Mississippi Mud : Southern Justice and the Dixie Mafia

Rating:
Summary: True crime that reads like fiction!
Review: I agree completely with "a reader from NJ"--the Sherrys apparently were not nice people, and they crossed the wrong people time after time after time with no thought of consequences. Mr. Humes is an excellent writer, and he certainly researched this book well.

The Kirksey Nix blackmail caper was borrowed by John Grisham in "The Brethren"!

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic and gripping... and utterly accurate
Review: I was involved with the Sherry case in Biloxi, so I know the truth when I read it. This book tells it all. Yes, it does read like a thriller, better than Grisham, in my opinion, but that doesn't mean its not all true. This is journalism at its best. It seems clear that there is one or two people out there cramming this site with repeat bad reviews. Don't be deceived by their phony compalints. They are liars -- probably friends of the crooks who are revealed for what they are in Mississippi Mud, if not the crooks themselves. Read this book if you want the finest in true -- and I mean TRUE -- crime writing.

Rating:
Summary: How Things Work
Review: This story takes place in Mary Higgins Clarke's social territory. Quite-comfortable, right-wing Catholic judge and his moral-activist wife are the victims of a contract killing. Their still-more-comfortable Catholic daughter fights over five years to undertstand the crime and have the authors face their just rewards.

But those are almost the book's only links to Clarke. Mississippi Mud is a painstaking report on a double murder in Biloxi, MI, that occurred in September, 1987, and the ensuing investigations and trials, leading to conspiracy sentences in March, 1992, and more conspiracy convictions in September, 1997 (covered in a postscript for this edition). There are 43 pages of source notes (all primary: interviews or court records) and 8 pages of photographs on good paper, but no index, a real lack. The author follows the daughter, Lynne Sposito, through all those years, and tries to hew to her point of view. (She moves much to the right.)

The book is divided into nearly equal parts by the revelation of the names of the sponsor of the killings and of the trigger man, by a new-found enemy of the sponsor. (He's right about the sponsor, wrong about the trigger man, and none of his testimony is worth bringing to court - as will often occur in the story.) The first part is true Biloxi Mud (in fact, the Church later comes out in support of the killers). By the time we get to the revelation, it's clear that in that neck of woods a judgeship is not what Clarke would think. The second part is what one might call a DA-procedural. I found both parts fascinating in their separate way, and the second especially instructive.

The contract killing was far too clean to yield a lead within the 48 hours in which most murders are basically solved, if they are to be solved at all. Practically everything that occurs during the five years following depends on Lynne Sposito's tireless and skilfull efforts. The central revelation is due to a private investigator she hired, and it would have zilch results if she did not bring in a local TV station to broadcast it. This puts the file on the DA's desk but, as the second part shows, it would not go much further without true devotion on Lynne's part and on the part of a lone FBI agent, past his retirement. Not for evil reasons: it is simply a very iffy case to bring to court. In the end, we still don't know the real motive for the crime, and there is one big thread left hanging, unnoticed by Humes, which could lead to an entire new layer of involvement.

One part of the story is amazing in itself. The sponsor is the son of another judge (still richer), who practically set his son up in crime. (From early youth the his aim in life was to be an outlaw.) Twenty years or so before the murders, he was sentenced to life without parole at hard labor in the nation's most isolated prison camp, Angola. Yet he found the way to set up and run a gay lonely-hearts scam that brought in millions (a small part of which went to pay for the murders). How? You'll have to read the book.

There is one unfortunate Mary Higgins Clarke aspect to this book and most of those like it. Clarke, like the writers of TV serials, invents feelings and inner thoughts for her heroines that are expected, reasonable and conventional the way inner life never is. Whether in soaps or in Clarke novels, this is effective because it supplies a nearly-blank screen on which the reader can project her own feelings and needs, and thus empathize with the fictional heroine. This should not occur in painstaking reports of true stories, but it does. Where it occurs in Mississippi Mud, it gives the book an undeserved veneer of unreality. "Just the facts, Humes."