BILLY CANNON

The Football Legend, Counterfeit Thief

Author’s Note: Billy Cannon was part of a Baton Rouge high school football located in a close knit community called “Little Dixie.” That 1950s football team, the Istrouma High Indians, has been called the “greatest high school football team in Louisiana history.” In 1965 I killed one of the most popular players on that team during a botched robbery attempt. He was a close friend of Billy Cannon. By 1965, Cannon and most of the other players on that Istrouma team had become very powerful figures in the Baton Rouge community. For the next 40 years, Cannon and virtually all of the Istrouma alumni of that era used their social influence and political power to oppose my freedom efforts through 12 pardon and parole hearings. That was my connection to the football legend.

In July 1983 Billy Cannon had become a target in a Secret Service investigation into the nation’s seventh largest counterfeiting ring. Fifty-five federal agents were involved in the investigation that led to the indictment of Cannon – a man who embodied the history and character of Baton Rouge.

Following the settlement of New Orleans, French explorers in 1699 moved up the Mississippi River until they came to a spot with a red stick, bloodied with animal blood, stuck in the ground. The stick marked the boundary between the Bayougoulas and the Houma Indians. The Indians called the red stick “Istrouma” and the French called it “baton rouge.” The French established a fort at the spot in 1719.

That small fort would eventually become the city of Baton Rouge, the capital of the State of Louisiana. It has always been a maverick city, loyal to the English ancestry that influenced its early history over the French/Spanish heritage that dominated New Orleans. Since the Huey Long “hayride” era, Baton Rouge has had two dominant social features: football and political corruption, and both are joined at the hip. Huey spared no expense or political effort to bring LSU football into national prominence – even if it meant corrupting the university and the game itself. The governor routinely bought the best players needed to put the LSU Tigers in the national spotlight.

Despite Huey’s efforts to make the LSU football program powerful, it was the Istrouma High School Indians that captured the city’s heart. By the early 1950s the school had become the focal point of football worship in Baton Rouge. Located in a segregated enclave in North Baton Rouge known as “Little Dixie,” the high school regularly drew more fans to its games than the LSU Tigers.

In 1934 two brothers, Ellis “Little Fuzz” Brown and his twin brother James “Big Fuzz” Brown, joined the faculty of Istrouma High School. The brothers created the school’s legendary football program one year later.

These two coaches became “living legends” in the Louisiana high school football arena, easily joining the Louisiana High School Coaches Hall of Fame. Little Fuzz coached the Istrouma Indians to their first state football championship in 1938 and went on to become the president of the Louisiana High School Athletic Association. Big Fuzz took the high school to even greater heights of football glory, capturing eight state championship titles between 1950 and 1962. Big Fuzz retired in 1967 with a record of 162-40-11. He served as president of the High School Coaches Hall of Fame.

“[Big Fuzz created a] power base never since equaled in state prep sports circles,” the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate reported in 1992. “Many of his assistant coaches and players went on to successful coaching careers and one former assistant coach, Robert Alost, became president of Northwestern State University.”

Several days after Cannon’s counterfeiting arrest, Larry Fortenberry, a Cannon football associate, saw Little Fuzz Brown.

“I will never forget the look on Fuzzy Brown’s face,” Fortenberry told the Morning Advocate. “He was almost crying. If ‘Big Fuzz’ had been alive, it would have killed him.”

Between 1950 and 1955, Istrouma had one of the most powerful football teams in the state which featured a gangly running back from Philadelphia, Mississippi named William Abb “Billy” Cannon.

Born in 1937, Cannon was reared in what J.R. Ball, a former LSU Tiger Rag editor, called a “tough neighborhood on the north side of the tracks” in Baton Rouge. This “Little Dixie” neighborhood was the home of blue collar families, many of whom worked in the oil and chemical plants first established by the John D. Rockefeller Standard Oil Company.

In the 1930s the Standard Oil Company found itself embroiled in a bitter political feud with Huey Long’s vast political empire. The governor had proposed a five-cent tax on each barrel of refined oil in Baton Rouge. Standard Oil responded by forming the Square Deal Association, a vigilante group that vowed to meet force with force against Long loyalists. The Governor placed Baton Rouge under martial law. He charged that the vigilantes were out to assassinate him. In August 1935 Long, then a Senator, told the U.S. Senate that a plot to assassinate him had been put in place by President Franklin D. Roosevelt and funded by the Standard Oil Company. He said the conspirators met in the DeSoto Hotel in July of that year. The Senator played a recording of the plotters talking about assassinating the “Kingfish.”

In a 1994 Sporting News article, Michael A. Goodman wrote that Billy Cannon’s father worked at one of these plants until he lost a leg to a piece of machinery. The accident, and the company’s lack of response to it, left the senior Cannon embittered and unemployed. According to former LSU coach Paul Dietzel, Cannon’s mother was forced to “take in washing laundry.” Dietzel seemed to think this family adversity instilled a bad “attitude” in Cannon - one that would lead him toward a life of irresponsible behavior.

One thing is certain: the social milieu of racial hatred and prejudice in the “Little Dixie” neighborhood in which Cannon was reared created a tough, mean young man by the time he entered Istrouma High School in 1952. Stanford Bardwell, who went to school with Cannon, told Goodman that the football legend was a “punk” and a bully who did anything “he damn well pleased.”

This behavior was publicly exhibited in 1955 when Cannon and a couple of his buddies gave the “finger” in a school yearbook photo – a crude gesture that would mirror the football legend’s life.

But Cannon’s crude behavior did not offend the fans of Istrouma High School. He could run, catch, and kick a football. He had personally delivered state championships to his high school alma mater. It was easy to overlook his rowdy exploits. He was the best of the Little Dixie football “titans.”

“Billy got away with a lot,” Al Harrison, a 1950s probation officer, told Goodman. “The coach and principal would come down and keep him out of trouble. He was a rough kid who had some compulsion to do nefarious things.”

But it was never quite enough to be a football “superstar” with the adulation of an entire community. Cannon had to throw his weight around. He and Fortenberry were walking to class after a school assembly one day at Istrouma. A “little bitty guy,” as he was described by Fortenberry, stepped on Cannon’s heel. The football great turned around and slapped the kid. That made him “tough” and instilled fear in others.

Longtime Baton Rouge Morning Advocate columnist Smiley Anders also attended Istrouma High School with Cannon. He posted an article on the school’s website entitled “Dawn of Cool” in which he recounts that 1950s era at Istrouma High School. The article offered insight into how and why the school shaped the culture of the Baton Rouge for decades to come, even to the present day.

“North Baton Rouge was in those days Istrouma country for a teenager, white teenager, that is. There was no integration in the schools, and little anywhere in our society. Our primary social contact with black kids was informal football games on Sunday afternoons at Bogan’s pasture, now the site of Capitol High School.

“The pasture was something of a border between North Baton Rouge and the larger black area to the south, and the games were a natural outgrowth of two groups of kids tossing footballs around. They were rough, but generally good-natured. Our parents, who went into a rage at the sound of WXOK (a black radio station), would have had apoplexy had they known of the games.

“There were only three white high schools in Baton Rouge at that time – Istrouma, the North Baton Rouge blue collar school, for the sons and daughters of the plant workers; Baton Rouge High, for the sons and daughters of the city’s white collar types, and Catholic High, which a private religious school occupied a special category.

“The rivalry was between Istrouma and Baton Rouge High, and it had the intensity that can only be generated by class warfare. The territories of the two schools were divided by the Illinois Central track along Choctaw. Once at a pep rally prior to a football game with Baton Rouge High, one of the Istrouma coaches played what he said was a tape of a pep rally held by the Bulldogs. In it a man identified as a BRHS coach made a remark about ‘those people across the tracks.’ The implication was obvious, and we felt a vast sense of outrage, which may have led to the Indians winning the game.

“We regarded ourselves as cooler and tougher than the effete snobs to the south and looked upon their elaborate social pecking order, with its fraternities and sororities (later banned) as the highest form of BS.”

When Billy Cannon entered Istrouma in 1952, he still had that awkward, “country” gait of kid on the verge of manhood.

“In his freshman year, he was tall, skinny and bow-legged cocky kid, devil-may-care,” Smiley Anders said for Michael Goodman’s article. “Billy spent summers working with Alvin Roy (who became a trainer in professional football, now deceased). When Billy came back each year, he was bigger and bigger, faster and stronger. None of us (students) could believe it.”

It is relatively easy to understand why Billy Cannon became a legend and, ultimately, a social icon in Baton Rouge. He gave the children of Istrouma social equality and economic opportunity through football. They didn’t have to worship Huey Long’s “every man a king” dream like their parents. Their dreams could be realized through the powerful legs and instinctive running skills of an angry young man that harbored unrealistic ambitions.

“Billy thought he could make $50 million,” T.J. Moran said. “[He] could never stay away from living on the edge, a risk-taker. He was always working an angle to make a buck any way he could”

Cannon graduated from Istrouma in 1955, but not before an LSU English professor filed criminal charges against the football hero. The victim also ended up being charged with a crime: attempted crime against nature against Cannon. The football great, and a buddy, was accused of stealing liquor and jewelry from the professor’s apartment after some kind of alleged homosexual activity between the professor and Cannon. The two city policemen who stopped the teenagers’ vehicle discovered a canvas bag filled with the professor’s liquor and his jewelry under the backseat.

Cannon was arrested on June 11.

On June 14 the professor pleaded guilty to the charge that there had been homosexual activity between him and Cannon [legally called “crime against nature”]. The professor was forced to resign from LSU.

Eight days later Cannon pled guilty to two counts of theft and was given a 90-day suspended sentence.

Robert Meador, who coached football and basketball during Cannon’s junior and senior years at Istrouma and who later became a powerful city councilman, was present in court when Cannon received the 90-day suspended sentence.

“I can remember after the trial was over and Billy was set free,” Meador recalled for the Morning Advocate in 1983. “He said he would attend LSU and he said, ‘I will become an All American’.”

The only thing that could have saved him from eternal disgrace was to become a “football All American” at LSU.

The Istrouma Baptist Church sat right across the street from Istrouma High School. The Cannon family lived on Osceola Street – just a three minute walk from the church. It was said that the elder Harvey Cannon had his family in that church every Sunday - and it was said that Billy Cannon “even went on Sunday nights” – to hear the strict “fire and brimstone” Baptist teachings.

He not only became an All-American but the state’s first Heisman Trophy winner as well; and he will forever be glorified after for delivering to LSU in 1958 its first undefeated season and its first national championship capped off with a Sugar Bowl victory. Those feats made him the most reversed and heralded football player in Louisiana history.

His status as a football legend became complete on a muddy, muggy Halloween night in 1959 when on he took an 89-year punt from Ole Miss’s Jake Gibbs and returned it for a touchdown, breaking 8 to 10 tackles along the way, in what has been called one of the “greatest” football runs in history. It was that single play that delivered the Heisman to Cannon and sealed his legacy in the rabid football community of Baton Rouge as a legend that will live as long as there is LSU football.

By 1983 Billy Cannon had become an icon in Baton Rouge. Many in the capitol city were prepared to re-write history in a concerted effort to excuse his counterfeit arrest. His North Baton Rouge neighbors during those Istrouma years remembered him as quiet and respectful of his elders.

“Billy was always serious when he was dealing with his superiors,” Meador told the Advocate. “He was an intelligent kid, a good student. He adhered, generally speaking, to the rules of the school. He was a typical youngster living in North Baton Rouge. By that I mean, kids will be kids. They all get into mischief.”

Cannon’s legacy of “mischief” followed him through his college years at LSU. It was announced on December 1, 1959 that he had been named the Heisman Trophy winner. According to Peter Finney in a 2004 New Orleans Times-Picayune article, Cannon had registered in a Philadelphia hotel under the alias of “Peter Gunn” where he met with the general manager of the Los Angeles Rams, Pete Rozelle (who would become the Commissioner of the NFL). Rozelle signed Cannon to a three-year deal calling for an annual salary of $15,000 with a $5,000 signing bonus. The contract was illegal because Cannon was still in “amateur” status. Rozelle got around that minor technicality by post-dating the contract until the January 1, 1960 Sugar Bowl to which the LSU Tigers and Cannon had been invited.

Cannon was presented the Heisman Trophy on December 9, 1959 at a banquet ceremony in the Downtown Athletic Club in New York. The trophy was presented to Cannon by Vice-President Richard Nixon who called him “an atomic cannon in the awesome arsenal of Coach Paul Dietzel.” The Rams contract was hidden in his pockets. He went on to play in the New Year’s Day Sugar Bowl classic – a game the Tigers lost 21-0.

Cannon didn’t mind. He had been in touch with Houston Oilers owner Bud Adams before the Sugar Bowl. Adams and other fledgling American Football League owners were in a secret bidding war for top college recruits, especially Cannon. The LSU legend reneged on the secret contract with Rozelle, signing a three-year deal with Adams in the Sugar Bowl end zone. He got a $30,000 annual salary with a $20,000 signing bonus, a 1959 Cadillac for his father and $10,000 gift for his wife. He was promised half interest in the Billy Cannon Oil Company to be formed by Adams and five service stations in Baton Rouge to sell Cannonball Regular and Super Cannonball. Those components of the deal never materialize for the 23-year-old father of three.

One month after the Cannon/Oilers contract Rozelle was named commissioner of the NFL. The Los Angeles Rams took the Houston Oilers to court. Six months after Rozelle was named NFL commissioner, a federal judge ruled that the Rozelle contract was “not binding” because the commissioner was, according to Finney, a “city slicker” who had victimized Cannon, calling him “exceptionally naïve for a college senior, a provincial lad untutored and unwise in the ways of the business world.”

But Michael Goodman quoted a Los Angeles journalist as calling Cannon “the most repugnant young profiteer ever to sell his talents to anyone who’d bid.”

Anytime Rozelle was in Baton Rouge he would always ask: “Tell me, how is that naïve country boy getting along?” (Rozelle had the “last laugh” on Cannon when he revoked Cannon’s induction into the NFL Hall of Fame following his 1983 counterfeiting conviction).

That “naïve country boy” would use the same profiteering motives in 1980 (the same year he launched his counterfeiting ring) to destroy the potentially lucrative baseball career of his son, Billy Jr. A talented high school prospect who was a probable first round selection, the 18-year-old Cannon Jr. watched his father publicly send telegrams to all 26 major league teams advising them not to waste a first round draft selection because young Cannon was going to college.

“Privately,” Goodman wrote, “the Cannons were meeting with George Steinbrenner, the owner of the Yankees. “Billy Jr. was drafted by the Yankees and signed for a reported $350,000 bonus. Then-baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn vetoed the signing. Kuhn said the other owners had been misled by Billy Sr.’ telegrams.”

The football legend spent eleven years in the American Football League, a member of the league’s Hall of Fame who earned a reputation as one of its most fearsome players. He returned to Baton Rouge in 1971 to a lucrative dental practice. During this period he was one of the most powerful citizens in Baton Rouge. Politicians of every stripe sought his endorsement.

A decade later the football great had become a man who gambled heavily and cheated friends and investors alike out of their money. By the early 1980s, at the same time he was forming his counterfeit ring and simultaneously destroying his son’s baseball career, he was facing some 40 lawsuits from lending institutions, investors, and individuals to whom he owed nearly $500,000 in loans and property.

Cannon actually got involved in the counterfeiting enterprise in 1980 while engaged in a t-shirt printing business with a convicted counterfeiter named John Stiglets. According to Randall Miller, the Assistant U.S. Attorney who prosecuted Cannon, the football legend tried to borrow money from a friend.

“The friend told Cannon,” Miller was quoted in the 1994 Sporting News article, “why borrow money? The guy printing those T-shirts makes the best money around. At the time, Billy Cannon needed money like a dead man needs a coffin. He bankrolled Stiglets with $15,000 and got in deeper and deeper.”

According to the federal officials involved in the investigation and prosecution of the counterfeiting ring, Stiglets printed six million in phony $100 bills in Texas. The duo planned to pass the money away from Baton Rouge but the ring eventually grew from those two to at least six more members.

In December 1982 security guards at the Cortana Mall in Baton Rouge noticed the same serial number on several $100 bills. They alerted the federal authorities. The feds eventually arrested David Duggan, Moise Domino, Anthony Harris, and Brett Burns. A fifth suspected was arrested but later released.

“We obtained information from a confidential source that [Cannon] had provided a quantity of counterfeit funds to persons we had previously arrested,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Stanford Bardwell said. The feds found counterfeit money under the hood of the source’s car.

Goodman quoted Bardwell, as saying:

“Under questioning, the guy said Billy Cannon was behind it all. The Secret Service agents were almost reluctant, embarrassed to tell me because it sounded so far-fetched.”

The investigation proceeded cautiously. The Feds, after all, were dealing with the biggest and most influential name in the Baton Rouge political power structure. The authorities placed authorized wiretaps on all the suspects’ telephones but they produced very little incriminating evidence. The counterfeit investigation soon discovered that cocaine was also involved in Cannon’s massive criminal enterprise. It proved to be one of the largest criminal ventures in Baton Rouge history.

“Lawyers are among [the] drug suspects,’ Bardwell said.

The cocaine trafficking uncovered during the investigation of Cannon’s counterfeit ring involved more than just lawyers. Some of the city’s richest and most powerful people were involved in narcotics trafficking. The grandson of one of the richest men in America was reportedly flying loads of cocaine into the city in a private plane.

Finally, on the afternoon of July 8 federal agents observed Timothy Melancon pick up Cannon in the parking lot at Cannon’s office. The two men left the office.

“[Melancon] drove in a highly evasive manner and was followed by law enforcement officers in a circuitous route to an unmarked dead end street off Jones Creek Road where the vehicle in which the men were riding disappeared after entering the street,” according to Secret Service Agent Michael James. “Dr. Cannon pointed out to Mr. Melancon a spot where containers containing counterfeit currency had been previously buried.”

Later that day Melancon met with Charles Whitfield, also known as Oscar Olsen, at Asian International, Ltd on Stanford Street in Baton Rouge. The two men left the business in separate vehicles and rendezvoused at a local restaurant. They left the restaurant in a pickup truck.

“[They] drove in a highly evasive manner, including u-turns, pullover and stops, varying speeds and constant looking around to see if anyone was following them,” according to Agent James.

The two men drove to the same dead end street off Jones Creek Road where Melancon and Cannon had been earlier. But this time agents observed Melancon drive pass where the pavement stopped and continued into a field. A short time later they exited the field and returned to Asian International where they unloaded two large bags containing $2 million in counterfeit bills. The agents moved in and arrested the two men, seizing the two bags covered with brown muddy water.

“A search conducted at the end of the dead end street uncovered an area of freshly disturbed soil which when dug up revealed two Igloo cooler chests which were found to have brown muddy water in the bottom,” Agent James said.

The agents quickly learned that the property where the ice chests were discovered belonged to Cannon. The following morning the agents returned to the property. Cannon was waiting for them. He told the agents that he owned the property. They told him they had a search warrant. The football hero said nothing. He simply got in his car and drove to the Jefferson Downs race track in New Orleans, a notorious meeting spot for the Carlos Marcello organized crime family. Cannon was arrested, along with Whitfield and Melancon, when he returned to Baton Rouge.

Cannon’s July 10 arrest staggered the Baton Rouge football and political community. The football legend quickly moved to neutralize the scope of the federal investigation, waiving the right to have his case presented to a grand jury. He entered an immediate guilty plea. He cooperated with the authorities against the other members of the counterfeit ring. He led agents to other ice chests, some buried near his dental office and others at the Jones Creek Road property, which contained at least three million more in counterfeit currency. The bogus money was sealed in $60,000 lots in “Seal-A-Meal type” packages according to Secret Service agents. The Cannon counterfeit currency would turn up in Texas, Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama.

A special preliminary hearing was conducted on the same day of Cannon’s arrest, Saturday, July 10, before Judge Polozola for the three arrested suspects. Whitfield, a Florida hog farm operator, told Polozola that he operated the Triple C oil brokerage business out of the Asian International building (Asian International was a registered American agent for the People’s Republic of China and sold oil field equipment for China).

Melancon, a Thibodaux, Louisiana native, told Polozola he was a broker who sold “just about anything you can think of, anything that’s available for sale.” He said that while he primarily worked out of his home, “we were just beginning to work out of Asian International.”

Polozola said that because the charges were so “serious,” the two men should be considered flight risks and the judge set bond at $2.5 million for each man.

Cannon’s legendary football status, and his immediate willingness to cooperate with the authorities, got him special consideration from the federal judge.

Dressed in jeans, cowboys boots, and western shirt with a cigar stuck out of his shirt, the beefy former football great appeared in federal court with his attorney Robert “Buck” Kleinpeter. Polozola set his bond at $100,000.

Whitfield and Melancon were led out of Polozola’s courtroom in handcuffs while Cannon was escorted away without cuffs.

When Polozola later sentenced Cannon to five years in a federal prison, he said:

“If the name of the person I was about to sentence was not Dr. Billy Cannon, what sentence would I impose? The court refuses to allow those who have fame and fortune or status in life to commit a crime and then have a slap on the hand imposing jail sentences on others who are less fortunate.”

In one of the many letters to the editor of the Morning Advocate following Cannon’s sentencing, Fred W. Hartidegen reflected the kind of influence the football legend had in the Baton Rouge community:

“I would like to comment on the ‘Billy Cannon Incident’ [Hartidegen couldn’t even bring himself to call it a crime]. I am uniquely qualified to do this for two reasons. First, I was student body president of LSU during the time Jimmy Taylor and Billy Cannon were playing there. Second, I had a partial scholarship (meals at the athletic dorm) on the boxing team.

“Therefore, my acquaintance with Cannon and my comments come from a unique perspective. On Saturdays I was one of five New Orleans students remaining on the Baton Rouge campus. The other 4,873 had left early on Friday to return to the Crescent City. At 7:00 p.m. in 1957 you could leave your dorm, walk to Tiger Stadium and have your choice of seats. Such were the size of the crowds back then.

“The following year Billy Cannon led LSU to the National Championship. The year after that Billy Cannon won the Heisman Trophy. Now there are no empty seats and there is a 20-year waiting list for LSU season tickets.

“As student body president, I had a very successful reign. We rewrote the Student Government Constitution, made giant strides to obtaining the present Student Union Building, left a surplus in the Student Government budget (the first time anyone ever heard of that), and so forth. As a matter of fact, we only had one of our projects fail.

“The project that failed was a proposed train trip to an out-of-town football game. We needed 1,000 students to participate in the train ride. The quota failed miserably. The game was the 1957 LSU-Ole Miss game.

“We know what happened on Halloween night of the following year. Consider the rabid loyalty of LSU fans now, especially in New Orleans fans for the Ole Miss game.

“In 1959 LSU should have had another undefeated season. They would have except for the referee’s call in Knoxville during the Tennessee game. Game films, movie clips, and video tapes clearly show Billy Cannon crossing the goal line for the two point conversion that would have won the game. ‘The Man’ in Knoxville did not see it that way.

“Cannon graduated in 1959 and became the first $100,000 player ever in pro football. Cannon opened the door for the Archie Mannings (Ole Miss, remember) and the Herschel Walkers. Every player in pro football today owes him a certain debt. Cannon started the Oiler franchise and indeed was the pivotal athlete for the formation of the AFL. He brought the Oilers to consecutive AFL championships in which he won consecutive MVP awards.

“Cannon was subsequently traded to Oakland where he helped that team win the 1967 AFL championship while leading the team in touchdown passes for the year.

“So in considering the Cannon ‘incident’ remember, that all things are relative. Consider what he did for LSU, for Baton Rouge, for the Oilers and for pro football. Then judge his present wrong-doing. After all, it isn’t as bad as driving off a bridge and drowning a pregnant secretary. And Cannon doesn’t plan on running for presidency.”

Earl Drathon Varnado was even more sentimental and adoring, saying:

“As far as I am concerned, Mr. William Cannon – now dethroned – became the true hero the day he stood before the judge and pleaded his guilt, both to his fellow man and to Almighty God. Then, without whimper held out his hands in humble submission to be shackled and taken away. In my mind, THAT is the hallmark of a truly great hero. It can never be cancelled or taken away.

“One day Billy Cannon will come back to us. I for one shall extend to him a welcoming hand and prompt acceptance back into a world of frail humankind and crude reality.”

The fact is that Billy Cannon had some of the best plates ever used in a counterfeiting operation. He was the “brains” of a criminal enterprise that went beyond counterfeiting. It involved cocaine distribution that, according to Bardwell, involved “lawyers” in Baton Rouge. The cocaine trafficking clearly went deep into the halls of power in Baton Rouge.

And that’s why he pled guilty and cooperated with authorities—to give up the small fish to protect the sharks.

On May 20, 2018, Billy Cannon died in his home in St. Francisville, Louisiana. He was 80 years of age. He finished out his working career as a dentist at the Louisiana State Penitentiary (more commonly known as “Angola”) where he and his Istrouma alumni tried to bury me. I survived and outlived all of them.