Tag: trial

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ACLU Trial Wraps Up, Ruling to Come in September

CREDIT: Brandon Dill

Brandon Dill

Protesters and police officers face off during the 2016 Hernando de Soto bridge protest

Court adjourned Thursday morning in the federal trial over Memphis police surveillance on activists. 

Memphis Police Department (MPD) Major Lambert Ross was the last witness to take the stand in U.S. District Judge Jon McCalla’s courtroom. Ross was the head of the Real Time Crime Center (RTCC) during the time of the alleged police surveillance.

The RTCC houses more than 30 large, high-definition monitors displaying live footage from 1,000 cameras around the city. The footage is monitored by both civilian and commissioned officer analysts who can radio officers when incidents occur, Ross said.

Ross said that the RTCC was never used for political surveillance, but to find out where events were being held and how many people were involved. Precincts were then made aware of any large events that were ongoing in their area.

The RTCC began searching social media in 2014, Ross said. Initially, it was used to assist in solving crimes, but after the 2016 bridge protest, searches related to protests were more common. Specifically, Ross said Black Lives Matter was a recurring search term.

“I’m not going to say we chose that term, but it chose us,” Ross testified. “The event picks the search term.”

When asked if searching social media was ever done to find out if specific people would be involved in an event, Ross said no. Ross said as a black man, he “understands the right to protest” and would never interfere. As his MPD colleagues testified before him, Ross said the motivation for the monitoring was public safety.

The city and the ACLU-TN both rested their cases following Ross’ testimony and are required to submit closing briefs in writing to McCalla by Friday, Sept. 14th. Then, both sides have until Friday, Sept. 24th to respond to the opposing side’s brief.

McCalla will release the ruling after both sides have answered each others’ briefs. After court adjourned, one of the attorney’s for the ACLU-TN, Thomas Castelli, said he hopes that the trial will result in court-ordered independent monitoring of MPD, a change in their policies, and better training as it related to the 1978 consent decree.

Additionally and separately from this case, the city has filed a motion to vacate or modify the decree. The ACLU has until early October to that request.

Bruce McMullen, chief legal officer for the city of Memphis, said the city is asking the court vacate the consent decree “because it’s not really relevant today.” It predates any standard technology that law enforcement uses today, he said.

If the court isn’t willing to completely do away with the decree, McMullen said it should “at least be modified and updated so that it’s applicable to the law enforcement best practices that we use today.”

“I want to emphasize that it’s nothing we’re doing today that 155 other jurisdictions do not do in law enforcement,” McMullen said. “It’s basic law enforcement, from Skycops to body cams, which a lot of citizens supported us getting.”

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News News Blog

Rallings Calls Media Coverage of ACLU Lawsuit “Erroneous”

CREDIT: Brandon Dill

Brandon Dill

Michael Rallings with crowd during protest

In response to news coverage of a recent court ruling saying that Memphis violated a 1978 consent decree by gathering political intelligence on protesters, Michael Rallings, director of the Memphis Police Department (MPD), said Tuesday that some of the language in the reports “does not accurately reflect the department’s activities.”

Specifically, Rallings said the terms “surveillance” and “spying” are “erroneous.”

Rallings also said the city’s goal has been to be transparent about the issues involved in the case, ACLU of Tennessee, Inc vs. City of Memphis.

“In fact the only reason many of the articles were printed in the first place is because we voluntarily unsealed documents and posted them on the city website for the world to see,” Rallings said.

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Set to go to trial Monday, August 20th, the case is the result of a lawsuit against the city for gathering political intelligence on protesters over a two-year period through social media and other mediums. Rallings said he can’t speak at length about ongoing litigation but “feels compelled to explain a few things”:

-The terms “surveillance” and “spying” are “erroneous,” and were never used in the court’s order. “Those words conjure up images of officers in unmarked vans on the street corner listening to tapped phone conversations. This does not accurately reflect MPD’s activities, or its motivation, regarding the monitoring of events which are the subject of this lawsuit.”


-Officers look at social media posts to help us gauge the size and intensity of demonstrations so that we can properly provide for public safety. This is also an effective tool in stopping criminal activity such as sexual predators, domestic violence, stalking, and threats. We also use other technology, such as body cameras, SkyCops, and security cameras in our law enforcement efforts to keep Memphians safe.

-Monitoring of social media posts and the usage of modern technology such as body cameras are considered to be best practices in policing nationwide. Various media reports show that many other cities, such as Boston, Charlotte, Denver, Little Rock, San Jose, and Seattle, use social media monitoring. In the aftermath of last year’s Charlottesville riots that resulted in about 40 casualties, including three deaths, the after-action recommendation said that monitoring social media is crucial to protecting public safety.

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“We feel like we have been complying with the consent decree as it would apply to today’s world,” Rallings said. “We need to be able to read these posts and use them as part of our decisions about how we deploy resources, since we are responsible for the safety of all involved.”

Protest and counterprotest can cause “mayhem and loss of life,” Ralling said, but proper social media monitoring helps the agency prepare and respond to those types of events.

“These tools enabled me to ensure that the 2016 bridge protest was peaceful and without injury,” Rallings said. “Without these tools, I believe that night would have ended very differently We will, however, follow the judge’s order.”

Rallings said if the judge rules in favor of the plaintiff, then the department will “find a way to balance public safety with complying with the manner in which the court interprets the consent decree.”

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News The Fly-By

Defense Theory

During the 1994 trials of Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jesse Misskelley Jr. — collectively known as the West Memphis Three — there was a mystery that neither the prosecution nor the defense could explain.

Though the penis of Christopher Byers, one of three 8-year-old boys found hog-tied and murdered in a West Memphis ditch in 1993, was removed, there was no blood found at the scene.

In a 500-plus page document filed with the court October 29th, Echols’ defense team attempts to explain the lack of blood. It also reports DNA results of hair and other material found at the crime scene.

“People look at this terrible genital injury and say, where’s all the blood?” said Dennis Riordan, a San Francisco-based attorney who took Echols’ case in May 2004. “But if [Byers] drowned before he was subjected to this wound, it wouldn’t bleed.”

The document suggests that the boys were drowned in a creek, and then an animal, perhaps a dog or raccoon, removed Byers’ penis.

“Have you ever been at the scene where a dog has killed a person? There’s no blood because, for the animal, that’s the whole point,” Riordan says.

Forensic pathology studies show that other wounds on the boys are consistent with those caused by animal claws and teeth.

During the trials, the prosecution suggested the murders of Byers, Stevie Branch, and Michael Moore were part of a Satanic ritual led by Echols. He was given the death penalty. Baldwin and Misskelley were both sentenced for life.

In July, news broke that DNA tests had linked hair in a shoelace used to hog-tie the boys to Terry Hobbs, Branch’s stepfather. Another hair found on a nearby tree stump was linked to Hobbs’ friend, David Jacoby.

In 2003, Echols’ lawyers began DNA tests on existing evidence. Arkansas did not allow DNA testing on closed cases until 2001.

According to Gabe Holstrom, spokesperson for Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel, it could take months for the state to study the report.

“While the state will look at the new allegations and evidence objectively, it stands behind the conviction of Echols and that of his co-defendants,” Holstrom said.

Since the papers were filed in Echols’ case, a new trial for Echols would not necessarily mean a new trial for Baldwin or Misskelley.

“But,” Riordan says, “it would have a tremendous effect on what the state decides to do with the other two.”

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Opinion

Another John Ford Trial?

The John Ford saga isn’t over, but some friends of the former senator would probably breathe easier if it were.

Ford plans to appeal his conviction on a federal bribery charge in the Tennessee Waltz investigation. Last week, he was sentenced to 66 months in prison. The FBI’s undercover sting operation has withstood previous challenges, and jury verdicts are seldom overturned. But the appeal could give Ford some leverage with federal prosecutors in Nashville, where he faces a November 6th trial date on charges related to his consulting work for TennCare contractors between 2001 and 2005.

“If I were his defense attorney, I would be going to the U.S. attorney up there and saying, ‘You all have already convicted my client, and he got 66 months, so what [would happen] if we dropped our appeal?'” said Hickman Ewing, former U.S. attorney in Memphis. “Maybe they would say that if he would plead guilty to one count they would make it concurrent to what he already got. The bottom line is how strong they think their case is.”

In the Tennessee Waltz, Ford’s “business partners” were undercover FBI agents posing as executives of E-Cycle Management while they secretly taped him. Ford was paid $55,000. In the Nashville case, Ford’s main business partners were TennCare contractors Doral Dental and Omnicare Health Plan, renamed UAHC Health Plan of Tennessee. Those companies, unlike E-Cycle, are very real and paid Ford more than $800,000.

If the Nashville case goes to trial, prosecutors will have to get a conviction the old-fashioned way, because there are apparently no secret tapes. The Nashville indictment came 18 months after Ford was indicted in Tennessee Waltz and delayed the start of his Memphis trial a few months. Further complicating things, there has been a change in command in the Nashville office this year. In 2006, Craig Morford was both U.S. attorney and Ford prosecutor, but this year he moved to Washington, D.C., where he is number-two man in the attorney general’s office.

Morford said the indictment revealed “an appalling willingness to violate [Ford’s] duty by using his public position for personal gain.”

Whether his successors share that hunger to prosecute — especially now that Ford has been convicted and sentenced — is not known. In a brief meeting with this reporter, assistant U.S. attorney Eli Richardson, one of the prosecutors in the Ford case along with Paul O’Brien, would only say that there is a hearing in September and a trial date in November. The trial already has been postponed several times since Ford was indicted on December 13, 2006.

According to the indictment, Ford owned a 40 percent interest in Managed Care Services Group (MCSG). The other owners were “Individual A” and “Individual B” in the indictment, but they have since been identified as Osbie Howard, former treasurer for the city of Memphis, and Ronald Dobbins.

Howard was one of 13 character witnesses at Ford’s sentencing hearing last week. Most of them got off the stand without being challenged, but not Howard. Assistant U.S. attorney Tim DiScenza accused him of making a false statement to an FBI agent earlier this year about Ford’s income tax return. Howard took the Fifth Amendment when DiScenza tried to question him further.

According to court documents filed in Nashville, Ford earned $470,414 in 2004 and $470,938 in 2003. The indictment says Ford formed MCSG to get payments from Doral Dental and hid that fact while working as a state senator and head of a TennCare committee. As a $10,000-a-month “consultant” to UAHC, Ford allegedly sponsored legislation benefiting them and met with other state officials on their behalf.

A Nashville trial could be embarrassing to other Ford “consulting” clients and business associates, including the Oseman Insurance Agency of Memphis, the Armstrong Allen law firm, Hospice USA, Connie Matthews (the mother of two of Ford’s children), and former Shelby County Commission member Bridget Chisholm, among others. If the case goes to trial, it could clarify what local and state elected part-time officials who claim that their full-time occupation is “consultant” can and cannot do.

Ewing said one option for federal prosecutors is to move to dismiss the case, provided Ford cooperates regarding other people. Despite his hefty income, Ford has pleaded indigence and is being represented by federal public defenders. If Nashville prosecutors don’t think he has money to pay fines that might be imposed, that could influence their decision about whether to try him again, Ewing said.

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Politics Politics Feature

Feeling the Sting

When, as virtually the last matter taken by the prosecution in former state senator John Ford‘s Tennessee Waltz trial, a $50,000 Rolex watch came into evidence, Ford and his support group, which included numerous members of his immediate and extended families, seemed of good cheer.

As was chronicled here last week, Ford felt sunny enough after that day’s testimony to engage in banter with the two FBI agents, Mark Jackson and Brian Burns, who had testified to being the originators of the entire Tennessee Waltz sting — the means whereby Ford and several other state legislators and other public officials had been induced to accept money in return for legislative favors.

If the watch — a gift from developer Rusty Hyneman that prosecutors were attempting to use as “predication” (proof of Ford’s disposition toward corruption) — had an outer-space element (it was partly made of material derived from a meteorite), so had the sting devised by Jackson and Burns and acted out by three other principals, FBI agents “L.C. McNeil” and “Joe Carson” (the names were pseudonyms) and undercover informant Tim Willis.

The premise of the sting was that a computer-recycling firm calling itself E-Cycle (it was an FBI shell company, as things turned out) needed expert assistance from the likes of Ford and was willing to pay for it — in the senator’s case, to the tune of $55,000.

Aided by defense attorney Mike Scholl, Ford felt that he had a strong prospect for nothing worse than a hung jury (indeed, Scholl would base his closing argument on an appeal to each juror to “act as an individual”).

The very fact that he felt like engaging in humorous asides with the professed architects of his then-pending peril was evidence that Ford and his supporters saw the predication case to be weak enough that he might indeed catch a break from one or two jurors.

Evidently Ford was right, but not right enough. When jurors fell to deliberating on Wednesday, following closing arguments, they did deadlock on the charge of extortion — an indication that Scholl’s claim of entrapment had found some sympathetic ears.

Equally tenuous were the three counts of witness intimidation — all ultimately resulting in not-guilty findings, at least partly because the main witness against Ford on that count, Willis, had seemed disingenuous or worse during a hard day of cross-examination by Scholl.

But the charge of bribery was buttressed by what seemed an endless series of videotapes showing Ford being handed money — $55,000 altogether — by McNeil, who had made sure to connect the payoff to specific talk about legislative action by Ford.

Ford’s mood had conspicuously turned gloomy by Thursday afternoon, when jurors and other trial principals were reconvened to hear Judge Daniel Breen‘s ruling on a definition requested by the jury: What precisely was the meaning of the term “under color of official right”?

When the judge ruled that it referred to actions by a public official, the feeling had almost palpably spread to all followers of the trial that some tide had turned against Ford. In fact, the question had to do with the extortion count, but its import was more general, and, as it turned out, there was no disagreement among jurors on the bribery charge.

Whatever sentiment there was that racial or political factors might have influenced the Tennessee Waltz prosecution (and on the latter score there was and is a considerable amount of suspicion; see City Beat, p. 14), the jury of six blacks and six whites did its duty by the evidence confronting their eyes and ears.

Hypothetically, all of this could come undone in the course of some appeal. In any case, John Ford has very little in the way of a breathing spell. Though he remains free on bond, he is up for trial again next week in Nashville, on charges relating to accepting money in return for legislative favors — this time on behalf of a real company.

• Shelby County assessor Rita Clark, the Germantown homemaker and Democratic activist who surprised herself and everybody else by winning her maiden political race in 1996, then went on to win twice more, won’t run again in 2008.

Clark announced her decision to members of the Shelby County Commission during budget hearings on her department Monday morning.

Asked to accept a 5 percent cut for the next fiscal year, Clark declared such a thing “impossible” and then went on to tell the commissioners she would not run for reelection and didn’t want to saddle her successor with a departmental budget that was too small.

Elaborating on that later on, Clark said, “My budget now is the same as it was when I came into office. There’s no way we could continue to provide an appropriate level of service with less.”

Although she had worked in other candidates’ political campaigns, Clark had never made a race of her own until 1996, when the late Democratic eminence Bill Farris prevailed on her to run against incumbent assessor Harold Sterling.

Clark was widely regarded at first as a pro forma candidate — someone to maintain her party’s presence on the ballot. She ultimately proved to be much more — fighting a hard mano-a-mano campaign against Sterling by questioning his hiring of a personal trainer and an out-of-county assistant.

She won in an upset, going away, and in the process her continued success suggested to many Democrats that, all other factors being equal, someone of her race and gender made an ideal countywide candidate.

To date, no other Democrat — except for Mayor A C Wharton — has been able to crack the Republican monopoly on countywide offices.

Commenting Monday on her decision not to seek reelection next year, Clark cracked wryly, “It’s just time. I’m afraid if I ran again, my husband would oppose me. And I couldn’t beat him.”

• Both Democratic candidates for the vacant District 89 state House seat, Kevin Gallagher and Jeannie Richardson, held campaign fund-raiser/receptions last week, as that campaign begins to mount in earnest. Two Republicans are also competing for their party’s nomination: Wayne McGinnis and Dave Wicker Jr.

Responding to at least one Gallagher supporter’s published skepticism concerning her residence (and the identity of her Midtown housemates), Richardson, a former inhabitant of Mud Island, said, “The people who live here with me are my son, my daughter, and my granddaughter, and I do hope they’ll all be active in my campaign.”

Both parties’ special primaries will be held May 31st, with the two winners facing each other in a July 17th general election.

• Still feeling their oats are a group of local Memphis bloggers who have been sought out of late for audiences by political figures like state Senate speaker pro tem Rosalind Kurita (D-Clarksville) and Memphis mayoral candidate Herman Morris.

Now, the group, whose efforts are pooled under the umbrella site memphisliberalblogosphere.blogspot.com, have been asked for another sit-down — this time by teacher Bill Morrison, a Democrat who ran a game but ultimately unsuccessful race for Congress last year against 7th District incumbent Marsha Blackburn, one of the Republican Party’s stars.

Morrison evidently plans to take on another behemoth — this time City Council incumbent Jack Sammons.

Both Sammons and his friend and fellow Super-District 9 council member Tom Marshall are presumed to be candidates for reelection, but each is also rumored to be still considering a race for mayor.

• It is still too early to write “finis” to the mayoral field. As of Tuesday morning, 14 petitions had been pulled from the Election Commission, and only one person — former Shelby County commissioner John Willingham — had actually filed.

Incumbent mayor Willie Herenton, presumably to cover his flank, made a point this week of dispatching a letter to Shelby County mayor Wharton, his erstwhile campaign manager, advising him that “no circumstances” would prevent him from running again and adding significantly, “I trust that your support will be evident.”

Without Wharton, who is still under pressure from potential backers to make a race, the “top tier” of mayoral candidates is generally considered to consist of Herenton, city councilwoman Carol Chumney, former MLGW head Morris, and Willingham. Some regard former FedEx executive Jim Perkins as belonging in that list, and there is talk also of a candidacy by entrepreneur/businessman Darrell Cobbins.

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Editorial Opinion

Looking for the Thread

With the impact of last week’s “voluntary manslaughter” verdict in the Mary Winkler murder case in Selmer still reverberating, John Ford’s trial on bribery and extortion charges headed toward its own conclusion this week in federal court in Memphis. And by now nobody — but nobody — was thinking slam-dunk about anything. Even if the Ford case were to go the government’s way (and that was still in doubt at our press time), most observers who had logged time at the former state senator’s trial — hearing all the testimony, weighing all the evidence — were well aware that the exact shape of the outcome still remained in doubt.

The reason? Juries these days weigh so many factors, including subjective ones, that dramatically contrasting conclusions can quite obviously be drawn from the same set of facts — especially when the prosecution and the defense make a point of presenting radically different interpretations of the same circumstances.

Consider what happened in Selmer: Rev. Matt Winkler had been slain a year ago by a shotgun blast, one that quite clearly came from a gun being held by his wife, Mary, who then fled with the couple’s three children toward the Alabama coast before being apprehended in that state. Authorities both in Alabama and Tennessee promptly claimed to have confessions from Winkler.

End of story? Hardly. By the time crack defense attorneys Steve Farese and Leslie Ballin had presented their version of the case last week, enough doubt had been raised that the slain Matt Winkler himself appeared to have supplanted his surviving wife as the true “defendant” in the case.

Much of this might have been foreseen. Even while most news accounts of the crime last year marveled over how such an inexplicable and shocking crime could have occurred in what had appeared to be a model church-centered family, the Flyer came across the first chink in that construct. That was when a neighbor family disclosed to senior editor Jackson Baker that Matt Winkler had angrily and without much apparent provocation threatened to kill their dog for wandering over onto the Winkler property.

A similar story was told during the trial by a defense witness — a dog-owner from McMinnville, the Winklers’ prior home. But that was as nothing compared to the testimony from the defendant herself about a lengthy history of alleged mistreatment from an overbearing and often irrational husband. Explicit claims by her of aberrant and oppressive sexual behavior on her late husband’s part were buttressed somewhat by evidence of stored pornography on the Winklers’ home computer, even if specific details (involving garish high-heeled shoes and a garish wig, among other artifacts) were in the “he said/she said” category. The late Rev. Winkler, of course, was well past saying.

There was much else that could be read one way or another, and it was up to a jury of 10 women and two men to unravel the contradictions. In the end, the unraveling produced a dominant thread that most observers had not expected. Jury nullification, as some critics of the verdict complained? We think not. It was a group operating as the dominant conscience of a community, and that, after all, is one way of defining what a jury of one’s peers is and does.

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Opinion

Miami Vice

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, but what happened in Miami in 2004 during three days and nights of partying involving John Ford, an undercover FBI agent, and their dates was courtroom fodder this week in Ford’s corruption trial.

Ford’s girlfriend, Mina Nicole Knox, 26, took the witness stand for nearly two hours as the defense closed out its case in short order. Ford did not testify, and the defense presented only three witnesses, including Knox, attorney Allan Wade, and Ford’s friend William Watson.

At Flyer press time, prosecutors were undecided whether to call a rebuttal witness. Otherwise, U.S. district judge Daniel Breen said the two sides would make closing arguments Tuesday afternoon and the case could go to the jury after that. The trial is in its third week.

Knox, who described her relationship with Ford as “personal,” is a petite former model and professional cheerleader and aspiring actress. She answered questions in a sweet, perky voice as defense attorney Michael Scholl and assistant prosecutor Lorraine Craig asked her about details of her weekend with Ford, Tim Willis, and undercover agent L.C. McNeil in Miami in July 2004. The weekend included a party aboard the now famous E-Cycle yacht, which was in fact an FBI prop, where undercover FBI agents smoked cigars, had drinks, and danced salsa with Knox and several of her male and female friends, including Ford.

Under questioning by Scholl, Knox told jurors that McNeil spent the night with one of her girlfriends in a hotel room and a second night with another woman from their party. McNeil testified last week that in his undercover role he “mirrored” Ford’s party style, but he insisted there was no sexual relationship, drug use, or anything “inappropriate” in his role-playing. In real life, McNeil is an ordained minister and specialist in undercover operations who said “it is a challenge to separate the two” lives he leads.

The weekend in Miami is important because it marked the beginning of the buddy-buddy relationship between Ford and McNeil and established the terms by which McNeil would pay Ford $55,000 in what the government says were bribes over the next nine months. Scholl spent more than three days cross-examining McNeil, who made all the payments and recorded them.

When it came his turn to present witnesses, however, Scholl elected to make it short and sweet. Wade, who represents developer Rusty Hyneman, said he never saw Hyneman give Ford an expensive Rolex watch and that Ford did not really save Hyneman any money on a state environmental matter, as Ford boasts on a secret tape. The other witness, a clothing designer who has known Ford for 20 years, also testified about the Rolex.

Then it was Knox’s turn. She said the purpose of the trip to Miami was to attend a black film festival. She did not recall hearing anything about E-Cycle Management. The defense contends Ford was targeted by the FBI and entrapped.

Prosecutors changed tactics by having Craig, instead of assistant U.S. attorney Tim DiScenza, handle the cross-examination. She asked Knox why three versions of the weekend in Miami that she wrote differed in detail, especially about McNeil’s implied romantic involvement. Knox said the first account was written hastily and in broad terms. Her final account of the weekend was written earlier this month just before the trial began. Craig suggested Ford might have coached Knox, but she denied having any help.

Jurors appeared to be listening intently to Knox, in sharp contrast to previous days in which witness testimony dragged on and was often interrupted by private conversations between the judge and lawyers. The courtroom was also unusually crowded with Ford supporters.

After Knox testified, there was a bench conference, after which Breen announced that the proof was complete unless the government decided during the lunch break to produce a rebuttal witness.

The anti-climactic end of the testimony left spectators and reporters guessing about the outcome and offering their opinions about the high and low points of the trial. With Ford declining to take the stand, the role of star witness must fall to either McNeil or undercover informant Tim Willis.

McNeil got the most face time, and the tapes of his payoffs to Ford were devastating, but for my money the trial’s most dramatic testimony came from Willis when he recounted his visit to Ford’s office in February 2005.

Willis was nervous, very nervous.

He had just gotten a call from Ford asking him to come to Ford’s office in downtown Memphis.

The call was short. Ford wanted to talk about one of Willis’ clients. Since Willis had only one client — E-Cycle Management — he could imagine what Ford was going to ask him: Are you working for the FBI?

Say what you will about Willis, he kept Operation Tennessee Waltz alive for three more months until the unveiling of the indictments on May 26, 2005. His commentary from the witness stand on the tape in which Ford threatens to shoot him was the signature moment in the trial.

The meeting at Ford’s office was Willis’ finest hour as an undercover informant. He outfoxed the fox in his own office, nervously shifting a miniature hidden recording device from one pocket to another while making up stories to counter each of Ford’s probes and keeping his nerve when Ford threatened to shoot him if he found out he was being betrayed.

At the time, Tennessee Waltz had been running for 15 months. Ford had been under suspicion since at least April 19, 2004, and had taken $40,000 in payments from an undercover FBI agent. Ford’s Memphis office was on the second floor of a small building on Third Street, with no easy access or interior observation points for FBI agents. Willis was on his own.

“I had a funny feeling about the call,” he testified.

So he called FBI agents Brian Burns and Mark Jackson, who told him to go ahead and to take a recorder with him.

After they talked awhile, Ford got down to business. How well did Willis know L.C. McNeil, the E-Cycle executive who had been paying Ford? What kind of contract did Willis have with E-Cycle? Was it for two years or three years? Where else did the company do business besides Tennessee?

“I’m just trying to figure out why they need a bill,” said Ford.

Then the big question: “Are they legit, man?”

Ford said Roscoe Dixon and two other unidentified people had warned him to be careful. Unknown to Ford, Dixon, hired a month earlier by Shelby County mayor A C Wharton as an administrative assistant, had been secretly taped for more than a year and had already been caught taking bribes from Willis. But Willis did not pay any bribes to Ford and testified that he didn’t even know Ford had been bribed when he went to his office that day.

To each question, Willis made up an answer. E-Cycle, he suggested, was a shell company for a get-rich-quick stock scheme. McNeil and his partner Joe Carson “hated each other,” and McNeil might be trying to sabotage the deal. McNeil grew up on the rough side of Chicago and might have been a drug dealer as a kid.

Ford wasn’t satisfied. The FBI has a lot of shell companies too, he countered.

“Let me ask you,” he said to Willis. “You ain’t workin’ for none of them motherfuckers?”

Ford whispered that he had a gun and said he would use it. Willis, as he had done several times before, broke into nervous laughter.

“He said he would shoot me dead and go tell my wife that I ran off with another woman,” he testified.

Ford was on the right trail but was missing enough pieces that Willis was able to talk his way out of the jam. The truth was worse than Ford suspected. McNeil was an FBI agent and instructor in undercover operations.

“The feds ain’t cut no deal with you?” Ford asked Willis, who had worked in his campaign in 2002.

In fact, that is exactly what they had done. Willis nervously shifted the recorder around in his pockets, sending static through the audiotape played for the jury.

As Willis was leaving, Ford threatened him again, telling him that if he was working for the FBI, “you gonna die right now.” He touched Willis on his shirt — Willis described it as a pat down — to see if he was wired, and Willis lifted up his shirt. As Willis walked down the stairs, Ford said, “It will not ever come back what you and I said.”

Little did he know that Willis would make it all come back. For the next three months, he never met with Ford again without an FBI agent in the room.

“We almost shut down the operation because of the threat,” Jackson testified.

Since he began cooperating with the government in 2003, Willis has been paid approximately $215,000. But on that day in February 2005 in Ford’s office, Willis was worth every dollar the government paid him.

Categories
Opinion

The Big Dance

The government showed its Tennessee Waltz playbook in the Roscoe Dixon trial last year, but prosecutors face a few more obstacles as they try to convict John Ford.

The X-factors include Ford himself, his attorney Michael Scholl, bagman Barry Myers, controversial U.S. attorney general Alberto Gonzales, and the Justice Department’s public corruption prosecutors in Nashville, who have Ford under a separate indictment.

In many ways, of course, the trials will be more alike than different. Prosecutor Tim DiScenza will play obscenity-laced audio and videotapes of Ford wheeling and dealing with an undercover FBI agent pretending to be an executive of E-Cycle Management. The payoff picture will be shown from different angles. Jurors will hear how the phony company was created and the role played by informant Tim Willis. Willis and the FBI agents who pretended to be free-spending E-Cycle executives will testify.

But Ford is an iconic name in Memphis politics, and he was a genuine leader in the Tennessee Senate. Dixon, on the other hand, was a plodder and secondary figure even in the estimation of his friends. He bumbled through an appearance on the witness stand, and his lame alibi and inconsistencies made him easy prey for DiScenza. The shrewdness that made Ford a self-described consultant with a high-six-figure income could also make him a formidable defendant, whether or not he chooses to testify. His reputation as a big talker given to outrageous overstatements might actually help him fight the three counts of his indictment that accuse him of threatening Willis.

Scholl has the benefit of learning from the trials of Dixon and Calvin Williams, a former Shelby County employee who was also convicted. Dixon’s attorney, Coleman Garrett, opened with the entrapment defense. Dixon went off in another direction when he took the witness stand. Based on pretrial motions, Scholl will apparently argue that Ford considered the money he got from E-Cycle to be a legitimate consulting fee.

The key witness against Dixon was Myers, described as being “like a son” and “protégé” to the senator. Myers, who did not begin cooperating with the FBI until the Tennessee Waltz indictments became public, was the bagman for Dixon and others. On secretly recorded tapes with E-Cycle bigshots, Myers calls Ford “the big juice” and one of the “heavy hitters” in the legislature. But Myers was not as close to Ford as he was to Dixon. As far as we know, Myers was not Ford’s bagman. Nor is some other bagman waiting in the wings to testify against Ford. It appears that Ford did his own collections.

In the year since Dixon went to trial, the political climate has changed. The Justice Department has taken a pounding from Democrats, who now control Congress, and some Republicans. Last month, it came to light that Gonzales was involved in the firing of eight federal prosecutors, including Bud Cummins of Little Rock. A Republican, Cummins said he resented the misstatements about the firings more than the dismissal itself and believes the Justice Department has lost credibility.

Gonzales is due to testify before the U.S. Senate next week, if he survives that long. Ford jurors will be instructed not to read or watch news during the trial, but Scholl may have an opportunity to suggest that Ford was politically targeted as a Democrat.

Dixon jurors were introduced to the concept of “predication” or predisposition to commit a crime. “You can’t go out trolling for public officials, can you?” DiScenza asked an FBI agent, who explained that Tennessee Waltz began as an investigation of Shelby County Juvenile Court. Jurors heard tapes of Dixon and Myers discussing bribes for helping a dental clinic (for which Dixon was not indicted) to show he was predicated.

In the minds of many Memphians, John Ford was predicated by being John Ford — a fast driver and big talker with marriage problems and expensive tastes. But that won’t cut it in court. Prosecutors will have to be careful not to trip over their own colleagues in Nashville.

In 2006, Ford was indicted in Nashville in connection with his “consulting” payments from companies doing business with the TennCare program. The indictment pushed Ford’s trial date back to April to allow Scholl to review hundreds more documents. Nashville prosecutors will only say that their case will follow sequentially the Memphis Ford trial.

(Check www.memphisflyer.com for regular trial updates.)

Categories
News The Fly-By

The Cheat Sheet

CREDIT: Greg Cravens

Bringing an end to one of the most notorious local crimes in recent history, a judge sentences confessed killer Dale Mardis to 15 years in prison for the slaying of code-enforcement inspector Mickey Wright. The victim’s family reacts to the verdict with outrage. We can’t say we blame them.

Temperatures drop below freezing over the weekend — in March, remember — making Easter egg hunts a bit more challenging for the kids, who might as well be picking up snowballs. Brrrrr!

Nothing about the Ford family Greg Cravens

surprises us anymore, not even the revelation that Tamara Mitchell-Ford carries ravioli in her pockets. Not Snickers, or packets of M&Ms, or even Slim Jims. Just bare, unwrapped ravioli. During her arrest for drunk driving back in February, police report that the former wife of John Ford pulled a piece of ravioli from her pocket, ate it, and then blew into the Breathalyzer. We’ve heard of ways to beat these machines, but we never knew pasta was one of them.

Thieves break into the abandoned Sears Crosstown building and steal more than $11,000 worth of brass valves from the structure’s plumbing and fire-control system. In recent months, we’ve read about thefts of copper tubing from air conditioners and even bronze urns from cemeteries. We never knew the scrap-metal business would be so appealing. What will be taken next — the trolley tracks?

A Memphis Symphony Orchestra member fights a Germantown traffic ticket — and loses. The musician, nabbed by the remote cameras precisely one-half second after running a red light, argues that a sudden stop might have damaged his prized viola. The judge doesn’t buy it, so Marshall Fine just ends up with an even bigger fine.

Categories
Opinion

Politics and Justice

How long do you think it will take the national media to follow the strands of the fired federal prosecutors story to Tennessee? I’d say about two weeks, at most.

On April 9th, former state senator John Ford goes on trial in federal court in Memphis. He’s a big fish in his own right and he’s the uncle of Harold Ford Jr., who is a celebrity, and the brother of Harold Ford Sr., who had his own federal trials in 1990 and 1993. The second trial, which resulted in Ford’s acquittal, was marked by exactly the sort of political meddling in the Justice Department that is now being exposed in the Bush administration.

There are so many good angles it’s hard to cram them all in, but here goes.

Don Sundquist’s name could come up in the John Ford trial because the powerful senator from Shelby County was a go-to guy from 1994 to 2002, when Sundquist was governor. Ford has a May 22nd trial date in Nashville on charges related to consulting.

But there’s much more. When he was a congressman in 1991, Sundquist recommended that Hickman Ewing Jr. be replaced by Ed Bryant as U.S. attorney for Western Tennessee. Ewing and his assistants were on the trail of Harold Ford Sr., who confronted Ewing in an elevator in the federal building in 1989 and told him, “You are a pitiful excuse for a U.S. attorney, but I can guarantee you that you won’t be the U.S. attorney much longer.”

Like the eight fired prosecutors who are now in the news, Ewing was replaced in mid-term. Ewing, Sundquist, and Bryant are Republicans, while Ford is a Democrat. In 1993, Bill Clinton was the newly elected president, and when Democrats in the Justice Department tried to influence jury selection in the second Ford trial, the government’s two trial attorneys resigned, albeit for only a day. So did Bryant, who was going to be replaced anyway along with 92 other U.S. attorneys as part of the new administration.

Sundquist, of course, went on to become governor. In his second term, when Tennessee Waltz was still just a song, federal prosecutors began an investigation of fraudulent state contracts. One close friend of Sundquist, John Stamps, was sentenced to two years in prison in 2005. Another Sundquist friend, Al Ganier, was indicted on federal obstruction charges in 2004. Three years later, he doesn’t even have a trial date. But in a court order in 2005, U.S. district judge Karl Forester wrote that Sundquist was “the impetus” for the federal investigation and said prosecutors had evidence that Sundquist “improperly interceded” on Ganier’s behalf.

Sundquist has not been charged and has said he is confident he is not under investigation. If the phrase “improperly interceded” rings a bell, that’s what has Joseph Lee on the hot seat over at MLGW in connection with another Ford, brother Edmund.

Meanwhile, federal prosecutors in Memphis and Nashville who were there at the start of the political corruption investigations have moved on. In Memphis, Terry Harris took a job with FedEx. In Nashville, Jim Vines resigned in 2006, and first assistant Zach Fardon left in January.

Will Attorney General Alberto Gonzales resign? He apparently lied about what he knew about the firings and when he knew it. Lying can be criminal. It was one of the factors that got Roscoe Dixon such a harsh prison sentence, and it’s one of the charges against Michael Hooks Jr., scheduled to go to trial later this year.

The bumbling of the Justice Department has been criticized by, among others, Bud Cummins, former U.S. attorney in Arkansas, who was fired last year to make room for a pal of Karl Rove and then smeared by his old bosses. Two years ago, Cummins, a Republican, staunchly defended Gonzales and President Bush.

If Republican prosecutors are upset, how do you suppose Democratic pols feel about being seven times as likely as Republicans to be indicted? A suggested opening argument in the John Ford trial: “Ladies and gentlemen, in the 1996 presidential election, Memphis delivered Tennessee, whose electoral votes clinched it for Clinton/Gore. The Republicans and Karl Rove never got over it, and Mr. Ford is the victim of a political vendetta by a Justice Department whose leadership lies.”