CRUSADING JOURNALISTS DEFEAT CORRUPT SHERIFF

Editor and wife risk much in small town

LINDEN, Ala. -- In a tiny Alabama town where people like to recall the
legacies of long-dead hunting dogs, and where the courthouse janitor has to
stop twice in a crosswalk to say hello to people who call him by name, a
weekly newspaper editor and his ace reporter, his wife, picked a fight with
a corrupt county sheriff's department.

The editor, Goodloe Sutton, and his wife, Jean, knew all along it would
cost them as they uncovered everything from extortion to petty thefts to
drug peddling, because telling the truth in a town of 2,500 can be harder
than in a big city.

Advertisers who were political allies of Sheriff Roger Davis of Marengo
County stopped their advertisements. Readers, who stood by the powerful,
popular sheriff even as proof of corruption spread across the front page,
canceled subscriptions. Threats came with the mail.

``You are brave people, with pens in your pocket, but I wonder how brave
you will be when someone catches you in a place where there are no
witnesses,'' wrote an anonymous supporter of the sheriff's department.
``Remember, your day will come.''

Media darlings

The Suttons and their newspaper, the Democrat Reporter, with a circulation
down to 6,000, finally won. The sheriff and two top deputies went to prison
last year for a variety of crimes that the newspaper had chronicled over
the last several years. Since then, reporters from around the United States
have traveled to this hamlet in southwestern Alabama to ask the Suttons if
they had ever feared for their lives.

Sitting in the offices of the newspaper his father bought in 1917, Sutton
said he probably should have feared for the safety of his wife and two
sons. But he had a feeling that everything would be fine, he said, a sense
of confidence that he never fully understood until the day last December
when the sheriff went to prison on extortion and bribery charges, the day
he knew the ordeal was finally over.

``I was at home, and I'd just sat down with a crossword puzzle and a drink
when the phone rang,'' Sutton said. ``It was an elderly man, and he told me
that he knew me and my family were in danger. `But every night,' he told
me, `I'd get down on my knees and pray for you and your family, for your
safety.' ''

``I think my own prayers kind of just ricocheted off the ceiling,'' Sutton
said, smiling. ``But all the years I had felt there was a shield around us,
protecting us.''

That caller ``was the epitome of the people who stood behind us all those
years,'' he said. ``I'd stand in the middle of the railroad track and fight
a freight train for those people.''

The answer might not make sense to anyone but Goodloe Sutton, a man in his
late 40s who is harangued by friends and enemies alike when he strolls in
his black penny loafers through the center of town. But that is his story,
and he is sticking to it.

``Some people will hate me till I die, and some of them will mellow out in
time,'' Sutton said. ``But it really doesn't matter. I couldn't just sit
back and let it happen.''

Davis was elected sheriff in 1991. He was a retired Alabama state trooper
with connections in the Marengo County courthouse and in the state
Legislature, along with friends and relatives in businesses in Linden, the
county seat, and nearby Demopolis, the county's largest town, with 7,500
people.

Even now, as he and two of his deputies, about a quarter of his staff, sit
in prison, many people in Linden who support the Suttons will not do so
publicly, out of fear of reprisals from friends and relatives of the former
officials.

Friendships put at risk

Family and friendships, Jean Sutton said, are often stronger than the truth
in a small town.

``But we put people in the newspaper when they do something `unusual,' ''
she said. (Her husband says she did the real work in the long
investigations that changed the face of law enforcement in Marengo County.)
``Friends, everybody.''

There was a lot of unusual activity in the Marengo County Sheriff's Department.

At first, it seemed no more ominous than shady manipulation of county money
and a pilfered pickup truck. In the early 1990s the Suttons, who had
attended the University of Southern Mississippi together, gathering
information from friends and contacts in the courthouse and community,
wrote that the sheriff had used department money to buy a truck for his
daughter. Sutton ran the article on the front page.

The sheriff said it was a bunch of lies, but he repaid the money.

Later, the Democrat Reporter discovered that the sheriff had been cashing
checks that had been intended for the county's mental-health center. Davis
could not deny it, because Sutton published copies of the checks on the
front page.

The newspaper also ran a copy of the department's ledger on its front page,
exposing irregularities that forced the sheriff to repay $5,000.

Sheriff retaliates

There were whispers that corruption in the department went deeper still,
that two deputies were protecting drug dealers. The Suttons ultimately
wrote of that, too.

The sheriff responded, Sutton said, by spreading rumors that the editor was
a drunkard, that his wife was having affairs and that one of his sons was
taking drugs. They were all routinely pulled over by deputies, who once
threatened to plant drugs in their house if they did not stop printing
articles about the department, Sutton said.

Meanwhile, Sutton wrote letters to the state ethics commission and to law
enforcement officials, hoping for results. For years, nothing happened.

But his newspaper's articles had drawn attention, in the simplest of ways.
E.T. Rolison, an assistant U.S. attorney in Mobile, learned of them from
his mother.

``My mother and father still live in Choctaw County,'' which borders
Marengo, Rolison said. ``I was up there years ago, and my mother said:
`Have you read the Democrat Reporter? Goodloe Sutton's making a case
against the sheriff in Marengo County.' ''

The articles, with the evidence right there on the front page, were more
than enough to begin an undercover investigation, Rolison said. But as
investigators built their case, they could not tell the Suttons.

``He was butting his head against the wall, thinking that nothing was going
on with it,'' Rolison said of Sutton. ``He was taking all this heat, and
really had no one to turn to.''

Finally, in May 1997, investigators had enough information to make arrests.
Deputies Wilmer ``Sonny'' Breckenridge, the county's chief drug-enforcement
officer, and Robert Pickens were arrested with 68 other people in a drug
raid in neighboring Perry County.

Prison terms

Pickens pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against Breckenridge in
exchange for a lighter sentence. Breckenridge was sentenced to life in
federal prison after a trial.

Davis, who was arrested later, pleaded guilty late last year to extortion
and was sentenced to 27 years. In December, he got an additional 27-month
sentence when he pleaded guilty to soliciting a bribe and failing to pay
state income taxes.

``Never get in an argument with a man who buys his ink by the barrel,''
Rolison said.

Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)