[.ca] Mississippi Mud: Southern Justice and the Dixie Mafia (ISBN 0671535056)

From Amazon.com:
Biloxi, Mississippi, has a "strip" of nightclubs and casinos where prostitution, drugs, and crooked gambling flourish unchecked. An older couple who thought they were retiring to a quiet seaside town got too deeply involved with local politics and the Dixie Mafia and were murdered. The investigation would've sunk beneath the muddy swirl of graft and business as usual but for the tenacious efforts of the victims' daughter. Despite death threats and indifferent law enforcement officials, she hired a private detective and swore to do whatever it took to bring her parents' killers to trial. Horror/suspense writer Peter Straubfinds the story reminiscent of Elmore Leonard and Carl Hiaasen: "Like those writers, Edward Humes can make the wild, amoral, scheming sleazoids he parades before our eyes all but sing and dance on the page. Here is America, fat and happy, both hands crammed into the till." Mississippi Mud was a 1995 finalist for the Edgar Award in Fact Crime.

Victims not sympathetic in this story:
I first became aware of this case via "City Confidential." That TV show, however, didn't even scratch the surface. Never have I had so little sympathy for murder victims. While no one deserves to be murdered, Vincent and Margaret Sherry were not nice people. The judge struck me as a bully (knocking his young daughter unconscious for bumping into him, punching his wife in front of her mother) and a phoney (supposedly upholding the law but doing business with all sorts of miscreants). I don't know what turned me off more about Margaret Sherry, her far-right-of-Pat- Buchanan politics or her "moral crusader" attitude that caused her to label everyone who didn't share HER values "corrupt." Even in Mississippi, that would be annoying! While I applaud Lynn Sposito for her dogged determination to bring her parents' killers to justice, she seems to have inherited her mother's "I-know-what's-best" attitude. I was waiting for one of the investigators or prosecutors to tell her to butt out. Good read, but it doesn't touch any of Ann Rule's books!

True crime that reads like fiction!:
I agree completely with "a reader from NJ"--the Sherrys apparently were not nice people, and they crossed the wrong people time after time after time with no thought of consequences. Mr. Humes is an excellent writer, and he certainly researched this book well. The Kirksey Nix blackmail caper was borrowed by John Grisham in "The Brethren"!

How Things Work:
This story takes place in Mary Higgins Clarke's social territory. Quite-comfortable, right-wing Catholic judge and his moral-activist wife are the victims of a contract killing. Their still-more-comfortable Catholic daughter fights over five years to undertstand the crime and have the authors face their just rewards. But those are almost the book's only links to Clarke. Mississippi Mud is a painstaking report on a double murder in Biloxi, MI, that occurred in September, 1987, and the ensuing investigations and trials, leading to conspiracy sentences in March, 1992, and more conspiracy convictions in September, 1997 (covered in a postscript for this edition). There are 43 pages of source notes (all primary: interviews or court records) and 8 pages of photographs on good paper, but no index, a real lack. The author follows the daughter, Lynne Sposito, through all those years, and tries to hew to her point of view. (She moves much to the right.) The book is divided into nearly equal parts by the revelation of the names of the sponsor of the killings and of the trigger man, by a new-found enemy of the sponsor. (He's right about the sponsor, wrong about the trigger man, and none of his testimony is worth bringing to court - as will often occur in the story.) The first part is true Biloxi Mud (in fact, the Church later comes out in support of the killers). By the time we get to the revelation, it's clear that in that neck of woods a judgeship is not what Clarke would think. The second part is what one might call a DA-procedural. I found both parts fascinating in their separate way, and the second especially instructive. The contract killing was far too clean to yield a lead within the 48 hours in which most murders are basically solved, if they are to be solved at all. Practically everything that occurs during the five years following depends on Lynne Sposito's tireless and skilfull efforts. The central revelation is due to a private investigator she hired, and it would have zilch results if she did not bring in a local TV station to broadcast it. This puts the file on the DA's desk but, as the second part shows, it would not go much further without true devotion on Lynne's part and on the part of a lone FBI agent, past his retirement. Not for evil reasons: it is simply a very iffy case to bring to court. In the end, we still don't know the real motive for the crime, and there is one big thread left hanging, unnoticed by Humes, which could lead to an entire new layer of involvement. One part of the story is amazing in itself. The sponsor is the son of another judge (still richer), who practically set his son up in crime. (From early youth the his aim in life was to be an outlaw.) Twenty years or so before the murders, he was sentenced to life without parole at hard labor in the nation's most isolated prison camp, Angola. Yet he found the way to set up and run a gay lonely-hearts scam that brought in millions (a small part of which went to pay for the murders). How? You'll have to read the book. There is one unfortunate Mary Higgins Clarke aspect to this book and most of those like it. Clarke, like the writers of TV serials, invents feelings and inner thoughts for her heroines that are expected, reasonable and conventional the way inner life never is. Whether in soaps or in Clarke novels, this is effective because it supplies a nearly-blank screen on which the reader can project her own feelings and needs, and thus empathize with the fictional heroine. This should not occur in painstaking reports of true stories, but it does. Where it occurs in Mississippi Mud, it gives the book an undeserved veneer of unreality. "Just the facts, Humes."

Dixie, dirt and a determined daughter.:
"Mississippi Mud" is, as author Edward Humes's introductory words explain, the name of that particular kind of poker where the cards themselves become irrelevant and the only thing that really counts is the ability to bluff and betray. It is also the name of a sweet, rich pie made from chocolate, eggs, sugar, vanilla and corn syrup (and according to some recipes, vanilla ice cream and/or whipped cream). In this book, "Mississippi Mud" is Humes's term of reference for the loosely organized group of people otherwise known as the "Dixie Mafia," whose members not so long ago used to leave traces of their unsavory plots all over the "Old South," from Louisiana to Texas and beyond. And one day in September 1987, their activities hit home in the Gulf Coast resort city of Biloxi, Mississippi. Not that this should necessarily have come as a complete surprise, you will say, if you've heard the gossip about the city's one-time notoriety, if you know some of the historic facts that have contributed to those rumors (such as early 18th century con artist John Law's get-rich-quick scheme which crushed the hopes of thousands of European settlers, or the exploits of James Copeland, arguably the "Dixie Mafia"'s 19th century forefather), or if you have made it all the way through this book's first third to read Humes's account of Biloxi's past. And of course, from New York to Atlantic City, Chicago, Las Vegas, Palermo, Corleone, Moscow, Hong Kong and Macau, there are plenty of cities large and small all over the world that have at one time or another seen their share of mafia, mob and triad activity; and gambling, illegal liquor and sex schemes often, although not necessarily, have something to do with it. More than once, those who have made it their business to rake out the mud get bogged down by it and die, instead of bringing the perpetrators to justice thus adding to the list of casualties in the seemingly never ending war against organized crime. And all too often the culprits get away with murder: literally so. Well, not here, however, and that is the difference in this story - or one of them, anyway. Granted, the "Dixie Mafia" may not have been as intricately organized as the Chinese triads, any of their Italian and Russian counterparts or the organizations run by the likes of Al Capone, Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, Salvatore "Lucky" Luciano and John Gotti; but Humes's account of a city government and a police force partly unwilling and partly too incompetent to mount a proper investigation into the murder of an outspoken critic of official corruption and of her husband, a prominent judge, sounds eerily familiar; and so does the involvement of a contender for public office with a group of notorious criminals running a scam out of a supposedly high security prison, with little to no interference from prison officials, and with a shadowy organizer pulling his strings in the background. The odds of successfully pitting a sole determined woman - the victims' eldest daughter - and her dogged investigator against the combined forces of political clout, an endless supply of seedy money, utter ruthlessness and sheer police incompetence were slim to none. Yet, Lynne Sposito persevered, and after ten years, finally got justice for her murdered parents. Edward Humes tells the story of Sposito's quest with a journalist's detachment; in a chilling matter-of-fact style and with an excellent eye for detail. He does not fall into the trap of glorifying the victims; both Vincent and Margaret Sherry were far from perfect, and the reader learns about their flaws and personal pitfalls as well as their strengths and, in particular, Margaret Sherry's undying commitment to rooting out corruption in Biloxi. Nor does Humes unduly vilify those involved in the conspiracy (although given their colorful personal and criminal histories and their various roles in the conspiracy to kill the Sherrys, any further vilification would have been unnecessary anyway and would actually have taken away a lot of the narrative's effectiveness). Equally unsettling as "In Cold Blood," to this day the benchmark of all true crime literature, although less literary in its description than Truman Capote's account or, for that matter, John Behrendt's famous "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," Humes's "Mississippi Mud" unravels the web of corruption and crime in which much (although undoubtedly not all) of Biloxi's society once used to be caught. And although the consequences of the events related here won't be as terminal for any of the conspirators as they are for Lynne Sposito and her parents, Mrs. Sposito can now at last, as Humes quotes her at the end of the book's paperback edition (which updates the narrative's conclusion vis-a-vis the earlier hardcover version), "get a good night's sleep" again - thus eerily echoing the sentiment expressed in Eliot Ness's (Kevin Costner's) final comment in Brian de Palma's "The Untouchables," who, when asked by a reporter what he will do after prohibition has been lifted, drily responds: "I'm going to have a drink."

Amazing, engrossing book!!:
I normally don't read true crime books, so I initially hesitated about reading this one. I am so glad I ended up reading this! The author does an amazing job of bringing the different stories of the different people together. You really feel for Lynne Sposito as she tries to find out who murdered her parents, and why. It's amazing how many people were involved with the crime, whether actually participating, or being involved with the coverup. You will never look at police investigations the same way again after reading this book. A must read!