DIXIE MAFIA: PHENIX CITY Ep. 5 | “The Empire Strikes Back”

might appear on an American TV show like SportsCenter, the highlights would have looked like this.

In 1938, the Ritz Café, owned by Phoenix City's two crime bosses, collapsed and killed

24 people.

In 1946, those same crime bosses, Hoyt Shepard and Jimmy Matthews, were involved in the murder

of a fellow crime boss, Fayette Leiburn.

Either Hoyt or his brother Grady pulled the trigger of the gun that killed Leiburn, and

the stronger suspicion has always been on Hoyt, but both men were found not guilty at

their trials.

A few months later, people started trying to kill Hoyt Shepard.

Gunmen shot him while he was riding in his car.

Several months later, someone fired a shotgun slug into his car.

Several months after that, someone on the street outside his house fired shots through

his window to try to kill him while he stood in his living room.

That same year, 1949, a reformer named Hugh Bentley helped create the Russell County Betterment

Association to clean up Phoenix City.

Bentley did his work so well that someone planted a bomb under his house in 1952.

The explosion blasted his 16-year-old son through a window and across the lawn.

Miraculously, the teenager suffered only minor injuries, and Bentley's wife was unharmed.

In the background, there was the continuous illegal gambling and prostitution, both of

which were open secrets.

There was obvious corruption at every level of city and county government, and in every

branch of law enforcement.

Hoyt Shepard rigged every possible election, and he bought as many politicians and lawmen

as he could.

After the bombing of Hugh Bentley's house, the good people of Phoenix City began to support

the reform movement with enthusiasm that they had not previously shown.

Bentley found support in state senator Albert Patterson, which was ironic because Patterson

was one of the lawyers who defended the Shepard brothers during their murder trials and helped

keep them out of prison.

But now Patterson was working with Bentley, and Bentley wanted Patterson to become the

top lawman in the state, Attorney General.

From that position, Patterson could enact real change.

And while Bentley pushed for change from the top down, he also pushed for change from

the bottom up.

He convinced city officials to crack down on the popular numbers game called the bug.

He forced the city commission to indict Russell County Sheriff Ralph Matthews.

Sheriff Matthews was not related to the criminal kingpin Jimmy Matthews, but the sheriff avoided

jail time and kept his position, just like Jimmy had so many times in the past.

Even though Sheriff Matthews avoided punishment, it was a victory just to get the crooked lawman

into a courtroom.

It would certainly not be the last time that the sheriff's department fell under severe

scrutiny.

And lastly, Hugh Bentley and the Russell County Betterment Association took on election reform.

It was hard to know when the last truly honest election was held in Russell County, where

Phoenix City was the county seat.

Bentley knew that if people could cast their votes without the fear of corruption, harassment,

or outright violence, then real reform stood a chance for success.

But therein lay the rub.

Bentley's opponents were going to fight just as hard and much dirtier to keep corrupt systems

and crooked institutions in place.

Not everyone would survive that fight, and it would require the actions of authorities

far beyond Phoenix City to finally stop the war.

From BlackBeryl Media, this is Infamous America.

I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this season we're beginning the long and complex story

of the Dixie Mafia.

If you had to point to a place of origin, that place is one of America's original Sin

Cities, Phoenix City, Alabama.

This is Phoenix City Episode 5, The Empire Strikes Back.

In early May of 1952, Hugh Bentley was hard at work building a new home on the site of

the bombed earlier that year.

In the wake of the attack, little had been done by local law enforcement.

They made no arrests and had no suspects.

Bentley was not surprised.

He knew that County Sheriff Ralph Matthews was tight with the criminal element in Phoenix

City, and the criminal element was most likely responsible for the bombing.

Bentley was also busy that May trying to build a stronger, cleaner city.

Since the bombing, he had been vocal about the need for clean elections where the criminal

machine couldn't stuff ballot boxes, buy votes, or intimidate voters.

That month's election had shaped up to be a contentious one between the two sides of

Phoenix City, those who wanted to keep the criminal status quo and those who wanted to

reform the system.

Bentley spent the run-up to the election denouncing the cronyism and downright corruption of Phoenix

City's Russell County elections.

He vowed that members of his Russell County Betterment Association would be on-site at

every ballot box to ensure no illegal voting occurred.

His opposition, the gambling, bootlegging, and prostitution bosses, vowed that if Bentley

or the RBA were seen on Election Day, there would be trouble.

Both sides kept their promises.

May 5th was Election Day.

It was a relatively minor election, with just seven countywide races on the ballot.

But every election was important.

At a voting station on Fifth Avenue in downtown Phoenix City, Hugh Bentley, his son, and a

fellow reformer named Hugh Britton stood vigil with their eyes on the volunteers who ran

the voting station.

At one point, a group of men tried to keep voters from entering the area.

Those voters were going to support RBA candidates.

Bentley and Britton tried to intervene.

The mob of intimidators pounced on the two reformers and beat them severely.

Bentley's son and a newsman were caught in the melee and also took bad beatings.

The Columbus Ledger published a photo of Bentley, his son, and Britton the next day.

Blood was pouring out of his nose and mouth, and Bentley had a bloody gash over his right eye.

Both men's white dress shirts were covered in blood.

Much like the images of the Bentley house after the bombing, the photos of the two bloodied

civic leaders galvanized the Betterment Association and the community at large.

The RBA and others immediately requested investigations into the beatings and any possible

voter irregularities.

And the reformers wanted Alabama Governor Gordon Persons to oversee those investigations.

Russell County Sheriff Ralph Matthews told reporters that people on both sides had been

responsible for the violence.

His office made one arrest, which felt like a token gesture and was viewed as empty and

hollow by the reformers.

Several citizens at the scene claimed that one of the main instigators had been Deputy

Sheriff Matthews' right-hand man.

Fuller was already known to be a crooked cop of the worst kind, but his full impact on

Phoenix City was yet to be felt.

He would allegedly be involved in something far more serious than voter intimidation.

Hoyt Shepard had also been on the scene, though he was not involved in the violence.

In fact, by his own account, he was not involved in anything questionable or criminal anymore.

Earlier that year, he and the other half of the once notorious S&M syndicate, Jimmy

Matthews, had surrendered nearly $250,000 worth of gambling equipment, sold their infamous

Bama Club, and claimed they were going completely legitimate.

The proverbial jury was still out on whether or not the claim was true, but it was possible.

Shepard and Matthews had purchased a nearby tourist motel and said they were concentrating

on real estate.

They pledged more than $30,000 to the construction of a city hospital, but big donations to the

city were nothing new for Shepard and Matthews.

Still, it did seem like they were trying to signal that they were going straight, though

there was also another, more tangible reason for their possible change.

New federal and state regulations were coming that were going to dramatically raise taxes

and license fees on their operations.

New regulations, combined with the growing reform movement, made it a good time to get

out.

And they got out right before the situation in Phoenix City hit rock bottom.

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He had been an oil field worker, a farmer, a teacher, and an attorney.

He served with distinction in the 36th Infantry in World War I, where he was awarded the Croy

de Guerre.

After being seriously wounded in a battle, he was forced to walk with a cane for the

first time.

In 1933, he moved his law practice and his family from Opelika to Phoenix City.

His first job in politics was on the city's Board of Education.

Later in 1946, he was elected to the Alabama State Senate.

He won the seat during the same autumn that he was defending Hoyt Shepard on charges of

murdering Fate Leiburn.

After the Hoyt Shepard trial, Patterson's prominence in the community continued to rise.

He became an active leader on the school board and the draft board.

His law practice became one of the most successful in eastern Alabama.

But in 1950, he ran afoul of Phoenix City's criminal syndicate.

Patterson took on a client named Gloria Davis, who wanted a divorce, alimony, and child custody

from her husband, William Bubber Davis.

What should have been nothing more than a messy divorce trial became a much bigger deal.

And that was because Bubber Davis' father, Godwin Davis, was a serious player in the

organized gambling ring that plagued the city.

Gloria testified in court that Godwin Davis ran the National Lottery Company, a numbers

racket that pulled in hundreds of thousands of dollars every year, dollars that certainly

didn't appear on any tax return.

Davis' activities were common knowledge and most likely endorsed by Phoenix City officials.

And now those activities were part of the court record and printed in the newspapers.

The story and the bombshell testimony brought attention from the IRS that Phoenix City criminals

did not want.

And since Albert Patterson was the lawyer who made the trial happen, Patterson drew unwanted

attention from the criminals.

Patterson was allegedly forced off of the school board and asked to resign as a deacon

at his local church.

It also put a target on his back.

As one author put it, Patterson was moved from the reserved list to the endangered list.

A few months after the trial, at Patterson's law office in the Coulter Building on Fifth

Avenue in Phoenix City, the criminals made their first play.

Someone set a fire in his office.

The arson attempt was only foiled by a janitor who was working late and noticed the flames

before they engulfed the whole building.

Patterson stood in the parking lot and watched as firemen put out the fire.

The fire drew a crowd, of course, and there was a decent chance that the arsonists were

in the crowd, but Patterson knew they would never be caught.

He also knew that the arson attempt wouldn't stop him.

Patterson would become the attorney for the Russell County Betterment Association, and

as he committed himself more directly to the cause of cleaning up Phoenix City, he and

Hugh Bentley launched his campaign for state attorney general.

Patterson took the campaign to all of Alabama's 67 counties.

He railed against crime, most notably organized gambling, and vowed to rid the state of vice

operations that had, until then, mostly gone unchecked.

In a paid campaign radio broadcast out of Birmingham, Patterson boasted of his record

in the state Senate, fighting for industrial growth and never missing a roll call.

He shouted about his love of Alabama and his deep roots in the state.

He decried the gamblers and how they were corrupting the state's children and how little

had been done to combat the gamblers on a state level.

And most of all, he talked about Phoenix City, though the gamblers of Phoenix City

were not Patterson's biggest problem.

His biggest problem were the men who protected them.

Silas Garrett, a former lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, was the current attorney general.

He was suspected to have close ties to the Phoenix City criminal machines and had

benefited from the machines' ability to sway elections.

He couldn't run for re-election because of Alabama election laws, so that opened the

door for Albert Patterson.

But it certainly behooved Garrett to make sure anyone but Patterson, the reformer, succeeded him.

At the local level, there was Arch Farrell, the city attorney for Phoenix City.

Like his counterpart at the state level, Farrell was thought to be well-entrenched with the

criminal element in his hometown and a key cog in the wheel of the Phoenix City machine.

His position meant he was responsible for dispensing justice, but he did very little of it.

Sure, he handed out fines for gambling that helped keep the city's coffers filled,

but that was about it.

When civic reformer Hugh Bentley's house was bombed, Farrell proclaimed to reporters that

he would seek the death penalty if anyone was ever tried for the crime.

But it was bluster.

There were no serious suspects, no arrests, and certainly no trials.

But possibly the most reckless and dangerous man who had his sights set on Albert Patterson

was Russell County Deputy Sheriff Albert Fuller.

Fuller was born and raised in Phoenix City and was a standout football player for Central High School.

Before World War II, Fuller was a Navy patrolman in the waters off of Orange County, Texas.

His time in Texas rubbed off on him, and when he returned to Phoenix City,

he became known for his trademark cowboy hat and boots.

But his wannabe cowboy image didn't work well when he got a job as a delivery man for a bread company.

So he quickly pivoted and took a job in the county sheriff's office in 1946.

Fuller worked his way up through the ranks until he was seen as the right-hand man of Sheriff Ralph Matthews.

The stalky, slightly pudgy Fuller gained the reputation as someone who was quick to violence.

With a pistol, at least, he seemed to live up to the cowboy image.

Legend has it he could, quote,

shoot the heel off a whore from 50 feet away.

While Fuller's position as deputy sheriff only paid him $300 a month,

he was well known for flashing thick rolls of big bills in the gambling joints of Phoenix City.

It was also well known how he came by the majority of his disposable income.

In a town built on rackets, Fuller used the one that was as old as time.

He shook down local club owners for protection.

If they paid Fuller, he would deal with the other operators who were trying to cut in on their business.

Or he would clean up the simple riffraff, the cheats, the drunks, and the punks.

If there was ever a man who didn't want to see Albert Patterson assume the post of the state's top prosecutor, it was Albert Fuller.

The primary election was set for early May 1954.

Three men from the Democratic Party were competing to be the party's choice to compete in the general election for attorney general.

As the primary election day drew near, the slogan,

A vote for Albert Patterson is a vote against crime, worked for the Patterson campaign.

Patterson was surging in the polls, and when the ballots were counted, Patterson won the three-way race.

His margin of victory was huge, nearly 70,000 votes more than the second-place finisher.

The runner-up was Lee Porter, an attorney from Gadsden, Alabama.

However, despite the wide margin of victory, Patterson did not receive 50% of the total votes that were cast.

That meant that on June 1st, there would be a runoff between Patterson and Porter to see who would be the Democratic nominee for state attorney general.

The four weeks between the primary election and the runoff provided the press ample time to dig into the background of the two candidates.

Patterson appeared to be relatively transparent, at least by Alabama politics of the time.

He had been crushed in the three-way primary, but now that the race was down to two men, Porter quickly gained new supporters.

America's first political action committee, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, backed Porter after not endorsing a candidate in the primary election.

Also, Lee Porter's declared campaign contributions were listed in the Birmingham Post-Herald newspaper as $5,700,

compared to just $525 for Patterson.

There were also whispers that outgoing Attorney General Silas Garrett was using his office's resources to help Porter's campaign.

If true, it was a serious violation of Alabama election law.

In the lead-up to the runoff election, each candidate accused the other of having compromising connections to Phoenix City crime and corruption.

It was consistently implied that Patterson must be a criminal syndicate crony after getting Hoyt Shepard cleared of murder charges.

When election workers began counting the votes, it seemed very possible that those insinuations made a difference.

When 80% of the votes were counted, Albert Patterson had a lead of just 5,000 over Lee Porter.

When 99% of the votes were in, Patterson led by a little more than 1,000 votes.

As the days passed and election officials scrambled to declare a winner, a shocking story came out of Jefferson County.

In the city of Birmingham, local officials counted 23,060 votes for Porter.

But when officials at the state level reported the numbers, they added exactly 600 votes.

An investigation began immediately, and a grand jury focused on the sitting Attorney General, Silas Garrett.

As the possible scandal played out in the background, Albert Patterson was finally declared the winner of the primary election by just 854 votes.

He celebrated, but then got back to work.

The Russell County Betterment Association was working on its own case of potential voter fraud.

The RBA petitioned for a grand jury investigation into the election of Russell County's member in the State House of Representatives.

The RBA charged that intimidation tactics had been used to sway the election,

and votes had been outright bought by those in and close to the Phoenix City criminal machine.

Gambling kingpins Hoyt Shepard and Gordon Davis were identified as two of the people buying votes.

Russell County Deputy Sheriff Albert Fuller was said to have been at voting places intimidating voters.

In one instance, a car mechanic was brutally beaten.

And the RBA named City Attorney Arch Farrell as the mastermind behind the tactics.

Albert Patterson was in the courtroom in Russell County to hear brave witnesses come forward.

He knew that the desire for change in Phoenix City was going to have to start with the citizens.

The previous day marked the deadline for a Republican candidate to enter the race for Attorney General.

None had.

So, in a few months, when the general election happened in November,

Albert Patterson would be automatically sworn in as the 35th Attorney General of Alabama.

Patterson was probably pleased.

He and Hugh Bentley had worked long and hard for the outcome.

But Patterson also had his concerns.

In a speech at a local men's club, he told the audience he believed there was only a 100-to-1 chance that he would ever be sworn in.

The line got a laugh, and Patterson delivered it with a smirk.

He had made a joke out of the fact that there was a very real chance he would never see the inside of the Attorney General's office.

It was dark humor, but Patterson knew better than anyone that he wasn't really joking.

Just before 9 p.m. on the evening of June 18, 1954, Albert Patterson finished a long day of work and packed his briefcase.

He had documents to review about the grand jury investigation in Jefferson County,

where they were trying to crack the mystery of the 600 votes that had been added to the total of Patterson's opponent in the runoff election.

At the center of the investigation was the man Patterson was replacing in the Attorney General's office, Silas Garrett.

Garrett was long suspected of having ties to the criminal element that controlled Phoenix City.

With Silas Garrett, election fraud, and Phoenix City's criminal machine on his mind,

Patterson put on his jacket and grabbed his cane, the one that he'd been forced to use since being injured in World War I.

One thing he did not have was a gun.

Patterson's friend and ally in the fight to clean up Phoenix City, Hugh Bentley, had offered him one.

Bentley had warned Patterson that running for Attorney General on a platform to stamp out crime could be very dangerous,

and a little protection might save his life.

Patterson saw no point in a gun.

In his mind, if the criminals were going to kill him, he'd never see it coming.

It would be an ambush.

He'd have no chance to draw a pistol and shoot it out like an Old West gunslinger.

So there was no point in carrying the weapon.

Patterson turned the lights off in his office in the Coulter Building on Fifth Avenue and headed outside.

His car was in an alley between the Coulter Building and a local cafe.

It was a Friday night, and the sounds of music drifted out of the cafe.

The smell of hamburgers likely wafted down the alley from Smitty's Grill.

Patterson approached his car, opened the rear door, and stashed his cane on the floor of the back seat.

He must have heard footsteps behind him, because he turned around.

There was a loud pop, and Patterson's head jerked back.

There was another pop, and Patterson fell back against his car.

Despite being shot twice in the head, he stayed on his feet for a few moments.

He staggered about 25 feet to the sidewalk at the mouth of the alley,

before he collapsed, face first, in front of a women's clothing shop.

He wheezed and sputtered, and somehow clung to life.

As people in the area rushed toward the sound of the gunshots,

they discovered Alabama's newly elected Attorney General lying in a pool of his own blood

on a sidewalk in downtown Phoenix City.

He was alive, but his status was as dire as it could be.

If he died, who knew what kind of hell would break loose?

Next time on Infamous America, find out exactly what kind of hell broke loose.

Lockdowns, raids, and soldiers in the streets

as the Alabama governor takes emergency steps to clean up Phoenix City once and for all.

That's next week on the season finale of Dixie Mafia Volume 1,

Phoenix City on Infamous America.

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This series was researched and written by Jamie Liko.

Original music by Rob Vallier.

I'm your host and producer, Chris Wimmer.

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Thanks for listening.