Bad Lies: Chapter Five
FBI Special Agent Alan McCready knew better than to expect clean narratives in a dirty business. Crime never followed the script. There was always randomness breaking in—loose threads unraveled in unexpected ways, and one small misstep could erase months of earnest work. His latest case, tracking organized crime in Louisiana, was proving no different. The so-called Dixie Mafia had operated under the radar for years, but a spike in high-end burglaries in Shreveport was setting off alarm bells.
The organized crime angle fell under his purview, but McCready knew the term “organized” was a stretch. Unlike the highly structured Italian or Irish mobs, the Dixie Mafia was a loose confederation of opportunists—chaotic, adaptable, dangerous. They had no formal hierarchy, no bosses or underbosses. They worked together when it suited them, and stabbed each other in the back just as easily. This wasn’t a syndicate of rules and traditions; it was a pack of wolves, each one out for itself.
McCready had seen it all before—corruption and crime deeply embedded in the Southeast. The Dixie Mafia’s unpredictability made them hard to catch, but their lawlessness also made them sloppy. Unlike the traditional mob families, they operated without a code, making them ruthless yet careless. No one was untouchable in their world. Betrayal and revenge were just part of doing business.
There was a brutal ingenuity to some of their schemes. More than twenty years earlier, a hustler from Fort Smith, Arkansas, named Kirksey Nix had orchestrated a “lonely hearts” scam from inside Angola prison. The con lured vulnerable closeted men into sending thousands of dollars under the pretense of romance. Nix, using bribed guards and prison phones, preyed on hundreds of victims—professors, mail carriers, politicians—convincing them that love would set them free, if only they sent a bit more cash. Nix believed the money could buy his way out of prison. The scam raked in hundreds of thousands of dollars until a critical misstep by his lawyer, Pete Halat, derailed everything.
Halat, who would later become the mayor of Biloxi, had siphoned off the money meant for Nix. When it came time to hand it over, Halat claimed his former law partner Vincent Sherry—a sitting state circuit judge—had taken it. Whether that was true didn’t matter. The Dixie Mafia ordered a hit on Sherry, and on a night in 1987, both Sherry and his wife were murdered in their home. It wasn’t just a crime. It was a message. When you crossed the wrong people, this was the price.
