Each time the prosecutors flipped through their papers, looking for the name of their next witness, the defense lawyers fervently hoped it would be Bobby Joe Fabian, the man whose testimony they had so painstakingly prepared to shred. But Fabian’s name kept slipping to the bottom of the witness list—where it would stay, if the prosecution had its way. Barrett and Jernigan had decided the mainstays of their case would be Robert Hallal and Bill Rhodes, the men who said they had been offered the Sherry murder contract. The government would win or lose with their stories.
And so, seventeen days after the trial began, Robert Hallal took the stand, providing the first direct testimony jurors heard about a plot to murder the Sherrys. In the gallery, Lynne whispered to Becky, “Finally.”
Smirking, slick-haired, pock-faced, and sarcastic, with flat, dark eyes incapable of warmth, Hallal was a lawyer’s nightmare, the sort of witness jurors would need no excuses to dislike. He had an immense rap sheet, numerous escape attempts, a wealth of lies about the Sherrys behind him, and a ninety-nine-year sentence for two armed robberies ahead of him. The elusive Hallal was brought to the courthouse in double chains to prevent any further escapes. But the one believable quality about him was his profession: Hallal looked like a professional criminal. He looked like a killer.
“He is the average citizen’s idea of the Mafia walking through the door,” George Phillips whispered to Lynne.
“Worse,” she answered.
Hallal had replaced Bobby Fabian as the star witness in the case. His testimony formed the basis for the murder-for-hire conspiracy contained in the indictment—the meeting he claimed to have attended in August at the Golden Nugget, in which he was offered the contract on Vince, along with a gun and silencer from Ransom. Because both he and Ransom would have crossed state lines to attend the meeting, Ransom’s interstate travel itself also became a federal crime—again, based on Hallal’s word.
“ ‘Junior wants a judge knocked off,’ ” Hallal said, quoting Gillich at the meeting. “ ‘. . . Junior thinks this judge ripped him off for a lot of money.’
“I said, ‘I’m not interested in killing any judge.’ ”
Then he added, without a trace of irony, “If it wouldn’t have been a judge, I probably would have taken the hit. But I didn’t want to face that kind of heat from law enforcement for a judge being killed.”
Asked directly if he were a hit man, Hallal asserted his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Reminded that he had been granted full immunity, and that nothing he said could be used against him, Hallal still refused to answer the question.
Thoroughly contemptible in speech and manner, Hallal had tried to escape enough times, and lied and altered his story enough times, to make him completely unbelievable, the defense attorneys told one another. They seemed to take this almost as a given as they began cross-examining him. But an odd thing happened as they began to grill Hallal on the witness stand, a cross-examination that lasted eight hours over the course of two days of trial: Hallal began to sound more believable, not less.
It was a strange dynamic, one that frustrated the lawyers, even as Hallal smirked all the more. Instead of becoming tongue-tied when confronted with his inconsistencies, he always had a ready explanation, leaving the lawyers sputtering instead. Hallal said simply that he held back early on in the investigation because he feared he would have been indicted with everyone else if he talked too much. That’s why he omitted the presence of Ransom in his first account of the meeting with Gillich at the Golden Nugget. If he had included Ransom, and it turned out later that Ransom carried out the hit, Hallal knew he would be in big trouble. So he got creative. He lied. But now he was telling the truth, Hallal swore.
The defense lawyers were unable to shake this story or its reasonable tone, though certainly it had its share of holes in it. The truth was, Hallal had continued to lie to the grand jury even after receiving legal immunity, when there was no chance of him being charged with anything. But the defense never made this clear. Rather than focusing on the spurious justification for his lies, they pounded Hallal with the lies themselves, pointing out every niggling contradiction—and thereby repeating over and over his most damaging testimony about Nix, Gillich, and Ransom.
After hours of this repetitive questioning, Jim Rose finally suggested lying came easily to Hallal, and that he had lied every time he testified, sweetening the pot to compensate for each of his escape attempts so he could stay on the good side of federal officials.
“All that is valid testimony,” Hallal countered with an evil smile. “And I’m willing to take a polygraph test on that.”
The defense lawyers jumped up and howled for a mistrial, but the judge denied their motions, saying the hostile and lengthy cross-examination had provoked Hallal’s outburst. Hallal continued to grin; his “outburst” was as calculated as everything else he did. The judge instructed jurors to ignore the statement about the polygraph—promptly fixing it in their memories.
Each time the defense tried to disprove Hallal’s testimony, he seemed to parry successfully. When his phone bill failed to show crucial toll calls from Nix and to Gillich—calls he claimed were related to the murder contract—Hallal accurately pointed to grand jury transcripts that showed he never actually said he used his home phone for those calls. Four years after the events in question, he said, was a long time, leaving him unsure what phone he had used. It had been his habit to use pay phones as a precaution, he added. Maybe that explained it.
He offered that same reasonable sort of explanation when he was criticized for providing different versions of conversations he claimed to have had with Gillich and Nix.
“As I have told you on several occasions,” Hallal said slowly, infuriatingly, addressing Gillich’s lead attorney, Albert Necaise, as if he were mentally impaired, “I can’t recall verbatim, word for word, everything that was discussed. I’m sure no one in this courtroom could, four years ago, with any conversation they’ve had with anyone.” Then, with his nearly black eyes slitted, he assured jurors that, “I know the essence of the conversation and I know why I went to Biloxi on that particular day.”
Judge Pickering finally had to tell the lawyers to stop bickering with Hallal, suggesting the defense had forgotten the purpose of cross-examination. “It’s not supposed to be to fix in the mind of the jury what the prosecution put on,” he reminded Nix’s lawyer, Jim Rose.
The net effect of this ineffective cross-examination and Hallal’s surprisingly strong performance was that very real, very large discrepancies in his account ended up sounding like minor detail, unworthy of the jury’s attention. Though the defense lawyers clearly felt otherwise, Hallal looked believable; the attorneys, meanwhile, came across as desperate and picky. Even Pickering, in an aside during a bench conference, made the unusual observation, “I find this witness to be very credible.”1
* * *
Not long after Robert Hallal’s testimony ended, a pleasant-looking man in his early forties sat down next to Lynne Sposito as she sat in the hallway, sipping some flat Coca-Cola from the vending machine in the courthouse lobby. The man looked at her for a long couple of seconds, then said, “You must be Lynne.”
Lynne stared back at the man, whom she had never seen before, then cautiously said yes. Smiling, he extended his hand and said, “I’m Bill Rhodes.”
He had just arrived to testify about conspiracy and murder, but William Rhodes looked more like the sort of man you might meet at a neighbor’s barbecue—no one you’d take on as a friend for life, perhaps, but someone you might chat with pleasantly enough while waiting in line for the hot dogs and fruit salad.
Lynne took his hand, too stunned to say anything. He seemed so—and there was no other word for it—ordinary. Just a guy, maybe even a nice guy, with short brown hair and a small round face, an easy smile. Yet here was a man who would have driven that yellow Ford if he had not been picked up for bank robbery first. Lynne was shaking hands with the man who said that, for thirty thousand dollars, he would have been John Ransom’s wheelman, who would have helped kill her parents for Mike Gillich and Kirksey Nix and Pete Halat. What do you say to such a man, Lynne wondered? She didn’t know whether to thank Bill Rhodes for his testimony, or to grab him by the shirt collar and shriek into his face, Why didn’t you say something in March 1987? Why didn’t you save my parents’ lives?
What she ended up doing instead was making small talk. Nice to meet you, she stammered. How have you been? And Bill Rhodes reflected that the plumbing business really hadn’t been going so well. “All I ever really knew how to do was rob banks,” he said with a small shrug. “And I was never really very good at that, either. That’s why I kept getting caught.”
* * *
Although prosecutors had decided not to make Bill Rhodes’s testimony key to their indictment, it did support their theory that Ransom, Gillich, and Nix—as well as Pete Halat—wanted the Sherrys dead. If the jury believed Rhodes, they would be more likely to believe Robert Hallal.
He certainly provided a sharp contrast to Hallal—no smirking, no sarcasm, just simple, genial answers as he coolly recounted a ride in Nix’s Mercedes in March 1987, with Halat at the wheel and Ransom in the passenger seat, double murder the subject at hand.
Rhodes swore, as he had on previous occasions, that the two men—then later, Mike Gillich—offered him thirty thousand dollars to drive the car in the Sherry hit. Vince had to die because he had ripped someone off for as much as a half million dollars, Rhodes said.
“I said, well, you know, it’s a judge. . . . I’ll have to think about it.”
When asked why a career criminal like himself would even hesitate at such a lucrative offer, Rhodes said, “You don’t commit yourself to these people until you know whether you want to go through with it or not.”
Alone among the witnesses, Bill Rhodes put the mayor of Biloxi—“the invisible defendant,” as the Biloxi newspaper called him—squarely in the midst of the murder conspiracy. Rhodes didn’t just attribute knowledge to Halat, he made him appear cold and vicious, even eager to eliminate his best friends for money and self-interest.
“No, she’s got to die,” Rhodes recalled Halat saying when the bank robber suggested Margaret might be spared. “We’re under investigation, he’s the weak link. She knows his business, she’s got to go, too.”
The defense team attempted to attack Rhodes’s testimony as hard as it hit Hallal, beginning with the fact that he had neglected, in his first grand jury appearance, to mention meeting with Gillich in the doughnut shop to discuss the murder contract. But the pattern set by Hallal continued: Rhodes blunted the attacks on his credibility even more smoothly.
“I didn’t want to give that information because I was in fear of my life and my family’s life. Because of his contacts,” Rhodes explained. “I wasn’t concerned about Ransom. . . . I wasn’t concerned about Pete Halat, because he [just] worked for the Dixie Mafia . . .”
Rhodes paused, then pointed to Gillich. “He’s the man that can get something done. Mr. Gillich over there.”
Then Rhodes surprised everyone, even the prosecution, by adding a new twist to the story, one that infuriated the defense but that it seemed helpless to contradict.
As he had sworn in the past, the witness explained how he had been unable to accept the murder contract from Gillich, Ransom, and Pete Halat because he was jailed in March 1987, shortly after his trip to Biloxi. He got out in November, after the murders—again consistent with his previous testimony. But the story had always ended there. Now Rhodes swore that within a few weeks of his release, Ransom met him and issued a warning.
“He was instructing me to keep my mouth shut,” Rhodes recalled. “. . . And then he told me that he had carried the contract out.”
This was a totally new and unexpected blow against the defense: John Ransom hadn’t just planned the crime beforehand. Now, according to Rhodes, he confessed to carrying out the murders.
When the defense challenged his truthfulness on this and other points, Rhodes developed a disarmingly simple way of responding to attempts to sully his character: He agreed with them. When Ransom’s attorney, Rex Jones, asked why there had to be so many meetings to discuss his driving the getaway car for the murders, Rhodes said he just couldn’t make up his mind.
“I could tell them the first time that I wasn’t interested,” Jones said. “How about you?”
“No, sir,” Rhodes said mildly. “I couldn’t, because I am a criminal.” Later, he added, “I’ve been a criminal all my life. I probably would have drove.”
When the lawyers asked him if he illegally possessed weapons while on parole—hoping he would deny it so they could proclaim him a liar—Rhodes said, “Of course. All criminals do it, mostly. They don’t think about, if you get busted you’re going to jail, and stuff like that.”
Rhodes, who had been nervous and uneasy while appearing before the grand jury, surprised prosecutors by coming across rock solid at trial, capturing jurors’ attention, even charming them at times with his agreeable admission of criminality. The depths of the defense attorneys’ desperation seemed to show when Nix’s lawyer, Jim Rose, attempted to prove Rhodes did not know how to drive to Biloxi from Atlanta, as he claimed to have done to discuss the murder of the Sherrys. To do this, the defense confused Rhodes with an outdated map from 1957, which failed to show key highways and interstates—until Judge Pickering caught the deception, and prosecutors delightedly went over the route with Rhodes with a more contemporary atlas.
As strong as Rhodes’s testimony sounded, the prosecution missed an opportunity to make it even more devastating. Sitting in the gallery, Lynne Sposito saw it, though. Rhodes’s remark about the investigation suggested he told the truth. The scam was under investigation in March 1987, just as Rhodes said, though he had no way of knowing that—unless Halat or Ransom or one of the other conspirators had told him. The jurors had even heard evidence about this investigation earlier in the trial—the tape of LaRa coaching Robbie Gant to lie to the FBI had been part of that investigation.
It could have all been tied together, Lynne thought, along with Margaret’s penchant for forcing Vince to do the right thing. March 1987 was also when Vince and Gillich supposedly argued. It was when Mike Lofton watched his girlfriend LaRa weep on the phone with Kirksey Nix, then admit to being involved in something bad she couldn’t escape. March 1987 was the month Pete Halat filed the long-withheld marriage certificate for Kirksey and Kellye Nix—after which Kellye theoretically could refuse to testify against her husband. Things seemed to be coming to a head that month, a confluence of events that would be hard to write off to coincidence—it all fit. The following May, both Vince and Margaret spoke of death threats. Yet the jury was not hearing any of these things.
Again, Lynne felt like jumping up and asking the questions herself. But the moment passed. There was no followup to Rhodes’s remark about an investigation. A few minutes later, the prosecution said, “No more questions.”
The defense wisely steered clear of these points during its cross-examination of Rhodes, choosing instead to attack the details of his account, hoping to show inconsistencies in his story, no matter how minute.
They attacked his description of Coast landmarks, suggesting law-enforcement officials deliberately drove him through Biloxi on his way to testify before a special grand jury session so that he could spot Gulf Coast landmarks to bolster his testimony. Rhodes denied it, and police reports backed him up, stating that he described the landmarks well before his trip to the grand jury.
Undaunted, the defense got Rhodes to admit he had read a magazine article on the case published in April 1990—an article Bobby Joe Fabian had handed him while they spent a few days in the same county jail, brought together by grand jury subpoenas. The article erroneously described Halat as blond, and Rhodes had later testified that Halat’s hair was blondish brown. In fact, Halat’s hair is dark brown. Obviously, Rhodes had constructed his account from the incorrect article, the defense lawyers suggested.
They might have had something there—except that FBI reports on Rhodes’s first statement in the case showed he had originally described Halat as having brown hair, though he had complained that the dimness of the light in the car made it hard to tell just what color it was.
They even attacked Rhodes for describing Halat as looking like the owner of the Los Angeles Raiders football team, Al Davis. The defense gave to the jury a picture of Davis to show a supposed lack of resemblance, but even if jurors agreed, Rhodes’s account of driving in the dim car, barely seeing Halat’s features, provided a ready excuse for errors in his description.
Rhodes’s testimony infuriated John Ransom even more than Pegi Graham’s or Chuck Leger’s. At one point, when Rhodes was asked what Ransom did for a living, the witness said simply, “He was a contract killer.”
Defense attorney Rex Jones leapt up and demanded a mistrial, but then a thin arm shot up, and Jones suddenly found himself thrown back into his seat by John Ransom. Again, the old man’s strength and quickness were on display before the jury. Ransom then whispered privately with the judge. He wanted no mistrial. He wanted it all to hang out, he said.
Later, Ransom demanded the opportunity to conduct his own cross-examination of Rhodes, but finally relented, so long as his lawyer read a verbatim list of questions designed to show Rhodes did not know Ransom as well as he claimed. Ransom fancied himself a jailhouse lawyer the same as Nix, but the questions he insisted on did not have the effect he sought. To prove just how close they had been, Rhodes began to reel off a long list of crimes they had committed together, until finally the judge said, “I really think you are bringing some things out that could have an adverse effect on your case.”
Ransom’s cryptic reply: “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander,” but even Rex Jones had to admit that the only one being cooked by his client’s questions was Ransom himself.