Murder, vengeance and memory: John Patterson recalls the Phenix City that launched his career

In an expanded lakeside cottage on 1,200 acres of family land in Goldville, Ala., former Alabama Gov. John Patterson sits surrounded by history, his rustic wooden walls adorned with framed black-and-white photographs from a long and busy life in politics.

Now 94, walking with a cane, his voice absent the strength it once had in speeches to campaign crowds and civic clubs, he is 75 miles and 63 years away from the place and time that killed his father, launched his career, and changed the course of history in Phenix City, a town then infamous for vice and corruption.

There on June 18, 1954, mob assassins gunned his father Albert down in a desperate and vain attempt to preclude the gambling cleanup the attorney-general nominee had campaigned on.

The shocking murder had the opposite effect: The governor declared martial law and sent in the National Guard, which raided the gambling joints and ousted corrupt public officials, including the police chief and the sheriff and their underlings.

Phenix City was clean in a year, named a National Civic League “All-American City” in 1955, today a little-known honor that old-timers still mention with pride.

John Patterson took his father’s place, running for attorney general in a special election, and taking office without opposition in 1955.

He moved his family from his hometown to Montgomery, and he never moved back.

No going back

He had not planned to return, even before his father was murdered, he said in a recent interview with the Ledger-Enquirer.

“When he ran for attorney general, he intended to move to Montgomery and not come back,” Patterson said of his father. “He really intended to do that. Not many folks know that. And of course I was going to do that, too. I was going to move to Montgomery myself, live in Montgomery.”

They liked Phenix City, but they did want to work in a corrupt legal system.

Patterson described it with references to Albert Fuller, the sheriff’s deputy later convicted of shooting his father, and Jimmy Matthews, a native Brit involved in the gambling business.

“It’s tough practicing law and doing defense work in a place like Phenix City,” he said. “You go into the sheriff’s office, and there sitting with his feet up on the desk is Albert Fuller, with — what was the Englishman’s name? — Jimmy Matthews. You’d go in the sheriff’s office almost anytime and there’d be one of them hanging around, and using the office as if it were their own. This is a typical town overtaken by organized racketeers.”

All lawyers had to represent some mobsters, because those were the people who needed lawyers.

“You see, a lawyer, practicing law in a place like Phenix City, if you didn’t represent people who got in trouble, you couldn’t make a living,” Patterson said, of his father adding, “And he represented some of the worst of them, some of the biggest gangsters.”

That included Matthews’ partner Hoyt Shepherd, and his brother Snooks, accused of killing Fate Leebern in 1946 at a joint called the Southern Manor.

Said Patterson: “He was sort of enticed over there to a meeting, and he was killed in that café and roadhouse. ... I remember going out there right after it happened. Everybody went out there…. ... Daddy was one of the lawyers that represented Shepherd.”

His father was among eight lawyers on the defense team. The brothers were acquitted.

Eventually Albert Patterson cut ties with the mob. Why?

“I don’t really know,” Patterson said. “A lot of this was going on when I wasn’t there.”

The Army

Graduating from Central High School in 1939, he first left Phenix City to join the Army, on March 27, 1940.

He was 17. He still remembers having to get his father’s written permission for the recruiter:

“I hadn’t counted on that. I went back over to his office and took this form in there, and he read it very carefully, and he said, ‘John, is this what you want?’ And I said, “Yes sir, that’s what I want.’ And he said, ‘I’ll sign it on one condition.’ And I said, ‘What’s that?’ And he said, ‘That you stick it out, to the bitter end, come what may.’

“Of course, my father had been a distinguished soldier and severely wounded, and he was crippled in World War I, highly decorated. ... He knew what he was talking about. And I told him I would, and I had a chance to think about that a number of times.”

The Army was to be his ticket to college. He planned to stay in no longer than he had to. “Then the war came along and I was stuck. I went to (Officer Candidate School) in Fort Sill, Okla., and became an Army lieutenant in the field artillery.”

Back then, before the crusade that led to his father’s campaign for attorney general, the assassination and the cleanup, he had thought they would partner in the town where he grew up.

“I had no intention of making the Army a career. I always in the back of my mind thought that I would come back to Alabama and study law and go and practice law with my father in Phenix City.”

Growing up

Despite the vice and corruption, he liked the place and the people. And he learned a little vice can be fun, when you’re young.

“Slot machines were a big business. ... These slot machines had stools made, platforms made so kids could reach the handle to pull the slot machines. When I was a little boy, I saved my coins and played the slot machines at the billiard hall right across the street from King’s Grocery, where King’s Grocery was on 14th Street. ...

“I knew everybody in town, I guess. And I played the slot machines and also we used to slip off on the weekends and go over in the woods and shoot dice all weekend. It was a great life for a young guy. I liked Phenix City. ... I took full advantage of all it had to offer.”

That included Central High School: “I got a good education there at Central High School. I really did. It helped me in my career later on. It helped me become an officer in the Army.

“I came back in ’45. I didn’t stay home more than two days. It was always understood that I was going to go to the university and study law. ... And that’s what my father wanted me to do, and I wanted to do that, too.”

He got his law degree in 1949, but the Army called him back for the Korean War. He was in Germany from 1951 to 1953. He came home just in time to get involved in his father’s campaign.

Gang violence

Back home, gangsters were targeting leaders of the Russell Betterment Association, formed to fight corruption and clean up the town.

On June 9, 1952, the mobsters put four cases of dynamite under crusader Hugh Bentley’s front porch and blew the house apart. None of the four people inside was seriously injured.

The Betterment Association ran candidates against corrupt officeholders, who won by stuffing ballot boxes. Thugs beat up association poll watchers.

When the gang set fire to Albert Patterson’s law office, that strengthened his resolve.

“I think when they tried to burn him out, that made him mad and made him more determined to tough it out. A lot of people advised him to move.”

The betterment association decided he should seek statewide office, too large an election for the mob to swing. The office to aim for, to end the corruption, was attorney general.

John Patterson traveled the state with his lame father, who needed help putting his pants on. The mob campaigned against him, claiming he was the corrupted candidate.

Patterson remembers the men who tried to flip that script.

“They’re all gone now,” he said. “Did you know that you’d have to look hard to find anybody still living that had anything to do with that in Phenix City? I don’t believe you’d find anybody. It’s amazing how rapidly people disappear, isn’t it?”

His father won the Democratic nomination, and the gangsters’ altering vote totals only brought them more trouble: Two Birmingham newspaper reporters exposed the scandal, sparking hearings that drew more scrutiny.

The night his father died, John Patterson was home reading a book in bed, and heard something had happened at the law office. He rushed over and saw the pool of blood outside.

His father was dead at the hospital. The son collected all that was in his father’s pockets, then left to see his widowed mother. Deputy Albert Fuller gave him a ride.

Spotlight

All eyes were on Phenix City, after that. Vice and election fraud weren’t just local issues.

“It was such a shock,” John Patterson recalled. “The people of Alabama had had enough. It was obvious.”

He traveled to Washington, D.C., hoping to meet FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, to get the feds to investigate his father’s murder instead of the corrupt officials who killed him.

Hoover wouldn’t meet. But when the national press learned Patterson was there, he was all over the news.

“I showed up at the airport. I was immediately mobbed by reporters, and they followed me, and the crowd grew more and more as I approached the Justice Department ... and Hoover wouldn’t see me.”

In Alabama, pressure was building to end the corruption that had surpassed statewide election fraud to murder. Gov. Gordon Persons called Patterson to Montgomery.

“He told me something to the effect that ‘I’ve got enough of that crowd.’ He said, ‘I’m not going to put up with this stuff, and I want you to know that we’re going to go after them.’”

Declaring martial law, Persons sent in the National Guard on July 22.

Today it’s hard to imagine how fast Phenix City changed in a year. Top officeholders were out by August, many later were indicted, and some convicted.

A special grand jury convened July 21 had by Dec. 11 indicted more than 150 people on 742 charges.

Three men were indicted in Albert Patterson’s murder, including the county’s chief prosecutor Arch Ferrell and state Attorney General Silas Garrett. Only Fuller, the deputy who gave John Patterson a ride to his mother’s that night, was convicted in the assassination.

Vengeance

What happened in Phenix City extended beyond news of the moment. It became iconic, thanks to the 1955 book “Phenix City” by Birmingham reporters Ed Strickland and Gene Wortsman, and to the Pulitzer Prize the Columbus Ledger won for its coverage.

Most dramatic of all was the dark, sensational movie, “The Phenix City Story,” filmed in Phenix City with townspeople taking parts. It portrayed John Patterson as a brash, brawling do-gooder on a mission to save his hometown.

After that, John Patterson was not just a lawyer or a politician. He was a hero.

Looking back, he admitted he was not on a moral crusade to redeem Phenix City.

He was out to avenge his father’s death.

“That was the driver, and I’d never had a such a human drive as that in my life,” he said. “I wanted to get those people so bad. ... I had the drive, and the desire for revenge, and vengeance is not a good thing for a fellow, but I had that, and it makes you want to do it and never get tired working on it, never get sleepy, weary.”

He chuckled.

“The desire to get even,” he said. “Isn’t that awful? Vengeance is a strong thing.”

Was it not vengeance on behalf of justice?

“Will the Lord look at it that way or not?” he asked.

As attorney general, he ethically could not be involved in prosecuting his father’s killers. He did continually target any gambling that cropped up afterward, and also loan-sharking, as lenders were fleecing the poor through $10-a-week loans with a 100- or 200-percent interest rate: “We put a stop to that.”

Governor, judge, retiree

His reputation fueled his 1958 run for governor, when he beat George Wallace on a segregationist platform, a cause Wallace took on in 1963.

After that, Patterson practiced law in Montgomery before running for U.S. Senate in 1970, losing to Howell Heflin. Wallace in 1984 appointed him to the Court of Criminal Appeals, to which he was elected and then re-elected, leaving in 1997.

His last public service was in 2004, when he was appointed to a Special Supreme Court that upheld the ouster of Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore, who had refused a federal order to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the state judicial building.

Over his career, John Patterson met other historical figures whose faces smile from the old photographs on the polished walls of his home in Goldville: Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy and other presidents, generals and dignitaries.

Out there on the family land that includes the home site where he was born, before his parents moved to Phenix City, he and his second wife Tina share the company of a goat they call Rebecca and a little dog named Tip. Each pet just showed up there, and they adopted both.

The couple read the Wall Street Journal in the morning, take a nap, and maybe go to lunch in nearby Alex City.

Usually in the evening the governor has a martini, and relaxes in his secluded home by the lake, where a little black dog and a big white goat patrol the green lawn outside, and the walls within are filled with flashbacks that precede color photography.

The past is always there, just a glance aside, and still so far away.

This story was originally published June 24, 2017 at 8:00 PM.