who also had the goods on him, ensuring that the corruption would continue.

Assuming that prosecutors won’t rest until going after the supply side as well as the politicians, the Tennessee Waltz is a watershed in Memphis history. Before this week, I figured the government was hoping Dixon would plead guilty. After seeing and hearing the tapes, I believe the Justice Department wanted to try the case and air the dirty laundry in the court of public opinion. A guilty plea would have been open to spin and dissembling.