Mike Gillich Jr. cut a curious figure for a crime boss. Humble in appearance and demeanor, Mr. Mike favored faded khakis and an untucked cotton shirt, a squarish pack of Lucky Strikes making the pocket over his heart bulge. He didn’t carry a gun or flaunt his women. His favorite hangout was a doughnut shop. He refrained from boastful, loud talk, his mild hazel eyes slightly enlarged behind thick glasses, a paunch rounding out his stubby frame. He prospered by keeping a low profile, living as he always had lived—modestly.
His home lacked pretension, one-story and colorless, located in a fenced compound two blocks inland from The Strip, near one of his clubs, the Horseshoe Lounge, a bookie’s haven later converted to strip shows. His first house on Point Cadet in the heart of Biloxi’s Yugoslavian enclave was equally unpretentious, though the enormous white Cadillac parked out front, custom-converted into a pickup truck, belied the humble image a bit. The beachfront property Gillich owned and on which he placed his other strip clubs made him a wealthy man, at least on paper. Yet he rarely flaunted his money, except in the shiny new cars and pickup trucks he favored.
His only other display of wealth came with his frequent and generous gifts to the Catholic Church. He received regular thank-you notes from the nuns and priests he helped support. There also were ample, if unrecorded, campaign contributions over the years to politicians and lawmen, the sort of under-the-table payments that helped make certain Mr. Mike’s business would continue smoothly even while his competitors suffered raids, arrests, shutdowns, and injunctions.
It didn’t hurt that he was close to almost every corrupt lawman in town as well, always respectful and friendly, greeting good cops and bad alike with a polite “Hello, officer. Come in, have some coffee, have a drink. Have a seat.” Some were amenable to other forms of hospitality—they knew about the bed in back, too.
Mike Gillich is that odd sort of success story Biloxi seems to have produced in great number, a man who rose à la Horatio Alger from humble origins, achieving wealth and status through his own hard, albeit illegal, work. For many years, he labored seven nights a week at his clubs, rising from bed around noon, returning home in the early morning hours after closing time. He never took vacations.
Born six months after the Great Depression began, Gillich was one year younger than Vince Sherry, though he looked older. Gillich started delivering ice for a living at age nine. He lived an undeniably hard life as a child, quitting school and going to work full-time after achieving a sixth-grade education and a threadbare mastery of the written word. This was a source of pride, however, not anguish: His completion of elementary school was more than either of his Yugoslavian immigrant parents had managed in the old country.
As a teenager, he bused tables, then tended bar at the Broadwater Beach Hotel, a long-lived Biloxi resort, legitimate if somewhat faded now, but boasting the Coast’s grandest illegal casino in the time of Gillich’s youth. It was tolerated—and patronized—by local law enforcement and mobsters alike. Gillich found his mentor at the Broadwater, a professional gambler and bookmaker, W. E. “Water Bill” Sanford. Water Bill looked as if he had just walked right off a riverboat, courtly in manner, merciless at the card table, possessed of a long, handsome face that gave away nothing its owner didn’t intend.1
Water Bill’s criminal contacts, his savvy, and his attitude about never cooperating with a police investigation made him a trusted member of Biloxi’s criminal elite, shaping his protégé Gillich’s attitudes and career. Mike Gillich might have lacked Water Bill’s legendary charisma, but he inherited his many contacts. And the taciturn Mr. Mike’s word became gold on The Strip, just like Water Bill’s.
In the early sixties, Mike Gillich struck out on his own, using his years of savings to open his first club—featuring strip shows and a bingo hall. He found plentiful demand for his services: The out-of-town conventioneer, the local hood with flash money in his pocket, the Biloxi police chief—all turned up on Gillich’s bar stool. In time, Vince Sherry would become a regular as well.
Biloxi was still wide open then, the illegal gambling undisguised, the prostitution all but advertised. It was a time when only one sort of business could thrive on that straight stretch of coastal highway, where a fraternity that would soon become the Dixie Mafia was beginning to nest. Gillich’s bingo hall was topped by neon outside, an open advertisement. There is no question about his operation’s illegality, but Gillich’s club was just one of many, all engaged in the same blatantly crooked activities. Craps and cards were played in the back, next to the trick rooms. Informants told the FBI that Gillich had secret cameras over the prostitutes’ beds, filming prominent men for purposes of blackmail. (This has never been proved, however.) In later years, Gillich opened a video store next to the club. A Biloxi policeman once stumbled on a bank of VCRs inside, churning out illegal copies of movies.2
Gillich pioneered a practice called “B-drinking” in his club, where the strippers, clad in negligées or partially unclasped robes, would sidle up to patrons, cooing obsequious nothings. A waitress would then appear, asking, “Would you like to buy the lady a drink?” Conversation continued with a yes, ended with a refusal (though the next stripper in line would then try the same, a process that would continue five, six, or more times with different women until the rube finally said yes to a girl, or left). The strippers talked to customers as long as the flow of overpriced drinks continued—four dollars for about six cents’ worth of Kool-Aid over cracked ice.
Each stripper kept track of her sales by collecting the swizzle sticks from every glass of Kool-Aid, which Gillich would count at the end of the night, doling out cash to each girl based upon her productivity. To the customers, each drink bought was worth about three or four minutes of purring, perhaps an occasional rub or pat, before the waitress reappeared and asked the man if he’d buy the lady another. More money led to more action in the back of the club or in the trick room, but even without escalating to actual acts of prostitution, the B-drinking earned tremendous profits—all in violation of city ordinances that banned the practice, but which were never enforced.
As the money poured in, Gillich eventually acquired more clubs—the Golden Nugget and the Dream Room, both located in the same huge complex that housed the bingo hall, and the Horseshoe a few blocks off The Strip. Over the years, he opened, closed, or held a part interest in several other joints, all similar in their seediness and use of striptease acts as fronts for B-drinking, prostitution, and gambling: the Tally Ho, the Jungle Club, the Mint, the Chez Joey, the Wits Inn, El Morocco, and several others, usually in partnership with one or more Dixie Mafia cronies.
Gillich co-owned one of the seedier joints, the Jungle Club, with a Dixie Mafia burglar and hit man, Henry Cook Salisbury. Known on the streets of Biloxi as Little Henry, Salisbury was notorious for his dapper, diminutive stature, his cruelty, and his willingness to kill for a pittance. He was eventually implicated in a plot to murder the police chief of Gulfport at the time, Larkin Smith, allegedly at the behest of another friend and confidant of Gillich’s, the corrupt Sheriff Leroy Hobbs. (Smith would succeed Hobbs as sheriff, and would occupy the office at the time of the Sherry murders, while Hobbs went to prison.)3
Later, when Little Henry became terminally ill with cancer while in prison, the charitable Mike Gillich sponsored him for humanitarian parole. Salisbury came home to die in lodgings paid for by Mr. Mike. Once Little Henry was in the ground, the already married Gillich took up with his widow, Frances. Gillich’s wife, Marlene, much later divorced him on grounds of habitual cruelty.
Long known as the financier and middleman for the Dixie Mafia, Gillich nevertheless remained untouchable. Shrewdly, Gillich befriended and serviced corrupt members of Gulf Coast law enforcement and government, and for more than twenty-five years, he weathered every attempt to shut down vice on The Strip.
In 1968, the Mississippi Highway Patrol, under the direction of its chief investigator, Rex Armistead, arrested him for lewdness, then blockaded Gillich’s Tally Ho with their patrol cars. Gillich outlasted the attempt to shut him down—as did every other strip-club owner in Biloxi.4 The governor pulled back the patrols after receiving repeated complaints from politicians and business interests on the Coast who worried about lost tourist dollars. A lifelong friend of Gillich’s, Justice of the Peace Roy Mattina, dismissed the lewdness charge the same year it was filed.
Gillich’s influence with the judicial branch extended to others as well: When a Dixie Mafia burglar, Clifford Hugh Fuller, was arrested for assault with intent to commit murder, Mr. Mike appeared before his old friend Mattina, arguing on Fuller’s behalf. Mattina unilaterally lowered the charges at Gillich’s request, fined Fuller twenty-five dollars, then set him free. Representation from Mike Gillich could, in the right case before the right judge, accomplish more than any lawyer.
But if being on Gillich’s good side had its benefits, anything could happen once his support withdrew. In December 1970, two years after Justice Mattina let him walk, police arrested Cliff Fuller in Georgia for armed robbery. Instead of falling back on his old criminals’ support system, Fuller this time said he would cooperate in an investigation of the Dixie Mafia in exchange for leniency. The denouement surprised no one: A few weeks later, a shotgun cut Fuller in half, another Dixie Mafia witness eliminated. He had eaten lunch a few hours earlier with a one-legged Dixie Mafia hit man named John Ransom, a perennial presence near Dixie Mafia hits—and a close friend of both Little Henry and Kirksey Nix. The murder remains unsolved.
Two years later, another murder case revealed a tangled web leading back to Mike Gillich and the peg-legged Ransom. William Mulvey and Tracy Johnson, two small-time crooks, were murdered near Covington, Louisiana—the scene five years earlier of the Gypsy camp murder. A man who later confessed to helping with the murders fingered two Biloxi thugs, friends of Gillich’s and Nix’s. Investigators learned that Gillich’s protégé, Little Henry, had put out the contract. And John Ransom was seen in the bar with one of the killers shortly before the murders took place. But no one was ever charged in the case.5
On the day they died, Mulvey and Johnson made several phone calls from a motel. One of those calls was to Mike Gillich’s telephone. To this day, no one but Mike Gillich knows why.
* * *
The Highway Patrol investigators returned to The Strip in 1972, reporting ten clubs, Gillich’s among them, as havens for vice. They identified Gillich in their intelligence reports as “a known associate of many felons and fugitives.”6
The report goaded the city of Biloxi into a reluctant but well-publicized crackdown. Two hundred eighty-seven charges were filed against the vice lords of The Strip, an unprecedented attack by city prosecutors. More than half of those charges were filed against employees of Gillich’s Golden Nugget and Dream Room.7 The new mayor of that era, Jeremiah O’Keefe, a war hero and local funeral home magnate, reiterated the Gulf Coast politician’s eternal promise: to clean up The Strip.
And for a short while, he did. The clubs either shut down or stuck to legitimate, if sleazy, business. But though O’Keefe’s police department appeared to get results for a time, many of the arrests turned out to be mere showpieces. Once the charges against Gillich and his cronies progressed beyond the headlines and into court, many were dismissed or dropped through a failure to prosecute. Many of the dismissals came at the order of a newly appointed judge, the youngest in Mississippi at the time, County Court Judge Pete Halat, who found portions of the city’s anti-B-drinking law unconstitutionally vague. It was during his time on the bench that Halat first became acquainted with Vince Sherry.
By the mid-seventies, the flurry of vice busts had ended, a return to business as usual, with more strip clubs fronting for prostitution and gambling than ever before. A new Biloxi police chief appointed by Mayor O’Keefe—later elected to the state legislature—befriended some of the vice lords, then ordered an end to the investigation of strip joints and gambling houses. In a series of scathing articles on Gulf Coast corruption, the capital city newspaper, the Jackson Clarion Ledger, savaged Biloxi in 1981, virtually indicting the entire community, arguing that nothing had changed in thirty years, that Biloxi sat in a time warp of speakeasies and gin mills. It was intensely embarrassing to Mississippi’s second largest city. One article—reported as fact, not opinion—flatly stated “Biloxi, more than any area of the state, has ingrained social mores which render an already handicapped Police Department a virtual cripple—mores formed in a community where even churches are involved in gambling and there is a general acceptance of some vice because it enhances the town’s reputation as a resort.”
This was the Biloxi Gerald Blessey inherited when he took office as mayor in 1981, elected, like so many of his predecessors, on a vow to clean up his city. But this time, the politician seemed to keep his promise—mostly. The fortunes of the vice lords on The Strip really did change for the worse, after decades of immunity and profits. Under the Blessey administration, the city police department canceled its hands-off policy and launched undercover vice investigations. To no one’s surprise, investigators found prostitution and other crime rampant in the strip joints. One by one, many of the joints were shut down as the city secured court injunctions against their illegal operations. This time, the joints stayed closed. Their empty shells stood as mute testimony to Biloxi’s past, walls sagging like old cartons set out for the trashman.
By the end of 1986, only three strip joints still operated in Biloxi: the Horseshoe Lounge, the Golden Nugget, and the Dream Room. They were all Mike Gillich’s joints. He had the vice business all to himself.
Many believed this monopoly showed official favoritism toward Mike Gillich, though city officials denied this. Critics saw many connections between Gillich and the Blessey administration. Mayor Blessey hired Gillich’s daughter Tina fresh from law school as his administrative assistant. Blessey appointed Gillich’s son-in-law to a city court judgeship. The city awarded Gillich’s nephew Andrew a lucrative computer contract. Even the staid Biloxi law firm that gave Blessey his professional start as a young lawyer was tied by marriage to Gillich.8
Time after time, city prosecutors chosen by the mayor told patrolmen and detectives who went after Gillich that they lacked sufficient evidence to justify prosecution. Yet the investigators involved in probing the clubs swore they had uncovered exactly the same evidence against Gillich’s joints as they had against his competitors, if not worse. Indeed, Gillich hired many of the same hookers put out of work by the other club shutdowns, expanding his hours and his shows, invulnerable as always.9
At least part of his ability to elude the police lay in an early warning system he devised to learn of upcoming raids. Federal prosecutors have alleged that Gillich’s old friend Roy Mattina, who had moved from justice court to a seat on the Biloxi City Council, passed on tips about undercover police operations and raid plans.10 Mattina, who regularly enjoyed coffee and doughnuts with Gillich at the Krispy Kreme on The Strip, would receive information from Biloxi police officials, then Gillich would give the hookers and gamblers the appropriate night off. The cops would show up at the Nugget or the Dream Room and find no hooking, no B-drinking, no gambling. And there would be Mike Gillich, smiling, nodding, yes-sirring the policemen, offering them anything they wanted. “When are you guys gonna learn?” Gillich would say. “I run a clean operation.” Mattina later pleaded guilty to perjury for lying about the tips to a federal grand jury, but he was off the council by then, and Gillich had other sources of protection.11
On the few occasions police managed to earn a conviction against Gillich—as they did with an illegal gambling charge in 1973—Mr. Mike found a way out. A few years after the conviction, he walked into the courtroom of County Judge Pete Halat, who expunged Gillich’s record. Although he had been Gillich’s friend most of his adult life—arguably a conflict of interest—Halat entered a court order that had the legal effect of wiping out any criminal conviction in Gillich’s history.12
Gillich knew how to treat his friends. When Halat reentered private practice in 1976, then took on Vince Sherry as his partner in 1981, Pete Halat found in Mike Gillich a ready source of legal business and referrals—starting with Kirksey McCord Nix.