Series: Part 2 Of 4

FATHER-IN-LAW HANDED BARFIELD A SECOND CHANCE

It has long been rumored that prominent Republicans got Phillip Henry
Barfield out of prison early after his drug conviction in 1985.

But not even the FBI could prove that political favoritism led to Barfield
serving only 3 years of a 35-year sentence for selling drugs, said Landis
Lee, a Sampson County sheriff's captain.

The rumor went that Barfield's father-in-law, McCoy Sutton, asked
then-Sheriff Cranford Fann to help him get Barfield released.

Back then, Fann was an influential Republican who helped raise money for
party members. Among them was Samuel A. Wilson III, chairman of the state
Parole Commission and the Republican candidate for attorney general.

Wilson said Barfield was paroled because of crowded prisons, his good
prison record and recommendations from people in Newton Grove.

Late in the 1980s, the General Assembly approved a law that allowed
nonviolent prison inmates to be released early because of severe crowding.

It was a time when many North Carolina inmates served just a fraction of
their sentences.

Fann said at the time that he had concerns about Barfield's parole but
supported it anyway.

"This boy's probation officer had a lot of good things to say about him,"
Fann told The Fayetteville Times in 1988. "He was convinced that if anybody
in prison had made a change, it was probably (Barfield). If the people who
supervised him in prison think he earned the right, I'm not going to fight
them about that."

Prison records show that Barfield had been cited three times for violating
prison rules, twice for disobeying prison officials and once for possessing
unauthorized money. He was found guilty of all three infractions.

Prosecutor Dewey Hudson was furious at the prospect of Barfield's release.

A month before it happened, he wrote a letter to the Parole Commission.

"To allow this dangerous major drug dealer to be released back on the
streets of society after serving only three years of a 35-year prison
sentence makes a mockery of the judicial system and promotes disrespect for

our parole system," Hudson wrote.

Barfield got out anyway.

Fann, who had a stroke about four years ago, said he cannot remember if he
helped get Barfield paroled.

"I honestly can't remember if I did or didn't," he said.

But, Fann said, if he did help, it was on behalf of Sutton, Barfield's
former father-in-law.

Sutton had less trouble remembering.

"I went through a friend of mine" who could influence the parole board,
Sutton said, then acknowledged that the friend was Fann. "Boom, Phillip was

out just like that.

"Yeah, I helped him out of prison. He had his second chance."

Sutton believes Barfield would have gotten out early anyway because of the
prison crowding law. He said he and Fann just speeded the process a little.

Barfield Joins Family

Sutton has battled his own problems -- he says he once drank heavily on
weekends -- and won. Sutton said he has not touched alcohol in 29 years.
He's now an elderly man in ill health. But he still emphasizes his strong
belief in God, family values and Jesse Helms. And that's why, when Barfield
first came into his life, Sutton despised him.

Barfield was a troublemaker from a broken home. He was nothing like
Sutton's daughter, who got excellent grades and stood out as a majorette in
the high school band.

Despite the disparities, the two soon fell in love.

Without her father's blessing, Becky Sutton married Barfield on Sept. 27, 1980.

The marriage took place in Sutton's small ranch home, just off Newton
Grove's traffic circle.

Sutton said he looked at Barfield in his hallway that day and wished he
could stop the marriage. "I knew it wasn't right for my daughter to marry
that man," he said.

It didn't take long to know why. Barfield worked hard as a truck driver,
but he never seemed to pay the bills, Sutton said.

"He thought he had married a blank check when he married my daughter," he
said. "I did a lot to help, but not a free ride."

Shortly after Becky gave birth in 1981, the power company shut off their
electricity. The Barfields moved in with the Suttons.

Sutton said he knew his son-in-law had problems back then, but he also
began to like him. Despite his many faults, Sutton and others say, Barfield
is a charismatic man with a big heart.

He had also become part of Sutton's family and, as such, a man worth trying
to reform, Sutton believed.

Sutton said he sat Barfield and his daughter down at his kitchen table and
told them that they had to change their lives. He made notes on what he
wanted them to do.

Instead of following his wishes, they moved to a trailer park in Nash
County, near Middlesex. Sutton said he asked a social worker to keep a
close watch over his daughter and grandchild.

"I said, 'Come hell or high water, I'm not going to see my granddaughter go
down in this mess,'" he said.

The social worker called on Aug. 23, 1983, to say the Barfields were having
problems.

Sutton said he rushed to his daughter, finding her drinking beer heavily at
home. At some point, they went to a store together. She kept saying she
thought the car would blow up, her father said. When they returned to the
trailer, she thought it would explode, too. Sutton said he took his
daughter to a hospital in Wilson. The diagnosis: paranoid schizophrenia,
manic depression and substance abuse.

Becky Barfield was transferred to a private hospital. A couple of days
later, Sutton said, Phillip Barfield called her and threatened to take
their child away to his mother in Maryland.

Sutton said his daughter got so upset that doctors gave her Thorazine to
calm her. "She never came out of it," he said.

Today, his daughter cannot walk and can barely talk. She has been confined
to a nursing home since October 1998, when she suffered further complications.

"It's been an ongoing struggle for all of us, really," Sutton said. "We
seen the whole picture, and we couldn't do anything about it." Yet Sutton
does not blame Barfield for his daughter's problems. He said he doesn't
know for sure whether illegal drugs contributed to her illness, or whether
Barfield played a part in it. He said he does not believe Barfield pushed
drugs on his daughter. He thinks friends did. "I'm not the blame-game type
person," Sutton said. "She followed a plan of life that followed her to
destruction."

After her illness, Sutton hung a saying on a door: "Each person is
responsible for his own destiny."

A Second Chance

Meanwhile, Barfield moved back to Newton Grove, where he continued to sell
drugs until his arrest in 1985.

Three years later, Sutton was helping him out of prison. He believed that
Barfield deserved a second chance.

But there was another reason: Sutton wanted his grandchild to grow up with

at least one parent.

"I done what I had to do to protect my granddaughter," he said.

A year after Barfield's release, he was back in trouble. In November 1989,

Sheriff Fann filed a civil lawsuit seeking to close the Club 50 nightclub
as a public nuisance.

Court records show that Fann believed the club, on N.C. 50 in Newton Grove,
was illegally selling alcoholic beverages, and possibly cocaine and marijuana.

Barfield was among the nightclub operators named in the lawsuit. The club
was padlocked by court order in 1990.

More trouble came quickly. In 1991, a state trooper arrested Barfield on a
charge of drunken driving. On the way to being booked, Barfield opened the
patrol car's door at a stop sign, jumped out and ran into the woods.

The same night, Lee -- now a sheriff's captain -- stopped Barfield in a
stolen pickup and charged him with larceny and resisting arrest.

Barfield was paroled from prison eight months after re-entering the system,
records show. It didn't take him long to get back into the drug business.

Initially, Barfield bought marijuana from various sources and sold it
mainly in Clinton, according to a presentence investigative report.

In 1994, Barfield hooked up with Leo Hinson, who distributed cocaine and
other drugs on a large scale throughout the United States, the report said.

Barfield moved to a farm near South Boston, Va., that year to be closer to
Hinson, the report said. He returned to the Newton Grove area in 1996,
after his house in Virginia burned.

He eventually bought a new double-wide trailer and placed it on land off
Watershed Road. The land is about two miles north of Newton Grove near the
Johnston County line and about a mile from his father's home.

The home became Barfield's main place for selling drugs, and Jamie Hewett
became his biggest customer, court records say.

When Hewett got charged with drug offenses in 1998, a magistrate set bail
at $1 million.

But the bail was lowered to $50,000, and Hewett's father bailed him out of
jail two days after his arrest.

The bond reduction seemed extraordinary, and people started wondering
whether Hewett was cooperating with drug agents, who wanted to arrest his
supplier.

U.S. Attorney Christine Dean said Hewett never became a government snitch.

He was murdered in Brunswick County before he got the chance, Dean said.

But a county away, near Newton Grove, Barfield began to get nervous. Court

records show that he talked to his drug buyers, trying to reassure them
that Hewett's arrest posed no threat.

Two months after he got out of jail, Hewett sat in church, attending Easter
service with his family.

"He was really trying to change his life," his mother told the Wilmington
Morning Star.

Two days after that service, Hewett lay dying in his brother's arms, two
bullets from a high-powered rifle in his back.

Hewett's death didn't end Barfield's troubles. Instead, investigators
started following a drug trail that led them to the top of one of the
biggest drug organizations in the Southeast.

Tomorrow: Phillip Barfield's behavior becomes more erratic in the months
before his arrest.