Ed Cates

I used to meet my father and grandfather at six thirty every morning to open the company mail. It was generally understood that this was an attempt to make up for all the family time lost during my father’s rocketing career. Generally, for that purpose, it worked. For a while, I would open the mail, have coffee with my father, and then head off to Millsaps, where I generally made very poor grades in the Else School of Management but otherwise did my best to do my part in keeping everybody’s head above water on campus, which wasn’t always easy.

We had an assembly line set up. Grandaddy would use gigantic “Teacher Sheers” (that we sold) to clip the ends off the envelope. My Father would empty the envelope, sniffing out any checks, which he handed to Mrs. Jeffreys to tally. Then, I would sort the contents according to their department, billing, purchasing, order entry, etc., keeping a lookout for any juicy purchase orders.

One day, Grandaddy said, “Did y’all hear they found Ed Cates?”

Ed Cates was a local lawyer who, for a while, was loosely attached to the Citizen’s Council until it started to fall apart. Then, he found himself elected to the City Council for Jackson, Mississippi. His daughter had been in my kindergarten class. She was and is generally loved.

For reasons nobody knew, Cates took his own life, and his body was found in a burnt-out car by the reservoir. That he shot himself, then set the car on fire, should have set off some alarms, but didn’t. Nobody knew why he did it. Everybody in town joined together to comfort his grieving wife and child.

Daddy gave me a look like, “Your grandfather is old; he’s talking about when they found the body a few weeks ago.” I accepted my dad’s position and didn’t say anything.

Thirty minutes later, while we were having coffee, our routine was that Daddy would read a section and then pass it on to me. As he opened the Clarion Ledger, he said, “That sumbitch.”

It seems Ed Cates was not dead. Alerted when he started trying to send his wife money, the feds found him in Georgia under the pseudonym of “General Curtz.” It’s generally believed he used this name because of Col. Curtz in Apocalypse Now.

We’d had some crazy cases in Jackson. We’d even had our share of civic corruption, but this one took the cake. Cates found himself accused of fraud and murder since the body found in his burnt-out car clearly wasn’t him.

Convicted without ever confessing, nobody ever found out who Cates killed, even though he was convicted of killing them. A friend of mine’s father was a forensic dentist. He was called in to try to identify the victim by using his teeth. Born in Latvia, my friend’s dad was a giant of a man with hands the size of frying pans. We used to laugh that he had to be a forensic dentist because his hands were too big to work on people while they were alive. His daughter was one of the prettiest girls at Millsaps. She was KA's Sweetheart but never had a steady beau. One night, we held hands and watched Terminator on HBO in the KA TV room. That’s about as far as I ever got. I consider myself lucky to have had that much.

Cate’s wife and daughter, who had been very socially involved in Jackson, started to push themselves into the bushes. They never did anything to deserve this. I always felt bad for them.

Most people thought Cates should go to Parchman, but instead, he went to the Madison County Jail. There, it was eventually revealed that the sheriff had made him a trustee, and Cates was seen eating at local restaurants without a guard. This was quite the scandal state-wide. Cates died without ever giving a clue about the identity of the man he killed.

Living in Jackson, you get used to civic drama and crime. Sometimes, people are accused and they’re not guilty because of political revenge, and sometimes, they are accused because they’re guilty as hell. I know some really great guys who got caught up in this. It ruined their lives.

This summer, we found out that the FBI called in an “Old Number 47” on the Mayor of Jackson, the District attorney, and a City Councilman. “Old Number 47” is a routine the FBI uses to catch local politicians by posing as a fake real estate company and offering them bribes. They’ve done it so much that the yacht they use as a honeypot in Florida has been on the news several times for cases almost identical to what happened in Jackson.

I would have preferred the FBI not be able to make a case against our government officials using a pretty obvious trap. There are ways to use entrapment as a defense, but they’re not terribly effective. These guys are gonna fight it, but I’m pretty sure they’re screwed.

What bothers me the most about this is that these aren’t some yokels that ended up getting elected. They’re experienced lawyers who should have immediately recognized that this was bullshit and avoided it. Three other City Council Persons did just that.

Hopefully, when they go to jail, it won’t be nearly as much of a story as when Ed Cates went to jail. I appreciate these guys giving me such great stories to tell. Dead guys aren’t necessary, though.