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Extortion, Southern Style
Extortion, Southern Style
One of the earliest lessons learned in any newsroom is about the fine line that
exists between cops and robbers. I grew up around police officers, detectives and law
enforcement administrators, and listened to them talk about their disadvantaged
backgrounds and growing up in dirtpoor sections of town. A chief of police in
Montgomery, Alabama once told me that “if not for the grace of God,” he could have
easily “gone the other way.” Many a family member or friend of law enforcement
personnel are killed on the streets or lost in prison forever. Sometimes there is a razor thin
line between the good guys and bad guys, which was never clearer to me than when a
news reporter at WBRCTV, the ABC affiliate in Birmingham where I worked for several
years early in my career, answered a phone call on a cold January day in 1982.
America was caught in the grips of the worst economy in years, and Birmingham,
an area built around an uncertain steel industry, was reportedly in a dead heat with Flint,
Michigan for the dubious distinction of having the nation’s highest rate of unemployment.
For dozens of years US Steel was the largest employer in Alabama’s largest county,
Jefferson, and home to hundreds of rugged, now second and third generation
steelworkers. They grew up under the hazy orange skies polluted by towering
smokestacks spread across the “Magic City,” nicknamed for its meteoric growth patterns
over a relatively brief period of time. Like their fathers before them, many of these men of
steel had experienced serious lay offs in the past, but the work had always returned in due
time. The steelworkers’ unions were strong, and supported the membership during even
the darkest of times, but something about 1982 seemed altogether different. And it was:
US Steel was about to shut its doors in Birmingham forever.
I had just moved to Birmingham from Chattanooga, which was only a couple
hundred miles to the north. During my second week on the job in Tennessee, my boss had
hastily called a station meeting and rather unexpectedly announced that WRCBTV, the
market’s NBC affiliate, and only the second television station to ever employ me, was
officially up for sale. Well aware of the serious unemployment issues around the south, I
was nervous, and spent the next 6 months unsuccessfully trying to develop a suitable exit
strategy. On December 5, 1981 with everything I owned wedged into my car, I moved to
Birmingham after accepting a position as assistant promotion manager at WBRCTV,
once the market’s most powerful television station. Ironically, my first day on the job was
Pearl Harbor Day, which probably should have been an omen as to what was to follow.
It was at a particularly bleak time in the area’s history when a news reporter
working at the station, which is located just below a mammoth iron statue, a landmark
known as Vulcan, hovering atop Red Mountain, answered a phone call from a man
making some pretty serious threats. In a husky, southern accent the caller asked for a
particular reporter, and went on to tell him about a bizarre plan. The man said he would
randomly inject poison into meats and beverages at a wellknown chain of grocery store
locations in the Birmingham area, unless he was paid $250,000 in cash.
The caller wanted to use WBRC reporter Lee Naves as a “gobetween” in an
extortionplot involving a local family that owned Food World grocery stores. He also
said that under no circumstances was the reporter to approach police with any of this
information. In fact, the colloquial speech the caller used during his initial conversation
with Naves, gave the distinct impression that he clearly understood law enforcement
protocol, which would later play a significant role in bringing him to justice. The man
said that he would have further instructions soon. Then, as quickly as he called, the
mysterious man hung up
The grocery business in Birmingham was diverse and the chain in question was
the largest in the state. It had humble roots, beginning in the early 1930s when a 19year
old son of Sicilian immigrants used a few hundreddollars in savings to purchase space
downtown Birmingham. The family’s oldest boys reportedly quit their jobs a few days
later then moved their entire family into a small space next to the new grocery store. An
industrious young Joe Bruno and his brothers proceeded to build the grocery, which was
said to be about the size of a modern day cold storage locker, and they did it from the
ground up, carving a niche for themselves in the tradition of immigrant grocers that
settled in the area just after the turn of the century. There were significant populations of
Italians, Greeks and Lebanese in Birmingham, due in part to the availability of work for
unskilled laborers in the steel mills and coalmines. Families settled in areas such as the
West End and Ensley, building strong community identities that survive today.
In 1959 the Bruno’s business was incorporated and began to flourish into an
empire of supermarkets. The family’s stores were eventually branded by half a dozen
different names around the region, and would grow to become by far the largest grocery
chain in the state. In time, everyone knew someone that shopped at a Brunoowned store.
In 1977 the family business boasted sales at well over $200 Million. By 1989 they
exceeded $2 Billion, and by the early 1990s approached $3 Billion. In addition to Food
World and Bruno’s, eventually company stores included Food Fare, Food Max and
Vincent’s Market locations, as well as Piggly Wiggly stores, primarily in southern
sections of Georgia. The family also owned a chain of successful Big B Drug stores that
prospered throughout the area.
In 1982 the Bruno family was well known, and had stores all over. By all
accounts they were a tight knit family, deeply religious and active in the Catholic Church
as well as the community at large. They were also known to be extremely philanthropic.
In fact, today one of the largest buildings on the campus of the University of Alabama in
Tuscaloosa is the Bruno Business Library. It was named in honor of Joe’s younger
brother and company president, Angelo Bruno, who along with another brother, Lee, died
tragically when a company plane crashed in Georgia.
The news director at WBRC was John Hayes, a tall man with thinning curly hair
and large, Cokebottle glasses. He’d graduated from the University of Florida, and
worked for Tampa’s legendary WTVT as the station’s capital bureau chief in Tallahassee
and later the assistant news director. He had a strong background in investigative
journalism, including a series of reports that contributed to the resignation of a corrupt
Florida Lt. Governor. Hayes was intelligent, and a good student of the game with
definitive ideas about running his own newsroom. He knew that getting actively involved
in a case such as this flew in the face of every rule of journalism. However, with a public
safety threat of this magnitude Hayes believed he had little choice. As he began to grasp
the potential of the story that had been dropped into his reporter’s lap, he clearly saw
opportunity for his news department. Hayes’ experience told him that a television
station’s reputation can rise and fall on a single news story like this one, and they don’t
come around all that often.
On Friday night, after the 6 p.m. newscast, it appeared that we had all had enough
for one day. It had been a long week; the important February ratings period was about to
crank up, and we were busy preparing. The station had been a lively place over the past
few weeks covering a good deal of spot news including a rare winter ice storm that
paralyzed the area. However just within the past few days, there was a strange energy in
the building, particularly in the newsroom. I had noticed a number of people that
appeared out of place darting back and forth; officiallooking men in dark suits moving
purposely in and out of the news director’s office. I observed one who carried some kind
of weapon just inside his sports coat, which was barely visible as he breezed by in the
hallway and his jacket opened slightly. The thought occurred to me that Taft
Broadcasting, the Cincinnatibased company that owned the television station, might be
preparing to sell the station. “Oh, great, not again,” I thought, feeling a little depressed
when my boss stopped by to see me as I was preparing to go home for the night. “I may
need you to come back in a couple of hours,” she said, advising me to be “available.” Was
she going to tell me about another sale? Would I be out on the street, looking for a new
job? No sooner did I walk into my apartment, which was only about a mile and a half on
the other side of the mountain from the television station in the bohemian Southside
section of Birmingham, the phone rang. It was the station’s program director Ann
Bryant, asking me to return immediately. I was exhausted from a long week. “What’s
going on?” I asked. Ann was a petite, sprite of a woman, usually smiling, upbeat and
happy. She’d started at the station years earlier in the newsroom, and had successfully
risen up the ranks to become one of the top executives, as well as one of the few women
in the company with serious clout. “No questions right now, Dave, okay? Just come back
to the station as fast as you can,” she said. To hear Ann Bryant use that kind of tone
seemed like a foreign language, almost out of left field, and made me more curious than
anything else.
It took me less than 5 minutes to get back to work, driving up the side of Red
Mountain on a cold evening. Ann, along with Dianne Brown, the creative services
director and my immediate supervisor, greeted me at the door. They were clearly anxious,
and in eye opening fashion, proceeded to describe the astonishing details of what had
happened over the past few days right under our noses. Later Hayes joined the
conversation and told us details about the original phone calls, the seriousness of the
threats, the covert drop offs and pickups, and how the station cautiously communicated
with the strange caller through a series of secret signals during the news broadcasts, all
under the strict supervision of the FBI. It was like something out of a madeforTV
movie. The news anchor was to deliver a specific verbal cue, Hayes said, and then we
were to display “Yes” onscreen during a newscast, essentially telling the extortionist,
“Don’t poison food, the money will be paid.” Earlier in the week I had stormed into the
control room during a live newscast after noticing the same word appear in an
unformatted, yellow font in the lower right corner of the screen. “What is going on
here?” I ranted during the live broadcast asking anyone who would listen, convinced that
it had to be the handiwork of a particularly slow union engineer undoubtedly asleep at the
switch. Now, it was all beginning to make sense. Little did I know that the graphic display
was the specific smoke signal the mysterious caller was looking for, and John Hayes, as
well as the production and engineering staff, had played the part of oblivious innocents to
absolute perfection telling me that there was a peculiar “glitch in the system” and to just
ignore it. As a young, inexperienced broadcaster, I had bought it all hook, line and sinker.
Throughout the week, Naves received more phone calls at the station and was
instructed to drive to various locations to pick up cassette tapes with further directives.
All of the telephone calls to the television station were funneled to a single extension in
the news director’s office, so that federal agents could record, and analyze them. As more
details emerged we learned that the man had actually contacted Bruno’s office earlier in
January, calling over and over, written off by an executive secretary as probably just
another redneck with a gripe, until finally claiming he had a “life and death” issue to
discuss. According to tape recordings later played in court, the man had originally
notified the Bruno family that he wanted $250,000. He said, “I want $50,000 in $20s and
$50s.” If not, he threatened to “…poison these stores all the way to the bottom.” Later
when Naves had another phone conversation with the man, he upped his demand to
$300,000 cash to be paid in the same, smaller denominations of unmarked bills. At one
point while Naves was attempting to deliver the pay off at a phone booth, the man was
unexpectedly spooked and called the transaction off.
Hayes described in meticulous detail how in a matter of just a few days the FBI
had developed a finely tuned profile of the caller based not only on what he said in the
phone conversations and cassette tapes left for Naves, but how it said it, too. “I want to be
a gentleman. I’m not going to kill anybody. I’ll make some people mighty sick,” he
declared in an early telephone conversation with Angelo Bruno. “I think if the news
media went in and found a bunch of poisoned steaks or gallons of milk or Coke, or
something like that, it’d shake things up.”
The caller became more and more bold, and coldblooded in his disregard for the
public’s safety. “Ya’ll will pay dearly…I promise you. Now you know as well as I do, the
onliest thing that I’ve got over you, if the news media gets a hold of it, if I squirt some of
this stuff in that stuff, and the news media gets it, you’ll lose a lot more money than that.
In a way, I hate that.” Officials at local police departments were also enlisted by the FBI,
and listened to the tapes to see if they knew the voice. Apparently the caller had used
several words that stood out, most notably “onliest,” to one cop who recognized the
butchered southern speak as a term often used by a former colleague. The police chief of
Jasper, Alabama, a small town in Walker County adjacent to Birmingham, also listened to
the tapes, and had a decent idea of whose voice he heard. Chief Joe Filyaw commented
that while he certainly wasn’t an expert on speech analysis, he said, “That sounds like
Bob Talley to me.”
These were the days prior to the kind of sophisticated law enforcement techniques
that seem so commonplace today; the kind that Jodie Foster used to track the
unforgettably creepy Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs. The Feds had systems,
but few of the elaborate computers or complex methodologies of today’s FBI existed, just
a data based, cataloging system that was more manual and time consuming. However, it
was effective. Based simply on the man’s vocabulary, pattern of speech, heavy southern
accent and the geographic locations involved, in addition to the Jasper cop’s good ear, the
FBI prepared to make the arrest.
Details that would probably have seemed insignificant to an untrained eye gave
the FBI’s lab technicians in Quantico, Virginia an amazingly accurate profile of who they
were looking for, and where to find him. Later in the evening Hayes introduced us to an
FBI agent who had even more information to share. He told us that once the Bureau had
collected enough information to create a definitive profile of the man they were looking
for, things began moving very quickly. All of the statistics that were fed into the FBI
database to create the profile was based upon a series of clues, many seemingly
unimportant. However within hours of developing the final profile, they were able to
connect an analytical series of critical dots and make an arrest. From the database
information gathered, the FBI reported with a significant degree of certainty the man’s
vital statistics such as his height and weight, and where he lived, within a mile or two.
They also said that he was considerably overweight, a heavy smoker and worked, or had
worked, in law enforcement, possibly as a former policeman (Jasper) or chief of police
(Parrish). They believed he was a huge NASCAR enthusiast, had recently driven long
haul trucks, may have even owned a trucking company, was intimately familiar with CB
radios, and had salt and pepper hair (more salt than pepper).
I was summoned to the station to produce what is commonly known in television
promotion circles as a “proof of performance” spot, or POP, a classic 30second
announcement trumpeting the station’s exclusive story. Our staff announcer, a local radio
disc jockey named Paul H. Woods, was called in to quickly track audio for the “proof.” It
was quickly edited and aired in the first available commercial break after the 10 p.m.
newscast, which was devoted entirely to the breaking news story about the arrest of
Birmingham’s most notorious extortionist. The spot opened with the date, January 22,
1982, revealing a single character at a time over a black background. In rapid fire “promo
copy,” it recapped the bizarre series of events that had occurred over the past few days,
from the disturbing seeds of the extortion plot and the reporter’s role as a middleman, to
the station’s critical responsibility in helping the FBI bring a dangerous criminal to
justice. The spot closed with a graphic of the Channel 6 News logo animating into place
over a dramatic shot of a stunned Robert Ray Talley handcuffed, cigarette lit, trying
desperately to shield his face from cameras with a windbreaker. And there, just off to the
side with microphone in an outstretched hand, stood the station’s news director, John
Hayes himself, demanding answers. “Did you extort the money? Did you extort the
money?” Hayes repeated over and over again.
An eerily familiar scenario played out later in the year on a national scale when
seven people in the Chicago area died after taking Tylenol capsules laced with cyanide.
The threat of such packaged substances being altered on the shelves of drug stores and
supermarkets across the country rocked the nation’s consciousness for months. The
sensational Tylenol murder case remains unsolved to this day, and while there have been
suspects, no one was ever charged. However as a result of the deaths and panic that swept
throughout the US, packaging of over the counter substances and anti tampering laws in
America changed dramatically as a result of the mysterious poisonings.