A Real True-crime Book

Want to read a real true-crime book? 

Try A Hanging in Nacogdoches, by Gary Borders. Published by University of Texas Press.

This true-crime book actually has endnotes, a bibliography, and a good index. 

Okay, it's a somewhat scholarly true-crime book, but very readable and accessible, an account that provides the actual context of the event, which, to me, makes it really, really true.

The crime and punishment of Jim Buchanan, the central villain, do not exist in a vacuum, isolated from the social, political, and economic realities of the time. Unlike some other books for sale these days, accuracy and attention to detail appear on every page.

Obviously, lynching is a main topic of the book. Interestingly, Borders mentions how much vigilante mob violence, including burnings - also known as barbecues! - and lynchings, were assisted by the recent installation of the telephone. Hard not to think of today's Social Media when reading that.

Oh yeah, the author's day job? A journalist - editor and publisher of the Daily Sentinel of Nacogdoches TX.

Without Fear of Arrest

The most important fact about lynching was not the number of blacks who were killed but the ability of whites to kill and torture with impunity. Often composed of respectable citizens and defended by politicians and newspaper editors, lynch mobs acted without fear of arrest or punishment.

 - Adam Fairclough
Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890-2000 

Gary Nickerson: Judge or Cop?

It was winter, but I can’t recall the exact year. Around 1972-74.

I was commuting between Chatham and Boston, two nights a week. 

One evening, I boarded a bus in Boston for its return run to the terminal in Hyannis, where I had parked my car.

My habit, when getting back to Hyannis, was to drive up Main Street to the 24-hour Dunkin Donuts in the West End before heading back to Chatham.

This one night, as I, a young white guy, walked through the terminal’s lobby after having exited the bus in Hyannis, I overheard two young black passengers ask a middle-aged, black passenger for a ride to Dunkin’ Donuts. The gentleman declined their request.

I originally intended to keep on walking toward my car, but my conscience called me racist. I told the two young black guys that I was going to DD anyway, so hop in.

Little did I realize that police routinely kept an eye on the bus terminal from their station diagonally across the street.  

About half way to DD, three police cars suddenly surrounded us. In seconds, police hauled the two black guys out of the front seat.

Then a Barnstable officer, just before I was ordered out of the car, charged across the front seat from the passenger side. He stuck his hand in the crevice between the back of the seat and the bench. He immediately pulled out what he claimed to have found there – 20 small packets of heroin.

I do not now recall whether the passenger secreted the heroin there or not. Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. But I do know that I was entirely surprised to see the cop find something like that so quickly.

All three of us were shortly thereafter arrested for possession of heroin with intent to distribute.

Immediately after my arrest and over the course of the next few days, several police officers who knew me well went to bat for me. They phoned the arresting officer, Manny Jason, and tried to convince him that I could never possibly be connected with these two black guys and certainly not with any heroin.

Their pleas and the pleas of others who knew me well fell on deaf ears. Barnstable police insisted that I was guilty.

I got a lawyer, Mitchell Benjoya.

Mitch told me the deal. Barnstable police would sever the case: the two blacks in one trial, with me as a witness against them, followed by me alone in a second trial.

If I testified in the first trial that I had seen the black guy hide the heroin in the seat crevice and the cop remove it, then they would drop the charge against me in the second trial.

It was totally clear. The police knew from the start that I had zero association with these guys, never saw them - or any heroin - before in my life. But the cops wanted my testimony in order to secure a conviction. In fact, they wanted it so badly that they threatened me with two and a half years in prison if I didn’t cooperate. 

I would not, said the police, go to jail for possession of heroin with intent to distribute if I, the prosecution’s only civilian witness, backed up their story of finding drugs that supposedly belonged to these black guys.

This “offer” came from a Barnstable police sergeant, whose name, I believe, was Gary Nickerson.

So I testified in the first trial according to plan, and the prosecution requested the charge against me dropped at the beginning of the second trial.

But the result was the same as the headlines. The arrest made the front page of the local paper; my exoneration was buried deep within the back pages weeks later. Ditto for the general public. They didn't know the details and didn't want to know them. Arrest was all that mattered. Today, sociologists call it an example of labeling theory.

Some things never change. It's a pattern I have seen repeated in my own life and in the lives of many others, some of them victims of a small-town grudge match that may have begun in high school or even in the family home decades earlier.

The arrest is the juicy part, the one that captivates the public's mind, but the details themselves are never known, no matter how exculpatory. Explaining these things to a lynch mob, including today's online version of one, is not even remotely possible. Social media, sadly enough, is composed too frequently of gangs of keyboard warriors keen for a taste of frontier justice. To them details are the devil.

I could be wrong, but I think the former Sgt. Gary Nickerson is now Judge Gary Nickerson, a superior court judge in Barnstable County. But who knows, maybe there are two Gary Nickersons, not an unusual name on the Cape.

Assuming the two Gary Nickersons are the same person – and maybe they’re not - then it’s not hard to believe that Judge Nickerson routinely approves the behavior that he himself practiced years earlier as a police officer.

Neither is it hard, therefore, to believe that the courts are merely rubber stamps for the continuing prejudices of law enforcement - and their vigilante proxies in today's world of Social Media. 

Byron Hefner and Stan Rosenberg, Massachusetts State Senate President

If it makes you feel any better, call me a crazy, far-right whacko, I don't care.

Fact is, the President of the Massachusetts Senate, Stan Rosenberg, despite the justly celebrated diversity of his own district, is becoming a sitting duck politically.

I have been trying to communicate with Rosenberg's office (he is my state senator) about the MassHealth CarePlus mess, so I Googled him a little.

Appears he had a domestic mess of his own when his boyfriend, Byron Hefner, bragged a little too loudly about his own legislative influence on the Baystate.

Influence, indeed. Rosenberg is about 65 and Hefner is about 27.

Okay, okay, true enough. Age really shouldn't matter. I agree even. A little. In the rare exception. But in a lot - and I mean a lot - of people's minds, a big age difference does matter.

If the difference were, say, ten years, no big deal. Maybe even twenty. But almost forty? That's not love. You don't share enough of the truly important things, the inner milestones so to speak, in life in order to have a constructive relationship with someone born when you were already on the doorstep of forty. You have very little of the most important things in life in common, including the kind of wisdom that comes exclusively with age.

C'mon, Rosenberg, this is not a privacy issue. And it's definitely not a gay issue. It's an issue of good judgment, common sense, and feeling comfortable about who you really are, where you’ve come from, and where you’re headed.

Dating, then marrying, someone forty years younger, while it is obviously not totally the worst thing in the world, and while it's certainly not illegal (nor should it ever be), is still more or less wrong. It speaks more than anything of insecurity, not merely the kind of insecurity unique to a lopsided marriage, but the broad conduct and judgment of a high ranking public official. Like Rosenberg.

Already, months ago, when they were still only boyfriends, Rosenberg had to tell Hefner to stop bragging about his, Hefner's, influence on Massachusetts politics.

But that's not even the worst. The worst is when they attend public events together and the age difference is so great and obvious to everyone else that it simply says - really, really loudly in its own elephant-in-the-room voice - that you are too cowardly to date and marry someone you can respect because they have more or less traveled if not exactly the same life road as you, but the same life time, the same life span, the same world, have had many of the same inner life experiences, more or less, as you.

For whatever reason, life experiences that are dependent almost entirely on one's age are maybe the biggest factor in love and life-long commitment. And deep down, most ordinary people know this, regardless of what they claim about May/December marriages.

I have not read enough to know whether Rosenberg and Hefner ultimately tied the knot, but their dating and plans to become married are enough.

Rosenberg now comes across as a lost soul. And that is terrible. He comes across as feeble unless united with someone four decades younger who can prop up his ego with the flimsy and false reassurance that those life experiences, especially the bad ones that either built your character up or tore it down, they don’t really matter that much. What kid forty years younger than you could even know this?  It's not even close to being realistic about the way life works on you and makes you who you are.

Rosenberg may not totally be a sitting duck politically, especially considering his district, but he's shown a surprising vulnerability that can only be described as a weakness that, by definition, dominates his entire life. And that includes politics. Because when you marry someone, your lives, for better or worse, are entire together. That’s why the age difference matters and why it affects Massachusetts politics - in this case, to its core.

And which is why Natasha Perez, Rosenberg's chief-of-staff, is utterly wrong when she says her boss's marriage is a private matter. The overall judgment of the President of the Massachusetts Senate is most certainly not a private matter.