"Teflon Tycoon," the Mobile Register, December 19, 2001 <p>12/19/01 By SAM HODGES, Staff Reporter <p>Shadiness is in the eye of the beholder, but it's a matter of public record that two federal juries, in trials nearly 40 years apart, convicted Frank Boykin of felony offenses. <p>An FBI file of more than 1,100 pages details other occasions when investigators and prosecutors considered pressing corruption charges. <p>Investigative reporters and muckraking columnists (notably Drew Pearson) found Boykin a renewable resource, so often did he provide them with conflict-of-interest tales. Generations of Mobile lawyers have kept alive the story (the truth of which will be assessed later in this article) that Boykin literally ate a telegram that a prosecutor intended to use against him. <p>Greg Smith, an 84-year-old Mobile nurseryman, said that as a teen-ager he once asked his father, the lawyer Harry Hardy Smith, if he would ever vote for Boykin. The answer was no. <p>"'Mr. Frank doesn't have any morals,'" Smith recalled his father explaining. "'He's not especially immoral. He just doesn't have any morals.'" <p>That may sound harsh, especially for someone who did as many favors for people as Boykin did. But Harry Hardy Smith was well positioned to pass judgment. He represented Boykin in Mobile's whiskey trials of 1924-1925. <p>Those proceedings represent a remarkable episode in the city's history, worthy of a historical novel. They combine with Boykin's 1963 influence peddling trial to illuminate the expedient side of the man whom southwest Alabama entrusted with its congressional seat for 28 years. <p>On Nov. 13, 1923, with Prohibition the law of the land, more than 50 federal agents fanned out across Mobile, raiding homes and businesses. The haul of booze was epic. <p>Agents confiscated 10,000 quarts the first day, including 415 cases from a single Conception Street address. The Mobile Register reported that nearly every large truck in the city was hired to bring seized bottles of scotch, cognac and champagne to the Federal Building downtown. <p>An indication of how important authorities considered the strike was that they brought in Izzy Einstein of New York, the "Sherlock Holmes of Prohibition agents," to supervise. "I came, I saw, I mopped up," Einstein told the Register, adding that he had never seen a city with so high a proportion of "shinny joints." <p>Arrests came in waves, with hints in the newspaper that well-known citizens would be implicated. By late December, Boykin was under indictment, as were Alfred Staples, president of Peoples Bank; Paul Cazalas, Mobile County sheriff; Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Mobile city police chief; and William Holcombe Jr., legislator and former sheriff, and Robert Holcombe, his brother. <p>Liquor raids were common, but this one, with its list of detainees reading like the local Democratic primary ballot, made The New York Times. A Register editorial lamented that "the community has been brought into an unhappy and unenviable notoriety before the nation." <p>By now, Frank Boykin was nearing 40, and was married with five young children. Though not yet in politics, he was well known in Mobile, from his dealings in land, timber and turpentine, and from his effervescent personality. On Armistice Day, a few years before, he had been one of three men chosen to lead Mobile's raucous, all-day victory parade. <p>It was no doubt with a much heavier heart that Boykin, newly indicted, showed up one evening at the Smith home at 1115 Government St., where a Taco Bell sits today. Greg Smith, then a small boy, answered a rap on the door and saw the broad, heavyset Boykin. <p>Boykin needed a lawyer for the whiskey trials, and wanted to hire Harry Hardy Smith. The reason is revealing. According to Greg Smith, Boykin had been running cattle onto Mobile & Ohio Railroad tracks as trains approached. Following the inevitable "accident," he would file a damage claim. The company had paid routinely until Harry Hardy Smith took over the account. Smith had been fighting the claims in court, and winning. <p>That night at the Smith house, Boykin told Harry Hardy Smith he could think of nobody better to defend him in the whiskey scandal, Greg Smith said. <p>In a 1963 letter, a copy of which is in the Boykin papers at the Alabama state archives, Harry Hardy Smith essentially confirmed this account. But he mentioned arson, not cattle sacrifice, as Boykin's strategy for fleecing the railroad. <p>The man behind Mobile's sensational raids and prosecutions was Aubrey Boyles, local U.S. attorney. He claimed that a huge protection racket existed for the illegal sale of alcohol in the area. He insisted further that Boykin and other prominent Mobilians tried to lure him into it. In 1922, he secretly alerted Washington, D.C., authorities, sending long letters and at least one coded telegram to Mabel Walker Willebrandt, the celebrated female Department of Justice lawyer in charge of enforcing Prohibition laws. <p>Boyles, as a potential witness, could not prosecute the cases personally. So Willebrandt and Harlan Stone, the new U.S. attorney general under President Calvin Coolidge, went looking for a special prosecutor. They settled on a talented, politically ambitious lawyer from Birmingham -- Hugo Black, future U.S. senator and Supreme Court justice. <p>The first of a series of trials began on April 4, 1924, in a jammed courtroom of the federal building on St. Francis Street. Black quickly obtained a conviction of Percy Kearns, a local lawyer who had been caught in a room at Mobile's Cawthon Hotel trying to bribe a Prohibition agent. (Other agents witnessed through a peephole.) <p>Boykin was one of 71 defendants in the second trial, which began in late April. The charge was conspiracy to violate Prohibition laws. Most of his co-defendents were street or wholesale whiskey sellers. Boykin, with the Holcombes and others, was alleged to be part of a ring that got $5 per case for ensuring bootleggers would not be raided. <p>A juror might reasonably have asked how Boykin, neither policeman or prosecutor, could have protected a bootlegger. Black, in his opening argument, portrayed Boykin as having had --- or at least claiming to have had -- influence with President Har ding's Justice Department. <p>Black promised to show the jurors letters and telegrams between Boykin and Jess Smith and Mel Daugherty, two members of the so-called "Ohio Gang" of politicians and hangers-on whose conduct tainted the Harding administration. Both Smith and Daugherty had been implicated in Senate investigations into bootlegger protection and fraudulent sales of war surplus material. Smith, who had committed suicide the previous summer, shared a house in Washington with Harding's attorney general and close friend, Harry Daugherty. Mel Daugherty was Harry's brother. <p>In Senate hearings, Boykin's name briefly surfaced as the author of suspiciously vague telegrams and letters to Smith. Boykin, Black told jurors in Mobile, "would show these letters to the blind tiger (whiskey-selling) operators, and would tell them, 'I am a big man in Washington.'" <p>But as the second trial proceeded, Judge Robert Ervin decided not to admit Boykin's correspondence into evidence. He said Black had not linked it to the charge or to other evidence. Black had to drop the case. <p>Though this seemed good news for Boykin, Black would convict others in that second trial, and they would decide to cooperate with the government in hopes of shortening their prison sentences. <p>Meanwhile, the heat was on Aubrey Boyles, the sidelined prosecutor. William Holcombe and others insisted that Boyles had informed on them in a desperate attempt to shift blame for his own botched bootlegger protection scheme. They charged that Boyles, a Republican, meant to break up the local Democratic Party machine. State solicitor Bart Chamberlain agreed to prosecute Boyles, who took a leave of absence as U.S. attorney. <p>In August 1924, Willebrandt, the Justice Department lawyer, arrived in Mobile to testify for Boyles. Before she had the chance, Judge Ervin dismissed for lack of evidence the charge that Boyles had sought to corrupt a federal agent. She praised Boyles for the information he had provided her on Mobile and said he "is due the gratitude of all law-abiding citizens for his honest, zealous and self-sacrificing efforts." <p>She also announced that he was immediately reinstated as U.S. attorney in Mobile. <p>Armed with new witnesses, Black came after Boykin again in February 1925. In the first of this new round of trials, Boykin, Stapes and the Holcombes were directly implicated by two of the wholesale whiskey sellers who had been convicted earlier and were brought from the federal penitentiary in Atlanta to testify. <p>In addition, a Chicago man named Ike Cohen testified that he had arranged with Boykin for a trainload of whiskey to be sent from Mobile to Chicago, hidden in pine tar barrels. <p>Boykin was charged this time not with conspiracy but with direct violation of the tariff act and Prohibition laws. Conviction required proof that he had helped smuggle liquor into the United States. Despite mounting evidence, including allusions to a "Rum Row" in the Gulf of Mexico, the jury acquitted Boykin and the others. <p>But the very next day, Boykin went on trial again with Staples, the Holcombes and J.B. Connaughton, a Hamilton, Ohio, lawyer and Boykin friend who had briefly lived in Mobile and was alleged to be bookkeeper of the protection scheme. This time the charge was bribery of a federal agent, and this time Black called Boyles, the local U.S. attorney, to the stand. <p>Boyles told jurors that Boykin had come to him saying that Andrew Mellon, the industrialist, had lent the Republican Party $5 million for campaign purposes, and that it was to be paid back through liquor prosecution protection, with certain U.S. attorneys assisting. According to Boyles, Boykin claimed to have a key role in the scheme, and promised him $100,000 a year for advance information on raids. <p>"He asked me if I had an automo bile. I told him no," Boyles testified. "He said, 'Aubrey, it does not look dignified for a United States attorney not to have an automobile. If you say so, I can have one delivered to your home tomorrow.'" <p>Boyles testified about the letters he wrote to Willebrandt, informing her of corruption in Mobile and asking for help. Black buttressed Boyles' testimony with most of the witnesses from the trial just completed, including Cohen. A federal agent, M.T. Gonzaullas, gave an extensive account of how the ring sought to buy him off. <p>Smith and other defense lawyers objected at every turn, but the judge in this trial, William Grubb of Birmingham, ruled with Black. Grubb allowed into evidence Boykin's correspondence with Jess Smith, and virtually everything else Black presented. <p>Boykin finally took the stand. He conceded nothing more than having bought a little whiskey from local bootleggers. He said Boyles tried to get him to join a protection scheme. The shipment to Chicago, he said, consisted only of turpentine. The vague correspondence with Jess Smith was over real estate in Washington, D.C., and the appointment of a new federal marshal in Mobile. <p>Smith had some supporting documentation of Boykin's far-flung real estate work, and he also introduced character witnesses. But after 22 hours of deliberations, the jury convicted Boykin and William Holcombe, acquitting or deadlocking on the other defendants. <p>Grubb gave Boykin two years in the penitentiary, but allowed him to post an appeal bond immediately. <p>Less than a year later, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans ruled that the indictment against Boykin and Holcombe was "fatally defective" because it wasn't specific enough to allow a proper defense. Out went both convictions. Boykin, without spending a night in jail, was in the clear. <p>Black and Boykin would later briefly serve together as Democrats in the Alabama congressional delegation. Boykin fought Black's pro-labor legislation, and Black opposed Boykin's effort to get federal funds for a Dauphin Island bridge. <p>Hugo Black Jr., a lawyer in Coral Gables, Fla., was with his father and Boykin at a couple of social functions. <p>"Boykin would approach, but my father would just smile and turn away," Black said in an interview for this series. "He had no use for him. He thought he was a bad guy, through and through." <p>He also said his father thought the 5th Circuit "wasn't honest" in the period when it overturned Boykin's conviction. <p>But Boykin always maintained that he'd been framed. He also noted in several letters that Black had belonged to the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. He claimed he and Holcombe would not have been convicted if Black hadn't managed to strike a Klan jury in the last trial. Harry Hardy Smith's 1963 letter makes the same claim. <p>Prohibition failed as a social policy. And the Holcombe-led machine remained in power in Mobile. If Boyles was the courageous reformer the Justice Department made him out to be, it did him no good. There were attempts to have him disbarred, and he eventually left Mobile for New York. <p>If there's a legacy of Mobile's whiskey trials, it's the story that Boykin ate a telegram Black meant to use as evidence. <p>The telegram episode has made it into a couple of books, including a recent biography of Black, but they don't specify which of the trials it occurred in or give details of what the telegram said. Newspaper coverage of the trials includes nothing on any missing telegram, much less an eaten one. Obstruction of justice by mastication would seem to be an offense any judge would speak about from the bench and punish severely, with full attention by the press. <p>But the story has survived for generations, and not without reason. At least a few older Mobile lawyers say they heard it from Harry Hardy Smith. <p>Smith's son Greg said Boykin did indeed use a trial break to chew an incriminating telegram, and kept the act secret for years after the trial. Harry Hardy Smith eventually found out. Greg Smith said he himself asked Boykin about the telegram many years after the trial. <p>"He said, 'Greg, I chewed it up and asked to go to the restroom and I spit it out in the toilet,'" Smith said. <p>Bob and Dick Boykin, the surviving sons of Frank Boykin, agreed their father never talked at home about the whiskey trials or any other problems he had with the law. But Dick said their mother, Ocllo Boykin, once confirmed for him the telegram incident. <p>"Hey," Dick Boykin declared between peals of non-judgmental laughter, "he did what he had to do." <p>In April 1963, Boykin returned to federal court, this time in Baltimore. Again he was accused of selling his purported influence over law enforcement officials, and again his correspondence would be used against him. There was no whiskey involved this time, just plenty of land and money. <p>By now, Boykin was a 78-year-old great-grandfather, and he'd recently lost his seat in Congress. His latest ethical problem surfaced in the press during his last political campaign, but he wasn't indicted until Oct. 16, 1962, nearly five months after his defeat. <p>That very night Boykin flew from Washington to Mobile, telling reporters in both cities that he had not been officially notified of his indictment. Federal authorities took care of that two days later, arresting him at noon in his Mobile office. He posted bond immediately. <p>Adding credence to writer Eugene Walter's description of the city as "sweet lunacy's county seat," the day of Boykin's arrest was officially "Frank Boykin Day" in Mobile. City leaders had planned to honor him for his years of public service, and they didn't see his indictment as any reason not to follow through. The celebration climaxed with a white-tie dinner at the Battle House Hotel, where Boykin accepted a "Mobile Citizens Award" and a scroll signed by 2,000 local citizens. <p>The next morning's Mobile Register had front-page coverage of the dinner. Lower on that page, a shorter story carried the headline, "Boykin Arrested at Downtown Headquarters." <p>If there was one thing Boykin's second trial made clear, it was that he had spent a considerable amount of his time as congressman trying to enrich himself and his family. <p>Through the 1950s, Boykin bought roughly 8,000 acres in southern Maryland, near the town of Waldorf, and 5,000 acres in Stafford County, Va., along the Potomac River. Though both tracts were mainly timberland, they were within long commuting distance of Washington, D.C. Boykin immediately began to recoup his investment through selling the timber. He also started trying to develop the land. He envisioned suburban communities that would be home to thousands of families, as well as industries and country clubs. <p>In 1958, Boykin sold the Mary land tract to Desser & Garfield, a development firm, for $6 million to be paid over 10 years. The price represented a huge profit over what Boykin had paid. But Desser & Garfield struggled to get the project under way and meet its payments. By late 1960, Boykin had reluctantly decided to foreclose on the mortgage he retained. <p>About this time U.S. Rep. Thomas Johnson, a Maryland Democrat, heard of Boykin's trouble and introduced him to J. Kenneth Edlin, a Miami-based savings and loan executive. Edlin quickly offered to finance Desser & Garfield or buy both the Maryland and Virginia tracts. <p>If Edlin seemed like Boykin's financial angel, he was a fallen one, having been convicted once of federal mail fraud and facing a second indictment for the same crime. <p>Boykin claimed he did not know Edlin's record until well after they entered into business negotiations. But in early 1961, he and Johnson agreed to intervene with the Justice Department on Edlin's new charge. Thus began a series of visits, letters and telephone calls on his behalf, lasting through the end of that year. <p>Meanwhile, Boykin took $250,000 in cashiers' checks from Edlin as down payment for the Maryland and Virginia tracts, which Edlin agreed to buy for $9 million. Johnson was regularly getting checks from Edlin, supposedly for legal work. <p>Prosecutors would, after extensive investigation, accuse Boykin and Johnson of taking Edlin's money in exchange for their efforts, as congressmen, to get his indictment quashed or at least have his trial postponed. <p>Boykin and Johnson hotly denied the charge and insisted on going before a Maryland grand jury to explain that their inquiries on Edlin's behalf were routine, benign, not contingent upon any financial dealings. <p>The grand jury heard them out and indicted them anyway for violating conflict-of-interest statutes and for conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government. Edlin also was indicted, as was one of his lawyers, William L. Robinson. <p>Publicly, Boykin maintained that he looked forward to a trial and would no doubt be vindicated. But he was nervous enough to hire Edward Bennett Williams, arguably the most famous American defense lawyer of the time. <p>Williams' client list had included Mafia don Frank Costello and Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. There was a saying among lawyers that if you hired Williams you stood an excellent chance of getting off, but everyone in the world would figure you were guilty. <p>The trial began April 1, 1963, before Judge Roszel C. Thomsen and an integrated federal court jury. That last fact bears mention because Williams worried how Boykin, a white Southern segregationist, would go over with black jurors, especially given the civil rights drama under way in Alabama. <p>During Boykin's 11-week trial, Birmingham Police Commissioner Bull Connor would turn firehoses on civil rights demonstrators, Martin Luther King Jr., would write his "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and Gov. George C. Wallace would make his schoolhouse door stand at the University of Alabama. <p>The world was watching and judging Alabama, so it was perhaps not the best time for someone like Boykin to be on trial 1,000 miles north of his hometown. On the other hand, the number of black jurors in Boykin's trial was two. Conviction would require the 10 white jurors going along. <p>Co-defendant Johnson had his own special concern. He publicly accused the lead prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Joseph Tydings, of trying to eliminate him as a Democratic Party political rival in Maryland. <p>Tydings, who would indeed go on to serve in the U.S. Senate from that state, and who now is in private law practice in Washington, D.C., said in an interview that he brought the cases only because Johnson, Boykin and the others were clearly guilty. <p>"I told the grand jury, 'I don't want an indictment unless you're 100 percent sure,'" he said. "Johnson was making statements that he was being persecuted by me. I knew if it went to trial it would be politicized.'" <p>Through testimony and documents, Tydings was able to show that Johnson and Boykin beat a path to the Justice Department, making 13 visits on Edlin's behalf in 1961. When phone calls and letters were included, the total number of contacts was 63. Among those they lobbied in person was Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. Boykin, always a big gift giver, followed up by sending Kennedy's children 100 pounds of pecans. <p>Additional incriminating evidence came when Tydings called to the stand an Edlin business associate, Louis Goldman, who was under indictment in a separate case and had agreed to cooperate with prosecutors. Goldman claimed he heard Boykin promise to "take care of" Edlin's legal problems. He also said Edlin had later complained to him that Boykin and Johnson weren't making progress in getting the mail fraud indictment quashed. "It's costing me a lot of money," Edlin said, according to Goldman's testimony. <p>Various of Boykin's letters were read into the record. In one to Kennedy and Herbert J. Miller, another top Justice Department official, he argued for a delay in Edlin's trial so that third party financing of the Maryland deal wouldn't be hurt by bad publicity. <p>"What we are asking won't hurt the government. It won't hurt a person in the world," Boykin said in the seven-page, single-space letter. <p>In another, written May 2, 1961, to Austill Pharr, president of Mobile's First National Bank, Boykin wrote "those Yankees took me again." But he was clear ly joking. The letter goes on to describe, in a tone somewhere between satisfaction and triumph, financial arrangements he'd made with Edlin. <p>The trial had its share of theatrics, including Johnson's decision to cross-examine Kennedy personally. Kennedy remembered that Boykin "had expressed concern that we were moving ahead" with the Edlin prosecution. But Kennedy conceded he had not seen anything improper in Johnson and Boykin's two visits to him, and that he regularly heard from members of Congress interested in one matter or the other. <p>Kennedy got one of the trial's few laughs by adding that the number of congressional visits had dropped dramatically since Boykin and Johnson had been indicted. <p>Once past Kennedy, though, the trial had no real star power and consisted largely of dry, complicated testimony about finances and land deals. It was June before Boykin took the stand. He was there for the better part of two days. <p>He began seeming vigorous and engaged, but under cross-examination became flustered and even defiant. He complained of ten of being unable to hear questions, and at one point pulled a bottle of pills from his pocket, prompting the judge to gavel a quick recess. <p>One of the assistant prosecutors, J. Hardin Marion, missed a morning session of court because his wife was giving birth to their second child at a nearby hospital. Marion got back to court that afternoon, and Tydings made an announcement about the birth in court. <p>"With that announcement, Boykin, who was sitting way down at the other end of the courtroom, bounced up and came running over to congratulate me, shaking my hand in front of the jury like the good politician he was," recalled Marion, now in private practice in Baltimore. "His inability to hear was pretty selective." <p>On the stand, Boykin didn't dispute that he'd received the $250,000 from Edlin, but said that money was a legitimate initial payment for Edlin's agreeing to purchase the Maryland and Virginia tracts. <p>As for helping Edlin, Boykin told the jury that he and Johnson really did nothing more than ask the Justice Department to see if the mail fraud indictment might have been incorrectly drawn. He added, accurately, that in his long tenure as congressman he had often intervened with the federal bureaucracy on behalf of others. <p>"There is no novelty for me to go see the attorney general," he testified. "I have been doing it for 28 years, and every other department of the government." <p>Boykin also testified that many of the calls and trips he made to the Justice Department in the Edlin matter were really efforts to help prosecutors get information Edlin supposedly had about Jimmy Hoffa. <p>Besides the $250,000, he said, he got nothing else from Edlin, "not even a drink of water, not even a copper cent, a nickel, a dime or anything else." <p>On cross-examination, Boykin had to acknowledge disparities between his trial testimony and his grand jury testimony. His trial testimony differed, too, with what he had said in letters introduced into evidence. Boykin's defense rested on the idea that he'd actually given Edlin a favorable deal on the Maryland and Virginia tracts. But passages in the letters, as well as testimony from other witnesses, suggested Edlin was prepared to cut him in by 15 percent on any resale of the properties. The profit potential for Boykin was tremendous. <p>Local lawyers packed the courtroom for Williams' closing argument, and he didn't disappoint. <p>"Through two-and-one-half hours, the lawyer gestured wildly, shouting and raising his arms to emphasize his belief that conspiracy and conflict-of-interest charges against his client were a 'hoax,'" reported The Baltimore Sun. <p>On June 13, 1963, the jury retired to consider the fate of Boykin and his co-defendants. The trial had lasted two-and-a-half months, and yielded 1.5 million words of testimony. Jurors needed only three-and-a-half hours to find Boykin and the others guilty on all counts. <p>When the judge postponed sentencing, Boykin promptly left the courtroom with wife Ocllo. If the ordeal had dispirited him, he did not show it. <p>"Everything's made for love," he told reporters. <p>Boykin talked about appealing, but decided against doing so. Williams and Tydings soon went together to the judge, asking that Boykin be spared prison time because of his age and ill health. The judge agreed, punishing the multimillionaire with a $40,000 fine. <p>Tydings said he has no regrets about prosecuting Boykin, but remembers him fondly. <p>"He was extraordinarily friendly," said Tydings, whose father served in Congress with Boykin. "He used to send me Christmas cards, before and after the trial." <p>Unbeknownst to Tydings, Boykin was also writing letters in which he bitterly pushed the theory that the whole case was Tydings' way of eliminating Johnson from the upcoming Maryland Senate race. Boykin also blamed his conviction on the presence of black people on the trial jury and grand jury. He even criticized the legal work of Williams, whom he claimed to have paid $150,000 in legal fees. <p>On Dec. 17, 1965, President Johnson pardoned Boykin. Thirty-seven members of Congress, mostly Southerners, had petitioned Johnson to do so. But Robert Kennedy had asked for the Boykin pardon too. Kennedy, according to press reports and Johnson administration officials, asked three favors upon stepping down as attorney general in 1964. One was that Johnson pardon Boykin. It's unclear why Kennedy made the request, but Boykin had worked hard for John Kennedy's presidential campaign in 1960. Moreover, Boykin and Joseph Kennedy, father of Robert and John Kennedy, were old friends. <p>In any event, Boykin's second criminal conviction, like his first, ended up wiped from the books. <p>There are Boykin supporters today who insist he never understood the charges against him -- never saw anything wrong with taking time from his congressional duties to ask the Justice Department to go easy on a man with whom he had a large real estate deal pending. <p>Others question whether Boykin's conduct was any worse that what's done legally today. They include Morton Mintz, the Washington Post reporter who covered the trial. Mintz, retired from the newspaper, said in an interview that he thought Johnson was guiltier than Boykin, and that neither one of them was any more corrupt than current members of Congress who vote the way their campaign contributors demand. <p>When his pardon came through, Boykin certainly didn't sound like a man humbled. He told the Associated Press that he considered the pardon not only a fine Christmas gift, but a just one. "I thought all along that right would prevail."