THE SINCLAIR CASE
Chapter Nine: Yellow Dog Attorneys
J. St. Clair “Judge” Favrot, the district attorney who preceded Sargent Pitcher, asked my mother in 1966 shortly after his appointment to my case:
“Why did Billy Wayne come to Baton Rouge? Of all places, why Baton Rouge? This is nothing but a Mafia-run town.”
Favrot was one of two attorneys appointed by the court in March 1966 to defend me in the murder case. He had served two four-year terms as district attorney before Pitcher who was elected in 1960.
During his tenure as district attorney, Favrot was elected president of the national and state District Attorneys Association. He understood Baton Rouge and the city’s close-knit political power structure. He, and another attorney named Harris M. English, was appointed to defend me by Judge LeBlanc.
The tentacles of the Istrouma network had forced three other prominent attorneys to withdraw from their appointments to the case.
One of those attorneys was Ossie Brown who succeeded Sargent Pitcher as District Attorney in 1972.
A 1973 FBI report sent to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover by New Orleans FBI agent Donald Moore said Brown was “closely associated with the Ku Klux Klan in the Baton Rouge area and attended some Klan meetings.”
Moore also told Hoover:
“[Brown] served as attorney for many Klan members and as attorney handling legal matters for the Klan. Brown was reportedly robed speak [sic] at the sixth district Anti Communist Christian Association (original Knights of the Ku Klux Klan) meeting on February 23, 1968, attended by 45 robed KKK members wherein he, Brown, praised the KKK, stated they should not be afraid of the FBI, should not cooperate with the FBI and that they should have no trouble with FBI unless they committed acts of violence.”
That was Ossie Brown in 1965—the same year the Klan attorney was appointed to represent me for killing a beloved son of Little Dixie.
Six months before his appointment to my case, Brown was representing Earnest R. McEleveen, a KKK leader in Bogalusa who had been arrested for the murder of Washington Parish’s first black deputy sheriff, O’Neal Moore, and the wounding his black partner, David Creed Rogers.
The month before he was assigned to represent me, Brown was able to get the charges against the Klan leader dismissed for lack of evidence.
Just three weeks after that Ku Klux Klan victory, Brown visited me in the parish jail.
“I can’t take your case, Sinclair” the large jowl, beet-faced attorney told me. “I’ve already had a phone call from J.C.’s daddy and a bunch of other folks. I’ve been warned not to take ‘the Sinclair case.’ I have a political future in this city and I’m not about to give that up by handling your case.”
That was the very essence of the Sinclair case. The folks in Little Dixie had no problem with Brown representing a KKK killer who cold-bloodedly murdered a black law enforcement office but would not tolerate him representing the killer of one of their own.
But what did I know?
I was a stupid 20-year-old at the time. I didn’t have the slightest idea what Brown was talking about. I knew nothing about J.C. Bodden or his position in the Little Dixie community. Someone had told me he was a “football player.” That was all I knew about him.
Before he left, Brown did offer me a piece of legal advice.
“Tell whoever you get as an attorney,” he said, “to plead the case down to manslaughter. This is not a murder case. J.C. chased you out of that store, and he was killed outside the store. That’s not murder. That’s manslaughter.”
Just as he was about to leave the room, he turned back to me and said:
“Personally, I think J.C. was goddamn stupid for not just giving you the money. But his old man and family will never see it that way.”
Brown clearly had inside information about the case. He knew J.C. chased me out of the store. The very fact that that this information was circulating inside the city’s political power structure is what forced Sargent Pitcher and Ralph Roy to fabricate the “cool and calm” killer who killed Bodden inside the store.
Brown served two six-year terms as district attorney—both of which were marred by a litany of corruption scandals. In the midst of all these political scandals, the district attorney nonetheless vigorously and publicly opposed my clemency efforts, parroting the “cool and calm” killer narrative as the reason why I should be kept in prison for the rest of my life.
Brown’s 2008 obituary said he was “known as the defense attorney who could win cases that couldn’t be won.”
Except mine.
The next attorney appointed to my case was none other than Robert L. “Buck” Kleinpeter—the same attorney who represented Cannon in his 1983 counterfeiting case. A young attorney named Kenneth Scullin was appointed to assist Kleinpeter.
Like Brown, Kleinpeter also told me he had received pressure not to represent me. He told me up front, “I’m not taking your case, Sinclair.”
He added: “I don’t like anything about you or what you did.”
I don’t know if Kleinpeter’s relationship with Cannon (assuming he had one with the football legend in 1965) had anything to do with his decision not to take my case. What I do know now is that he was also an Istrouma graduate and, like Brown, he had received enough political pressure from the Istrouma network that made him file a formal motion withdrawing from his appointment to my case.
The court granted the motion, just as it had for Brown. And it granted Scullin’s motion to withdraw—a motion that quickly followed Kleinpeter’s motion to withdraw.
None of the three attorneys wanted anything to do with “the Sinclair case.”
Harris M. English, an elderly gentleman with a pronounced speech impediment, was appointed as co-counsel with Favrot. He was a kindly, grandfather-looking man who took his appointment seriously, although he did tell me that Favrot would be the lead attorney representing me.
“I’m here to help Mr. Favrot in any way I can,” English told me. “But he will have the final say in all matters about the defense. He’s a great lawyer, one of the best in the city – and if anyone can save you from the electric chair, it will be the Judge.”
Favrot was affectionately known in the Baton Rouge legal community as “Judge Favrot” because of his previous tenure as a popular criminal court judge.
I told Favrot exactly what Brown had told me about the killing of Bodden not being a death penalty crime.
“Ralph Roy has two eyewitnesses who will put you inside that store,” Favrot responded. “Not only that, they will say you gunned J.C. down in cold blood and calmly walked away to your getaway car. I’ve already learned that much about the state’s case.”
“That’s a lie,” I replied. “The man charged me and I ran from the store. I fired at him as I ran away. I didn’t even know he had been hit. There were other people there. They saw what happened.”
Favrot stared at me a long time.
“You really don’t understand what you’ve gotten yourself into, do you?” he asked. “I know you’re telling the truth, but the truth went out the window the moment you killed J.C. Bodden. I’ve been able to get a little information about the case from my sources inside the DA’s office but they’re not letting me inside the case. This is the first time I haven’t been able to get inside of a case. Pitcher’s office has shut me out. Ralph’s going to get the death penalty against you unless someone drops a miracle in our lap. I don’t even know if a miracle can save you from the people who want you in that chair up there at Angola.”
What Favrot did not tell me was that, as district attorney, he had hired Ralph Roy as an assistant and that he had been the dirty prosecutor’s mentor. Favrot also did not tell me that, as district attorney, he had “fixed” things so Cannon would get a mere 90-day suspended sentence for a so-called theft conviction—a crime that was actually a strong-armed robbery of a prominent church deacon as he left his mistress’s house by the Istrouma football great and several of his Istrouma thug buddies.
That’s just one of the many ironies in “the Sinclair case.”
\Billy Cannon and his little “gang” of hoodlums, as the football legend described them in his memoir—“Cannon: A long, Long Run”—committed more robberies than Billy Sinclair ever committed. He could have just as unintentionally killed one of his victims as I killed his buddy J.C. He got a 90-day suspended sentence because of Judge Favrot’s corrupt political generosity while the Judge betrayed me as a client.
One thing is certain: at age 18, or any time during my high school years, I was not strong-arming people for their money, watches and jewelry, or slapping “queers” around with a “gang” of “thugs” as Cannon did in his youth.
It was against this political backdrop that Favrot gave me the first real glimpse—more of a warning actually—about the “politics” I was up against.
Fear seized my gut.
With one attorney after another bailing out, I began to sense that J.C. Bodden was an important person in Baton Rouge. His family and friends had forced three powerful attorneys to flee “the Sinclair case” like yellow dogs.
Even Judge Favrot made it clear that he did not want to be involved the case.
“If I could get out of this appointment,” he said right after he was assigned to my case, “I would. I don’t like who you are or what you did. But as long as I am on this case, I will give you the best defense I can – the law says you are entitled to that.”
Again, just before my trial was scheduled to begin, Favrot told me: “I don’t like being on this case, Billy Wayne. I know you didn’t mean to do what you did, but that does not matter to J.C.’s family and his friends. You hurt a lot of good people that night besides J.C. It doesn’t matter that I think J.C. got himself killed. Those Istrouma people want you dead and it’s my job to do everything I can to keep you out of the electric chair. But my advice to you, son, is that you learn how to pray.”
I just sat there, looking at the bespectacled, diminutive attorney. There was an air of confidence, almost arrogance, about him.
I did not trust Favrot. I was on my own. I may have been stupid but I was not crazy. I sensed something sinister lurking in its underbelly of my situation. What I didn’t know was that it emanated from that “Little Dixie” neighborhood where the people in the Istrouma network grew up together.
In some perverse way, I symbolized their blame for that lost “wonderful era” DiBenedetto described—an all-white, segregationist era that was being snuffed out by the violent and turbulent civil right movement of the 1960s. I was not black but I was an outsider who tore something out of the social fabric of Little Dixie and aroused the hatred stillborn in their community soul.
Indeed, as Favrot put it, why did I ever stop in Baton Rouge that December night in 1965?