#DIXIE MAFIA TV#
#DIXIE MAFIA FREE#

Sinclair is big, hawk-nosed, his eyes wary and hooded. Word that Sinclair had become a “snitch” shattered the magazine’s credibility and left its remaining staffers faced with skeptical readers and sources, the editorial added. In tipping the FBI to the scam, Sinclair decided that the investigation was more important than the prison magazine where he was co-editor, the Times editorial said. The state seal, applied when the governor signs, is gold in color. “Gold seal” is prison slang for the governor’s signature approving a Pardon Board recommendation that a sentence be reduced. His sin? He told the FBI that the then-chairman of the state Pardon Board, Howard Marsellus Jr., was selling the “gold seals” that every prisoner yearns for. His secret dealings with the FBI in 1986 still echo at the 18,000-acre, plantation-style prison-and triggered a disapproving New York Times editorial and a critical article in the Columbia Journalism Review. These even led him to become a friend of the FBI. Somewhere along the way, this four-time loser, convicted of murdering a store manager during a 1965 holdup in Baton Rouge, grew a shiny new set of ethics. My brother-in-law stood as Billy’s proxy.” “It took place on June 9, 1982, in the office of a courthouse clerk in Texas. “It was very unromantic,” his wife, Jodie Sinclair, recalls.

#DIXIE MAFIA TV#

The bride? A Baton Rouge TV reporter he met at the prison while she was covering a death penalty story. A notarized statement designated a proxy to stand in for him. In a style befitting a smart jailhouse lawyer, it was done by document. Since he figured that the warden would forbid such goings on at Angola, he didn’t ask. He was one of the most upwardly mobile lifers in custody.ĭetermined to get out of work in the field or the kitchen, he read his way to the top, evolving into a hotshot jailhouse lawyer and co-editor of the prize-winning prison magazine, the monthly Angolite.Īs a writer, his articles won the George Polk Award and the Silver Gavel from the American Bar Assn., no small potatoes in the news business.

In the years between his two abortive escape attempts, he managed quite a career.

#DIXIE MAFIA FREE#

So here Sinclair stands today at age 45, 6-foot-2 in his favorite pointy-toed cowboy boots, too lucky to perish in the copper clasp of “Old Smokey,” too quick for the Dixie Mafia, too felonious to be a free man. It should not be confused with more-sophisticated organized crime syndicates.

The Dixie Mafia is described by the Louisiana State Police as a loosely connected group of traveling thugs who are prone to violence and operate primarily in the Southeast.

Dixie mafia