Be my summer lover, the personal ad implored. Cute, slim, seeks sincere, warm relationship. Willing to relocate for the summer or permanently if love blooms. I’m romantic, cuddly, shy and need someone special in my life.
James Dickey couldn’t have imagined a more appealing advertisement, not if he had written it himself. The writer of this personal sought “a torrid summer affair that may change both our lives for the better,” but also added, “looks and age are not as important as what’s inside.” Summer lover didn’t even smoke.
At age fifty-four, divorced, with two grown children long gone from the house, Dickey had been feeling the cold gnaw of loneliness each night when he came home from work. He had just broken up with his live-in lover of seven years. There had been no warning, no argument, no hint of the relationship’s end: Dickey had just returned from his reporter’s desk at the San Jose Mercury News one evening to find an empty closet and a good-bye note on the kitchen table. Anger hit first, then depression, months of it, almost crippling. He toyed with the idea of suicide.
Then, idly scanning the personals, the long, thin columns of fine print one after another providing a testament to human desperation, he saw “Summer Lover.” Something in that ad clicked for him, making him want to reach out from his sadness and apathy. He had never really considered seeking solace through the personals before. It seemed so melancholy and random, perhaps dangerous. The other personals he had read seemed alternately silly or grotesque, embarrassingly graphic or sickly sweet. But not this one. Someone out there had aimed right for him, uncannily on target. Why not give it a try?
Dickey penned a response, agonizing over the wording, wanting to get it just right. He, too, needed someone, maybe for the summer. Maybe more. And as far as he could tell, the author of that personal ad, Eddie Johnson, twenty-three-year-old gay white male, sounded like just the answer to James Dickey’s prayers.
* * *
He should have known better.
Dickey had come out of the closet nine years earlier, not long after his divorce. After that, he began covering gay issues for his newspaper, which, in the San Francisco Bay Area in which he lived and worked, quickly became a big beat. He considered himself a gay activist, educated and well-informed. As a journalist, he had heard about many kinds of scams—con games perpetrated on the elderly, on the terminally ill, on inexperienced investors and, yes, on lonely gay men. Hell, he had reported on that sort of thing before.
Yet Dickey still fell for it. Hard. Before he was done, Dickey’s Visa card would be overdrawn, his bank credit exhausted. He refinanced his house, depleted his savings. He spent more than seventeen thousand dollars to bring Eddie to him, with nothing to show for it in the end but immense debts and that same empty closet and lonely house. And two thousand miles away, Kirksey McCord Nix moved seventeen thousand dollars closer to freedom.
But who could have known? The note Dickey had received in response to his letter seemed so convincing, so genuine and heartfelt. “Got your letter,” Eddie had gushed. “It made my day.”
There was a problem, though, Eddie wrote. Since his personal ad had run in the Advocate, a national gay magazine, his one remaining parent had died, then he’d been in a car accident. The wreck had led to some charges against him, and he had landed in what he called a “vocational program.” He promised to call collect and explain everything to Dickey in more detail, urging him to be patient. That was his only initial request: not for money, just patience.
“Maybe we can add a little sunshine in each other’s lives,” Eddie wrote in his typed letter. “The summer is not over yet!”
The envelope had a Lubbock, Texas, post office box for a return address. Inside, a picture of a boyishly handsome young man with a glowing smile, wearing a university T-shirt bearing the logo “Central Michigan,” beamed at Dickey. “I hope you like it,” Eddie shyly added.
He called a few days later, as promised. His voice sounded young, hopeful, almost bubbly, despite his upsetting circumstances. Dickey was charmed.
Eddie said he was calling collect from the Shenandoah Ranch, where he had been sentenced to a rehabilitation program for first offenders. He hadn’t just wrecked a car—he had been accused of stealing it. The charge was bogus, Eddie swore; he said he had permission to borrow the car. Unfortunately, the owner—either out of anger at the wreck or because he was scamming his insurance company—had reported it stolen. And Eddie now bore the consequences.
“They’ll release me if someone will provide me a home and help getting a job,” Eddie explained. “I can’t wait to get out of here. It’s all a mistake.”
With Dickey promising to help any way he could, they agreed Eddie would come to California. Later, Eddie’s supervisor at the ranch, Ben Dickerson, called. Eddie Johnson was different from the other inmates, Dickerson confided, his Texas accent gruff but his words kindly. “Eddie’s a good boy,” Dickerson said, “not like the other criminals we get here. He just needs some guidance.” No one asked him for money, sealing the air of legitimacy. If they had, he would have said no.
Over the next several days, Dickey exchanged many calls with the ranch, which he learned was run by a quasi-public agency called FNW. The Texas number he called was always answered, “FNW,” but the receptionist invariably said she’d have to take a message because Mr. Dickerson was busy. Dickerson would call back later in the day.
Eventually, Dickey agreed to wire $491 to pay for Eddie’s airfare to California. He was directed to send it to Eddie’s social worker, Martha White, which he did. Dickerson then called to give him the time Eddie’s flight was to arrive in San Jose.
A few hours before arrival time, Dickerson called back. Unbeknownst to Dickey, the scam had kicked into a higher gear: Contrary to earlier promises, the owner of the wrecked car had filed formal theft charges. Eddie had been hauled to jail practically as he was boarding the plane, Dickey was told. “If you could just pay the fines, restitution, and court costs—another five hundred seventy-four dollars—Eddie can still come,” Dickerson explained.
Then Eddie got on the phone and promised to pay back every penny. He sounded near tears. In the background, the institutional sounds of a jail could be heard, the clanging of metal doors shutting, the murmur of men confined like laboratory animals, impersonal and suffocating.
“Do you hear that?” Eddie whispered, weeping in earnest now. “I hate this place.”
Dickey sent the money.
And so it went, one problem after another impeding Eddie’s valiant attempts to get to San Jose, always plausible, always infuriating, always costing Dickey more. An incompetent travel agent landed the newly released Eddie in New Orleans instead of San Jose. Eddie then got into a scuffle with two young thugs while he awaited his flight. They wanted two diamond rings that had been his mother’s, a weepy Eddie told Dickey. “I should never have taken them out to look at them,” he said. “I was just thinking of my mom.”
In the ensuing fight, several video game machines got damaged and one of the thugs dropped a baggie of marijuana. Now Eddie was locked up for drugs and criminal damage.
Through repeated conversations with New Orleans Airport Police Lieutenant Roy Garland, Dickey learned that Eddie had tested negative for drugs, but that the two thugs—both juveniles—had accused him of owning the pot. Worse, their parents were pressing charges against Eddie for contributing to their delinquency. Garland said it was all ridiculous and that he believed Eddie, but he had no choice in the matter. The system had taken over, and he had to arrest Eddie. The policeman had taken a liking to him, however, and he said he was protecting Eddie by keeping him in an airport immigration cell, rather than sending him to jail, where he would become a certain target for sexual assault. Dickey found himself thanking the lieutenant for his concern.
“Now, if you would just send his bond money, I can get Eddie on a plane to California tomorrow,” Garland told him. “You’ll get it back when this is all cleared up.”
Two thousand dollars later, Eddie was supposed to be on his way. Instead, Lieutenant Garland called once again. Overnight, Eddie had been sexually attacked by a Haitian immigrant. Then a sobbing Eddie got on the phone, describing the open sores all over his assailant’s body. He was terrified of contracting hepatitis or AIDS. Eddie had fought back, only to be charged with assault himself. More bond money would be required, or he’d never get out, he wept.
Garland said the new bond would be five thousand dollars. When Dickey began to protest, however, the police lieutenant quickly said, Don’t worry, I can find another judge to lower it to twenty-eight hundred. Dickey was grateful. He sent the money.
More glitches followed as the trip from Lubbock to California took on Homeric proportions. Whenever Dickey objected to a requested payment, he would be told that if he stopped now, everything he had spent previously would be lost, and Eddie would land back in Lubbock where he had started. But one more payment, and you’ll get everything back, they kept telling him. “Eddie will be safe in California,” Dickerson said, “and you’ll be repaid. The bail bonds will be released.” Eddie promised to go to work and sell his mother’s rings to repay him. Dickey couldn’t say no, even when he began to suspect he was being taken. Whatever was happening, it was the system’s fault. Poor Eddie needed help.
When his credit ran out and he had no more money to give, Dickey contacted a gay rights organization, looking for legal help for Eddie. They put him in touch with a lawyer in New Orleans, where Eddie was still trapped. The lawyer would do pro bono work in such cases.
But as Dickey spoke to the attorney and began describing the Eddie Johnson saga—articulating it aloud for the first time—he began to realize how insane it all sounded. The lawyer quietly confirmed his fears even as Dickey’s gorge began to rise. There were no holding cells or police lieutenants at the New Orleans airport, the lawyer explained. Never had been. A few quick phone calls revealed more lies: There was no Lieutenant Garland in the New Orleans Police Department, no Shenandoah Ranch in Lubbock, and no FNW anywhere. The telephone number for FNW was simply a private answering service in Texas, which greeted calls in the manner it was paid to answer them, forwarding messages to an anonymous customer out of state.
When his phone bill came at the end of the month, the key to this bewildering puzzle spilled out on his kitchen table. Dickey saw no collect calls from Eddie in Texas and New Orleans, though there should have been dozens of such toll charges. Instead, he found a series of collect calls from somewhere called Tunica, Louisiana. The phone company told him the rest: the Tunica numbers on his bill belonged to pay phones at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Any one of five thousand inmates could have telephoned him, posing as Eddie Johnson.
Dickey never heard from Eddie again. He reported his experience to the police, but no one was interested in hearing about Louisiana inmates preying on a gullible homosexual. So he ate his losses and got on with his life.
Dickey had no way of knowing it, but Kirksey Nix, whose range of disguised voices was beautifully practiced and astonishingly diverse, had been Eddie Johnson. He had also been Roy Garland. And Ben Dickerson. And just about everyone else Dickey had spoken to, except Martha White, who, phone records revealed, had been in New Orleans, not Texas, when speaking with Dickey. The money orders had been picked up by White, the wife of a criminal cohort of Nix’s, and by the real Roy Garland, an Angola parolee, at Western Union offices in New Orleans and Biloxi, Mississippi. The recipient of a Western Union money order can pick it up anywhere in the world, it turned out, not just the Lubbock office where Dickey had directed his. The money then vanished, untraceable and clean. Martha White and Roy Garland were just two soldiers in an army Nix had assembled to fleece the Jim Dickeys of the world.
And there were thousands of other victims just like him, with more discovered every day.
“Whoever Eddie was,” Dickey would later say, “he is very, very perceptive. He knew just what to say, just what to do, to hook me. And he really hooked me. They appealed to my desire to help someone else. They realized I am a rescuer by nature. I couldn’t abandon it. And they knew that.”1
* * *
In its 114-year history, the Angola penitentiary has borne a number of unflattering titles: It has been the nation’s bloodiest prison, the nation’s most brutal prison, the nation’s most corrupt prison. Men have died of exhaustion, exposure, and starvation there, as concentration camp conditions wasted their bodies and destroyed their dignity. In its earliest days, guards with rifles and whips stood by as the convicts in their black and white stripes built levees on the malarial banks of the Mississippi, deadly epidemics of yellow fever sweeping through their ranks. The Angola cemetery is filled with crude crosses and headstones dating back to that era—and from much more recent days—etched with inmate numbers memorializing lonely graves by the side of a prison road. A small picnic area was tacked on to the cemetery at some point, so trustees could barbecue hamburgers with their families in full view of the forgotten dead. That Kirksey Nix could survive and prosper in such a place so long, bending to his will an institution designed to punish and degrade, bears witness to his cunning and strength and, most of all, to his persistence. Thanks to him comes the newest addition to Angola’s bloody, corrupt reputation: The prison became home to the nation’s most lucrative inmate confidence scams.2
Even its name has a dark history: Angola was the region of Africa from which slaves were forcibly exported to work the land during its plantation days, before it was converted to a prison. At eighteen thousand acres, Angola is now the physically largest penitentiary in the nation. Surrounded on three sides by a U-shaped section of the Mississippi River, and on the fourth side by the Tunica wilderness, it is virtually escape-proof—not because of its high walls (there are none) or its imposing fences (simple chain-link topped by barbed wire), but because there is nowhere to go from there. Angola is isolated from civilization, a world unto itself, with its own water supply, its own cattle, its own crops, even a school, houses, and clapboard church for staff. The nearest town, St. Francisville, with its shade trees and wide porches, once home to John James Audubon, is more than twenty miles distant. The only road to the prison from St. Francisville ends at Angola’s unimposing and gateless front entrance, whose peeling brown guard shack and dusty parking area resembles more than anything else an aged rural service station.
The prisoners are confined in “camps” scattered throughout Angola—separate barrackslike, self-contained compounds spread throughout the grounds instead of one massive lockup for the fifty-two hundred prisoners. The cell blocks grow inhumanly hot in summer, the inmates locked inside lying on the concrete floors and dousing themselves with buckets of water to survive the suffocating heat.
Behavioral problems are confined to Angola’s extended lockdown tiers, the modern version of solitary confinement, where they are fed “the Loaf.” The Loaf is a nutritionally balanced meal—meat, vegetables, bread, starch, dessert—liquefied in a blender, then baked into a dense square that can be imbibed by hand, without need of potentially dangerous utensils. Hard cases get water and the Loaf until they learn to behave. Otherwise, they are kept twenty-three hours a day inside their barren but constitutionally sized and ventilated cells, a civilized, tortuous confinement. A few meals of the Loaf accompanied by virtual sensory deprivation, and most prisoners, even the psychopaths, are ready to agree to anything.3
Such recent innovations aside, some things at Angola have never changed. Stepping onto its grounds, once you pass the deceptively charming flower gardens and white rail fences near the main gate, is to plummet into another century. Long lines of inmates dressed in stained blue denim stiff with dried sweat, with hoes, spades, and picks slung on their shoulders, still can be seen marching two abreast into the fields to labor for two cents an hour, a sight unchanged in fifty years. Guards on horseback cradling shotguns, black leather boots and saddles creaking, still lope alongside the work gangs, just as they have for decades. Some guards still accept money, jewelry, or other forms of payment to allow convicts to smuggle drugs, sell bootleg alcohol, or, as in the case of Kirksey Nix, to conduct ever-widening criminal enterprises.
It was Nix’s good fortune to enter Angola during a cycle of reform, an era of extended inmate privileges, improved medical care, and guaranteed constitutional rights. Nix’s genius lay in putting to use the resources he had at hand within Angola. Unlike other convicts, who lay in their bunks plotting their next big score as soon as they got out, Nix chose not to wait. Prison would not impede Kirksey Nix. As soon as he arrived, he took a quick survey: He had access to the mail, to underpaid and easily coerced guards, to a network of criminals on both sides of the prison fence, and, most important, he had ready access to telephones. The latest reforms at Angola guaranteed all inmates unlimited access to phones for making calls related to their criminal cases—legal calls, in prison parlance. Nix knew the Halat and Sherry law firm would be the perfect vehicle for getting him access to the phone whenever he wanted. All he needed were the right victims. It didn’t take long for him to choose that most vulnerable set of people—the lonely—as his targets.
In fairness, Junior did not conceive of the lonely-hearts scam that defrauded men like James Dickey. He merely raised it to an art form. The corrupt and pliant prison around him, so oppressive to most other inmates, nurtured Nix’s criminal genius, making him creative and bold in ways he had never imagined as a free man.
Junior Nix learned the rudiments of the scam from an old friend who was awaiting him when he got to Angola. His one-time burglary partner and Dixie Mafia crony, Bobby Joe Faubion, had been in Angola since 1974, convicted of murder, then of kidnapping and shooting a state trooper. He had been arrested during a spectacular escape and flight that ended with Faubion in a ditch and Rex Armistead’s pistol trained on his heart. He had already been sentenced to life in Mississippi for murdering a horse breeder there, but Louisiana held on to him, imprisoning Faubion without possibility of parole.
Faubion was known as “Fabian” at Angola, having changed the spelling of his last name years earlier to thwart police records searches. (Slight changes in names or birth dates can totally confound the literal world of police and courthouse file clerks. Fabian managed to be convicted as a first-time offender three times through this simple method.)
Fabian’s nickname on the street was “Satin”—based, he claimed, on his old stage name from when he supposedly made a legitimate dollar singing the blues as Sonny Satin. Comrades say the moniker owed more to the satin-smooth delivery he used when lying, his story molding to the contours of a situation like a fine German sports car hugging the Autobahn. When it came to robbing, burgling, shooting, and stealing, Fabian turned out to be fairly incompetent—he had been caught time and again. But when it came to lying and conning, Bobby Joe Fabian had few equals. He worked the phones so often and so well to further his scams, he earned a new nickname at Angola: Mr. AT&T.
The scheme he used was simple and neat. He would respond to personal ads from women seeking male companionship, concocting a plausible reason why they should send him several hundred dollars so he could come visit them. Sometimes he would disguise his voice as a woman’s and answer ads from men seeking girlfriends. For them, he would admit to being in a prison—albeit a woman’s prison—spelling his name “Bobbie Jo” in correspondence, a good country girl’s name. He collected pictures of inmates’ girlfriends, or had associates on the street snap pictures of passers-by. Then he would have hundreds of copies made to send to the marks. As the inmates involved in the scams multiplied, they began trading the photos, keeping stacks of them in their cells, packs wrapped tight with rubber bands thick as a child’s baseball card collection. Later, he published his own ads, then ripped off the respondents.
“You want to get in on a good thing, Junior?” Fabian asked Nix soon after he arrived at Angola. “We can partner up, make some serious moolah, ya see.” Bobby Joe Fabian had a tendency to end every sentence with a “ya see.”
“I see,” Nix responded with a laugh. “Let’s do it.”
Nix had plenty of time to devote to perfecting the scam. His supposed sentence to hard labor for murdering Frank Corso went quickly by the wayside. He pestered the prison doctors with frequent sick calls, claiming his gunshot wound had left him in pain and incapable of any heavy duties. One of the prison doctors finally acquiesced and assigned him permanently to light duties—cleaning up the dormitories and other small tasks, which he quickly paid other convicts to handle. Nix’s only hard labors at Angola went toward his newest criminal career.
Exactly when Nix began profiting from prison scams is unclear. He had some legitimate sources of income that helped him disguise his illegal profits—a life insurance policy that paid forty thousand dollars for his wife Sandra’s death, and an inheritance when Judge Nix died in 1979. Clearly, though, a substantial income with no legitimate source began by the early 1980s, as he purchased his house on the Coast, a new Trans Am for Kellye Dawn, his Mercedes, a dune buggy, several other cars and motorcycles, and a houseful of imported furniture, all the while providing generous allowances—several thousand a month—to both Kellye and LaRa Sharpe. At the scams’ height, Nix would later claim, his monthly expenses reached twelve thousand dollars.
Nix began scamming straight men looking for women at least as early as 1982.4 By 1983, Nix hit upon homosexual lonely hearts as easier and more profitable victims for his con game. Not only did his gay “tricks,” as he called scam victims, tend to be older and therefore to have more money, but if he was lucky enough to hit upon a victim who was still in the closet, he could later blackmail him with the threat of exposure. It also eliminated the need to pretend to be a woman. Nix and his fellow scammers collected stacks of photos of willowy young men to insert in their letters instead of female cheesecake—the photo of Eddie Johnson that James Dickey received was a particularly popular one, copied several thousand times.
By 1984, Nix had expanded his operations, employing confederates on the outside. He used free-world post office boxes, mail drops, and answering services to make contact with his tricks, then he would have them send money via Western Union. All he needed were helpers—“road dogs” in prison parlance—to make the pickups, to be his arms and legs. He had more than a dozen road dogs working for him, earning ten to fifteen percent of the cash they picked up, plus expenses. Other confederates helped him work the phones, posing as the policemen and social workers essential to lending the aura of authenticity to his scheme, freeing him from having to play all the characters.
Nix typed up elaborate scripts, distributing them to other inmates and to his free-world helpers. His information packets were professional in scope, containing complete dialogue suggestions for posing as policemen, lawyers, social workers, and relatives. The scripts provided suggested backup lies to use when tricks balked at a money request, and extensive biographies of young men and women, so Nix could remember the background of characters he was playing.
The scams also demanded elaborate cover-ups. Nix recruited other inmates to receive his mail in their names so he would not have to claim suspiciously huge quantities of letters himself. On other occasions, materials came to him disguised as thick packets of legal mail with return addresses of the Halat and Sherry law firm and other law offices—sometimes LaRa purloined envelopes and stationery with legal letterheads.5 Other inmates hid his scripts and papers for him, as well as notebooks stuffed with typed sheets containing thousands of names, addresses, and phone numbers for his tricks. Each entry had space for Nix’s frantic jottings as he recorded progress on each individual victim. One read, “Slow, but talked,” another, “Good prospect,” while another entry reminded him, “Needs call from ranch.” One entry Nix penned stated, “So easy, it’s scary.”6
On the outside, road dogs in Biloxi, Baton Rouge, and New Orleans picked up, at a minimum, several thousand dollars a week, extracting the ten or fifteen percent commission, then delivering the balance to one of several individuals: LaRa Sharpe, Mike Gillich, a variety of banks, and a variety of attorneys’ offices, including the law firm of Halat and Sherry.7
Some of Nix’s outside helpers made “three-ways” for him, a type of phone call that greatly expanded his scamming capabilities. He would make a single, supposedly “legal” call to a scammer on the outside, who would then use business telephone setups to link him through conference calls to his victims, one after another. That way, he did not need to make multiple calls, arousing suspicion at the prison, yet he could play a variety of characters for several different tricks, without ever hanging up the phone. At the same time, he could call his marks collect on a three-way, and their bills would show the number and city of his underlings on the outside, rather than the giveaway Tunica phone exchange.
In time, Nix eliminated the need for an accomplice to assist in patching through three-ways by buying personal computers with custom-made voice-mail and telephone switching programs—crafted by Mike Gillich’s computer-expert nephew, Andrew Gilich. Nix’s ingenious computer systems contained a dialing directory for hundreds of his tricks. He could access the computer from a prison phone, even though he called collect—the computer’s voice-mail would tell the operator it would accept the charges. Nix could then command the computer to dial a victim or play back his messages, all with coded access no one else could touch. The computer served as the equivalent of a secretary. Nix’s career-long penchant for gadgetry showed here, as it did in his pocket computers and autodialing devices concealed in wristwatches, which replaced his old bulky notebooks crammed with phone numbers. Instead of having to destroy papers during prison shakedowns, he could foil a search with one punch of a button, erasing his computer memory. He had backup minicomputers that other inmates held for him in case he had to purge the one he was holding. Nix left nothing to chance.8
Whether he used electronic gimmickry or human accomplices, one thing remained constant: The money poured in. He and Bobby Joe Fabian began sporting pounds of gaudy jewelry in the prison, as much as forty thousand dollars’ worth each—big diamond rings, thick gold neck chains, gold bracelets, and imported wristwatches. Each of them had a dozen toadies to wait on them, some running errands, others acting as bodyguards. Inmates who might otherwise have targeted Nix for ripoff or worse hesitated when they heard of Nix’s reputation, built through years of careful boasting about the Dixie Mafia, about shooting off Buford Pusser’s face, and about killing Frank Corso and Pusser’s wife. “Always go for the family,” Nix would say with a grin. “That’s how you really get to someone. Go for the family.” He also enjoyed the protection of his old “fall partner” in the Corso case, Peter Mule, who had built his minor mob ties into a towering reputation at Angola, where inmates and guards alike called him “Uncle Peter.” Everyone at Angola knew not to touch Kirksey Nix.
Nix’s ostentatious displays of wealth showed just how profitable his scams could be. One parliamentary official in Canada alone lost $200,000 through fraud, then extortion. Another government employee in Canada, a legally blind man working on behalf of the disabled, lost thousands of dollars, then refused to make blackmail payments—only to be fired once the scammers exposed him. In Grand Junction, Colorado, a retired coal company manager squandered most of his life’s savings—about $100,000—on a Nix creation named Billy Taylor. And a disabled postal worker in Kansas sent some $26,000 to his phantom would-be lover.
Such big-hit tricks were the exception, a cause for celebration on the cell block, as well as in Nix’s house in Ocean Springs, which gradually became a hive of scam activities under the watchful direction of Kellye Dawn Newman Nix, then later LaRa Sharpe, then Nix’s half-sister and her husband. Most of the victims ended up losing much less—anywhere from two hundred to five hundred dollars for “airfare.” The lucky ones wised up after that first payment. Many others pumped thousands more into the scam, trying to help the poor young man they hoped to meet. And a few ended up in financial ruin.
But there was a weakness in his plan, as Nix often complained: the quality of his employees. He fretted constantly about informers, about people who ripped him off, about incompetents unable to convincingly scam tricks. To combat such human breakdowns, he always tried to bind his principal helpers to him through love, money, drugs, and, when all else failed, threats.
For a time, Kellye Dawn served as the most important cog in Nix’s scam machine, with Nix bringing to bear all of these forms of persuasion to keep her in line. But eventually, Kellye’s drug problems, the birth of her disabled daughter, Meagan, and her utter unreliability finally turned Nix in another direction. In the summer of 1985, with the scam picking up momentum, LaRa Sharpe supplanted Kellye as Nix’s most trusted lieutenant, his new Number One. The scams began earning more than ever.
Just how much Kirksey Nix, Bobby Joe Fabian, and the other scammers working for them earned from their wire fraud scam may never be known. One of Nix’s closest partners late in the scam—after Junior and Fabian had a parting of the ways—estimated the con game grossed some $800,000 in just two years.9 The total earnings from 1982 on have never been ascertained. Nix would eventually claim to have personally profited by a half million dollars. Others estimated it as a multimillion-dollar enterprise—figures that more closely jibe with scrawled calculations prison guards once stumbled upon in one of Nix’s datebooks. In any case, there is no question that his brilliantly conceived confidence racket was all too profitable, and that it was bringing Kirksey Nix ever closer to his goal: freedom, bought and paid for.