The Narcotics Racket

Chapter VII-The Narcotics Racket
THE NEEDLE, THE POWDER, AND THE PILL— these were the hellish trio that broke scores of lives in Phenix City where a disregard for law was normal, murder was permissible and the quick dollar was the goal. How those dollars came, and who suffered to supply them, was of no concern to the ruthless mobsters who ruled the city with an iron fist for more than twenty years.

Narcotics, like a fire in the blood, consume the health, the self-respect, the morals and the finances of the victim. Finally the very life of the unfortunate person so enslaved is burned away.

Dope and "goof balls*' swept over Phenix like a raging forest fire in the late thirties and early forties, leaving in the wake more sorrow and devastation than can be imagined by those who have not viewed the results. Those results can be seen today in the pallid faces, the trembling hands, the bleary eyes and the emaciated bodies of the human wrecks who still can be found in nearly ail sections of the city.

Surprisingly enough, there appeared to be little marijuana sold or consumed in Phenix City. Only one of the local sports is known to have thrown an occasional "pad," as a marijuana party is known. Occasional shipments of heroin were known to have come into the city, once considered by narcotics agents among the hottest in the nation. Most of the narcotics used in Phenix City were in the form of tablets of morphine or dialudid. The latter is a powerful narcotic, even more potent than morphine or heroin.

There is no type of investigation in the kingdom of crime that approaches in difficulty that of making a narcotics case stick. Those who push the drug are cagy, suspicious and ever alert for the informer or the double cross. To convict under federal narcotics laws it is usually necessary that a purchase be made with marked money and the money recovered from the pusher, or that narcotics be found in the possession of the inspect.

Few narcotics cases were made during the vice cleanup, though a considerable amount of narcotics was seized or purchased.

On the heels of the local drive against vice and crime, came three agents of Federal Bureau of Narcotics. They were assigned directly from the narcotics bureau in Washington, D, C., following the appearance of a newspaper article. The story was a true account of how one popular high school girl from a prominent Phenix City family became addicted to dope and how it wrecked her own life and those of her father and mother.

The story was of a beautiful, vivacious high school girl, popular and talented as a dancer. In some manner, during her last year of high school in Phenix City, she started taking narcotics.

The girt was the only child of well-to-do parents. It was several months before the parents began to suspect the real truth of why their daughter's grades suddenly had gone down, and her usually sunny nature had been replaced by spells of crying, fits of temper and an air of secretiveness.

The father learned the dreaded truth when he found morphine in his daughter's room. He finally induced her to talk. She said she bad been taking the drug for several months, but would not give the name of her supplier.

The girl was sent away to a sanitarium for treatment, and spent several months there. After her return home she went back on the needle, and her father worked with narcotics agents to find how she was obtaining the drugs. The investigation was successful, and both the girl and her male supplier were convicted in the U. S. District Court at Opelika, Alabama, in 1944. She drew a sentence and was sent to a government hospital where addicts are treated. She escaped and her family found her in New York, living with a group of drug addicts.

By now her youth and striking beauty were beginning to fade, and her dancing career was on the downgrade. The family spent thousands of dollars trying to help their only child. The parents later died— broke and broken-hearted. Today the girl, now a mere shell of her former self, is still seeking to satisfy her craving for dope in the gutters of a West Coast city.

That story was selected merely as an example of the results of dope traffic in the neon jungles that hid the drab dives of the city. Phenix City in the early forties had been top on the priority list of the narcotics agents who worked tirelessly to remove the threat from the vicinity of important military bases. They had succeeded to some degree, and at the time of the cleanup, the narcotics traffic was not of the great proportions in Phenix that it once had been. That was perhaps the only type of vice or crime that was on the wane before the Patterson murder built a fire under the rackets in the river town.

No one could deny, however, that dope was stilt a big problem and that addicts were able to obtain their supply. General Hanna ordered the formation of a special narcotics squad of Guardsmen and that squad began a campaign to cut off the supply. The dope sleuths first made out a list of known addicts. Some of these they picked up for questioning, in an effort to discover the sources of supply.

Working through an undercover agent, a former B-girl, the squad was able to obtain barbiturates almost at will, even in the midst of the clean-up drive. The girl also was able to obtain other narcotics, but from medical sources where it was most difficult to make a case that would stand up. The investigators discovered that most of the narcotics were being obtained through two certain doctors, while barbiturates could be purchased like aspirin.

The addicts themselves, fearful of cutting off their supply source, refused to talk. While some of them were being questioned, narcotics were administered to them in jail on the order of the jail physician, who said that their lives would be endangered by an abrupt termination of the drug.

One such addict was Gambler George T. Davis, Sr., a co-owner with sinister C. O. (Head) Revel of the Bridge Grocery. Davis had been on the needle for years and freely admitted that he required three grains of morphine daily. Davis was among the first of the "old guard" of gambling to be jailed, and was held for several weeks because of the amount of the bond set against him in fifty-four gambling and lottery cases.

Once when Davis was not given the needle for several hours, he became violently ill and was rushed to Cobb Memorial Hospital, where doctors quickly administered morphine. Investigators learned that Davis received his morphine in lots of four hundred tablets at a time from an out-of-state source. He, like several others in Phenix City, could get narcotics on prescription if need be, because they had been addicted so long that doctors considered the drug necessary to keep them alive. When off the dope for a few hours, he was a pathetic sight, but within a few minutes after a shot in the hip he became his usual arrogant self.

A woman who operated one of the more notorious joints off the beaten path in Phenix, was "hooked" on dialudid and investigators said she consumed up to five grains daily to satisfy the habit.

While the older addicts were tragic figures, the younger members of the "jolting" fraternity were even more pathetic. During the past few years a number of the younger set had died directly from the effects of an overdose of narcotics, or as an indirect result of using drugs. Some had died at their own hands, unable to face life, enrolled in the vicious drug habit.

The older residents of the city could recall those names. They could rattle off the names of others, young and old, who had gone to the sanitarium at Milledgeville, Georgia, or to the hospital operated by the government at Lexington, Kentucky, to kick the drug habit. A few of them did succeed, but many returned to Phenix to take up within a few weeks or months where they had left off.

A corporal from Fort Benning was investigated by CID men who suspected him of selling narcotics. He admitted that he had bought dope from a man at the Oyster Bar, downstairs under the Riverside Cafe. The password for getting the stuff, he said was "I want to pick up some jive."

A private from Fort Sam Houston, Texas, turned himself in, AWOL on April 10, 1953, and surrendered a bottle containing six tablets which resembled amphetamine. He said he had bought and used dope in Phenix City. He made purchases, he told investigators, at both Bernie's Cafe and the Ritz Cafe for $2.50 per capsule. He also told investigators that he had purchased not only heroin but draft classification and registration cards, and a Social Security card, from a man known to him only as "Eddie," who worked for a Columbus taxicab company.

During the days in Phenix when a "jolt" could be obtained almost as easily as purchasing a package of cigarettes, the rich market was supplied in part by a man who had escaped the current cleanup because he had made his fortune and got out of the rackets and into a legitimate business. While he was serving as the major channel for the drug traffic, he had his supplies flown in from Mobile and Savannah, His record and his former activities are well known to many residents of Phenix City, and he stands today as the apparent exception to the rule that crime does not pay.

It has paid him handsomely, and he has not yet been required to reap the harvest from the dragon's teeth he sowed.

After several weeks of investigation, members of the narcotics squad of the Guard stated publicly that they were faced with a nearly impossible situation. Certain doctors, they said, were giving prescriptions for narcotics and barbiturates to addicts, and the investigators were helpless to stop the semi-legal traffic. They called upon the doctors and druggists to cooperate in drying up the source of possible new addiction.

Shortly thereafter an elderly doctor, R. C. Prather, was questioned by Guardsmen when a former female associate of his was found shot to death. In the doctor's coat pockets they found almost a pint of barbiturate tablets and capsules loose. He explained that he kept them handy to give to patients who needed them.

While no local case has been made against any physician in Phenix City, the federal government did assess an income tax lien of $106,000 against Dr. Prather. The source of the Income, which the government claims the doctor did not report, has not been disclosed and the case has not come to trial at this writing.

On one occasion. National Guardsmen traced a supply of narcotics to the home of a farmer outside Phenix City. When questioned, the farmer showed the effects of narcotics, and finally led the investigators to a pig pen where a supply of the drugs, both morphine and heroin, was concealed in an old automobile tire.

Tile drug was seized and the man arrested. The supplier, however, had slipped through their fingers.