Vince Sherry never wanted to move to Biloxi.
He despised what he had seen of the city in 1965, when he and his family lived within the protective embrace of Keesler Air Force Base. Outside the military reservation, the gambling, the corruption, The Strip and everything it represented—all the things that so enchanted Kirksey Nix when he had arrived two years earlier—persuaded Vince that the Gulf Coast was no place to raise a family.
During his time there as a military lawyer, Vince all but quarantined his children. He kept them on base whenever possible, away from what he called the “local ruffians”—defined as any child not living in Keesler’s stock of red-brick ranch homes. Lynne and the other Sherry children could not even go on class trips because Vince refused to sign a waiver promising he would not sue the school if some harm befell his kids during the outing. “In Biloxi?” he asked. “You must be joking.”
When Colonel Sherry transferred to Okinawa in 1967 to finish out his military career—a post some servicemen consider a hardship—Vince was overjoyed. The kids then grew up in the cloistered military community there. During vacations, Vince traveled throughout Asia. He studied and prepared for his doctorate in Vietnam, reading original documents in French dating back to the founding of that republic, haunting staid libraries and universities in a country unraveling with each passing day. He learned to speak Vietnamese, interviewing jurists and attorneys. He blithely traversed neighborhoods armed soldiers avoided, displaying a brand of fatalism about personal safety that sometimes bordered on the foolhardy, an almost Calvinist insistence that his fate had been decided long before and that nothing he did would hasten or delay his demise. One night driving with friends through Saigon, he insisted on switching on the dome light in their cab so he could read—even as gunfire could be heard nearby and his friends hugged the floorboards.
“If it’s time for me to die, I’m not going to worry about it,” Vince had said, silencing their pleas to extinguish the light. “If it’s your time, it’s your time.”
After Okinawa, his military retirement plan had always been to move back to the lush green horse country of his adoptive hometown in Kentucky. Though he led people to believe otherwise, Vince had not lived his whole life there—he had been born in New York City, where he spent his childhood dodging an abusive father’s fists. He had moved to Kentucky with his mother at age thirteen, declaring himself a Southerner and making his Yankee heritage his most guarded secret. He loved Kentucky and wanted to return.
But Margaret feared interference from their disapproving mothers-in-law—neither liked her child’s choice of spouse. She suggested a return to Biloxi instead. She had not shared Vince’s distaste for the place, and it was a way of staying in the South. She loved the ocean and the small-town feel—apart from The Strip, much of Biloxi and the Mississippi Gulf Coast seemed unsullied.
So the Sherrys settled in Biloxi for good in 1970, eventually buying a house in the Ancient Oaks section of town near the Sunkist Country Club, a comfortable, tree-lined enclave far removed from the sleaze and hustle of The Strip, large, simple houses with big yards and fruit trees in back. That same year, Lynne married Dick Sposito and moved with him to Ohio. Eric and Vin continued grade school in Biloxi while Leslie soon began kindergarten. Vince, meanwhile, at forty-one, began to wind down the final year of his Air Force service, practicing military law at Keesler, then entering private practice with one of Biloxi’s largest law firms. It was just as Margaret wanted. But then a curious thing happened.
Margaret found herself increasingly appalled by the corruption around her. Though she never wavered in her love for her adopted hometown, Margaret Sherry began to despise the blurred lines of Biloxi government, the criminal powers that carried such weight behind the scenes, the futile attempts at reform, the essentially law-abiding majority who seemed unable to shrug off the tyranny of a corrupt few.
Vince, on the other hand, quickly overcame his repugnance for his new home. He became fascinated and beguiled by the characters he defended in court, who lived life so hard and so fully, whose choices were so alien from his own. They had no concept of conventional morality, he found, though they seemed to live by their own code. They were mysterious and cruel, like Vince’s father, a man who had married under an alias, and whose true identity was revealed to his wife only when a brother appeared at the door one day and asked for him by his true name. Once found out, Vince’s father had claimed he lived under a false name because of undercover work he had done for the government. But the family always suspected a shadier reason.
Now, half a lifetime later in Biloxi, Vincent Sherry found himself reveling in the uncertain moral landscape, happily and thoroughly at home in the same sort of environment that had so repulsed him when he was a child. He began spending more and more time with Biloxi’s criminal elite, enjoying their companionship and secrets. Like his new city, Vince finally came to embody the same countervailing qualities that made Biloxi a place of contradiction—the man of high principle and ability who, nevertheless, was touched by and fascinated with the dark side.
In Biloxi, Vincent Jerome Sherry learned that he enjoyed the moral equivalent of juggling. To his credit, and his family’s ultimate misfortune, he was all too good at it.
* * *
In short order, the bulk of Vince Sherry’s law practice became the defense of the city’s most notorious criminals. He would make his rounds at night, moving in and out of The Strip’s various dives and haunts, a doctor of jurisprudence attending to the legal needs of an endless series of motley patients. He drove from courthouse to bar to illegal gambling casino to a doughnut shop to meet a stripper with legal troubles. The same man became a stalwart of the local Democratic Party, socializing by day with governors, federal judges, U.S. senators, and Biloxi’s elite. But he also enjoyed rubbing elbows with the city’s underworld, inhaling the stale beer and tobacco atmosphere of some club on The Strip while a tired heroin addict removed her G-string to bad disco on a plywood stage. Vince even stored excess law books and case files in the cavernous warehouse on The Strip that housed two of Mike Gillich’s clubs, the Golden Nugget and the Dream Room, and behind them, a variety of gambling and prostitution facilities. With a glowing introduction from Pete Halat, a lifelong friend of Gillich’s, Vince came to enjoy an easy friendship with “Mr. Mike.” Vince bailed Gillich’s employees out of trouble time and again, his address book filled with their names and numbers.
Vince’s work for Gillich most often involved getting work cards for the strip-joint owner’s “girls.” The cards were the city of Biloxi’s gesture at keeping drug dealers, prostitutes, and other assorted felons from working The Strip as bartenders, waitresses, and strippers—the idea being if you keep the criminals away, you keep the crime away, too. Supposedly you couldn’t get a work card from the Biloxi Police Department if you had a criminal record; clubs with cardless workers were supposed to be closed down, their owners arrested. It was a system observed more in the breach than in practice. Mr. Mike regularly hired Vince to obtain work cards regardless of a stripper’s criminal past, and women with drug and prostitution records regularly went to work in Gillich’s clubs.
Dick Sposito once asked Vince, “How can you hang out with these crooks, live the professional life you live, then go home and live your life the way you do with your family?”
“You just separate them,” Vincent Sherry said. “It’s that simple.”
It was the sort of typical Vince comment Lynne Sposito would mentally replay time and again years later, wishing she could tell him, “It’s never that simple, is it, Dad?”
* * *
If Vincent Sherry was a moral relativist, totally at ease with visiting a client at his illegal casino, dice tables and slot machines noisily in use, Margaret Sherry was another matter.
There were no shades of gray in Margaret’s moral universe, just the absolutes of right and wrong, straight and crooked. She and Vince were something of an odd couple, he a lifelong Democrat (though he had been a George Wallace man), she an ultraconservative Republican opposed to even the most basic government programs. Margaret despised the criminals Vince brought home for dinner all the time, though she tolerated them as a necessary part of his business. On the other hand, she served as Vince’s conscience at times, as she did with the Acevedo case, when she compelled him to turn over the guns he had removed from a client’s home, despite potentially dire consequences.
Margaret shared the same poor roots as Vince, but unlike him, a closet Yankee, Margaret Smith was born in Louisiana, where her father had toiled in the oil fields, then later moved to Kentucky. The Smiths were far ahead of their time when it came to supporting the ambitions of their daughter, saving to put her through college. She and Vince met while undergraduates in Bowling Green. He stood her up on their first date, a Christmas party, apologizing the next day with the boxed candies of a Whitman Sampler. Vince made a habit of repeating that same gift every year throughout their courtship and marriage, the rectangular yellow box appearing before each Christmas without fail, an unspoken apology for the past year’s transgressions.
Margaret’s parents could never stand Vince. Her father told her to stop seeing him or get out. She chose the latter, moving to Detroit with her brother—later to be Eric Sherry’s natural father. Vince courted Margaret with long, eloquent love letters, and she fell in love with his wit as much as anything else. For years, Margaret’s parents virtually disowned her, even refusing to attend the wedding in 1950.
“They say you’re the smart-ass from New York who came down to Kentucky to steal their baby,” Margaret told Vince. Vince’s mother was no better. “I don’t want that Margaret at my funeral,” she instructed Vince shortly before her death. By the time they settled in Biloxi and after twenty years of marriage, the rancor had cooled somewhat, but Lynne never had to guess why her mother had fought so adamantly against moving back to Kentucky.
In college, Margaret earned a dual degree in mathematics and art, then went to work for an architect in Washington. Vince joined the Air Force, serving at the Pentagon in Intelligence. Margaret became the breadwinner while Vince juggled military duty and law school.
Lynne remembers her mother as the calming influence in the family, while Vince was subject to terrible bouts of violence and temper, sometimes striking Margaret in the early days of their marriage. Lynne also remembers being knocked unconscious as a child for accidentally bumping her father while picking up a penny. Later, by way of apology, Vince came to Lynne as she lay in her room recovering, holding out a box and saying, “I bought you a corsage for Easter.”
This was exactly the opposite of the Sherrys’ public image, in which Margaret appeared to be the fire-breathing politician, and Vince the jovial everyman. Margaret Sherry was no doormat for Vince, however: She put up with a great deal, but she drew the line when necessary, fully capable of raging as loudly as her husband. Sometimes she refused to speak to him for days, walking by him, talking through him, until he began to feel like a wraith haunting his own home. He would in the end beg forgiveness, finding Margaret’s silence too potent a weapon.
During one visit to Biloxi by Margaret’s mother when Lynne was very young, Vince asked his wife what was for dinner. “Whatever you make,” she replied lightly. He snapped out an open fist and struck her, lightning quick, right in front of Margaret’s mother. He instantly regretted it, but said nothing. Margaret paled, but she, too, remained silent. When Vince left the room to take a nap—his bouts of anger always left him exhausted—Margaret followed a few minutes later.
Once they were alone, she pulled out the pistol she had just retrieved from the closet, and pointed it at Vince. “You apologize—in front of my mother,” she said, “or I pull the trigger.” He apologized. And he meant it.
Later in life, Lynne would come to believe that her father’s sporadically abusive behavior owed as much to a medical condition as to the fact that Vince suffered at the hands of his own abusive father. Even as a young man, Vince had been stricken with high blood pressure and crippling headaches that would leave him alternately tense and irritable, or supine on the couch. As he approached middle age, a long-overdue diagnosis and new medication brought these conditions under control. Vince’s violent temper faded after that, ending the intense swings between nurturing parent and belt-wielding terror. The youngest Sherry child, Leslie, would remember only a wonderful dad who doted on her in every way, and who never raised his hand in her life—though nothing would ever completely cure Vince’s fiery temper and penchant for shouting in anger.
Despite the ragged memories, Lynne could always forgive her father. She always recalled Vince’s attitude about his own father, whom he had forgiven in later life and welcomed into his home and family. “If nothing else,” Vince once told her, “he gave me life. Who can ignore such a gift?”
Strangely, Vince and Margaret rarely battled over the most logical source of potential conflict between them—his representation of Biloxi’s most notorious criminals and her desire to win the office of mayor, then put those same men out of business. On the contrary, Vince was Margaret’s most ardent supporter when she decided to enter politics in 1981, eleven years after they settled in Biloxi, and he never wavered in that support. He had at first liked and supported Gerald Blessey, whose political philosophy more closely resembled his than Margaret’s. But when she took him on, Vince got behind his wife, no questions asked. And when she announced she wanted to close down his friend Gillich, and the rest of The Strip, Vince just laughed. “If you want to shut them down,” he said, “that’s fine with me. You’ll just make more work for a good defense attorney.”