JACKSON - A rural, Bible-belt state such as Mississippi may seem an unlikely venue for the biggest sting operation ever waged by the FBI against local government corruption.
But in the mid-1980s, that is exactly what happened, right here in good ole Mississippi. It was called "Operation Pretense."
Over the course of three years starting in 1984, the FBI ran an undercover operation that nabbed 57 county supervisors in 25 Mississippi counties. All but two of the supervisors wound up behind bars.
Indigenous corruption had long been suspected in Mississippi's county supervisor system because counties divided road money into five separate fiefdoms known as "beats" with little oversight from the state.
This reporter back in December 1961 set off an investigation by a joint legislative committee in stories revealing from an obscure bankruptcy proceeding how payoffs were regularly paid to supervisors on road machinery purchases. As a result of the probe, the Legislature passed some weak laws, supposedly to stop road equipment kickbacks.
Ten years later, this reporter was able to document with the cooperation of an honest Lauderdale County supervisor how the supers padded the price of metal road culverts to skim money off the top. Another legislative investigation followed, and suddenly prices of metal culverts dropped some 30 percent.
Soon, however, when nobody was looking the supers went back to their old ways of skimming money off road material purchases, notably metal culverts, the very items I had zeroed in on in 1972.
A veritable "gift from Heaven" from a Carthage minister/businessman in 1984 is what triggered the FBI and U.S. attorney's office in Jackson to launch the Pretense undercover operation, complete with its own fake road materials company called Mid-State Pipe and tobacco-chewing FBI agents as salesmen.
The "heavenly" tie-in came when John Burgess, a Pentecostal minister who also had an interest in a bankrupt road materials company, told FBI agents how the county supervisor kickbacks were paid. He offered to cooperate in an undercover investigation of the system and help set up Mid-State Pipe.
The step-by-step story of how "Operation Pretense" unfolded, from its inception to its end, is told in a fascinating new volume written by University of Southern Mississippi professor of accountancy, James R. Crockett. Entitled "Operation Pretense - The FBI's Sting on County Corruption in Mississippi," it is soon to be published by the University Press of Mississippi.
Professor Crockett has made a valuable contribution to the historical literature of Mississippi by producing massive documentation of how pervasive corruption at the local government level in this state was rooted out and punished. Federal agents and prosecutors did the heavy lifting, helped, in part, by state officials, and some vendors who were "flipped" by the FBI.
Crockett takes us behind the scenes of this landmark crackdown on lower governmental corruption. His is not merely a scorecard account of the county officials who were indicted and convicted. As a bonus, he also relates the workings of related corruption that brought down several members of the state Highway Commission in the 1980s.
The USM professor shares with us rich material he found in his meticulous research: some outrageous and laughable statements county officials made when they were caught red-handed taking kickbacks; or incredible places, such as a men's toilet in the county courthouse, where ill-gotten gains changed hands.
That three of the five supervisors in tiny, mostly white, Perry County were convicted of taking kickbacks makes you realize how deep into the backwoods of rural Mississippi Operation Pretense reached.
When Perry Supervisor Trudie Westmoreland was brought to trial in U.S. District Court in Hattiesburg in 1987, it became something of a spectacle, with colorful criminal defense lawyer Al Binder of Jackson vying against the government's ace prosecutor, James B. Tucker.
Westmoreland, who owned a string of small businesses in addition to holding county office, also was the first supervisor to be brought to trial on Pretense-related charges. Her conviction, as Crockett writes, "proved to be pivotal (and) demonstrated the strength of the government's cases."
Her testimony, which Crockett relates in detail, could make good script material for a TV soap opera. Westmoreland testified that she took $760 that FBI agent Jerry King, posing as a salesman for fictitious Mid-State Pipe, handed her because she wanted to act as though "I was maybe like from New York City, that I wasn't a little ole country girl from Perry County."
Little ole country girl or not, Westmoreland wound up with a nine-year prison sentence, later appealed to no avail all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. After serving two years, she was let out on parole.
Later, the three-out-of-five Pretense conviction rate among Perry County supervisors was topped by Hancock County, where four of the five supers bit the dust in Pretense. But by this time, the county officials had gotten wise and began copping pleas, rather than tackling the feds in court.
And by 1988, many counties around the state, forced by then-Gov. Ray Mabus into voting in a statewide referendum on adopting a "county unit" system to replace the perennial "beat" system of road management, moved toward some reform.
In November 1988, 46 of the 82 counties voted in favor of the "unit" system. Then-State Auditor Pete Johnson, with his eye on running for governor in 1991 with support of the politically potent county supervisors, doused cold water on what benefits the Mabus-backed county unit system might bring.
Republican Johnson himself wound up on the political ash heap, being defeated in the 1991 GOP gubernatorial primary by a dark horse political novice named Kirk Fordice.
Crockett's book should serve as a constant reminder that graft and corruption is not an evil confined to the big cities and urban states up North. As "Operation Pretense" proves, it lurks out at the country crossroads in some of the poorest counties in Mississippi.
Ironically, as Crockett tells us, the word Pretense, coined after Rev. Burgess came forth, stood for "Preacher's Ten-Percent Supervisors Expense."
It would be laughable were it not for the thousands of dollars that have gone to line the pockets of corrupt public officials and not used for the benefit of the public.
