The Dixie Mafia: Gone South w/Jed Lipinski
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St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana, February 18th, 1969. Just across the water from New Orleans on the last night of Mardi Gras.

The area has been plagued by robberies lately of the ski mask variety, but the local cops can't really get a beat on anything. They can't link anyone in the area to them. And they're starting to realize there might be a group of bandits, traveling criminals as they call them, come into the area, do some heists, then get away. This is the late 60s, right? There's no real databases. There's no sort of inter-police communication. It's not really a thing quite yet.

These traveling criminals are actually big on preying on other travelers of sorts, especially those who may carry large amounts of cash on them, like salesmen or carnies, you know, circus folk who go from town to town, throwing their carnivals, collecting cash and more cash that they don't typically store in a bank or let the IRS in on.

And at this moment, well, there just happens to be a traveling carnival in town. And these bandits, they just happen to have some inside information on the Carnie folk. Turns out that 30 miles north of New Orleans, in a small city called Covington, there's a woman they call the Gypsy Queen holding onto a large amount of money from said circus folk, who everyone there calls gypsies.

Some of it's in a safe, some of it's buried, and it's supposedly a ton of cash all stored by the gypsy queen in a trailer park. And on this night, the last night of Mardi Gras, all the men who would be staying in the trailer park, they're out at the festival working concession stands. There's only women and children in the entire trailer park, though they do have a security system and whatnot. Still, it's pretty wide open.

These traveling bandits, though, they are thorough, and they plan things like a paramilitary group doing a raid. I'm talking heist men, safecrackers, an electronics guy, a weapons guy who delivers a whole mess of guns, including stolen military pistols. They've got a boat and a seaplane on standby for the getaway. This is the not-messing-around crew.

When they finally arrive at the trailer park, they're all in black. Ski masks, gloves, with black duffel bags. They disable the alarms immediately, cut the phones, sneak right in, and get to business. Chaining up all the neighbors and herding them into one trailer. At the same time, others in the crew are going to work, breaking open safes and robbing cash. They find the queen, and they start demanding she show them where the real windfall is hidden.

But you don't become the gypsy queen by giving in that easily. She refuses to answer, she's defiant, and when the moment's right, she fights back. Wrong move. A hatchet splits her head open, and then one of them shoots her in the face. It's brutal. An execution. Things go a bit more haywire when one of the carnies shows up back from work early, and the bandit robbers flee after giving chase, using their boat and seaplane to disappear.

The sheriffs launch a manhunt with Roblox, but they turn up nothing. Until a few days later, when a local man says earlier in the week he had seen a bunch of guys shooting off their guns who looked a little out of place. Suspicious. He tells the cops a license plate number he had jotted down, and the cops trace it to one guy.

They arrest him, and he right away starts telling tales and naming names. Turns out, the robbery had been arranged by an amorphous crew of highly skilled and dangerous criminals, loosely affiliated from down south, known as the Dixie Mafia.

Somewhat headquartered in a nearby lawless strip of Biloxi, Mississippi, these outlaws, over the next few decades, are going to have their hands in everything from mail fraud to big-time heists, major gambling operations, prostitution, drug trafficking, robberies, burglaries, contract killing, even going after judges and politicians, those they hadn't managed to buy off.

In the meantime, that guy you snitched, he gets released a little later. And a little later after that, his body turns up with a lot of holes in it. They may not be La Cosa Nostra, but nobody speaks on the Dixie Mob and lives. This is The Underworld Podcast. ♪♪

Welcome back to the Underworld Podcast, the radio broadcast program where two journalists who have reported all over the world and are this close to just giving up on it all trade off telling you, the listener, stories of underground, underworld, organized crime from the past, present, and future from all around the world. I'm Danny Gold. I'm usually joined by Sean Williams. He is not here. I've sent him to like one of those sketch stand-up comedy school things because you guys know he's just, he's not funny anymore and he needs to be more funny.

But we do have a special guest. As always, bonus episodes, you can subscribe right here on Spotify or on iTunes or at patreon.com slash the underworld podcast for a very low, low price of $5 a month. Email us at the underworld podcast at gmail.com for tips or whatever else, or buy our merch, you know, good t-shirts, some mugs, whatever it is. Don't Instagram your crimes, all that at underworldpod.com. Today, our special guest,

a fellow crime reporter turned podcast guy, creator and writer and host of a podcast about crime in the South called Gone South, Jed Lipinski. I don't know if you guys have watched Justified or other sort of like gritty Southern movie and TV shows they're always sort of whispered about or talked about. I didn't know a lot about them until I listened to this podcast, which really gets into like the...

the nitty gritty details of who they are and what they did. And Jed actually interviews a bunch of them. It's, it's pretty wild, but Jed, thank you so much for joining us here today. Of course. Thanks Danny. So who, like what was and who was the, the Dixie mafia? Cause I think, you know, I've seen things I think you talk about too, who some people claim it was just like a rumored sort of thing. It wasn't real. Others talk about this sort of informal structure and,

Of course, it wasn't really a mafia per se, but can you kind of talk about the beginnings or the origin of it? Yeah, absolutely. So what I knew at least from the start was that this was basically like a loose-knit group of criminals that operated mostly in the southeastern US. They specialized in certain things, organized heists, safe cracking, getaway driving. They would employ weapons experts.

And basically, they would get together for certain jobs. They would come from different parts of the Southeast, converge for a crime, and then scatter back to their respective states. When I asked people at the time I was first learning about them a few years ago why they were called the Dixie Mafia, they tended to kind of laugh because it was kind of a made-up term in a way. What seems to have happened is that back in the 70s,

It was the early 70s. Nixon had appropriated all this funding to law enforcement agencies to combat organized crime because of the mafia in places like New York, L.A., Las Vegas. So it benefited law enforcement agencies if they could prove that they were working against organized criminals, organized crime networks.

And so there was a, I think it really comes back to one guy named Rex Armistead who worked out of Mississippi and was a private investigator and used to work for various law enforcement organizations down there. But he came up with the idea of sort of labeling these loose net groups of criminals who were, you know, would come from different states and then go back to their home states as the Dixie Mafia. He's like, let's call them a mafia and then we'll get the funding necessary to fight them. And that's what happened.

They did get the money and the media played along and constantly, you know, if a job went off in Dallas or Georgia and say a heist or a bank was broken into and they suspected that these traveling criminals, as they called them, were behind it, they would get, you know, a big front page headline that said Dixie Mafia strikes again and it would strike fear into the hearts of the locals. And they were able to use that kind of mafia language to

get the money and the resources to fight them. Obviously, this really annoyed members of this group, so to speak, who didn't think they were any kind of organized group at all. That includes, of course, Kirksey Nix, who we'll talk about in a minute. But they really resisted that mafia label. There was no godfather, they said. There was no real structure at all. It was just a bunch of guys who kind of knew each other from card games and

and the sort of underworld lifestyle in the South. Yeah, a group of outlaws, you know, would be one way to describe them. But it's also, you know, it reminds me a bit of, we've done episodes on the so-called Russian mafia that was in Brighton Beach in the 80s and 90s. And it was a sort of similar thing

that you know it wasn't like this hierarchical sicilian cosa nostra sort of thing where they all took orders and and and you know were formalized it was more like the guy who had the idea to do the crime was in charge uh and they would gather other like-minded criminals together and you know they would trade off working with so and so and this guy would work with that guy and when it came that time to do a heist or a killing or drugs or anything like that but

Even there, and I think with the Dixie Mafia too, we see that it did kind of formalize a bit, right? There were some guys who were a little more in charge, and it kind of went from being a sort of loose thing to being a little more formalized, yeah? Yeah, absolutely. And I'll just say that one of the reasons for the mafia term was that there were rumors at the time, this is back in the late 60s,

early 70s that they had some affiliation with Carlos Marcelo, who was the mob boss of New Orleans for many years. He was later caught up in the key Favre hearings, the famous key Favre hearings. But as far as I could tell from people that I was interviewing, you know, many of these these guys that we talked to for the podcast were in their their 80s and 90s even.

sheriffs and former deputies from Mississippi, Louisiana, specifically the Deep South, those are the people we were talking to, would say that there was really no connection to the actual mafia. So, you know, it was kind of like a made up term, but you're right. It was formalized to some degree.

because these guys did know one another and they were really like coordinated and they knew what they needed and they would disappear after jobs that they pulled. And so there was a level of coordination for sure. And I think too, we should clarify, we've been talking about, they got together, they did heists, they did jobs, they pulled these sort of crimes, but these guys were, I mean, they were serious, right? We're not just talking about heists, we're talking like armed bank robberies,

They got involved with drugs and trafficking drugs. They ran a lot of gambling operations. There was contract killings. And they were pretty smart, too, in terms of their sharpness getting wrapped up with law enforcement and politicians, right? These guys were no joke. Oh, yeah.

Absolutely. They were dangerous. Many of them were contract killers. They put a lot of hits on people. Certain individuals would be pulled from Texas or Georgia specifically, and that's what they did. They were rumored to have killed dozens of people throughout the South during those decades. So yeah, a violent criminal organization, definitely. And then we have Biloxi, Mississippi, which kind of becomes their

Yeah, it's a good question.

I lived in New Orleans between 2013 and 2017. I never made it to Biloxi. I'm not a gambler, but that's a place where a lot of gambling still takes place. It's kind of the Atlantic city of the South.

And from people who lived there during the 60s and 70s, the way they would describe it, it was just this kind of Wild West Southern town. There was a lot of, as you said, prostitution, gambling, corruption was just rampant. And this guy, Sheriff...

Leroy Hobbs, who was the sheriff of Harrison County, where I think Biloxi is the county seat. He really like embodied that corrupt reputation of Biloxi. He was elected, I think, back in 1972 and under the expectation that he would clean up Biloxi. I think that was probably, you know, that was just a hopeful thinking among members of the community. But he immediately started facilitating criminal activity there.

Within days of being elected the sheriff, he would do things like release gang members from jail. He protected drug traffickers. He protected criminals and specifically members of the Dixie Mafia who saw Biloxi as this kind of place that they could come hang out, bring their girlfriends, hang out at the strip clubs in the dark, do drug deals and kind of

get away from law enforcement, particularly because Hobbs and many other police officers were compromised. They were on the take. This really comes down to another guy who's important to the history of Biloxi, which is Mike Gillich.

You might have been about to ask about him, but he worked closely with Leroy back then. Mike was the owner of a popular strip club called the Golden Nugget. He also ran a few other strip clubs along what was known as the Biloxi Strip.

Mike was... If there was a godfather of the Dixie Mafia, he was probably it. He was friends with all of them. He was very suave and likable, really nice guy. He used to hang out at this Krispy Kreme donut shop, and he was friends with all the cops, and he would, you know...

get them set up with women at the clubs, the strip clubs that he ran. The point is, Gilich was really somebody of real significance to law enforcement back then. They knew that he was corrupt. They knew that he was in bed with Leroy Hobbs, but he was untouchable. I think the sheriff's department and the police department in Biloxi were so corrupted that

that every time they tried to break into Mike's clubs and book the women there for prostitution, strippers who were acting as prostitutes, the club would always get tipped off. The other clubs along the strip were getting shut down in the 70s and later in the 80s, but Mike's clubs were always the ones

that stayed open somehow, just because he was so connected. And of course, Gillich would become very important to the murders of Vincent and Margaret Sherry, which is probably the most famous Dixie Mafia hit in history. Yeah, yeah. We'll get to that because that is a crazy story and your podcast really unravels that in a very crazy way. All right, guys, let's talk Factor Meals.

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But it's interesting to think about like my, you know, my image, which is quite ignorant of like the South in the 60s and 70s is going to be like a very law and order place, right? Like you think of crime, you think of the Bronx, you think of like Philadelphia, these sort of mafias, organized crime, Chicago, corruption, that sort of thing. But you had this going on in some of these cities in the South and it was kind of like almost fiefdoms, right? Like because the sheriff and maybe some of the local politicians are on the take in these areas, right?

there's really nothing anyone else can do at this point. The FBI doesn't get involved until much later. I mean, was that your impression that it was just kind of lawless if you were tied in with the right people? Yeah, absolutely. It was a lawless place. And that's why Dixie Mafia members loved it.

It was super cheap to live there. They could gamble. There were strip clubs they could hang out in. It was just like a place to go and get away, especially because during this time, law enforcement was really kind of bearing down on bigger cities like New Orleans and

And so Biloxi was close to New Orleans. It's just a fairly short drive. So these guys could go into New Orleans, hang out on Bourbon Street and come back in the same day. So that was convenient for them. But yeah, it's this little out of the way, small beachside gambling den that really attracted these guys from all over the country, really. I think too, like we have this image of these guys, of these Southern criminals, maybe as kind of like, you know, these good old boys who weren't exactly...

sharp or smooth operators, but these guys really were. They knew what they were doing. They knew how to kill and get away with it. They knew how to trap drugs, gambling operations. They outsmarted law enforcement at almost every turn.

Yeah, they did. They did. I don't have much specifics to talk about there, but they were a sophisticated group. I think it's easy to kind of dismiss them. You know, you hear the term Dixie Mafia and you think of, I don't know, just sort of like a bumbling hillbilly, maybe if you're from the North. Yeah, Dukes of Hazzard. Dukes of Hazzard is like the immediate comparison. But no, I mean, yes, they were on drugs. Yes, they were drunk a lot of the time. Yes, they were all unemployed and died early in their 30s.

and 40s, but they had actual skills. They had really viable skills. They were talented. They were smart. And they got away with it for a long time. The cops didn't really close out the group until the 80s. So they had a good 20 to 30 year run

At the time, I should also mention, one of the ways they were able to get away with these jobs for so long is that at the time in the 60s and 70s, specifically, law enforcement agencies in different states weren't really connected in the same way that they are now. So it was hard for them to track these guys across different states in the way that it would be fairly easy to do now.

How did you find out about the Dixie Mafia? Like, how did you get involved in this story? Because you get really involved. Yes. So we were doing the first season of our show, Gone South, about a murder that took place in 1987 in St. Tammany Parish, Louisiana. That was the murder of a woman named Margaret Kuhn. She was a assistant district attorney in St. Tammany Parish who was killed. She was stabbed in the back once and died.

And we tried to understand who killed her. It was just an unsolved murder. A DEA agent that I knew when I worked as a crime reporter in New Orleans had told me about the story. He had some leads on a potential suspect that had emerged in just the last few years. This is I'm talking 2016, 2017.

So we wound up doing that story. And one of the theories that a lot of people had in St. Tammany in Louisiana back then and still did was that she was somehow connected to the Dixie Mafia or that this was like a Dixie Mafia job. Like one of the Dixie Mafia hitmen was

had bumped her off while she was jogging through her exclusive subdivision at night. I never saw any evidence that that was true. Then again, we didn't like totally solve the case. The case remains unsolved. The point is though, that during our interviews with all these people who knew her back then and members of law enforcement in Louisiana, they kept mentioning the Dixie Mafia. They would say it like almost offhandedly. They would compare the former district attorney of St. Tammany to a member of the Dixie Mob,

one woman said. And other people thought that, yeah, whoever killed her was a hit man for the Dixie Mafia. And I'd honestly never heard that name before. I'd worked as a crime reporter for several years in Louisiana, in New Orleans specifically, but no one had ever mentioned that name to me. And that was partly because the Dixie Mafia now is non-existent and has been really since the 80s.

But enough people mentioned it that we started bringing it up in conversation with law enforcement after we finished the first season of our show. And we were encouraged to kind of look deeper into them. I was curious. I was just kind of confused, really. And one way that we got a foothold in the story was that one of our sources, somebody that we talked to for the first season, gave us this book. And it was called The Dixie Mafia. Okay.

They had an old printed copy that actually it had been photocopied. And we read that. It was available, you know, for hundreds of dollars on eBay. It's long out of print. It was self-published, but it was just called The Dixie Mafia. And it was written by a woman named Darlene Kern. And it told the history of the Dixie Mafia in the 60s and 70s particularly. And

And we had no idea who this woman was. She seems to have passed away. And the back cover had like a picture of her holding a gun and posing kind of seductively on a bed. We're like, who is this woman? And we later heard that it might have been written by an attorney who used to work as a defense attorney for the members of the Dixie Mafia. We still didn't know, but it was totally fascinating.

One of the things that the book begins with is this heist, which happened in St. Tammany Parish, which was the same place that the first season of our show took place.

And I read about that heist and I can talk a little bit more about that, but it was totally fascinating. These Dixie Mafia members had converged on St. Tammany Parish on this little campground, kind of tucked away in the bayou, not far from Lake Pontchartrain, which is the lake that separates New Orleans from St. Tammany. They called it the North Shore. And they robbed this entire camp of gypsies.

people who worked for Mardi Gras, like carnival workers who traveled around and had this kind of campground.

And they went around and they locked up all these individual gypsy people with locks, chains around their necks. They stole all this money that these people had hidden in safes on the property. They killed a few people and then they split and they disappeared and no one ever caught them. From there, I was just totally fascinated. And the last point to make there, I think, is what we decided to do the second season of our show about them.

But only after we spoke to a DEA agent friend of ours who told us, well, this Dixie Mafia story is really sprawling. I mean, it's impossible to cover in a season of a podcast. They existed for decades. What you should do is focus on the murder of Vincent and Margaret Sherry in Biloxi, which happened to coincide with the murder of Margaret Kuhn. They both happened in 1987.

And he said, that's a story you could tell that has a lot of Dixie Mafia characters in it. It's probably the best known Dixie Mafia case.

And that you could probably do in a season of your show. And yeah, one of those main Dixie Mafia characters is someone who you end up talking to a lot, who's currently locked up, I think for life, right? In prison, Kirksey Nix. So I was fascinated by Kirksey because he just sounds... I mean, he's kind of like the son of privilege, right? Like his parents are well-connected. He appears to be incredibly smart, but he's also like a through and through outlaw who does some pretty brutal stuff. So can you kind of get into...

you know, Kirksey, both the beginning of his story and kind of how you guys get connected? Yeah, definitely. So it's funny, while I hadn't heard of the Dixie Mafia before, I had heard the name Kirksey Nix because that name is pretty famous in the South, especially Louisiana. So people had mentioned that name to me before. I didn't understand that he was actually connected to the Dixie Mafia.

Really interesting backstory from Oklahoma, born into this really powerful Oklahoma family. His dad was a very famous, prominent defense attorney and later a judge. I think he's considered like one of the most famous defense attorneys in Oklahoma history or something. His mother was also this pioneering lawyer.

which is very rare for someone of her era. And yet Kirksey was kind of the black sheep. He rebelled from his teenage years. He was pulling these small time cons and that led to bigger cons and ultimately criminal acts. He got arrested for the first time when he was probably 16 or 17. And

He just kind of found his way into the Southern criminal underworld, started spending time in Biloxi, which by the way, was a place I'd asked him when we later got connected

How did you wind up in Biloxi? Like, what was the draw there? And he'd actually spent time at this Air Force base where he'd done some computer repair before going back to his life of crime. Getting in touch with Kirksey wasn't easy. I was really interested in speaking with him, but it took a long time. I sent him a number of letters to him in prison. He's at this prison in Oklahoma serving multiple life sentences. He had previously been at Angola prison.

which is the Louisiana State Penitentiary in Louisiana. We wound up connecting with a friend of his on the outside, this guy who now also lives in Louisiana, who'd been a cellmate of his and a friend of his at Angola. And he spent, you know, a couple hours kind of quizzing me and testing me and researching me online, asking me questions until I finally kind of gained his trust and

And then he put me in touch with Kirksey and we wound up talking on the phone for, you know, it seemed like a month straight. He would call me in 15 minute intervals from his federal prison. And the life story that he unfolded for me was just really incredible. He's probably 80, 81 years old now, his early 80s. He's frail. He's not in good health.

but his brain is still really, really there. He could remember things from 50 years ago and talk to you about them in detail. He remembers names, no problem, from 50, 60 years ago. Incredibly smart. And he was considered the leader of the Dixie Mafia back then. That's what people would say and the reporters would say in the newspaper. He was always identified as the leader or the godfather of the Dixie Mafia.

And at least in my initial conversations, he was one of the people that would say, yeah, the Dixie Mafia is a myth, man. You know, like I was never the leader of anything. He was locked up by the by by age 20, 28. He was like, that's I wasn't a godfather. It was just a guy who who knew these dudes from, you know, poker games and and like little cons that they would run in small towns throughout the southeast. Yeah.

So he really rejected that idea. Of course, that was like beneficial to him because he never thought he should have been connected to the Dixie Mafia and the things that they did. So he was a bit self-interested. But the point is extremely bright person. And it was really sad to think that someone with such an incredible mind had spent the last 50 years of his life in prison. Yeah. And I want to get to those the Vincent Margaret Sherry murders, too, because those are crazy.

But I mean, Kirksey was doing murders before that, right? We have another crazy one, the Sheriff Buford murder or his wife got murdered, right? This sheriff that was trying to...

kind of bring down various organized crime elements in the South and they tried to kill him a bunch of times. Yeah. So if you don't mind, I'll talk about the one crime that he was actually convicted of and then I can tell you about his alleged role in the Buford Pusser story if that works. So basically, the reason he wound up in prison was for a crime that he committed in 1971. He had been living in

Louisiana at the time. I think he was living in New Orleans, not far from where I actually lived back then. He was involved in a botch home invasion right near City Park in New Orleans.

He and some of his friends broke into the home of a grocery store owner, a guy named Frank Corso. Frank came running down the hall with a gun after his wife screamed. Kirksey shot him and Kirksey got shot in the process. He took a bullet to his abdomen. He later fled to Dallas and that's where he was arrested.

People would tell us that Kirksey, you know, would always try to talk his way out of everything and usually succeeded. But he was not able to do that this time. His defense attorney even convinced the doctor that was treating Kirksey for his bullet wound not to remove the bullet, presumably because that would connect him directly to Frank Corso and his gun. So I think he still has that bullet inside his stomach somewhere. But he was found guilty of murder for that and sentenced to life.

Angola. You know, it was also rumored during his heyday, which really lasted from the mid to late 60s because he was still just a young kid. He was rumored to have played a role in the death of Pauline Pusser, who was the wife of the famous Tennessee Sheriff Buford Pusser. And this happened in 1967. Daredevil is born again on Disney+. My name is Matthew Murdoch. I'm a lawyer.

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This is a super famous case, by the way. It's something we actually did an episode about in our fourth season just recently. So it's kind of fresh in my mind. There were several movies made about this, the Walking Tall movies. There were three in the 70s and early 80s, I think.

There was also a remake starring The Rock in 2004 where he plays a version of Buford, a kind of contemporary version of Buford. But the short story there is that Buford claimed that a group of gangsters ambushed him and his wife as they were driving to a crime scene early in the morning in 1967. I think it was August 12th, 1967. Yeah.

And they shot his wife twice in the head, killing her. She was in the passenger seat. And he claims that they shot him once in the face and blew his jaw away. And there are these famous pictures online of Buford with his face sewn up. And that became the basis for these movies. It became the basis for this bestselling book. Buford was considered this American hero, right?

And he allegedly, because there's no real proof that this actually happened, but he allegedly went on a kind of revenge spree and is believed to have killed some of the people who were involved in that ambush, some of whom were supposed to be close to Kirksey Nick's.

And the legend is that the only reason he didn't kill Kirksey is because by then Kirksey was locked up for the Frank Corso murder. Naturally, Kirksey claimed that he had nothing to do with that murder. He had nothing to do with the ambush. He said he wasn't even in town, which on the face of it is like, OK, that's convenient. He was connected to by law enforcement, you know, a dozen other murders around the country.

There's no proof that he committed those, but he was thought to have been connected to them. What's transpired just in the last few years is that it is very possible that Buford made that story up and that he may have killed

his wife Pauline due to some kind of domestic dispute that was going on at the time and that he may have even to make it appear like an ambush something that someone like Kirksey Nix and his group would have been involved in he may have shot himself in the face this is the first time I'm hearing of this it's really interesting there was a group called just to elaborate briefly

There was a group called the State Line Mob that was similar in nature to the Dixie Mafia. They were this crew that you might have heard about that operate on the state line between Tennessee and Mississippi, where there were gambling dens and these roadhouses and things like that. And Sheriff Pusser, when he took office, kind of declared a war on the State Line Mob. And one of the leaders of the State Line Mob was a guy named Toehead White.

He and Kirksey were rumored to have been friends back then. And so Toehead White didn't like Buford shutting down his gambling operations and blowing up his moonshine stills in the woods out there in McNary County, Tennessee on the state line. So it was believed, and Buford later would claim that Toehead and the state line mob were behind the ambush.

and that Kirksey was, you know, the driver or in somehow connected, at least he was in the car and might've been one of the people who shot Pauline. But there's no evidence that that was true. Wow. I'm actually, uh,

shocked right now. That's fascinating. I had no idea. Yeah. And just the last piece on that, you may have seen this, but probably not. I don't know if this made national news. It was in the papers in Tennessee. Pauline last year, about a year ago, was exhumed. Her body was exhumed from her grave in McNary County. And the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation had realized that an autopsy was never performed on Pauline.

Oh, damn. Yeah. Presumably, if you buy into the idea or the theory that Buford had a hand in his wife's death, that's presumably so that they wouldn't be able to connect it to one of Buford's guns. Or it wouldn't really compute with the story that he told about being ambushed at 4 o'clock in the morning by these guys who pulled up beside his car. For some reason, he's responding to a crime scene.

at four o'clock in the morning with his wife by his side. It's like, what kind of sheriff, what kind of self-respecting lawman would, would bring his wife to, to a domestic disturbance call like at four or five in the morning. There's a lot of mystery surrounding it, but yeah, her body was exhumed back in February. The results of the autopsy are supposed to come out anytime. So we'll see. Yeah. I mean, this is, if ever a movie needed a sequel, I think we're kind of, you know,

Jesus. I mean, that's an insane story. Yeah, it really is. And Kirksey, again, was adamant that he had nothing to do with it. He said that Pusser was a criminal, that he killed people. And there's some evidence to suggest that that is also true.

So, Kirksey has a point there. It seems pretty evident that he did kill Frank Corso. That seems almost beyond dispute. Whether he had a role in the death of Buford Pusser's wife, Pauline, very possible that that never happened. So, we've talked a bit about, you mentioned the Vincent Margaret Sherry murders.

That is a pretty crazy story. It's kind of the focal point of your podcast Gone South Season 2, kind of unraveling what really happened there. Can you tell us a little bit about those murders and how Kirksey was related and what was really going on there? Yeah, absolutely. It's a complicated story, but I think I can do it fairly efficiently. Yeah.

Basically, after our DEA agent friend told us about that story, I looked it up online. It's no secret. It's probably the most famous murder case in Mississippi history, or at least one of the. What was interesting is that while we were researching this case and considering doing an episode, or sorry, an entire season about it for our show, you know, it

There's a lot that goes into that trying to decide, okay, are we going to spend like six to eight episodes on a single story? It has to have a lot of twists and turns to sustain that amount of coverage. It's eight episodes, six hours of content. But it seemed like there was a lot there. And then out of the blue and coincidentally, this woman reaches out to me. Her name was Brandon Halott.

And she was Pete Halott's daughter. Pete Halott was the former mayor of Biloxi. And she tells us that her father, who is a central character in the Vince and Margaret Cherry story, and who was convicted of participating in the conspiracy that led to the death of Vince and Margaret Cherry.

She says that, yeah, my dad is innocent. He's not guilty. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison and served them. And he was out and living in Biloxi. And he was happy to talk to us about why he wasn't involved and in order to kind of clear his name. So I think the combination of our fascination with the Dixie Mafia, plus the fact that Pete Hallett or Hallot, it's pronounced different ways, was willing to talk, convinced us to do it.

Backing up, the basic idea of the Sherry murders is that in 1987, this couple, Vince and Margaret Sherry, were living in Biloxi. Vince Sherry was a defense attorney who worked with a lot of these and defended a lot of these underworld characters, including certain members of the Dixie Mafia, guys with really fun names like DJ Venus and Dewey D'Angelo and other people that spent a lot of time at Mike Gillich's clubs.

And Margaret, I think she was like a member of the city council, a very outspoken person. And she was always railing against the corruption in Biloxi, specifically against the corruption that she thought existed inside the office of the mayor at the time. So in 1987, right before the murders occurred, she was actually involved in an FBI investigation of the mayor, who they both believed was corrupt.

On the day in question, they're both shot in their home. I think this happens around, you know, late at night, 10 o'clock at night or so. No suspects. The Sherry children, including a woman named Lynn Sposito, who would wind up really getting involved in the case, are all...

completely appalled. They have no idea what happened. And they're really upset with the Biloxi Police Department and the sheriff's office because they feel as if they're complicit somehow, that they're involved in a cover-up, or they're just incompetent. And their concerns are kind of exacerbated as the days and weeks go by, and no one solves the case. What soon happens, and where the story really picks up

Steam is the involvement of the Fed, specifically the FBI, and specifically a guy named Keith Bell, who's a main character in our show, and by the grace of God, like, agreed to participate in our show. He was another guy who took, like...

days of convincing i had to travel to you know we have a podcast budget which is not big um but i had to travel down to biloxi to meet with him in person at a seafood restaurant where just like um kirksey's buddy he like grilled me for my colleague uh for for for an hour about our intentions and what we would do and even then he didn't agree until two weeks or months later

He was from the Gulfport, Mississippi, Biloxi area. And he grew up with a lot of these Dixie Mafia guys. And he knew a lot of them. And he'd been tracking them as an agent for years. And he had a storied career as an agent in California. But he'd returned back to the Gulf Coast primarily to fight against Dixie Mafia characters. He was actually one of the people who took down Leroy Hobbs in this incredible sting operation.

Anyway, he suspects that Mike Gillich and Kirksey Nix are involved somehow in the murder of Vince and Margaret Sherry. And like I said, it's a long story, much too detailed to go into here. But he winds up working closely with Lynn Sposito, who is somebody we didn't manage to get for our show, but is a fascinating character.

really dig into this case. Lynn is the source of a number of leads that she feeds to Keith. Keith uses, he tracks this case to Angola where Kirksey next is currently incarcerated at the time in 87, 88. And what he learns or what he suspects is that Kirksey was involved in what was

called a lonely heart scam. He was basically scamming gay men and lonely women on the outside, convincing them to send him money, convincing them that he was in love with them and that they should form a relationship and that he would get out soon and that he would come and live with them. And

remarkably, and he was doing all this over pay phones at Angola and people, the guards didn't really care. And in fact, I thought it was kind of funny that he was making all this money. He was making like, not just like a little bit of money. He was making hundreds of thousands, maybe, maybe millions of dollars with a network of guys at Angola who were all doing this and participating in this scam. And what,

Keith learns by developing sources inside the prison, former inmates who knew Kirksey, guys who were actually still there, who he had connections to from his days on the Gulf Coast.

He learns that Kirksey had amassed all this money in order to try to buy himself a pardon. That's another long story, but again, this is Louisiana in the 80s, and there was a governor at the time named Edwin Edwards who was famously corrupt and was known to have or alleged to have offered pardons to serious criminals serving life sentences, but

in exchange for bribes, you know, like a hundred grand would get you out of prison. 50 grand would get you a sentence reduction. This is Andrew from the scary mysteries podcast, where every single week we dive into insane and creepy true crime compilations on Mondays. And on Wednesdays, we have our twisted news episodes where we get you up to speed on the most terrifying and strange news stories currently happening all around the world.

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So Kirksey was trying to do that. He was just doing what you do. He was raising money to buy a pardon, allegedly. But according to these sources that Keith developed at Angola, some of his money, which he was funneling to people on the outside, acquaintances, ex-girlfriends, his wife, who lived in Biloxi at the time,

money that he'd been saving to buy that pardon had come up missing, approximately 100 grand. And Kirksey was super upset about this. And, you know, he was a very kind of like suave individual, very smart, very kind of slick. But when he got angry, he got really angry. And he had an explosive temper. And when he learned that $100,000 of his, you know, pardon funds had

had disappeared, potentially compromising his ability to get out of prison, he got angry. And Keith believed that he'd put a hit on Vince Sherry because he suspected that Vince, who was friends with Pete Hollett, Pete Hollatt in Biloxi, he was convinced that Vince had stolen his money.

And that's what happened. The story goes on from there, but yeah. Yeah, I mean, the mail fraud thing is crazy, and you guys go into details about it. But, you know, it just sounds so easy, kind of makes me want to do a bunch of mail fraud. But I don't think I'm ready for the consequences. But it's a good hustle for them. Very. And it's pretty wild, too, coming from these guys in Angola in the 80s. It's a nutty story. And that murder, too,

The people that are implicated, the sort of giant conspiracy. It's a wild one, man. But yeah, if you guys want to go into details about that here more, definitely go listen to season two of Gone South. Have you heard from Kirksey recently at all? Is he still kicking around? You know, the last time I spoke with him was last year. He was trying to get a compassionate release because he's in his early 80s and very frail. Like I said, he's got a bunch of different health conditions and

He still has family members in Oklahoma, but it hasn't happened yet. He's still locked up. He's still hoping to get out. We'll see. We'll see. Yeah, I heard from him last year and he recently put me in touch with a friend of his, a drug smuggling friend from Florida who I'm hoping to interview soon. So he's been a good source for me over the years. Yeah, sounds like it. I mean, he helped unravel this tale, but

But yeah, Jed Lipinski, thank you so much for joining us and kind of giving us the whole rundown on the Dixie Mob, Dixie Mafia. If you guys want to hear more, definitely go to Gone South. I think you guys are in season four now. There's tons of interesting stuff there, but the one specifically about Kirksey and the Dixie Mob is season two. I want to go back and listen to that one about the sheriff murder now because you just kind of blew my mind with everything going on there. Yeah. But yeah, interesting.

It's a crazy one. Yeah, for sure. Thanks for joining us. Until next week, guys, thanks for listening. ... ... ...

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