Gone South

Len Davis was a New Orleans police officer known in the Desire projects as Robocop and the Desire Terrorist. In 1994 he ordered the murder of Kim Groves, a 32-year-old mother of three who had filed a brutality complaint against him — and he's since been called the most corrupt cop in the city's history. What brought him down was Operation Shattered Shield, and at the center of it was an undercover FBI agent posing as a high-level drug dealer, known only as J.J.

His name is Juan Jackson. He was one of roughly 300 Black agents in an FBI of 11,000 when he entered the Academy in 1983, trained under Joe Pistone of Donnie Brasco fame, and spent two decades undercover — as a hitman for hire in Chinatown, an arms dealer, a money launderer, and a drug kingpin in Waterbury, Connecticut. He tells us how he got Len Davis to strip to his underwear in a wired hotel room at the New Orleans Hilton, and why, testifying for two and a half weeks, he couldn't stop smiling.

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In 2019, John Fenley was 39, newly separated, and living in one of his mother's rental apartments in Provo, Utah. Searching LoopNet for the biggest building at the lowest price, he found a 220,000-square-foot warehouse on 17 acres in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, listed at $375,000. He assumed the price was a typo. He had never been to Arkansas. He bought it anyway — and then bought Murfie, a bankrupt Wisconsin startup, inheriting roughly a million CDs belonging to strangers.

What followed was copper thieves, a pandemic lockdown that stranded his shipping containers, a running battle with Pine Bluff's zoning office, and a feud with Go Forward Pine Bluff, the tax-funded nonprofit he believed was blocking him at every turn. Then an $890,000 windfall landed in his bank account, and he bought 74 parcels at a tax auction, making him one of the largest landowners in town. Writer Max Read dubbed him "The Man Who Bought Pine Bluff, Arkansas." Four years later, he's still there.

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In 1996, a pipe bomb packed with masonry nails exploded in Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park, killing two people and injuring more than a hundred. The FBI's first suspect was Richard Jewell, the security guard who'd found the bag and helped clear the area. By the time he was cleared 88 days later, investigators had no idea who they were looking for. Columnist John Archibald had covered the Olympics that summer, never imagining the bomber would come to his own city.
On January 29, 1998, a bomb hidden in a FedEx box exploded outside a Birmingham abortion clinic, killing an off-duty police officer and gravely wounding nurse Emily Lyons. This time someone saw the bomber walk away — a UAB student named Jermaine Hughes, who followed him to a gray Nissan pickup with North Carolina plates. The name that came back was Eric Robert Rudolph. Within hours he vanished into the Nantahala National Forest, where he'd stay for five years while locals put up signs reading "Run, Rudolph, Run."

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In October 1997, a vault supervisor named David Ghantt loaded $17 million into a van and drove out of a Loomis Fargo warehouse in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was the second-largest cash heist in American history. It took him about an hour, working alone. He stole two of the facility's three security tapes. The third one kept rolling.

What followed was five months of botched getaways, wild spending sprees, an FBI wiretap, and a murder plot hatched at a Halloween party. Reporter Jeff Diamant, who covered the case for the Charlotte Observer and interviewed nearly every co-conspirator, tells the story of the crime that came to be known as the Hillbilly Heist — and how a crew that studied Goodfellas managed to ignore every lesson in it.

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Paul Skalnik was a cop turned con artist turned jailhouse informant. Over two decades, he provided testimony or information in more than 40 criminal cases, trading confessions he claimed to have overheard for reduced sentences and early release. Prosecutors in Florida's Pinellas County knew what he was. They used him anyway. Four of the men he testified against were sent to death row. At least one of them, Jim Dailey, is almost certainly innocent — and after more than 30 years, he's still there.

Journalist Pam Colloff spent 20 years at Texas Monthly before joining ProPublica and the New York Times Magazine, where her investigation into Skalnik won the National Magazine Award and helped halt an execution. In this episode, Pam tells the story of a con man who married nine women, posed as an oilman, a lawyer, and an FBI agent — and discovered that his most profitable scam was the criminal justice system itself.

Pam Colloff's new book is "Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast" 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0593230868?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback

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n 1985, Charles McCrory was convicted of murdering his wife in their small Alabama hometown — a brutal crime scene with no blood on him, no witnesses, and no physical evidence tying him to the house. What sent him to prison for life was a celebrity forensic dentist who testified that two small marks on Julie's arm were a bite mark made by Charles's teeth.

Forty years later, that same dentist has recanted. The science behind bite-mark evidence has been thoroughly discredited. And there are reasons to believe another man — one the police knew about from the beginning — should have been the prime suspect all along. Speaking with Charles himself from inside an Alabama prison, and with his attorney Mark Loudon-Brown, this episode asks how a wrongful conviction can outlast the evidence that built it.

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When the federal case against Jim Sullivan was dismissed in 1992, Lita McClinton's family thought they'd lost their last chance at justice. They were wrong — but it would take another fourteen years, a tip from a receptionist in a Texas refinery town, an international manhunt, and a four-year fugitive run through Costa Rica and Thailand before Lita's killer finally stood trial.

In the second of a two-part series, writer Deb Miller Landau picks up the story where Part 1 left off: with a wealthy man getting away with murder. She walks us through the trucker who admitted to pulling the trigger, the prosecutor whose phone call may have tipped off the killer, the resort in Cha-Am where the FBI finally caught up with Jim Sullivan, and the verdict that came nearly twenty years after Lita McClinton answered her doorbell.

Deb Landau's book is "A Devil Went Down to Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege, and the Murder of Lita McClinton​":
https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Went-Down-Georgia-Privilege/dp/1639366830

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In January 1987, Lita McClinton answered her doorbell in one of Atlanta's wealthiest neighborhoods and was shot dead by a man holding a white flower box with a pink rose. She was 35, the daughter of one of Atlanta's most prominent Black families, and on her way to court that morning for a pivotal hearing in her divorce from her white millionaire ex-husband, Jim Sullivan. Police were sure Jim had ordered the hit. They just couldn't prove it.

Writer Deb Miller Landau first reported on the case for Atlanta Magazine in 2004 — and never let it go. In this episode of Gone South, she walks us through her years-long investigation: an interracial marriage that began in 1970s Macon, a $2 million mansion on Palm Beach, a sloppy hit, a payphone call traced to a Georgia rest stop, and the long, twisting road to justice for Lita McClinton.

Deb Landau's book is "A Devil Went Down to Georgia: Race, Power, Privilege, and the Murder of Lita McClinton​":
https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Went-Down-Georgia-Privilege/dp/1639366830

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In 1954, Dallas executed a 19-year-old Black man named Tommy Lee Walker for the rape and murder of a young white woman near Love Field. Walker had no criminal record, eight alibi witnesses placing him across town at the time, and he recanted his confession the moment he was returned to his cell. None of it mattered. Three months after his arrest, a jury sentenced him to die in the electric chair.

Seventy years later, Innocence Project attorney Chris Fabricant set out to do something that had never been done before: exonerate a man who'd already been put to death. Jed talks with Fabricant about the coerced confession, the junk-science polygraph, the racial panic that swept Dallas in 1953, and what it took to finally clear Tommy Lee Walker's name.

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In 2016, nine men tied to the College of Charleston's Kappa Alpha fraternity were arrested in what police initially described as a 40,000-pill Xanax bust. The real number was closer to three and a half million, along with cocaine, LSD, weed, luxury watches, a fleet of cars, and a grenade launcher. The crew had spent years pressing counterfeit pills in rented beach houses and shipping them across the country in Skittles bags, fueling an unregulated drug economy that ran straight through one of the most beautiful college campuses in America.

Jed talks with journalist Max Marshall, author of the book "Among the Bros," about how he embedded himself in this world, his hundreds of hours of late-night phone calls with an imprisoned ringleader, and what the case reveals about American fraternities and the lives of the men inside them. 

Max Marshall's book is "Among the Bros: A Fraternity Crime Story" 

https://shorturl.at/ynPGO

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