The Brea File (16 page)

That morning in the Blue Goose Cafe in Omaha when Ruhle made his announcement, there was never a moment’s doubt in Paul Macimer’s mind that he would also volunteer for the Jackson assignment.

Puzzled that Gordon Ruhle would be eager to protect civil rights workers drawn to the South by the Movement, Macimer soon understood that Gordon’s views had not changed. Ruhle had little sympathy for liberal activists, but he was an FBI man through and through. He had sworn to uphold and enforce the laws of the land. If that meant protecting long-haired northern radicals in jeans and T-shirts from the hatred and violence of southern rednecks and Klan terrorists—for whom Ruhle had no more use than he did for New York Jewish liberals, Communists or militant blacks—then he would protect them. Or find their murderers.

When Macimer expressed surprise that Russ Halbig would volunteer for dangerous duty in Mississippi, Gordon Ruhle shook his head. “No surprise,” he said with a cynical grin. “The Old Man is gonna be watching what we do down there. Halbig knows that. He could work ten years in Omaha without ever being noticed.”

In the hue and cry following the murder of three civil rights activists earlier that summer, J. Edgar Hoover gave a veteran agent, Roy K. Moore, five days to have a new field office open for business in Jackson, to serve as headquarters for the Bureau’s greatly expanded effort to find the killers and to prevent further violence. Moore was not exactly your typical SAC, although he had Hoover’s confidence. He was flamboyant, action-oriented, a man who got things done and would overlook departures from the FBI Manual if they brought results. Gordon Ruhle loved him.

Moore set up the Jackson office in July of 1964 at the height of that summer’s voter registration drives and in an atmosphere of hostility and threatened violence. Macimer, Ruhle and Halbig arrived in August. Two nights later Macimer was crouching behind a hedge bordering the dirt lot of a Negro church when a shotgun blast neatly decapitated the hedge. It was his first real taste of being under fire.

The agents had plenty of action over the next two years, shepherding youthful activists from the North and trying to protect those blacks who were bold enough to provide the outsiders shelter, sympathy and a reason for being there. Jackson itself was not what the agents called hazardous duty. The Mississippi power structure kept things under control in the larger and more prosperous cities. Danger waited back in the woods, on the remote farms and in the small rural towns. Macimer and Ruhle spent nights in a mosquito-ridden swamp on a stakeout, crawled under a grocery store to defuse a ticking bomb, had the tires of their moving car shot up. From Ruhle, Macimer learned how to ferret out and use informants, who generally acted less from altruism or moral conviction than the need of money. Russ Halbig, true to form, became useful to the beleaguered Moore as a liaison between the SAC and the hundreds of reporters who were underfoot, for the Jackson office had become the information center for the civil rights struggle in Mississippi.

In the summer of 1966 a young man named Ira Rothleder came to Mississippi from New York, where he had worked in a settlement house. He was accompanied by his wife Maureen, a pretty, sunny-natured Irish girl who had a special way with children. The young couple opened a child-care center and library, stocked with books they had brought with them in cardboard boxes in their overladen VW bus. Maureen began luring children and their mothers to the center while Ira joined other activists in that summer’s voter registration drive.

On a hot evening late in July, the Rothleders and a seventeen-year-old black girl from Hattiesburg who was helping out at the center were busy unpacking boxes of newly arrived used books. Without warning fire bombs crashed through two front windows and exploded. In panic the three young people tried to escape through the back door of the small frame building. Another bomb turned the narrow back hallway into an inferno. There was no way out of the burning building except the front door.

Outside, parked in the street with the motor of their pickup truck running, four men waited, at least three of them armed with rifles or shotguns. Rothleder, the first one through the door, was struck down by two rifle bullets in the chest. He died almost instantly. A shotgun blast nearly cut the slim young black girl, Cynthia Watson, in half. The last rifle shot, as the pickup roared away, struck Maureen Rothleder in the jaw. She would survive the fire, the rain of gunfire and a series of operations over the next six months to rebuild her shattered face.

Paul Macimer and Gordon Ruhle were among nearly a hundred agents who worked on the case over the next six weeks. The pickup truck was found two days later parked on a street in Greenville. It had been stolen in Jackson twenty-four hours before. Although a score of FBI lab technicians sifted the cab and bed of the truck for every hair, fiber and smear of dirt from a muddy boot, no evidence was found that would identify the four men who had waited outside the Rothleders’ child-care center for the flames to drive their victims toward them.

What seemed a promising lead developed through one of Macimer’s informants, who claimed to know the identity of the driver of the pickup truck involved in the killings. The driver was a nineteen-year-old who had been present that night to prove his worth as a new member of the local klavern of the Ku Klux Klan. According to his story, he had not been armed. Because he was the only one involved who hadn’t fired one of the murder weapons, he was not trusted by the other three attackers. He was afraid for his life.

After a series of aborted meetings, Macimer finally came face to face with Leroy Parrish in a remote, abandoned farmhouse. Parrish was not a prepossessing youngster—skinny, chicken-necked, his face blotched with acne, he wore the hangdog air of a born loser. The kind, Macimer thought, who would say anything to get attention—or a reward.

But something about Leroy Parrish rang true: his fear.

That first meeting the youth refused to admit that he had driven the pickup truck to the scene of the bombing. He would not reveal the names of the other three men. He demanded assurances of protection if he talked—and enough money to get a long way from Mississippi.

The SAC of the Jackson Field Office was skeptical. There were dozens of more solid leads to track down. Agents were meeting would-be informants on every street corner and behind every barn. Nevertheless, after wary negotiations over the next two weeks, an agreement was made to protect and relocate the young man, and to pay him $10,000 for his testimony—providing that he could produce evidence leading to the identity of the three bomber-slayers.

The deal was conditional. It was one of many being made, all of them contingent on some proof that the informant was telling the truth. No one gave Leroy Parrish’s story much credence—except Macimer.

Abruptly the youth vanished. For two frustrating weeks there was no word. Either Parrish’s story had been a hoax, a con game designed to get him some money for nothing, or he had been murdered. Then, late one Saturday afternoon in September, Macimer received a phone call. He recognized Leroy Parrish’s voice immediately. The deal was on.

Leroy agreed to meet the FBI agent at the farmhouse where they had first met. But the youth insisted that he would deal only with Macimer himself. If the agent didn’t come alone, there would be no meeting. Parrish trusted no one else. When Macimer was dubious, Leroy offered an irresistible inducement: he would take the agent to the place where the murder weapons had been buried.

It was a hot September day and the office was quiet. Even most of the hordes of reporters had escaped to their motel rooms and cold six-packs. The SAC could not be reached, and the few agents on hand had their own assignments.

Russ Halbig came on duty at four o’clock; he would be in the office until midnight. Macimer told him what he was doing. Then he tracked down Gordon Ruhle. The older agent was skeptical of Leroy Parrish’s story, and he didn’t approve of Macimer meeting the youth alone in an isolated place. But he finally agreed to trail behind Macimer with two other agents in a backup car, staying well out of sight.

Macimer drove alone to the farmhouse. He waited there with Leroy Parrish until dark. They drove north in the FBI man’s car for a half hour. Then, at Parrish’s insistence, Macimer let the youth take the wheel as they turned along back roads away from the main highway. Parrish drove with surprising speed and skill, turning frequently onto side roads. Macimer realized that the backup car had probably been lost far behind. He wondered if Parrish had known or guessed that they were being followed.

The last dirt road led them onto a desolate farm, dark and empty, bordered by an almost impenetrable swamp.

Macimer was knee deep in mud at the edge of the swamp, bathed in sweat as he dug by the light of a full moon, when Leroy’s scream alerted him. A car’s headlights slashed the dirt road leading across the farm toward the marshy bottomland.

“You tricked me! I tol’ you no one else was to know!”

Macimer stared at the headlights racing toward them. “Those aren’t FBI.”

“Oh my God!” Parrish moaned. “Then it’s them! They been watchin’ me.”

Macimer floundered out of the swamp. The mud sucked one shoe from his foot. “Get down!” he warned. “Behind the car.”

The whine of the approaching car’s engine cut off abruptly. An instant later the headlights vanished. In the sudden darkness a rifle crashed. The bullet smacked through a side window of Macimer’s automobile. Macimer fired at the muzzle flash with his Smith & Wesson. Someone cried out.

Macimer felt a surge of adrenaline. But even if he had scored a lucky hit with his first shot, he thought, it wasn’t going to be much of a fire fight. Not if the remaining attackers carried rifles to overpower his handgun.

He crawled over to the car door on the driver’s side. Ruhle and the others in the backup car might have been left behind, but they would be searching, somewhere not far off. If he could send a radio message for help…

When he had first taken possession of his assigned vehicle Macimer had taken the precaution of taping over the button on the door frame that turned on the car’s interior light when the door opened. He reached cautiously for the door handle.

Either the tape had come loose or the connection had not been securely broken. As Macimer opened the door, the light came on.

Two rapid shots drove him away from the car door. The shots had come from a second rifle, this one off to his left.

Then another bullet ricocheted off the rear bumper.

“Back off!” Macimer ordered Parrish. “We’re going to have to get wet.”

“No! I can’t-”

“If they hit that gas tank,” Macimer said grimly, “you won’t spend any of that reward money.”

He dragged the shivering youth into the swamp. The thick marsh grass and stunted trees would hide them.

As if in response to his thought a searchlight sprang on. From its height and steadiness Macimer guessed it was attached to the terrorists’ vehicle. The bright beam began to track across the edge of the swamp. Macimer took careful aim and fired. The light exploded.

With the return of darkness the attackers began to fire at Macimer’s car, a fusillade of high-powered rifle shots seeking out the gas tank. When a bullet finally found the target, the concentrated force of a half tank of gasoline exploded with the fury of two hundred sticks of dynamite. Forty yards away in the swamp, Macimer was flattened by the concussion.

He came up spluttering, found Leroy Parrish underwater and pulled the youth’s head up. Sensing the boy would scream in his terror, Macimer clamped a hand over his mouth.

Crouching in the swamp, up to his waist in the muddy water, Macimer wondered if the attackers had been able to see him and Parrish in the searing light of the explosion. There was a good chance they hadn’t. The terrorists themselves had been close enough to the ear-shattering explosion to have been knocked flat, or even hit by flying shrapnel if they hadn’t had the sense to fire from cover.

He retreated deeper into the swamp. Young Parrish resisted, moaning and shivering. Macimer warned him angrily. “If they find us before help gets here-if it gets here at all—they’ll gut us and fill our bellies with rocks and dump us so deep into this mudhole we’ll never be found. So make up your mind whether you want to keep sending them messages.”

“It… it’s not just them,” Parrish sobbed. “It’s… the snakes! I can’t stand snakes.”

Macimer felt his own blood run cold. He had forgotten that these swamps teemed with water moccasins.

Fifty yards into the swamp Macimer found a patch of relatively solid ground. There he huddled with Parrish in the tangled grass. One thing was now certain, he thought wryly: Leroy Parrish had told the truth. And his fear had been justified.

A half hour dragged by. With each passing moment Macimer’s hope that Ruhle and the other agents in the backup car might have seen the glare of the explosion and fire became dimmer, dwindling like the glow from the burning car. He could hear the terrorists prowling about along the edge of the swamp. They, too, were reluctant to enter it in the darkness. Occasionally they called out to each other. Two voices. That meant that one of the attackers had been dealt out of the game by Macimer’s first shot.

Silence closed over the swamp, whose surface was now bathed in an oily sheen of moonlight. The only sounds were an infrequent small splash from something moving in the water and the buzzing of mosquitoes zeroing in on their tempting targets. Macimer began to wonder if the mosquitoes would leave enough of him to care about. He fought off the urge to slap at them. His only protection was to slip into the muddy, foul-smelling water, leaving only his head exposed. Once he dipped his head underwater to wash off the persistent mosquitoes. When he broke the surface again something flicked past his cheek. Macimer shook the water from his eyes and stared. A four-foot snake glided across the moonlit surface of the swamp, its speed astonishing. The moccasin’s tail had stroked Macimer’s face as it passed. The agent crouched in the swamp, shuddering as Leroy Parrish had shaken in his fear.