The Atavist Magazine, No. 164
1
The killer is happy to see us. That’s the first thing we notice when we spot Larry Thompson halfway across the visitation room of the David Wade Correctional Center. He rises from a chair and waves, his face unfurling into an avuncular grin. Our separate journeys to this prison in Homer, Louisiana—me from Maine, and Myron Fuller from the mountains of Utah—afforded plenty of time to set expectations, and neither of us anticipated a Norman Rockwell greeting. I pictured a menacing scene bathed in the neo-noir lighting of The Silence of the Lambs. And Fuller? He long believed that the next time he and Thompson saw each other would be through gun sights.
The visitation room Warden Jerry Goodwin escorted us into is large, square, and filled with cafeteria-style tables. It’s December 2021. Lights on a small artificial Christmas tree wink, at once cheery and monstrously sad. Vending machines line one wall, glowing sentinels filled with bags of junk food. During normal visiting hours, the chatter of reunited families animates the room. But Fuller is a retired FBI agent with an illustrious career, I’m an experienced journalist, and Thompson is a model inmate, his vast criminal history notwithstanding. As such, Goodwin has granted us special privileges: an open-ended block of time, and a dedicated room with no bars or glass partitions, just a bored-looking guard at a nearby desk.
“Larry,” Fuller says.
“Good to see you,” Thompson drawls. The two old adversaries take chairs facing each other across six feet of wood laminate. I perch on a bench halfway between them and fan out the objects I’ve been permitted: notepad, pen, digital recorder.
At 78, Thompson is 18 years into an 80-year prison sentence for attempted first-degree murder and aggravated burglary. (A 35-year federal term theoretically begins after that.) One morning in 2003, Larry and his son Larry Neal Thompson Jr., along with four other men, robbed an Intertrust Armored Services car. They were spotted by a witness—a rare event in Thompson’s long criminal career—and a cop chased their escape van. One of the men shot an AK-47 through the officer’s window, wounding him. A massive manhunt ensued, and after several hours all six of the perpetrators were caught. They were subsequently convicted. Then, in 2014, Thompson confessed to four murders for hire in exchange for a reduced prison term for his son. (That deal never went through, because the official who overseeing it died before it could be finalized.) Thompson was later transferred to Wade from the maximum-security Louisiana State Penitentiary—better known as Angola.
Seated before us, he wears the standard-issue uniform: blue jeans and a light-blue chambray shirt. His hangdog blue eyes are framed by gaffer-taped tortoiseshell glasses that rest atop his prominent nose. His hands are missing parts of two fingers. “This one I cut off with an electric drill,” he’ll tell us later, holding up the stump of his left index finger. Then he’ll wave the remains of his right ring finger. “My dog bit me on this one.”
The warden tells us goodbye, then turns to Thompson. “Behave yourself,” he says, not unpleasantly. Goodwin hesitates for a beat, as if he wants to say something to us or is curious about why we’re here. Cops come to interview prisoners all the time, of course, but he doesn’t see many 79-year-old retired FBI agents dropping in on one of his more notorious inmates.
Fuller shakes Goodwin’s hand and thanks him. The truth, as best Fuller can grasp it himself, is that he’s hoping to dislodge a few ghosts from his psyche. He enjoyed an illustrious 31-year career in the bureau, with one notable exception: his tenure running the office in Shreveport, Louisiana, from 1981 to 1985.
What went wrong? Only everything. Crooked cops. Investigations that inexplicably faceplanted. Political interference. Wiseguys and one particularly ethically challenged attorney. And, most prominently, a murder Fuller believes he could have prevented: Maria Marshall, a mother of three. It was a hired job; her husband, saddled with debt, wanted to collect the life insurance. The hit man was Larry Thompson.
Soon after that crime, Fuller decided to prematurely end his Louisiana interlude. He left angry, frustrated, and defeated. When he crossed into Mississippi on his way to FBI headquarters in Washington, he climbed out of his car, walked back to the state line, and emptied his bladder onto the far side of it.
Fuller now has what looks like a retiree’s idyllic life. He travels to Europe with his wife. He plays golf, hikes with his dogs, and skis Utah powder. But some part of him can’t leave Shreveport behind. And in small, sleepless hours, he finds himself absorbed in long-ago memories.
Recently, he decided that four decades was enough time to stew in regret. He located Thompson in an online registry, sent him a letter, and then connected with him by phone. Thompson agreed to a visit. Fuller invited me along because we’d built a rapport when I interviewed him for a book, and we both sensed that it would make for a good story.
So Fuller is here now, he guesses, to confront his past, to see if certain elements of his former life might finally be pinned down and examined. He can’t change what happened, but maybe it’s possible to understand how it all went sideways.
They have certain things in common, the hit man and the agent. Both arrived at their twilight years looking strikingly similar: They have bald heads and are slender, fit, and just under six feet tall. And long ago, both were raised on the wrong side of the poverty line in the Deep South.
Born in 1941, Fuller grew up on a subsistence cotton farm near Beebe, Arkansas. His family didn’t have electricity until he was seven. One morning when he was twelve, his father overfilled the woodstove and burned the house down. The insurance had lapsed, and all that was left as the family stood in the snow that morning was the equipment in the barn and the underwear they’d slept in.
After a stretch of teenage fecklessness, Fuller earned a degree in school administration and was offered a job in Colorado that would make him the state’s youngest principal. His wife, Patricia, was pregnant at the time, and it felt as if he’d punched his ticket into stable adulthood. But before they could move to Colorado, Patricia was abruptly taken by a mysterious fever; their unborn daughter died with her. Fuller turned down the Colorado job and spent the next several months reeling. He was still trying to figure out how to put his life back together when he played golf one day with an acquaintance who was about to apply for a job at the FBI. Fuller thought the work sounded interesting and soon applied himself.
As a young agent in New York City, he developed a knack for talking with criminals, including a con man named Mel Weinberg. Other agents had dismissed Weinberg as a habitual liar looking to pare down his prison sentence, but Fuller saw potential. They teamed up for the notorious Abscam investigation, which swept up seven members of Congress for taking bribes. (Bradley Cooper plays a caricature of Fuller in American Hustle, the film loosely based on the case.)
While still riding high from the Abscam probe, Fuller was offered the job in Shreveport. Here was an opportunity to return to the South—a fraught, complex place, but home nonetheless. His marching orders couldn’t have been plainer. “There’s something wrong down there,” his boss told him, referring to Shreveport. “Go fix that fucking place.” Fuller had heard that the city’s police department was riddled with corruption. The FBI should have been all over it, but Fuller saw no evidence of that.
On their first night in town, he and his second wife, Dawn, dined with agent Jim Smith, the interim boss. Curiously, Smith told him that everything was under control and that Fuller could look forward to spending afternoons playing golf. “You just come down here, enjoy yourself, and wait for your next promotion,” he said.
Fuller soon began receiving anonymous tips about dirty cops in town. One tipster even warned, “You have a corrupt agent in your office.” This rattled him, but he pushed forward. He looked for an avenue to start investigating the Shreveport police. Before long, Fuller says, his boss called to inform him that he must be doing something right, because Louisiana congressman Buddy Roemer had complained that Fuller was being too “aggressive.”
Roemer’s feathers weren’t the only ones ruffled. Local contacts told Fuller’s office that they’d heard rumors: Someone was going to plant a bomb under his car; someone was planning to throw acid in his face. Even his successes were followed by setbacks: He took down a mob-connected illegal gambling operation, but the U.S. attorney shuttered his police probe. No one wanted to rock the boat. They wanted him to play more golf.
Then, in 1984, an informant revealed that a contract had been taken out on the life of a blond woman. That was all the FBI could glean. Several weeks later, two New Jersey–based detectives walked into Fuller’s office. They were investigating a murder at a picnic area north of Atlantic City, and their suspect was Larry Thompson. “Wait a minute,” Fuller asked. “Is the victim by any chance blond?”
One of them produced a picture of Maria Marshall. Fuller slumped in his chair, sickened, and put his face in his hands. Thompson, a career criminal in Louisiana, had been on his radar; he felt that he should have been able to stop the murder.
Several years later, Fuller was sitting in the waiting room at his dentist’s office when he came across a review of Joe McGinniss’s true-crime book Blind Faith. Fuller was horrified when he realized that the book was about the Marshall killing. By then Marshall’s husband, Robert, had been convicted of capital murder. Thompson was acquitted based on testimony from several witnesses, including his son, that placed him in Louisiana on the day of the murder. (He would later confess to the crime.)
The details of the murder—and the anguish it caused Marshall’s family—devastated Fuller. McGinniss’s book became a bestseller, then an Emmy-nominated miniseries. And after each replaying of the tragedy, Fuller found himself awash again in guilt. On one occasion, he became short of breath, felt his pulse pounding, and scrambled to call an ambulance. I’m going to die right here, he thought. It was a panic attack, and more would follow. He began carrying Xanax for when he felt one coming on.
“I’ve been a criminal all my life,” he says, sounding almost surprised, as if the reality of it only now dawned on him. “I don’t know why. It just happened, you know?”
“I think the one and only time we ever met was when you visited us in the office there in Shreveport. Remember that?”
Smiling across at Thompson, Fuller eases into the prison visit with a conversational chess opening. An early memory, from 1982, well before the Marshall case.
“Yeah,” Thompson says. “I came to see Jimmy Hairford.”
Hairford was a well-connected FBI asset who, unknown to Fuller, was also an intermediary between the criminal underworld and the bureau, assisting either side depending on what was most useful or profitable for him. For the right number of cash-filled bags, Hairford could make sentences shrink or criminal charges vanish from state or federal court.
Thompson doesn’t recall exactly why he went to see Hairford that day, but he remembers the general thrust of their meetings. “I paid him a lot of money,” he says. Asked to elaborate, he adds, “He helped me with—” and then stops himself. After a pause, Thompson chuckles and says, “…in a deal one time.”
The two men slip into class-reunion mode: who they knew back when and how. Eventually, Fuller pauses. “Why are you talking to us?” he asks.
“Well, you asked me to.”
“Why did you agree to it?”
Thompson lifts his shoulders in a languid shrug. “Ain’t no big thing to me.”
His speech has a melodious quality that he emphasizes with long pauses. Sometimes he halts because he can’t recall the particulars of a story; other times it’s clear he’s intentionally holding back. In these moments, his thin lips spread into a tight smirk, he tilts his head back provocatively, and he crosses his arms.
Thompson is a tangle of contradictions. He’s a self-professed family man who accompanied his eldest son on an armored-truck robbery that sent them both to prison. He claims to be protective of children but confessed to killing two mothers of young kids. He calls himself “just a country-ass plain-vanilla boy,” and then asserts that “there’s not a whole lot of people in the world who can do what I do—or did. Why I was able to do that, I don’t know. It just come natural to me.”
He grew up “poor-off,” the third of six children. His father was an itinerant carpenter and Baptist choir leader who taught him the value of hard work; Thompson was plowing fields behind a mule by age ten. His parents hauled their six kids to Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, and South Carolina—the whole family shoehorned into a 40-foot trailer. When they finally settled in Shreveport in 1954, Larry was a puckish 11-year-old.
He absorbed the region’s deeply embedded racism. For his first armed theft, at age ten, he stole a Black farmer’s tractor using a borrowed pistol. On weekends during his teen years, he and his Sunday school teacher hunted Black people for sport. “We caught a [N-word] on the street after dark. We whupped his ass,” Thompson says. At age 13 or 14, he committed his first murder—an assault that went too far—and dumped the body in the Red River, the rust-colored waterway that separates Shreveport from Bossier City. (He was never questioned by police in the case.)
Thompson claims that he was expelled from Fair Park High School more than 160 times, for exploits such as detonating fireworks refashioned into bombs. But, he says, “My daddy worked for the school board at the time, so he could get me back in school.” His parents tried to set him straight—they would “ream my ass out,” he says. “But what’re you gonna do?”
He’s at a loss to explain how he broke so bad. “I’ve been a criminal all my life,” he says, sounding almost surprised, as if the reality of it only now dawned on him. “I don’t know why. It just happened, you know?”
The first time he was arrested, Thompson was 19 and just out of high school. He and a friend were caught breaking into a wrecking yard. His skittish buddy gave away their location under a junked car, and Thompson was sentenced to four months in Angola. While in prison, he says, “I got my nose broke twice, I got my jaw broke, I got stabbed in my right lung, had six ribs broken.”
If his brief stint at Angola was meant to change him, it fell flat. Instead, the lesson he absorbed was to commit crimes only with people who were equally capable—or, better yet, to do them alone. “When I went in there, I weighed 129 pounds,” he says. “When I got out, I weighed 164, and I was as hard as this table.” He raps the surface between him and Fuller with what remains of his right hand.
In fact, the bureau made Thompson so uncomfortable that he hatched a plan to shoot Fuller and a few other agents.
Thompson first appeared on Fuller’s radar as a suspect in two bank robberies: one in Shreveport and another in nearby DeSoto Parish. Soon after that, the FBI heard from other banks across the South that someone was prying open night-deposit boxes and emptying out the cash. When law enforcement asked around, informants mentioned Thompson’s name.
The agents Fuller assigned to investigate the rash of bank jobs made zero headway. They would hear that a robbery was planned and put the suspected location under watch, then a different bank across town would get hit. Thompson seemed to know exactly what they were doing. Fuller countered with an around-the-clock surveillance team from the bureau’s office in New Orleans, thinking that it might prevent Thompson from getting wind of their activities. This too failed. “They stuck out like a sore thumb,” Fuller recalls. “The police would come by and say, ‘Hey, who are you guys?’ ”
As time passed, Fuller learned more about Thompson’s reputation. If a building suspiciously burned, or a prostitution or drug or dogfighting ring was robbed, Thompson’s name always came up. He was also a known hit man. But the FBI could never pin him down.
In conversation with us, Thompson confirms masterminding the bank heists; he says that he pried open and emptied around 300 night-deposit boxes, lifting bags of cash like bird eggs from their nests with a custom-made grappling hook. He also talks about the hits he carried out—to him they were just jobs he was hired to do. He never thought about his victims, nor did he ask for the reasons behind the killings. “It didn’t matter to me. As long as you had the money to pay me, I didn’t care,” he says. He worked carefully and efficiently, and when possible made his targets vanish. “Never heard from again,” he says.
When Fuller asks how many hits there were, Thompson gets quiet. He allows that there were bodies “from coast to coast and border to border.” Fuller says that he heard the number 14. “There were several more than that,” Thompson replies.
We wait for elaboration. Instead, for ten seconds, Thompson stares serenely at us. Through us. A sphinx in prison-issue cornflower blue.
Despite all the mayhem he perpetrated, Thompson spent barely a night in jail for most of the seventies and eighties. “Local lawmen call him lucky, a modern-day Jesse James—smart enough to do the crime but pay no time,” the Shreveport Times reported in 1987. Philip Martin, a local journalist who covered his exploits, once wrote, “I’ve never been more terrified than when I heard Larry Thompson laughing at the other end of the telephone line.”
Fuller harbored a persistent suspicion that underworld currents ferried Thompson beyond the bureau’s grasp—that he slipped through trap doors and escape hatches opened by someone in law enforcement, maybe even Fuller’s own office. “My snitches were better than your snitches,” Thompson told him when Fuller first reached out about meeting. Now, as we sit in the prison, riveted, he elaborates. Justice was for sale back then. Certain cops had his back. This rang true to Fuller: He once heard that on at least one occasion, when Thompson was caught in a dragnet, he escaped in the trunk of a police cruiser.
Thompson also claims to have built relationships with courthouse clerks, prosecutors, and judges. Some friends he genuinely liked and some he paid for, though it was a Venn diagram, not separate circles. Some of these people were on the payroll of Carlos Marcello, the don of New Orleans’s most powerful crime family from 1947 until the mid 1980s, and a figure believed to be linked to the Kennedy assassination. Thompson tells us he was close with Marcello.
Fuller nods. This makes sense to him. And what was Thompson’s role in Marcello’s operation? After one of his long pauses, Thompson says, “Problem solver.” A problem might take the form of someone who “knew too much, or they were gonna tell somebody something, or go to court, testify against somebody,” he says.
Despite the compromised cops and corrupt judges, Thompson tells us, Fuller came closer to catching him than the FBI ever realized. In fact, the bureau made him so uncomfortable that he hatched a plan to shoot Fuller and a few other agents. “I told [agent] Jim MaGee in y’all’s office the time I came up there, I said, ‘The only thing that saved you was, I left Shreveport [for California],’ ” Thompson recalls, arms folded. “ ’Cause I was gonna start knocking y’all’s ass off.”
Fuller stares at him, digesting this.
“I had more pictures of you than you had of me,” Thompson continues. “Coming in and out of that building, I got you both front end and back.”
“So how were you going to do this?”
“Long-range.” Thompson holds up his hand in the shape of a gun.
“I always thought that this was going to end in a gun battle.”
Thompson snorts. “You don’t want to get into no gun battle with me.”
A former Shreveport cop said that D’Artois asked him to “take care of Jim Leslie” in exchange for money.
Another of Thompson’s associates in Shreveport was George D’Artois, the longtime public-safety commissioner. When Fuller mentions his name, Thompson says, “I liked George. George was my kind of people.”
D’Artois was only 36 when he was elected commissioner in 1962, which wasn’t surprising, because he seemed born for the job. A prototypical good old boy and a Shreveport native, he had a thick round face, dark eyes, and a sandy-brown crew cut. A World War II veteran and Marine, D’Artois both played to and reinforced the city’s darkest impulses—especially when it came to race—during his 14 years in office. The absence of any notable race-related uprisings in Shreveport during the civil-rights era was directly linked to his scorched-earth tenure. In 1963, he denied a march permit to Little Union Baptist Church members holding a memorial for the four girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing. To ensure they didn’t defy his order, D’Artois—who controlled the city’s police, fire, and traffic departments—assembled a 200-man riot squad. Cops on horseback rode onto the steps of the church and beat the pastor so badly he was hospitalized.
Many Shreveport residents knew that D’Artois was lenient when it came to gambling dens and Sunday liquor sales, and that his henchman did the rounds every Monday, collecting his cut of the business. Once, when three well-to-do young white men were arrested for gambling, D’Artois vaporized the charges. The Shreveport Times later wrote that “D’Artois had many high-placed friends in the city, friends for whom he didn’t mind doing favors.”
By April 1976, however, D’Artois’s excesses were causing him major agita. The Shreveport Times reported that he had received $17,300 from a fund designated for police informants, for which D’Artois couldn’t produce receipts. There were also revelations that D’Artois, a heavy gambler, had been chartering flights to Hot Springs, Arkansas, a gambling haven and Mafia outpost.
Then, in May, reports surfaced that a well-known public relations maven and campaign strategist named Jim Leslie had evidence of further wrongdoing. Leslie had created commercials for D’Artois’s 1975 reelection campaign, and the commissioner twice tried to pay him for the work with $3,500 drawn from a city account instead of his own campaign funds; D’Artois altered the invoice to make it appear that the work had been done for the city’s Department of Public Safety. Leslie refused the payment both times.
Shortly after the news broke, D’Artois was hospitalized for heart problems. While there, according to testimony later given to a grand jury, D’Artois asked several people to kill Leslie. One of them, a former Shreveport cop, said that D’Artois asked him to “take care of Jim Leslie” in exchange for money.
Around the same time, Leslie was holding a meeting in his office with a colleague named Elliott Stonecipher and several other people. The phone rang; it was D’Artois. Leslie turned away from the people around him, and the air in the room stiffened. After he hung up, Leslie flipped his chair back around and Stonecipher saw that he’d turned white. “I never saw Jim Leslie that color,” he says. “And then in full voice, nodding his head, [Leslie said]: ‘Man’s gonna have me killed.’ ”
Leslie testified in front of a Caddo Parish grand jury that June, and D’Artois was charged with attempted felony theft of city funds for one of the checks he tried to give Leslie. A month later, Leslie turned up dead in Baton Rouge, gunned down in the middle of the night in the parking lot of the Prince Murat Inn.
Within a couple hours of our arrival at Wade, Fuller appears to feel something like relief: Yes, things went badly in Shreveport. But look at the forces arrayed against him.
Thompson, for his part, is relishing his role as underworld tour guide and historian. When the topic turns to his brief relocation to California in the 1980s, Fuller asks, “Did you do anything out there that was illegal?”
“Only about every ten minutes,” Thompson replies. They both laugh.
Then the conversation takes an interesting turn. Fuller recently read The Commissioner, a 2009 book about Jim Leslie’s murder. Although the case pre-dated his arrival in Shreveport by half a decade, Fuller had long been fascinated by it—how it revealed the city’s brokenness. The story was front-page news in Louisiana for years, spawning two books and several investigative newspaper series. The Commissioner author Bill Keith once described the case as “the second most highly publicized murder in Louisiana history, second only to that of Huey Long,” a U.S. senator who was assassinated in 1935. He added: “Leslie’s unsolved murder no doubt is one of Louisiana’s greatest mysteries.”
Keith’s book lays out the case, now fully enshrined in Shreveport lore, that D’Artois paid someone to carry out the murder. Fuller puts the theory to Thompson. “When he contracted [a hit man] to take care of Jim Leslie, were you interested in that?” he asks.
“Who do you think killed Jim Leslie?” Thompson replies.
Fuller starts to repeat the local lore, then stops. “Are you saying you were involved with that?”
“I’m not. I’m just asking you who—”
“You’re asking me what I think,” Fuller says. “I can only think what I read in that book.”
He then asks whether Thompson agrees with the version of events Keith describes. Thompson looks away.
“Yea or nay?” Fuller finally says. “Does that fit your recollection of what happened?”
“No.”
“Well, that’s interesting. What do you say?”
“I know.”
“I’m starting to realize that.”
Thompson folds his arms. “See,” he says, “my name never came up in that deal.”
The conversation soon pivots away, but Thompson’s answers—really, his nonanswers—stick with me all afternoon. Toward the end of our visit, I return to the topic. “That Leslie murder,” I ask. “Do you remember where that happened?”
Thompson nods. “That hotel parking lot.”
After six hours, we thank Thompson for his time. He gives us copies of two unpublished fictionalized memoirs, one of which is handwritten. Salient details have been changed, he says, but the events really took place. “It’s got a lot of stuff in it,” he says. He pauses, then adds: “I guess a person—a real sharp person of your caliber, maybe—could figure out some things that went on.”
There’s a lot to digest from the day. But as we drive away, headlights piercing the darkness along Interstate 20, Fuller and I find ourselves returning to Jim Leslie. What did Thompson mean that he knew what happened that night?
We traveled to Wade thinking the trip would be worthwhile if Fuller were finally able to put the ghosts of Shreveport to rest. And he unpacked just how alone he really was amid the crookedness and corruption. But expectations are clay, and they get remolded. Fuller has the answers he originally sought, but now there’s a whole new set of questions—ones about Jim Leslie and Larry Thompson. Before we know it, we’re talking about going back.
2
It should have been a night for Jim Leslie to savor. On July 8, 1976, the Louisiana State Senate passed what was known as the Right to Work Bill. One of the most fiercely debated pieces of legislation in decades, the law did away with mandatory union membership and allowed businesses to hire nonunion workers.
Given the interests involved, this was a staggering achievement. Labor had a muscular presence in Louisiana, largely because it was controlled by organized crime. Developers were ordered to kick back as much as 25 percent of the cost of construction, and those who wouldn’t play along sometimes faced dire consequences. Plants blew up and buildings burned. In January 1976, a gang of more than 75 men commandeered a forklift to smash through the gate of a Jupiter Chemical construction site, where the company was building a new facility using non-AFL-CIO crews. The mob fired hundreds of rounds, killing one man and injuring five others.
Hired by the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry, Leslie inserted himself into the debate by creating a savvy ad campaign intended to build support for the Right to Work Bill. He was known for creating some of Louisiana’s first sophisticated TV spots. His reputation was as a brilliant influencer, and he was in high demand. He had run about 60 political campaigns by then, winning more than 80 percent of them. He had already opened three satellite offices—in Dallas, Baton Rouge, and Monroe, Louisiana—and seemed destined for the national stage; people speculated that he would spearhead the Southern arm of a presidential campaign, maybe as soon as 1980.
No one in Shreveport was surprised by his success. Leslie was a soft-spoken jokester and spellbinding storyteller with a dimpled chin, a Paul McCartney mop of hair, and a prodigious work ethic. At 20, he’d dropped out of college to become a reporter at the Shreveport Times, where he latched on to daring stories. After wrangling an invitation to a Ku Klux Klan meeting, he wrote a piece describing 60 robed members conducting a cross burning. He exposed after-hours liquor sales and served as the prosecution’s star witness when the city shut down two well-known club operators. Once, while covering a shootout between police and a fugitive, Leslie was so excited that he yelled “Shoot! Shoot!” at the staff photographer behind him, only to look back and see his colleague waving a firearm. “No, no! The camera!” he shouted.
Leslie became a public relations executive in 1964, and when his employer announced a move to Houston in 1967, he remained in Shreveport and opened his own agency. In 1972, he scored a chance to lead J. Bennett Johnston’s long-shot campaign for U.S. Senate; after his man won, Leslie’s phone never stopped ringing. In 1975, he elevated Anthony Guarisco from little-known attorney to state senator by filming a commercial featuring an actor dressed in 18th-century garb, quoting poetry. For the Right to Work campaign, he crafted a TV spot that showed labor leaders dangling state legislators on marionette strings. He was a Dixie Don Draper.
That July night, after the successful legislative vote, Leslie headed to Baton Rouge’s Camelot Club for an after-party, and then to the Sheraton Inn for drinks with colleagues. But he was not in a celebratory mood, according to Stonecipher. Leslie was married, but he slept around and feared he was facing divorce papers back home. “Jim knew what was waiting on him, family-wise, as soon as he got back to Shreveport,” Stonecipher says. “He was depressed.”
Eventually, Leslie said goodnight and made the short drive to the Prince Murat Inn, where he was staying. As he pulled into a parking spot, fireworks detonated close by, vestiges perhaps of the summer’s raucous celebration of the U.S. Bicentennial. It was about 1:50 a.m. when he exited his car. He was still wearing his work clothes: brown checked suit, yellow dress shirt, tie.
He’d taken about a dozen steps when a shotgun blast exploded into his upper back, tearing through his heart and lungs. Leslie staggered sideways and fell face down onto the asphalt, dead before he landed.
Curtis saw a white 1976 Oldsmobile Cutlass pull onto the property: Jim Leslie’s car. Moments later he heard the blast.
John Curtis thought the sound he heard was a cherry bomb. Partiers had been setting off fireworks on the other side of the fence bordering the Prince Murat, in an adjacent shopping center with a grocery store and a club called the Cahoots Lounge. Curtis, the hotel’s assistant manager, had just come outside to see whether the revelry was spreading into the Prince Murat’s parking lot when he saw a white 1976 Oldsmobile Cutlass pull onto the property: Jim Leslie’s car.
Moments later he heard the blast. He quickly walked 100 feet to the corner of the hotel, where he could peer into the back lot, and saw a body in a widening pool of blood. Curtis summoned the hotel’s security guard, who checked on the body and told Curtis to dial 911.
Baton Rouge Police detective Chris Schroeder happened to be nearby at the time, checking out a report of possible shots fired. He entered the Prince Murat’s lot “simply to drive around the building to check,” he’d later testify. But then he saw a man “waving frantically, pointing around the corner.” It was Curtis. Schroeder accelerated, then had to slam on the brakes to avoid running over the body.
Once Leslie was confirmed dead, Schroeder radioed a patrolman dealing with fireworks complaints and told him to look for a man with a shotgun instead. Curtis didn’t see or hear a car leave the hotel, so police thought the shooter might be on foot. They fanned out, searching a large warehouse on the back side of the neighboring shopping center, but came up empty. Meanwhile, officers began processing the scene. Finding a loose board in a wooden fence near where Leslie had parked, they surmised that the killer had pushed a gun barrel between two slats to fire the shot.
The murder became national news. The New York Times covered it, and radio legend Paul Harvey commented on it during his noon broadcast. Rumors churned that Leslie was targeted in retaliation for the Right to Work legislation. But Stonecipher and many others in Shreveport immediately thought someone else was responsible: George D’Artois. Having been present for the call between Leslie and D’Artois, Stonecipher concluded that Leslie had prophesied his own death.
As police looked for ties to the disgraced commissioner, there was a startling development: Before they could solve Leslie’s killing, a second murder took place.
Rusty Griffith likely felt some anxiety about the meeting on the evening of October 15, 1976. Griffith, 34, was a 400-pound Shreveport man with a mustache and dense curly hair. He had many livelihoods, some of which were legitimate: He ran a seafood business; several nightclubs, including one called Big Daddy’s Lounge; and a limousine service that ferried people from Dallas and Houston to the Louisiana Downs racetrack in Bossier City. His links to organized crime were well-known. He shared an office with Don Gardner, 39, a large, bearded former wrestler from Shreveport. Both consorted with a group of dodgy characters loosely known in law-enforcement circles as the Dixie Mafia. Among them were a trio of men from Baton Rouge: Steve Simoneaux, Clayton Kimble, and Jules Ron Kimbel. The latter two were siblings but spelled their surnames differently.
That night, as dusk approached, Griffith drove his brown Cadillac into the Three Rivers Wildlife Management Area, a dense forest nestled between the Mississippi and Red Rivers in Concordia Parish, about 200 miles southeast of Shreveport. Jules Ron Kimbel had asked him to meet there. What Griffith expected remains unclear, but it may have been trouble. About three weeks earlier, he and Kimbel had been indicted in Mississippi for interstate transportation of a stolen bulldozer, part of a Dixie Mafia scheme in which heavy equipment was swiped and taken to Mexico to be fenced.
Griffith met Kimbel as planned, on one of Three Rivers’ dirt roads. While they talked, another vehicle pulled up. The driver rolled down his window, and someone fired a shotgun into Griffith’s face. He died at the scene. Griffith’s address book, found in his car, included contact information for numerous organized-crime figures—and for George D’Artois.
As police investigated the killing, various Dixie Mafia members claimed that Griffith possessed recordings of conversations about the machinery thefts, illegal gambling activities, and the Leslie murder. These sources said there was concern that Griffith might use the recordings to reduce a potential sentence in the heavy-equipment case. The theory of his murder quickly became that someone had silenced him and sent a warning to others, in case there were copies of the tapes.
By November 7, Jules Ron Kimbel had been booked as a material witness in the Griffith murder, and so began what the Shreveport Times would later describe as one of “countless investigations by parish and city law enforcement from Baton Rouge to Shreveport” into the deaths of Griffith and Leslie. Soon, Gardner and six others were arrested for first-degree murder in the Griffith case.
As for the Leslie murder, it was difficult to piece together a working theory. By April 1977, the state had added Clayton Kimble and Steve Simoneaux to its list of witnesses, but their stories were ever changing and influenced by the promise of immunity in exchange for testimony, the possibility of a get-out-of-jail-free card for parole violations, and a $35,000 reward in the Leslie case offered by the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry. The best version of events investigators could piece together was this: Two weeks before the Leslie murder, Griffith and Gardner asked Clayton Kimble if he could find someone to kill Leslie for D’Artois. At a second meeting, Kimble was offered $30,000 to do the job himself but declined; killing wasn’t his kind of work. The three men agreed that the murder should happen in Baton Rouge to insinuate a link to organized labor and deflect attention from D’Artois. Gardner then gave Kimble $5,000 as a deposit while he looked for someone to take the contract.
Five days before Leslie was killed, Kimble returned the money, saying that he couldn’t find any takers. Griffith then said he and Gardner would do it themselves. They decided that Griffith would hide behind the hotel fence with a shotgun while Gardner waited in a car parked in the space closest to Leslie’s room. When Leslie arrived, Gardner would leave, prompting Leslie to pull into his spot, and Griffith would do the deed.
Kimble told police that several hours after the murder, the conspirators met at a Denny’s, where Griffith and Gardner reported that the plan had worked. Seconds after Griffith killed Leslie, Gardner had retrieved him from behind the fence. The two men then drove to a bridge over the Mississippi River and threw the shotgun Griffith used into the water below.
Police obtained an arrest warrant for first-degree murder for Gardner, who denied involvement and said he was in Shreveport the night Leslie was killed. (He also denied having anything to do with Griffith’s death.) Investigators brought the same charge against D’Artois, which only added to his legal headaches. Over the previous year, a grand jury had indicted him for tampering with evidence seized in gambling raids; for the theft of more than $32,000 in city funds; for intimidating grand jury witnesses; and for malfeasance of office. He had resigned from office the previous July.
On April 19, 1977, Caddo Parish sheriff’s deputies showed up at D’Artois’s home to arrest him. He quickly locked himself in his attic with a .357 Magnum. Officers persuaded him to come out—only for D’Artois to barricade himself in a bathroom. After an eight-hour siege, three deputies crashed through the bathroom door. One of them told the Shreveport Times that D’Artois “was grabbing for the gun when we pinned him to the floor.”
It took only a few weeks for the Leslie and Griffith cases to begin to fall apart. The police had no physical evidence linking any of the purported participants to either murder; they were relying entirely on Kimble, Kimbel, and Simoneaux and their shifting, conflicting accounts: While the three men sometimes agreed that Griffith had shot Leslie, in other moments Simoneaux claimed Clayton Kimble had pulled the trigger, or that “a man from Dallas” had done it.
One by one, charges against the defendants in the Griffith case were dropped for lack of evidence. After the prosecutor in the Leslie case refused to grant Simoneaux, Kimble, and Kimbel immunity, the men took the stand at a hearing and pleaded the Fifth. The murder charges against D’Artois and Gardner were quickly dismissed. But D’Artois didn’t have long to enjoy his emancipation. On June 8, he underwent heart surgery in Houston; three days later, at the age of 51, he died from complications, taking countless secrets with him.
D’Artois’s death, along with the collapse of the two cases, left people wondering whether the murders would ever be solved. Then, in 1981, a new federal grand jury was empaneled. The state rounded up the same cast of characters and pegged the late D’Artois as the ringleader in both crimes—directing men to take out Leslie because he was talking to law enforcement, and to murder Griffith because he seemed like he was about to squeal. But after reviewing the evidence, the grand jury issued an indictment that only brought charges in Griffith’s slaying.
In 1982, five people were put on trial: Clayton Kimble, Jules Ron Kimbel, Don Gardner, and two peripheral Dixie Mafia players, Kenneth Brouillette and Benny O’Quinn. They were charged with violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, statute; conspiracy to violate RICO; conspiracy to violate Griffith’s civil rights by murdering him; and obstruction of justice. Steve Simoneaux, who was in prison at the time for a series of robberies of expensive watches in Dallas, took a plea deal and served as star witness; his testimony would reduce his potential life sentence to 20 years. After more than three weeks of proceedings, Kimble and Kimbel were convicted. Brouillete and O’Quinn were acquitted, and a mistrial was declared for Gardner; prosecutors said it would be too expensive to retry him.
Leslie’s murder was a point of discussion during the Griffith case, given how intertwined the two men’s killings seemed to be. And U.S. Attorney Don Beckner assured the press that his office, along with the FBI, was still pursuing indictments for Leslie’s death. But Beckner never did bring charges against anyone; he wasn’t able to build the case he’d hoped for.
That result was unsatisfying but perhaps predictable, given the lack of physical evidence and the dependence on unreliable narrators. When Kimble and Kimbel appealed the verdict in the Griffith case, a panel of three judges noted: “Simoneaux acknowledged that he was dishonorable and that he had repeatedly lied, including lies under oath, to save his own skin.” (They upheld the brothers’ convictions anyway.)
No one found the situation more unpalatable than Elliott Stonecipher. He grew up in Shreveport, in a tiny house in the wrong-side-of-the-tracks Caddo Heights neighborhood. A stellar student, he was also a skilled public speaker, and by the time he returned from college he was touted as the city’s future. “I was supposed to be the mayor of Shreveport,” Stonecipher says.
But he was never willing to traffic in the kind of machinations necessary to reach the mayor’s office. Instead, he worked as a pollster, public speaker, and political strategist. In the 2010s, Stonecipher launched an effort to finally untangle Leslie’s unsolved murder, thinking he could lean on his access to Shreveport’s levers of power. He dug through records in the National Archives and at Louisiana State University Shreveport, and attempted to track down people rumored to be involved. But in his telling, the wealthy and powerful didn’t want the matter revisited. Longtime friends suggested that he let it lie and chastised him for reopening old wounds. Potential clients said their boards of directors weren’t comfortable hiring him. “I was simply viewed as a turncoat,” he says. “And those are not tolerated by the wealthy leadership of Shreveport.”
Stonecipher has gone as far as he can with his search for answers. He’s eager for help. And in an interview, he makes a provocative claim: He believes that authorities identified the man who shot Leslie, and that it wasn’t Rusty Griffith. It was the guy from Dallas Simoneaux had once mentioned, a shadowy mob-connected assassin named Rick Roberts. Stonecipher has never been able to track him down—but maybe we can.
Murdering someone with a shotgun in the middle of a major city without being spotted seemed well beyond the Dixie Mafia’s skill set.
The first mention Fuller and I find of Rick Roberts is in the 1981 grand jury indictment. It’s odd, however. He was one of nine people named as conspirators in Griffith’s murder, but he was never charged, and he wasn’t included in the indictment’s description of the conspiracy. When it covered the indictment, the Shreveport Times ran a front-page grid with a photo or sketch of everyone named by the grand jury—except Roberts. We also find a story in the Times about a taped interview in which Simoneaux told investigators that Roberts took part in planning Leslie’s murder, then served as the getaway driver—a role that hardly seemed to require a seasoned hit man.
We find more references to Roberts at the LSU Shreveport library. The archive has a robust section on George D’Artois, and at some point pages of testimony from the grand jury proceedings were deposited there. (By law that testimony is sealed, but someone apparently wanted it in public view.) The documents include testimony that put Roberts in Griffith’s orbit and at the scene of Leslie’s murder: A witness said Roberts worked at one of Griffith’s establishments, the Inside Out Club, but left for Dallas after Griffith unloaded it. Clayton Kimble recalled that the afternoon before the Leslie murder, various conspirators gathered at a Holiday Inn, where Griffith had a “buddy … which we found out later was Mr. Rick Roberts.” Kimble further claimed that he saw Roberts in the back seat of Griffith’s Cadillac, the supposed getaway car, shortly before the murder, and that Simoneaux told him after Leslie’s death that “Rick Roberts killed a man.” But Kimble also said that he never saw Roberts after murder. “I took for granted that he possibly drove the red and white [Cadillac] wherever it had to go,” Kimble testified, referring to the vehicle he’d previously placed Roberts in.
Roberts was called to testify before the grand jury too, but his testimony isn’t in the library’s files. There’s only a cover page and a second sheet noting where the proceedings took place and who was present.
Was it possible that Griffith, working on behalf of D’Artois, contracted Roberts to shoot Leslie? On the surface, the idea of a professional assassin made sense. Murdering someone with a shotgun in the middle of a major city without being spotted seemed well beyond the Dixie Mafia’s skill set. As Fuller and I zoomed out, questions mounted. How could Griffith have wedged a shotgun into a narrow space in a fence, fired, extracted the weapon, shimmied his 400-pound bulk out of the tight space between the fence and a loading dock, then driven away with Gardner—all within seconds? How could a car have sped away from the scene without the Prince Murat’s assistant manager, who was standing outside the hotel when the murder happened, seeing or hearing it?
And also: Where the hell was Rick Roberts?
With questions about the Leslie murder rattling around in our heads, Fuller and I return to Wade in March 2022, curious to follow up on the richly embroidered account of Thompson’s life as a hired gun and career criminal in one of his fictionalized memoirs, titled The Killer P.I. His character is a consummate professional: no drinking or drugs to impede clear and quick thinking. (“Never trust a drunk” was one of his mantras.) He is unfailingly polite, avoids conversation, and keeps his face and head covered, though he sometimes wears only a bandage on his cheek: If someone is asked to describe him later, that’s the detail they’ll focus on. By then he’ll have long since removed it.
Thompson tells us that, as a hit man, he adhered to a set of rigidly compartmentalized behaviors. His killings usually lacked any direct connection to him. He used pseudonyms and avoided anyone involved with a hit—including the person who hired him. He limited contact to an intermediary who shared his adherence to the Mafia’s code of silence. “Everybody that I’ve done business with all my life will tell you that I’m very secretive about what I do,” he says.
Fuller and I are eager to learn how this approach informed some of his most notorious hits, including the Maria Marshall murder, which Thompson breaks down for us in detail. But we also want to glean more about the Leslie murder. I tell Thompson that there’s something I want to ask him about from our first meeting. We noticed how readily he recalled the detail about the murder’s location.
“You answered so quickly,” I venture, “it sounded as if you were there.”
He smiles and says, “I probably was.”
3
By the time we arrive at Wade for our third visit, Fuller and I have become fairly obsessed with the Leslie murder. A known hit man who seemingly admits to involvement in a notorious unsolved crime will do that. We’ve copied or photographed thousands of pages of files kept at the LSU Shreveport archive—old newspaper stories, police reports, transcripts, George D’Artois campaign materials—and pored over them. Fuller has plunged into his early FBI days, exploring possible links to one of his assets in New York City: a former New Orleans–based Marcello-family mobster. He has reconnected with former colleagues from the Shreveport office and cold-called law enforcement who were active in the seventies. We hope that Thompson can provide some additional intel.
We greet him by asking about his recent bout with COVID and how his job in the prison kitchen is going; during wild boar season, he tells us, local hunters sometimes drop off cuts of meat. After catching up, I hand him a summary of the East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff’s investigation of Leslie’s murder. I point out something that’s already obvious: Although the probe seemed exhaustive, Thompson’s name didn’t come up, which seems to undercut his claim that he was there that night.
It’s a gambit. Fuller and I have now talked to Thompson for a total of 15 or so hours. We have a pretty good idea of how he communicates. If we draw inferences or make intuitive leaps that are accurate, he’ll confirm them in his own way: “Maybe I was” or “I may have.” Our understanding of his code has allowed us to develop a kind of Larry Thompson operating manual. He doesn’t respond well to overly broad questions. “Tell me what happened that night” goes nowhere. We steer him onto a subject and then sit quietly, asking questions but also leaving conversational space to fill.
Thompson reads the investigation summary slowly, looking as if he’s just chewed tinfoil. “I don’t know where they get all this shit right here,” he says when he finishes.
I ask how he—or whoever was in the parking lot that night—knew when Leslie would return to the hotel. Thompson says that he had a spy, someone who reported back when Leslie had left the party. “I was by a phone,” he says, “waiting for that call.”
We nudge him on. Was the plan to shoot through the hotel fence, as police believed the killer did? Thompson shakes his head. He accurately recalls the makeup of the fence, but says, “I didn’t have to go through no fence.”
At this point the room ionizes. It’s happening, I think. Thompson is not only telling us that he was there, but he’s confessing, in his own elliptical way, to having pulled the trigger. Not wanting to break the spell, I resist the urge to look over at Fuller. Somewhere outside a door slams. The conversation unfolds with an eerie calm.
“You were not behind the fence?” I ask.
“No.”
“So you were just in the parking lot?”
He nods. “Behind an automobile.”
He knew Leslie’s room number, he says, and “it don’t take a rocket scientist to figure out where he’s gonna park at.” When Leslie pulled in, Thompson tells us, he slipped from behind an adjacent vehicle and fired his gun.
He says he knew that the blast would draw attention, so he’d planned a non-getaway getaway: He’d checked into the Prince Murat under a pseudonym the previous day. After killing Leslie, he hustled straight through the back entrance of the hotel and headed to his room, where he stashed the shotgun under his bed. “How many of the police are gonna think the man who shot that man was in the hotel?” he says. At about 6 a.m., Thompson quietly got into a car he’d parked elsewhere in the lot, drove to Shreveport, and disposed of the gun.
We ask him: Why did he do it? Did D’Artois order the hit, as was widely believed?
Speaking deliberately, pausing for long intervals, Thompson says the hit was connected to labor and thus to organized crime—no surprise, given the contentious Right to Work vote. Leslie was “talking to the wrong people,” Thompson says. “You didn’t talk to the wrong people back in the day, ’cause there was a lot of money floating around back then, and they didn’t mind spending it.”
Some of that money, Thompson says, took the form of bribes—specifically, his buddy Carlos Marcello had tried to influence the state senate’s vote. Leslie became aware of this and was sharing the sensitive information with people in the capital. Why take that risk? Thompson believes Leslie became so successful so fast that he felt untouchable.
“We used to call that too big for your britches,” Fuller says.
“That’s exactly what we got there,” Thompson replies. “He thought he was somebody he wasn’t.”
When Thompson is done telling his story, we sit quietly for a while. “You said quite a bit there,” I say.
Thompson gazes at us and nods. “I shouldn’t have,” he replies.
Scott almost seems impressed by the planning that went into the crime. “That has a lot of Larry Thompson in it right there,” he says.
It’s a balmy May evening when Fuller and I emerge from Wade Correctional. I feel both dazed and wired. We walk silently to the car, letting the enormity of what we’ve heard sink in. We climb into the rental and Fuller looks at me with raised eyebrows. “Well,” he says. I can see how energized he is. He’s not just back in the middle of an investigation; he finally has the chance to get to the bottom of something in Shreveport.
Is there a chance Thompson merely told us what we wanted to hear? It’s possible. He could be looking to burnish his legend or simply keep us entertained and coming back. Then again, Thompson has a full visitation list; he has no shortage of company. And his version of events feels utterly plausible: a known hit man pulling off a professional job, a crime no one was ever able to solve.
More than that, his story explained what hadn’t made sense as we dug into the police investigation—for instance, how, in the short time it took the hotel’s assistant manager to see Leslie’s body, the killer had supposedly maneuvered from behind the fence and vanished in a getaway car without being seen or heard. If Thompson was telling the truth, the answer was now as clear as it was obvious: He didn’t.
To check our instincts, we run the story past law enforcement who know Thompson. When we talk to Larry Scott, a former Shreveport cop acquainted with Thompson since the 1980s, he almost seems impressed by the planning that supposedly went into the crime. “That has a lot of Larry Thompson in it right there,” he says. Scott also believes that organized crime was likely responsible for the hit. “The union was 100 percent behind killing Jim Leslie,” he says. “They just let [the police] go after D’Artois.”
But how was it that Thompson was never linked to the Leslie murder? “My first thought is that Larry is very good at what he does,” Ford McWilliams, a former Caddo Parish prosecutor, tells us. “He killed all these people and robbed all these banks and night deposits, but he knew to keep his mouth shut. If he had a loose end, he tied it up, and he was just very professional. He didn’t make mistakes.”
Robert “Robbo” Davidson is a former chief detective for the DeSoto Parish Sheriff’s Department. He has met with Thompson many times in prison and investigated one of the cold cases Thompson confessed to in an effort to reduce his son’s prison time; arguably no one in law enforcement knows the hit man better. Davidson not only thinks Thompson’s description of the Leslie murder is believable, but he also finds it strange that Thompson’s name didn’t come up during the investigation. “He was so close to D’Artois,” Robertson says. “I think the first person [D’Artois would] go to was Larry Thompson.” But the case was mostly built in Baton Rouge, not Shreveport, and before Thompson had achieved the peak of his notoriety. If his name did come up, it could have slipped through the cracks.
What about the motive—did the bribes Thompson mentioned actually occur? I look up people Leslie worked for; most of them are gone, but Anthony Guarisco, whom he helped get elected to the state senate, is still alive. When I search his name online, something astonishing pops up: Guarisco was mentioned at the end of an Associated Press story about Leslie’s murder. Citing a New Orleans newspaper, the piece says that Guarisco told federal authorities he declined an offer of $10,000 to help clear a campaign debt if he opposed the Right to Work Bill.
I connect with Guarisco via email, and he sends me a document titled “The Bribe.” It’s only an introduction to the story I want to know—a 326-word passage that begins with a detailed description of Leslie heading to work on the day of the vote. I reply by asking Guarisco to elaborate over the phone, but when I later mention that I’d like to loop in a retired FBI agent when we talk, he decides he has nothing to share about the Leslie case.
Fuller reaches out to Mike Barnett, a retired colonel from the East Baton Rouge Sheriff’s Department, which investigated the Leslie killing. Barnett agrees that Leslie was murdered because he inserted himself into an extremely charged political issue. If the mob couldn’t stop the Right to Work Bill with bribes, maybe a reminder of the cost of going against them would help their interests in the future. “I think they believed it was going to intimidate a lot of legislators,” Barnett says.
We are building consensus around the idea that Thompson might have pulled the trigger, but if that’s true, a key question remains: What about the elusive Rick Roberts? Was he involved?
Fuller, who once worked in the FBI’s Dallas office, canvasses his law-enforcement contacts throughout Louisiana and Texas: longtime members of sheriff’s offices, mob investigators, veteran agents, people who knew criminal heavyweights of all kinds. None had heard of a hit man named Rick Roberts.
Elliott Stonecipher says he was equally baffled when he tried to find him. “I tried every way I could to get a lead on Rick Roberts,” he says. “I couldn’t find cops that knew him, couldn’t find anybody.”
“Imagine that. Nobody’s ever seen him. Don’t know what he looks like, don’t know what he sounds like. And nobody’s ever met him.”
When Warden Goodwin ushers us in for a fourth prison visit, Thompson seems glad to see us. A certain camaraderie has developed. After all those years as rivals, Fuller and Thompson have become, if not exactly friends, at least not not friends.
This time we’ve brought pointed questions about the Leslie case, based on details drawn from police and forensic reports. Even after so much time has passed, the hit man’s answers largely match what we know to be true. He estimates that he was 30 feet from Leslie when he fired the shotgun, echoing the distance cited in the initial police report (31 feet). The description of him slipping into his hotel room fits the timeline of how long it took the assistant manager to see Leslie’s body.
I have another question for Thompson, one that’s been percolating since our most recent conversation with Stonecipher, about the purported Dallas hit man. I remind Thompson that in his fictional memoirs, his character uses a pseudonym while working as a contract killer. It’s part of that character’s modus operandi to leave no trace. Then I ask: Did he ever use the name Rick Roberts?
Without hesitation he chuckles. “I don’t know, I might have,” he says.
We’ve learned to pay close attention to Thompson’s reactions. Fuller has occasionally thrown in questions about murders he knows Thompson didn’t commit. When Thompson wasn’t involved, he says so immediately. It’s like introducing a control into an experiment. Now his response to the question of Roberts’s identity feels unpremeditated.
“Rick?” Fuller says. “Can we call you Rick?”
Thompson laughs deeply. “That don’t mean I’d like to answer to it,” he says. “I would use a lot of names over the years, but nobody’d ever know who it really was.”
The admission is such that I have to force myself to stay plugged into the moment. But there’s something in the room that makes it easy. Maybe Thompson is energized by the chance to confess after all these years, and I’m feeling it—Fuller is, too. We are three people who have little in common but are emotionally joined, like the survivors of a plane crash or an infantry unit under fire.
We explain that we’ve done extensive research in archives and throughout the law-enforcement community for information about a hit man named Rick Roberts.
Thompson nods. “They can’t find him, can they?”
“They can’t,” I say.
“Amazing how someone could just slip by like that.”
“Allegedly,” Fuller says, “he might be in Dallas.”
“Son of a bitch,” Thompson replies. “Imagine that. Nobody’s ever seen him. Don’t know what he looks like, don’t know what he sounds like. And nobody’s ever met him.”
Two things come to me. One is that Thompson was never considered a suspect in the investigation in part because none of the other men charged in connection with the crime ever mentioned his name. If Thompson is now telling the truth about using a pseudonym, that was by design. Keeping his identity a secret from the Dixie Mafia guys who knew Leslie was going to be murdered would have been as much a part of the planning as where to dump the gun afterward.
The second thought is a wisp of a memory, something Thompson told us the first time we visited, when Fuller initially asked about the murder. If we’d understood more then, we might have divined its meaning: See, he told us then, my name never came up in that deal.
There’s just one problem with the theory we’re working out in our interview: Investigators and prosecutors did talk to someone named Rick Roberts. We know this because of the bare-bones documents we found at the library, pointing to his grand jury testimony in 1981. Finding other evidence of his existence will require a trip west.
In early 2023, Fuller and I drive to the Fort Worth, Texas, branch of the National Archives, which holds transcripts and court filings from the 1982 trial. The staff brings out three boxes and we dig in; there are more than 10,000 pages. They’re divided into binders, each containing a single day’s testimony. Every binder begins with a table of contents naming the day’s witnesses. I churn through them all, scanning the contents. When I open the binder for June 9, 1982, my pulse thumps in my forehead. There he is, on page 58.
The transcript takes up a mere ten pages, double-spaced. It reveals little. Roberts knew Rusty Griffith; he’d worked at Griffith’s lounge in Shreveport; they’d talked about a development project in Costa Rica; before that, Roberts sold advertising for Holiday Inn. Roberts said that he only ever spoken to Don Gardner once in his life, and never met the four other defendants charged with conspiring to kill Griffith. When asked about the Leslie murder, Roberts replied, “The only thing I know is that he was killed, and that I have given testimony in front of two grand juries already concerning the fact that I knew nothing of that situation at all.”
“Have you ever been a hit man?” he was asked.
“No, sir.”
“Do you know what that term means?”
“I believe so. I don’t even own a gun.”
Prodded one last time for any knowledge of either killing, Roberts said, “I know nothing about anything. I was just a victim of circumstances, being at the wrong time in the wrong place.” And with that he was dismissed.
I show the pages to Fuller, my mind churning. Rick Roberts did exist, and if he played a role in Leslie’s killing, he seems to have artfully avoided any blame. Does that mean Thompson was lying about using a pseudonym? Could Thompson be protecting Roberts? Or, more improbably, could Thompson have been interviewed by the police or appeared in front of a grand jury in character?
Fortunately, Wade Correctional is our next stop.
Fuller and I sit, thunderstruck. This, it occurs to me, is literally how you get away with murder.
This visit, we don’t spend much time on preliminaries. Once we’ve settled into the meeting room, I hand over the first page of the Roberts testimony. Thompson is unfazed; he says he sort of knew Roberts. We watch for a reaction, but Thompson reveals nothing. I begin to wonder if he even remembers our previous conversation.
We let it slide for the moment and move on to other subjects, but later I return to the topic. Since Roberts turned out to be a real person, maybe there was some kind of miscommunication before, I suggest. Is Thompson certain he used the name as an alias? “Yeah, I’ve used it,” he says.
“So it’s just a coincidence that this guy’s name is also Rick Roberts?”
Thompson allows one of his trademark long pauses. “I guess,” he finally says. “I used a lot of names in different places. I can walk into a restaurant up there in Arkansas and they’ll call me Mr. Morrow.”
But, Fuller says, “You wouldn’t appear before a grand jury and raise your right hand and say your name is Rick Roberts and ‘I live at XYZ address,’ would you?”
Perusing the testimony again, Thompson finds a way to answer. “I’ll tell you one thing, I never worked for Rusty Griffith.”
As we mull over the riddle, Thompson grins, head tilted back. “When he smiles like that,” Fuller says to me, “there’s more behind the story.”
Then it strikes me: What if Thompson used Roberts’s name on the Leslie job because he wanted their identities to blend? What if the goal was to be confused with Rick Roberts, to deflect attention in the ensuing investigation?
When I put these questions to Thompson, he nods. “That could be what happened.”
The genius of this washes over me. If the police were given the name of a nonexistent person, that would raise suspicion. So Thompson could have used an alias that didn’t require him to invent a new identity. He could have borrowed the name of a real person—someone he knew would be quickly dismissed as a suspect, and whose name was commonplace to boot. When I advance this idea, Thompson, arms folded, says: “Might’ve happened just like that.”
Fuller and I sit, thunderstruck. This, it occurs to me, is literally how you get away with murder.
Fuller and I then try to get a deeper understanding of why the hit was ordered. Thompson claims that Leslie was given information by someone associated with Carlos Marcello about the mob’s attempts to infiltrate the state firefighters’ union. “Organized crime wasn’t controlling that union here [in Louisiana] at the time—not like they did up north—and they were trying to get that established here,” Thompson says.
These efforts may or may not have included the bribe attempts he mentioned earlier, like the one that former state senator Anthony Guarisco declined. But it wasn’t the bribes that led to Leslie’s demise; it was his loose talk about them. Thompson tells us that Leslie scheduled a meeting with law enforcement to discuss the payoffs on July 9, only hours after he was murdered. “You can’t do what he was doing and get away with it, not back then,” Thompson says. “Or do what he was doing to the person he tried to do it to.”
Leslie’s stature made him a real threat. “He had the power of the media,” Fuller says.
“Right, that was his power right there,” Thompson replies. “He had a lot of ears, and he was using some of those ears in the wrong way, and it was getting back to the right people.”
We later confirm a key element of this account: According to an investigative series in Baton Rouge’s Morning Advocate, Leslie was due in a meeting with U.S. Attorney Douglas Gonzales Sr. the morning after he was killed. The timing of the hit worked in another way, too: By waiting until after the Right to Work vote, Marcello’s people could pin the hit on D’Artois—who was in ever deeper legal trouble.
Outside the prison, Fuller and I linger in the humid air for a while, somewhat dazed and in disbelief. It took five trips to Louisiana and nearly 40 hours of conversation. But after three years circling a case that had gone ice cold—47 years after Jim Leslie was shot dead—everything seems to fit together.
EPILOGUE
During our last trip to Shreveport, in March 2025, a source tells us that Louisiana has created a cold-case task force to try to pin Jim Leslie’s murder on Larry Thompson. The unit’s existence promises something we weren’t sure we’d obtain on our own: closure.
It’s unlikely that filing charges will accomplish more than that. Wade’s new warden, Michele Dauzat, tells me that Thompson, now 81, has been moved to another prison. He isn’t responding to our communications like he used to. When Thompson was at Wade, he answered emails within hours; now he doesn’t reply for days, if at all. Extending his sentence would be a symbolic gesture, given the term he’s currently serving, his advanced age, and some kidney-related health problems he mentioned to us. He might agree to a deal to shorten his son’s prison term, but it’s unclear whether he’d be offered one.
Still, there are plenty of people that resolution would mean a lot to—most prominently Elliott Stonecipher. “Everything that happened to Jim is insane,” he says. “Everything organized labor got away with, not to mention organized crime, is insane.”
Stonecipher has told us countless hours’ worth of stories over the years about the ways Shreveport broke his heart. The racial schisms. The corruption. But one is particularly personal: Jim Leslie and George D’Artois were both buried in the city’s venerable Forest Park Cemetery, less than a year apart. It bothered Stonecipher that the crowd for D’Artois’s funeral rivaled that of Leslie’s. “They couldn’t get in all of the cars that wanted to be in the funeral,” he recalls. “And Forest Park’s road goes on forever.”
For Stonecipher, it was a reminder that Shreveport had learned nothing from the senseless tragedy of Leslie’s death. “I never got over that, and frankly, it changed everything that I ever felt about my hometown,” Stonecipher says. “It never came back.”
As for Myron Fuller, Shreveport was the one place during his 31 years in the FBI where he struggled to find a gear. Clandestine forces conspired against him, investigations blinked out, people died. He came back looking for a reckoning. He needed to know it wasn’t all on him.
He comes away not only with a deeper understanding of his time in Shreveport, but with something more: He may have cracked open one of the most famous unsolved murders in Louisiana history. “When you’re in the middle of the forest, you can’t see the trees,” he says. “When you get out of there and look down from a bird’s-eye view? Holy shit. So that’s what this has done for me.”
Our last night in Shreveport, we have no plan. We drive for a bit, get hungry, and spontaneously land at Ernest’s Orleans, a place long known as an organized-crime hangout. It still has an unreconstructed mafioso vibe, as if it were lifted straight from a 1970s Scorsese film. A guy wearing a gigantic cowboy hat sits at a table near ours with an ostentatiously dressed woman. The waiter, a portly, uniformed man who also seems from another era, confirms the mob history: Yes, Carlos Marcello came here.
Fuller orders a whiskey on the rocks, looks around. When he talks about Shreveport, the edge is gone. The ghosts have vanished. But only for him. For the city, they remain.
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