Dark and Bloody Ground (11 page)

On Christmas Eve 1981, the
Clinton Courier-News
carried a front-page story about the new jailhouse cook. A photo showed Benny posed plunging spoons into a bowl of stuffing, wearing a Snoopy sweater Sherry had given him for Christmas. His hair and beard were neatly trimmed. He looked into the camera with sad, suspicious eyes. He was preparing a dinner of roast turkey, baked country
ham, green beans, mashed potatoes, giblet gravy, cranberry sauce, hot rolls, and pecan pie for twenty prisoners.

The story referred to Benny’s “culinary magic” and suggested that the dinner the prisoners “will sit down to is bound to be as good as many would get if they could be at home for the holidays.

‘"My main concern is I want to see prisoners fed right. I didn’t get fed right when I was a prisoner,’ the quiet-spoken, friendly Hodge said over a cup of coffee in the jail kitchen.”

He was planning to open his own restaurant after he received parole but said he would continue working at the jail until Maw Webster returned. “’I’m more interested in getting my own place than anything. I’d like to have it in Anderson County. That’s home now. Everybody is friendly around here and I’m just not used to that.... I’d like to be a chef but it would take some training. I can make it taste good but I can’t make it look pretty.’”

Bena Mae Seivers, a secretary at the sheriffs department, disputed Benny’s self-deprecations. His meals were not only delicious and nutritious, they were pleasant-looking. ‘"He doesn’t just fix those all-white plates, you know.’”

The prisoners’ plight, the story concluded, “may not give them much to be cheerful about but they at least can dig into a holiday spread prepared by a future professional who has personal reasons to see them enjoy it.”

A sign posted on the wall outside the entrance to the Anderson County Sheriffs Department read:

Through These Portals Pass

The Finest Law Enforcement

Officers in the World

Professional Dignity

PRIDE.

With the possible exception of Maw Webster, a generous soul, no one who worked for Sheriff Dennis O. Trotter or who had been arrested by his deputies could take the sign as anything but a joke.

The sheriff, who was into his second term of office by the time Benny Hodge went to work for him, maintained his perennial popularity with voters by insisting on a liberal policy toward motorists. He
instructed deputies to treat county residents who exceeded the speed limits with the utmost courtesy, forgiveness, and understanding. His concept of law enforcement was based on a principle of fairness, that is, that if he did a favor for you, it was only fair that you did him the favor of voting for him. To receive anything more than a warning for speeding in Anderson County, you had to be either an outsider or guilty of some additional offense, such as being imprudent enough to display a bumper sticker supporting one of the sheriff’s opponents. Trotter was also popular with drug dealers, fences, moonshiners and bootleggers (Oak Ridge was the county’s only wet city), prostitutes, bookies, and operators of poker machines and other illegal forms of gambling, all of whom paid protection to him if they cared to stay in business. Four hundred years ago, when freebooting chieftains along the Scottish border exacted tribute in return for freedom from plunder, the way Sheriff Trotter operated was called blackmail. In the eighties in East Tennessee, they called it politics.

Of the sheriff’s several sources of payoffs, drug dealers were by far the most lucrative for him. Aside from its geographical and topographical advantages to the drug trade, the presence of Oak Ridge within its boundaries meant that Anderson had more cash floating around than other counties in the area. Oak Ridge, which used to call itself The Atomic City, is home to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge Associated Universities, the American Museum of Atomic Energy, and numerous government plants. It has been the nation’s leading center for nuclear research since the forties, when, because of the abundance of water and power nearby, the government created it as part of the effort to make the bomb, displacing more than a thousand local families and bringing in scientists and technicians from around the country. Its population once exceeded fifty thousand, later dwindling to around thirty thousand—a well-paid, highly educated group, distinct from and with more money to spend than most East Tennesseans on everything, including recreational drugs.

Oak Ridge had its own police force, but Sheriff Trotter’s jurisdiction included smaller communities and unincorporated areas favored for their obscurity by drug drealers and other crooks, who could slip into the larger city on business or let the traffic come to them. People in the know understood that Sheriff Trotter and his chief deputy controlled Anderson County. And the sheriffs power derived from more
than taking bribes. Several of his deputies and plainclothes enforcers spent a good deal of their time making the rounds to collect payoffs, but another key to his success was being able to get the drugs back into circulation once they were seized in a well-orchestrated raid. Recycling, some called it; through it Trotter was able to share in the actual profits from drug sales, horning in on the retail end of the action.

Typically a dealer, or sometimes a lower-level snitch, would tip off the sheriff to where a cache of drugs could be found. The sheriff would stage a raid, making sure reporters knew about it so he could reap publicity. The headline might read
DRUGS SEIZED, SUSPECTS FLEE
.
If anyone was actually arrested, a portion of the drugs would be kept for evidence, the rest returned immediately to the street. Deputies routinely stored evidence in their lockers, from where it had a way of disappearing.

Every few weeks the sheriff made a show of destroying material no longer needed as evidence. He would put a match to heaps of drugs at the county landfill—except that what was burned was bogus, the real stuff being back on the street. He would unseal samples returned from the state toxicological lab, sell the genuine narcotics, and replace them with baking soda, sugar, or over-the-counter pills obtained through burglary and hijacking. If open crime got out of hand and citizens began to squawk, the sheriffs underworld connections enabled him miraculously to solve a few cases and return the stolen goods.

While the structure of Sheriff Trotter’s organization was hardly innovative—muckraking journalists uncovered identical practices in America’s largest cities nearly a hundred years ago; reforming that sort of corruption was the basis of the Progressive Movement—the violent nature of the narcotics trade made it especially vicious and dangerous. It thrived because by no means all of the deputies were on the take or privy to the sheriffs nefarious activities, although many were aware of them; Trotter, like any successful gangster, understood the importance of confiding in only a few intimates. One key was that each raid, whether legitimate or phony, had to be cleared beforehand with the sheriff or his chief deputy, Tim Schultz, who could decide whether to lay off this or that dealer or gambling joint. At least two deputies quit during 1982 but, valuing their health, reported nothing. One of them was asked to resign by her husband, who feared for her
safety; another enrolled in a creative writing course and began composing tales of police corruption, disguised as fiction.

By January 1982, when he was finally released on parole, Benny Hodge was familiar with Sheriff Trotter’s philosophy of law enforcement. Trotter had not been so understanding about Sherry and free with weekend passes merely to foster his trusty’s love life. Technically Benny had violated the conditions of his position and had jeopardized his release date. After the incident at the Family Inn, the sheriff had an arm on him.

Trotter began using Benny as a bag man, to deliver drugs from the jail and collect payment for them. Benny was not only physically right for the job, the sheriff could make use of him without spending an extra dime. Whether Benny would have been willing to perform these services of his own free will was beside the point. The alternative for him was back to Brushy.

Once Benny achieved parole, he moved in with Sherry in the house she was sharing; a week later they rented a trailer together at the Cedar Grove Mobile Home Park on Laurel Road in Clinton. He continued on as the jailhouse cook and, occasionally, as the sheriffs bag man, aware of Trotter’s power over him. Sherry urged him to look for another, full-time job, but Benny hesitated. He was unused to being free, and finding other work would not be easy for an ex-con. Cooking was the first legitimate employment he had had since high school.

One day Sheriff Trotter summoned Benny to his office, which was decorated with marijuana plants and fruit jars of moonshine—evidence, of course. The sheriff sipped from a jar and, patting his beer gut happily, offered some to Benny, who declined, saying he didn’t drink.

“I guess pussy’s your vice. Right, Hodge? Biggin, I got plans for you.”

Some people, the sheriff observed, did not understand how important it was to pay their debts. They had no sense of honor or responsibility, and sometimes they needed persuading to cough up.

Trotter offered Benny a job as an enforcer. Benny could go on as cook if he wished; the sheriff would even see to it that he got a raise. But the real money would be in his new position. He would be guaranteed a percentage of every debt he managed to collect. Whatever techniques he used would be up to him. Big as Hodge was, the sheriff
did not think that many delinquents would choose to argue with him. He could carry a gun, however, and use it whenever and however necessary. All in the line of duty, no questions asked. Was it a deal?

Benny said that he would talk the matter over with his girlfriend. He was just getting started in his new life. He had children to worry about. He didn’t want to mess things up.

“You do that,” the sheriff said. “Get you some of that butt and talk it over with her. Tell ‘er old Trotter can’t think of a better way for a fella on parole to stay out of trouble than helping the sheriff fight crime, hear?”

Sherry was strongly opposed, it wasn’t the physical risk; she figured Benny could take care of himself. It was the idea of getting in so deep with Sheriff Trotter, whom only a damn fool would trust and who sooner or later would set Benny up and hang him out to dry. For a few extra bucks, he would be buying himself a one-way ticket back to Brushy.

Benny told Trotter that he appreciated the offer but preferred to stay on strictly as the cook for the time being.

“Sure, I understand,” the sheriff said. “Now you can haul ass out of here. You dumb idiot, you’re fired!”

9

O
THER THAN THROUGH SHERRY
, whose friends and relations were being cool toward her, and through his wife and children, Benny’s only contacts in the free world were people from the jail and former convicts, who for better or for worse maintained a certain solidarity. One former Brushy Mountain prisoner who had managed to start a contracting business gave Benny a job painting apartments in Oak Ridge. Most of Benny’s fellow workers were also ex-cons; the only way to endure the boredom of house painting is to listen to the radio, get high, talk, or manage a combination of two or three of these; among ex-cons the conversation naturally turned to what else they might be doing for a living and who was into what. Benny was not a talker, but he did plenty of listening; and to supplement his meager wages, as well as to gain the satisfaction of some revenge against Sheriff Trotter, Benny visited the Clinton jail from time to time and helped himself to drugs with the aid of a deputy who remained friendly. Sherry approved of this. The drugs had already been stolen, she reasoned, and would soon be on the street again anyway. Why shouldn’t she and Benny sell them, rather than leaving them to fatten Trotter’s wallet?

But the sheriff took his own revenge, or so Sherry believed, against Benny because of his defiance. On June 28, 1982, deputies arrested Benny. At the jail, an elderly lady identified him as one of two men who had broken into her house on the night of June 16.

On learning of Benny’s arrest, Sherry went immediately to his parole officer to try to stave off trouble. Merely having been arrested and charged with second-degree burglary was enough to have Benny cited with parole violation. Sherry begged for leniency. This was a setup, she pleaded. Benny was trying to go straight, but Sheriff Trotter had framed him out of resentment at him, she thought. Didn’t everybody know what kind of a crooked bastard the sheriff was?

The officer reacted sympathetically. For his part, he had more work than he could handle anyway; he agreed not to cite Benny—"I won’t violate him,” was the way he phrased it—unless an actual conviction came down. Sherry assured him that it would not. Not only was there no evidence, the only witness was an old biddy who couldn’t see any better than a common garden mole.

If Sherry did care for her boyfriend as much as she appeared to, the parole officer said, she should try to keep him on the straight and narrow and make sure he sent in the ten dollars every parolee was required to remit each month to pay for the paperwork. If Benny did that and stayed out of trouble, the officer would be just as happy to mark him reported and clean and to forget about him. Sherry gladly forked over two months in advance and told the officer she would keep Benny honest. It was a pleasure to meet an understanding gentleman for a change. She had begun to think that there were none left in the world.

With money saved from drug sales, Sherry managed to make Benny’s bond. Whether arresting him had been solely the sheriffs idea, or whether the other suspect, who had been arrested first, had been offered a deal to name Benny was unclear. Benny had been told by deputies that the corruption and misuse of informants was standard practice in this sheriffs office, where criminals were frequently paid, threatened, or induced to incriminate others in order to save their own necks.

Sherry, who was by then working as a cashier at the Bi-Lo market in Oak Ridge, claimed that Benny had been in the store at the time of the incident; another cashier backed her up. The victim, moreover, had been unable to identify Hodge from photographs shown her by deputies prior to his arrest and had described him as smaller than his accomplice, whereas he turned out to be taller and heavier. She had caught a glimpse of him by only the light from a television set. There was no physical evidence because, the woman said, the burglars had
fled when they determined that she and her husband were armed.