McCOMB — Retired Ole Miss Chancellor Robert Khayat, in his book “Education of a Lifetime,” wrote about some painful times in his life, as well as the successful ones.
One rough period was when his late father, Edward Khayat, faced criminal charges resulting from investigations and prosecutions of county supervisors in the 1980s.
Edward Khayat was a stalwart citizen of Moss Point, known throughout the state as a progressive county supervisor and economic development leader.
But he, like numerous others, was caught in a net of investigations that resulted in sweeping changes in the way county governments operate.
For years, it was pretty much accepted in Mississippi that your supervisor would gravel your driveway or put in a culvert or perform some other service you needed at public expense.
That’s how they stayed in office.
Some of those favors, of course, were more flagrant than others. It was shown that some supervisors were receiving kickbacks on equipment purchases, taking bribes from vendors and building private ponds and roads with county equipment.
Some bad practices got changed as a result of those investigations — the most sweeping being known as “Operation Pretense,” where undercover agents gathered evidence against public officials and equipment salesmen.
I believed then, and still do, that some of those put away got what they deserved.
Others, guilty of less egregious acts of public malfeasance, saw their reputations tarnished for doing what they thought they were expected to do by their constituents.
Edward Khayat, in my opinion, was one of those. He copped a plea, received a suspended sentence and never had to serve prison time, as did some. But Robert notes in his book that his once vibrant father became a broken man and never was the same after that.
About the time Robert was a sophomore at Ole Miss, I was working as a cub reporter in Jackson.
Among my early assignments was one to cover a convention of the Mississippi Association of Supervisors at what was then the Heidelberg Hotel in Jackson.
The city editor told me to see Eddie Khayat, let him know I was covering the meeting and ask him to explain anything I didn’t understand.
Mr. Khayat was extremely nice to me, as well as helpful, and I never forgot it.
About 25 or so years later, my son Martin was in law school at Ole Miss.
His adviser and favorite professor was Robert Khayat.
So two generations of Dunagins have a deep appreciation for two generations of Khayats.
I just finished Khayat’s book, and it’s a great read. Any Mississippian, Ole Miss partisan or not, should enjoy it.
In reading the part about Robert’s father, I was reminded of another good Mississippi book I read earlier: John Hailman’s “From Midnight to Guntown — True Crime Stories From a Federal Prosecutor in Mississippi.”
Hailman, an assistant U.S. attorney in North Mississippi for more than 30 years before retiring, recounts numerous cases, many of them funny, in which he was involved.
One story is about the father of famous novelist John Grisham.
Grisham’s father, like Khayat’s, was a supervisor. He was in DeSoto County, near Memphis. The senior Grisham, who also owned a heavy equipment business, was accused of selling some worthless equipment to the county. He ended up serving eight months in jail at night in Memphis but was allowed to go to his business in the daytime. He “resigned as a supervisor, turned his business around, had no more legal problems, and successfully retired several years later to a quiet home in the Ozarks,” Hailman wrote.
But Hailman surmises that the case had an impact on the son’s novels. “Many of John Grisham’s best-selling legal thrillers have featured FBI agents and U.S. attorneys as ambitious, heartless villains,” he wrote.
Incidentally, John Grisham also was one of Robert Khayat’s law students.
Khayat, in his book, tells of giving a test to a class in which Grisham was a student.
Grisham did OK on three parts of the test, but on a fourth Khayat said he constructed “a well-written, humorous, creative and clever story” which had nothing to do with the subject.
Khayat wrote on Grisham’s paper: “You missed all the legal issues, but you write great fiction.”
Years later, Grisham made a lot of money writing more great fiction.
