Yesterday I was thinking wistfully about my younger days when I was stationed on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I got to thinking particularly about this old guy I knew who owned a couple of bars my friends and I would frequent. This old fellow is surely dead by now, or so I’d think as this was 30-something years ago and at least he seemed to be somewhat long in the tooth, but not wanting to take chances I will just call him “Ben.”
Ben was by all accounts a bookie. This was back before the Mississippi Sound was invaded by casinos. I say he was a bookie. I had no proof back then, just hearsay and circumstantial evidence. The latter came from my watching these shady-looking guys walking in and out of Ben’s office at all hours with racing forms in their hands.
One time I remember Ben holding forth at the bar. I think one of his bartenders was off. He bragged to a bunch of us how the FBI had tried but failed to catch him although he didn’t elaborate. It just so happens that yesterday while thinking about this guy I came across some kind of legal case that involved him. The best I can tell it was some kind of forfeiture suit the FBI had against Ben in the early 1970s in which they had seized some kind of machines including those for pinball that had allegedly been used for gambling. The best I could tell through the legal-speak, the feds lost. I don’t know if that was what Ben was talking about, but this unexpected find certainly seemed to provide some ammunition for his bluster.
Ben would not be the last outlaw I knew. I shared a room once in a barracks there in Mississippi with a guy who got busted for going out on an armed robbery spree one night with one of his friends. There were others I knew who took a walk on the criminal side.
For certain outlaws, such as Ben and unlike my weirdo roommate, it’s kind of easy to have an affinity. You grew up reading stories like those about Robin Hood, you know, the benevolent robber-type. Although unless you are anti-social, one doesn’t normally think much of the outlaws who do enormous amounts of harm such as Bernie Madoff or violent creeps such as Charlie Manson. There are exceptions though.
In elementary school one of my friends and I used to play “Bonnie and Clyde.” I don’t think either one of us were actually Bonnie. I think had we thought it out a little better we would have actually been playing “Clyde and Texas Ranger Frank Hamer.”
It took awhile to learn that Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were also murderous, sociopathic creeps although it was slow in coming to me. This was because where I grew up, in Southeast Texas, some of the older folks still saw Bonnie and Clyde somewhat in terms of Depression-era Robin Hoods. Perhaps they were to some extent but the were still cold-blooded killers and bank robbers.
I suppose many members of society at large have a type of admiration for certain crooks, especially those that show some sort of skill and intelligence. What with the entertainment value that “dumb criminal” media have presented in recent years, it seems the smart ones seem even less and less among us these days.
I’ve thought long and hard about crime and punishment. I figure that morality has played some part in keeping me on the straight and narrow, and out of the slammer. But too I would have to say that fear of imprisonment has likewise done its share to deter me from a life of crime.
My title is really more a play on words of the old Willie Nelson song (It’s always about Willie, for me, isn”t it?) “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys.” But at least in some circumstances there is a little fire popping through the smoke.
