The Underworld Podcast - The Dixie Mafia's Texas Millionaire Murders

Episode Date: August 12, 2025

When Bill Richardson, a troubled oilman and pro pigeon shooter, was gunned down on his Corpus Christi doorstep in 1971, everybody assumed it was an open-and-shut organized crime hit. But when Richardson’s supposed killers walked free from court, and another body showed up in the Gulf of Mexico, investigators stumbled on a conspiracy that pitted millionaire gamblers and sharpshooters against the narcos, conmen and killers of the Dixie Mafia.For decades the case fell cold. But has a reporter just busted it open again? Sean spoke to Bellingcat investigator Peter Barth to find out more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Stop taking bad travel advice. Start comparing hundreds of sites with kayak and get your trip right. Bad advice? You talking to me? Kayak, got that right. It's June 6, 1972, on Mustang Island, a barrier right across the ocean from Corpus Christi, Texas. A local fisherman is standing in the surf, checking the tide, when he spots something out of place. Driftwood, parts of a sunken ship, the objects moves closer, then the fisherman realizes.

It's a man, dead, wrapped in chains with his hands tied behind his back and a block of cement around his neck. cops quickly identify the corpse as Randy Farrantle, a 32-year-old millionaire and playboy from Corpus Christi that the magazine Texas Monthly euphemistically describes as a quote sportsman. A gangland slain, clear as a South Texas morning. Farenhold had been scheduled to testify at a federal trial against four men accused of swindling him out of $100,000, not a small amount of cash in the early 70s. The scheme had involved the purchase of treasury notes that the men claimed were owned by the mafia. Randy, a keen gambler, went for it, agreeing to buy the mafia skin money at a knockdown price. His transaction with the four men was set to take place in the Houston motel room. But just as it began, the group was held up and robbed by a man brandishing a shotgun. Randy had decided the man was a plan that he'd been set up and he ratted to the cops.

Big no-no. In the early hours of June 4th, somebody beat and strangled poor Randy to death, wrapped him up and tossed him in the corpus Christy Bay. Without his testimony, the case against the four men falls apart. Two of the guys who were indicted, though, were involved in scams against other wealthy locals, themselves part of a high-states pigeon shooting and gambling ring

alongside a man named William Bill Asher Richardson Jr., a decorated former Marine and oilman, who'd been gunned down on his doorstep almost a year previous. Suspects had gotten off that killing at trial, controversially, while rumours swirled that they and Randy Farenholt's killers were members of the Dixie Mafia, a loose-knit group of crooks and gangsters preying on the rich and famous down on the Gulf Coast. Cops get a break in the Farenhold case later, though, when a jail mobster testifies that Bruce Lusk, Bass the 3rd, one of the two guys connected to the pigeon shooting and gambling ring,

killed Randy, then enlisted the mobster to dispose of his body. What's more, the jailbird testifies that Bass had killed Richardson too, potentially closing the book on one of the era's most notorious, unsolved murders. Bass is convicted of Farronhold's killing in 1977, but not for the Richardson case. Almost 50 years later, though, has a journalist lifted the lid on the whole sorry affair? And what was the Dixie Mafia anyway? Welcome to the Underworld podcast. Welcome to the Underworld podcast.

I'm your host in Wellington, New Zealand, Shorn Williams, and I'm joined today by Peter Bath, who is in... Boston, Massachusetts. Boston. I love Boston. I had a crazy Irish bar kind of pub crawl there one time. That was really fun. And I got a free trip and stayed in a penthouse apartment that was... like used by a Jay-Z and Beyonce the night before, which is nothing interesting other than that report on though.

But Peter, as you just heard from my cold open, he has put together a rather extraordinary piece of reporting for Bellingcat. Obviously, we'll put the links in the description to the show. This is a story that really kind of starts from a mystery and just tumbles out into a million different directions. So, yeah, first of all, congratulations for doing it. something so crazily involved and complex and putting it all into a really thrilling story. I should say before we dive into things, people can join up on the Patreon obviously. They can subscribe there for a couple of bucks a month. They can also buy merch at our website underworldpod.com and we've got tons of bonuses coming up soon. I have a long-awaited

interview with a woman who specialise in Japanese crime, which is going to be really, really good. Yeah, so let's jump into it. Peter, thanks so much for joining us today. How did you get involved in this story, this kind of decades-old cold case, that just laid sitting on in files and desks for so long? Yeah, I mean, the short answer is, well, there is no short answer, but I got involved decades ago myself. So 20 years ago, to be exact, I was a 12-year-old kid visiting my grandparents' house in Corpus Christi, which is a, it's like a small, city, pretty industrial city on the coast of Texas and the Gulf Coast. My dad grew up there, and I was visiting his childhood house, basically, seeing my grandparents. And we were leaving their house, and somebody just offhanded pointed out this beautiful house down the street, like midway down the street from my

grandparents' house and said, oh, you know, that's the house where the pigeon shooter was shotgunged in his driveway by two hitmen. And I'm this 12-year-old in the back seat, just like, excuse me, what, what, come again? And that was my intro to it. And looking back, it's, man, it's probably one of the reasons why I went down this weird road of reporting on organized crime. I mean, the story just kind of perplexed me from the get-go when I heard that. So, yeah, I heard the story as a kid. It sort of stuck with me. I had a lot of unanswered questions, you know, about the murder.

I think at that point in life, I'd probably seen the godfather. My dad was, like, watching the Sopranos every Sunday, like every dad in the early 2000s. So I knew about... Everyone should. Right. And I knew about the Italian-American mafia because of that. So the first question I had was like, oh, is it, you know, who killed him? And someone in my family was like, oh, it was just a mafia thing.

And I'm thinking, well, what mafia in Corpus Christi, Texas? Like the Italian mafia? Are we talking drug cartels? Who are we talking about here? And somebody said, oh, like the Gulf Coast mafia. And I realize now that they were referring to the Dixie Mafia, what we were referring to the Dixie mafia, what we would call a Dixie Mafia, but just sort of this nebulous, cloudy group of people that were loosely described to me at the time. So that was decades ago, and then flash

forward to, oh man, I think it was three years ago now, I was bored at 2 a.m. decided to look this up on newspapers.com, see who killed my grandparents' neighbor, see if it had ever been resolved. And I figured out it wasn't. It was just this open mystery. It's still unsolved to this day and people still don't want to talk about it. The police won't release files. People who knew the people involved are hesitant to talk about it because it was tied in with these southern gangsters, this Gulf Coast mafia, as they called it. Yeah. And so I just wanted to dig in from there and see if we could kind of use some of our Bellingcat open source methods and kind of do some digital archaeology and answer some questions. Yeah, it's incredibly fascinating. What do we start

with the, well, the unfortunate protagonist of the story, Bill Richardson, William Asher Richardson, Jr., to be more precise. He had an incredibly interesting life in his own right, right? So tell us a little bit more about him and how he came to be embroiled with these southern gangsters, as you say. Yeah, he's a really colorful guy, as you said. He was the son of basically one of the original kind of Texas oilmen. His dad, William Asher Richardson, Sr., had founded a big oil company called Richardson Petroleum Enterprises. And yeah, he'd moved to Texas and struck it big in that first wave of Texas oilmen. And, you know, Richardson Jr. grew up as this, you know, the son of an oil baron, essentially. He grew up in an affluent neighborhood in San Antonio between there and between Corpus Christi,

His family had a ranch outside of Corpus, I believe, also. And he had this really privileged childhood, and he was kind of known as a troublemaker, though. His daughter told me a story about how the dentist literally couldn't get him to sit still in the chair when they were trying to do some sort of simple dental procedure on him. And they made his parents pay them more money, basically, to operate on him because it was that problematic. So he was kind of known as this, like, troublemaker, you know, son of an oilman. And he was kicked out of three different high schools and then joined the Marine Corps and went to Korea. And his record in Korea is pretty wild.

At one point, he was being pursued by the Chinese and the Chosen Reservoir and ended up picking off like 13 pursuing Chinese soldiers with a rifle at several hundred yards. He was a really, really good shot. He grew up hunting and fishing all over Texas. And everyone I talked to remarked on that, they said, like, he was one of the best shots with a shot. shotgun, a rifle, and a pistol that anyone knew at the time. And that would come in handy later on because he ended up becoming a professional pigeon shooter. But yeah, so this Korean War had... Hell of a baptism of fire for your pigeon shooting career to be picking off Chinese soldiers. Right, right. He was wounded as well, as his daughter mentioned, that he had to walk miles back to an

aid station, like holding his intestines and his gut after being shot. So his Korea experience was pretty harrowing. And when he came home, he started his own oil company. It did well. initially, and then at one point it just started drying up. His friends commented that he was hitting a lot of dry wells and just sort of had a string of bad luck that ended in a bankruptcy in 1969 for, I think the modern day equivalent of like $27 million. He owed a hundred-something people, millions and millions of dollars

by the time his oil business went under. So yeah, and then that's kind of how he ended up in pigeon shooting. I think he was doing that for fun on the side. And by the time his oil business went under, he was basically earning a living as a competitive pigeon shooter and off of the gambling that was involved with those tournaments. Right. So Colum Bear Pigeon Shooting, essentially somebody chucks a pigeon in the air, right?

Yeah. Is that kind of it? Yeah, you got it. It's this highly skilled. It's considered one of the most competitive forms of shooting in the world. And it kind of comes from this moneyed Mediterranean background, I think it started in Spain or Monaco or Italy, somewhere in the wealthier part of the Med, and then it moved over to Latin America, to Argentina, to Mexico. And then because it was popular amongst wealthier folks in Mexico, it kind of migrated across the border. And next thing you knew, wealthy Texan ranchers, it was sort of a fad in the 50s, 60s, and into the 70s. So, yeah, he got involved with that. I'm not quite exactly sure when, either at some point. in the 50s or 60s, he started participating.

And he was so good that he was on like the All-American team for Column Bear-style pigeon shooting, competed in a bunch of international tournaments. Yeah, he was the real deal as far as that sport goes. But the Colum Bear in the sport is the skilled thrower. They're usually guys from Latin America who will take the live pigeon, pluck a couple feathers from it, and then pitch it while they're standing in front of the shooter so that the pigeon flies in an unpredictable pattern and the shooter's got to try to hit it before it crosses a certain point. So really interesting sport, definitely a blood sport, definitely a sport for the wealthy at the time.

Yeah, yeah. And so he falls in with a very odd group of people. You described them as a Dixie Mafia. People might recognize that term from, I think Danny's done a couple of shows here, about the Dixie Mafia, but it's not really a mafia in the sense that, you know, you would understand sort of like a five families, you know, bananas, kind of crime family. It's something a bit more nebulous, like you said, right? How does this, how does that kind of definition sit?

Yeah, that's a great question. And Jed Lipinski, who is the guest on the episode with Danny about the Dixie Mafia, does a really good job of describing, you know, they're less like a mafia with a structure in a hierarchy and more of like a criminal subculture, like a certain type of southern gangster that were, they kind of emerged somewhere out of after prohibition, and they were really around probably until the late 80s, 90s when they kind of, the version that we, when we say the Dixie Mafia, that sort of loose crew of people or multiple crews of people that were talking about had kind of disintegrated by then. So it's really more of a type of criminal than, it's guys that would hang

out in clubs and over poker games and dice games and they'd go to strip gloves together. It's guys who sort of knew each other and would travel all around the South and the Midwest and the Southwest and link up to pull off these individual crimes, whether it was a burglary, some sort of like con man job, contract killings were a big deal as they are in this story. So it was a loose constellation, if you will, of sort of different crews and different individuals across the So when I'm talking about the Dixie Mafia here, it was really like one sort of loosely connected group of people who hung out with each other in Corpus Christi. And they kind of centered around a couple folks who seem to be the alleged masterminds of a few of these crimes, including the murders. But that overlap is really kind of why the story pulled me in so much.

You have this class of southern gangsters, you know, these guys hanging out in strip clubs and planning safe. scapecrackings and burglaries and contract murders, overlapping with wealthy Texan oilmen and ranchers who own, you know, vast tracks of land and gamble hundreds of thousands of dollars a night over dice. And they got mixed up together and they were interacting with each other at least for a couple years. And it ends with a couple murders that I write about in the story. I mean, I guess it isn't so strange that the murder remained unsolved. But it was a pretty flagrant killing, right? it was an execution. There were plenty of people around. It wasn't like it was in a secluded part of

town or anywhere in a cornfield or anything. Can you give us some of the particulars and kind of what jumped out you at first, you know, when you decided to kind of dive into the records and see if you could flush out some new information? Yeah. So with Bill Richardson Jr.'s murder, the immediate thing that jumped out at me was, as you said, this was a really brazen murder. This is something that you'd see in like a Martin Scorzzi movie or a movie about the Italian-American mafia, right? Gunmen in jumpsuits with sought-off shotguns blowing this guy apart in front of his family in his driveway. I mean, it was a very brutal shooting. I mean, the coroner's report, I think they'd logged like 45 different entry wounds from number four buckshot, which is, it's a load that you would

typically use when you're hunting like deer or coyote. It's a heavy, it's a heavy load of buckshot. And yeah, I mean, he was literally like blown apart in his driveway. His family witnessed it. It was in the middle of a very leafy, exclusive neighborhood full of these like beautiful mid-century houses that had just been built. So my grandparents down the street, like the night of the murder, had just come home from dinner and they saw these two guys across the street smoking cigarettes and kind of hanging out outside of a car.

And they thought, you know, this is a little shady. These guys don't look like they're. from here, they're up to no good, maybe they're trying to rob a house. And before my grandfather could go out and say something to them, they were gone. And they didn't hear about the murder until the next morning. And then they realized like, oh my gosh, that was probably part of the hit team, at least, waiting for the guy to get home. So the circumstances of the murder right away, I was like, this has organized crime

written all over it. They were casing the house. They'd even cut the phone lines to the house, which was interesting. And yeah, they were wearing jumpsuits, baseball caps, and sunglasses, is what the witnesses reported. What the stepson who witnessed the shooting reported and what the maid, who ended up being the key witness. She also saw these guys running across the front lawn with sought off shotguns, saw them shoot Bill Richardson, Jr., saw them run away. A bunch of neighbors saw a getaway car speeding across the neighborhood and out. So, yeah, just the circumstances of the murder were so interesting to me that I'm like, okay, there's a story behind this.

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And remember, stay safe. Yeah, and it wasn't as if the trail goes cold straight away, right? There's a whole investigation guys are brought in front of a court. Tell us about this sort of strange constellation. It feels like a, it feels, I mean, it is a bygone era, but it feels like very in cold blood sort of style characters, right? Very wild west, quite. How would you say it's just this kind of like certain breed of criminal

that only seems to exist in the 50s and 60s? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So where to even get started on the accused hitman, the maid had got a pretty good look at them. Good enough where when they brought her in and some of the other family, including the stepson and some friends of Bill Richardson, who'd been with him the weekend of his murder. They brought all of them into the police station.

And they started presenting photographs. I don't know how they selected the people in the photographs to show them. But they just started showing photographs, I guess, of people that they must have suspected of being contract killers in Texas. And pretty quickly, the maid, her name was Mary Chavez, pointed out these two guys from Fort Worth. One was named Otis Hammond, who's quite the character, and the other was named Sam Mina. And these guys were hardened criminals from Fort Worth. I mean, there are criminal records. First of all, they were both usually described as pimps.

They were pretty heavily involved with pimping for years up in Fort Worth. But they had records, criminal records, for everything from burglary to robbery, to human trafficking. And Hammond himself had actually been involved with at least two other murder. that we know of before this one, including his friend. Right. Got off on a, I mean, how the hell did he, well, he kind of stays out of serious, serious trouble, right? Pretty unbelievably. Right.

He's this, even though he's got this crazy criminal record, he seems to be this kind of edigmatic character, like when you read newspapers, articles about him, people are describing how Hammond is this guy who kind of came of age and a Wild West era of Fort Worth when there were gangsters shooting each other with two people. Tommy guns and blowing each other up with car bombs. And if you know who Benny Binion is, he was a big-time gambler from Fort Worth who became so successful that he opened a casino in Vegas that's still there. And I think run by his family.

But Benny Binion came from this world. And Hammond and Mina and this crew from Fort Worth grew up in the aftermath of this sort of gangster era in Fort Worth and kind of grew into gangsters themselves. And we're pimping and we're involved in all kinds of gambling. shady activities. So people described Hammond, for example, as being friends with a young Willie Nelson, when Willie Nelson was a up-and-coming country star. And he was known as a chiefly as a pimp in all of the articles about him. But yeah, he had murdered a friend, well, he'd shot a friend. He claimed in self-defense in an argument over a sex worker. Her name was apparently Jackie Bottoms, which is a wild name.

And yeah, his friend, I guess, was angry, either over her earnings or over a relationship that the two guys had with her. I'm not, it's unclear which, maybe both. The friend tried to shoot Hammond, Hammond shot back. There's some wild newsreel footage of the time of his friend dying on the operating table. And they must have just let film crews in like the operating room in the 50s in Texas. Yeah, what? Wild stuff. Okay.

Yeah. And so let's go back to the maid Chavez because she allegedly made these two guys essentially. She's seen them pretty well and she'd drawn them into this investigation. So what was the deal, you know, there were attempts to get rid of her, right? Yeah, so she identified the two of them as, hey, Sam Mina and Otis Hammond were the two shooters. These are the guys I saw with shotguns running across the yard and shooting him. The police pretty quickly, including the Texas Rangers, who stepped in the investigation also arrested both of them in Fort Worth.

Mina, who had a serious criminal record already, had a loaded gun on him at the time. So they kind of locked him away on that gun charge. They brought Hammond to trial, and they had other witnesses that had put Hammond near a hotel at a pigeon shoot that Bill Richardson had been competing in the days before his death. So Bill Richardson, when he was murdered, had just gotten home like 10 minutes prior from a pigeon shooting tournament on the U.S. border. And he had been there for a couple of days that weekend with his family. There were a lot of folks from the sort of the Texas wealthy pigeon shooting scene there.

And a few folks there had noticed this guy standing in the back of the crowd. He kind of looked out of place. He wasn't talking to anybody. He was just in the pigeon shooting crowd watching them. There was a waitress at a hotel who saw Hammond walk into the hotel cafe, sit down, ordered a coffee. They had a conversation and Hammond had mentioned, oh yeah, you know, I drove down here from Fort Worth, which is hundreds of miles away, and a car that runs on gas and butane, so I didn't have to stop for gas. So he had this like customized car for long distance

travel. And apparently the guys had been casing Bill at the pigeon shooting tournament the weekend before. So the case from a witness standpoint, I mean, they had someone at the crime scene, They had people the weekend before putting both Hammond and Mina, you know, surveilling and then shooting Bill Richardson. But when it came time to the trial, for some reason, it just all fell apart. That's one of the more interesting parts of the case. They had a really good defense attorney, this guy named Doug Tinker, who was sort of famous in South Texas for defending colorful characters. And he brought forth, he kind of just started shooting holes in the prosecution's case. He argued that it was too dark at night for the maid to have really seen these guys well enough.

So how can she put both of them at the scene? They brought a firearms expert who questioned other witness testimony about the type of shotgun used in the shooting. So the Stepson claims that he saw the guys using break-open shotguns, the same type of shotgun that was used in the competitive pigeon shooting tournaments. Yeah, yeah. He claimed the shooters had sought off versions of those and that when he saw them running away, he saw them inject the shells. And they found four spent shells at the scene. So the defense attorney brings forth this firearms expert who says, well, the shotgun shells we found at the scene, the holes have markings that indicate they came from a semi-automatic or a pump-action shotgun, not a break-open shotgun.

So therefore, his witness testimony isn't accurate. So he did a lot of little tricks like that just to shoot out in the case. And apparently it worked. I mean, they acquitted Hammond of the murder charge. It was like a six-week trial. They had dozens of witnesses. The newspapers covered it by the day. And tellingly, when Hammond was acquitted, there's a photo of him walking out of court, and he's got a cigarette in his hand, a lit cigarette, and sunglasses on, and he's just smirking at the camera. And he's still got cuffs on the cuffs on. He's still got the cuffs on. Yeah, nuts. He hasn't let him take the cuffs of him. Wild stuff. Yeah. And so after he was, after he was acquitted, they already had his partner, Mina, on the gun charge. And they basically were like,

well, we're not going to try him for the murder. We already have him on this gun charge and he's a felon. So they put him away for a couple of years on that. And so this thing is, you know, kind of quote unquote put to bed for a while. But then in 1972, in the summer of 1972, something else happens. So do you want to tell us about that? It's pretty crazy. Yeah. Just outside of Corpus Christi on a beach near Puerto Ranzas, there's a fisherman who's waiting out from the beach, just his usual morning routine, I guess. And he sees something in the water, and it turns out to be a dead body. And that body is chained to a block of concrete. So it's very clearly, you know, right.

Don't find that on the beach every day, at least not anymore. And so, yeah, they figure out that this murdered guy chained a concrete. is another really wealthy Corpus Christi Texan playboy guy named Randy Ferenthold. And I think they identified him initially. I think it was his watch. That was the initial thing they identified. But he'd been like badly beaten over the head. I think he'd been slashed or stabbed. He'd been strangled with something like a like a garret or some kind of cord. And then he was thrown in the water chain to concrete and so his cause of death is pretty unclear it was sort of he had water in his lungs which

seems to mean that he was still alive when they threw him in the water so it was a really brutal brutal murder and people knew right away you know chained a concrete that's that's some kind of organized crime case right there right but that case doesn't fall apart right they get a conviction so what goes on there it's really interesting because it takes them a couple years But because of who he was, he was the stepson of an extremely influential politician in Texas, Sissy Farenthold. She ran for governor of Texas, I think twice. She broke a lot of ground as a female politician in Texas. Just died a couple years ago, actually. But that was her stepson. So they were able to pull in a lot of weight in terms of law enforcement resources to look into this. And a couple years

go by, the Texas Rangers, the FBI, the Corpus Police, everyone's looking into it. They're interviewing people all over the Gulf Coast and even in Mexico, all over the place. And they end up getting a jailhouse confession from a snitch, basically, who points to this guy named Bruce Bass from Corpus Christi. And he says, you know, Bruce Bass murdered Randy Farenthold and threw him into the Gulf, sheened a concrete, because Ferenthold was about to testify against him. and a federal fraud trial, basically. So a couple weeks after Farrenthold was murdered, he was supposed to testify against this guy, Bruce Bass,

and three other guys, for swindling him out of $100,000. That's $100,000 in 1979 money. So it's a lot more now. Yeah, what's, I'm gonna guess at like $1.52 million, something like that. Yeah, I think probably the million mark. Yeah, okay. And so this kind of leads into some of the information about the kind of more organized elements of these worlds colliding, right?

So can you take us through kind of how authorities and how you are able to kind of piece together this kind of picture of a wider network of organized criminals? There are some details, by the way, that feel like they're almost parochial these days, right? like loaded dice and kind of like equipment to throw, you know, poker games and casino tables and stuff like this. Yeah. But it was making incredible amounts of money defrauding this kind of operation back then, right? Yeah. So for reference, we're talking about a group of guys that were gambling in the neighborhood

of like $400,000 to $500,000 per dice game. So we're talking about very high stakes. dice. I think poker was, I think they also played poker. They also were betting on the pigeon shoots themselves. There was a lot of betting around the pigeon shoots. But yeah, basically, the guy identified in Farenthold's murder was this guy named Bruce Bass. And he's really interesting because he ends up being convicted for Randy Farenthold's murder. And there's some other people named with him in the same testimony who aren't convicted, who aren't ever convicted and seemingly get away with the crime.

But Bruce Bass was, he was from Mississippi. His dad, I think, had come from, wasn't successful oilman himself. So Bruce Bass had, I don't think he was necessarily loaded, but he came from like at least a middle class background. He had some money from his dad, right? And the people I talked to who knew him described it to me as this like kind of a playboy type. He was kind of a tall, lanky guy. He wore these 70s like Bond villain suits everywhere. And he would show up to parties and barbecues.

with like a new girlfriend every time and often a new car. I spoke with a retired policewoman from Corpus who told me that she was once sent into a strip club in Corpus to try to see if Bruce Bass had a gun in his boot when he was in the club illegally.

Okay. And so he's just this interesting Corpus area character. But he was friends with Bill Richardson. He was friends with Randy Farenthold. He was part of this pigeon shooting scene, he was actually a really good pigeon shooter himself. He was a really good shot. He was a competitive shooter. I found a newspaper photo of Richardson and Bruce Bass shaking hands,

actually, after a tournament, which is wild of considering what we figured out later. So yeah, he's part of that whole kind of wealthy playboy gambling and pigeon shooting click who are hanging out together. And basically through the public records that I was able to find, just off of simple Google searches, by the way. A lot of this was just off of Google searching. Yeah, we should dive into that. So it's really interesting. Yeah. And just off of Google searches and FBI FOIAs and things like that, I started kind of piecing together. Okay, this was sort of a click of wealthier guys who hung out together. People like Bruce Bass, maybe from a shadier background, some of them were more wealthy. Some of them didn't come from as much money.

But they all hung out together in strip clubs. They all partied together. They went to pigeon shoots together. They drank profusely all the time. Surprise, surprise. And, yeah, it turned out that some of them had some connections, including Bruce Bass and then a friend of theirs named Jerry LaBarba. Some of them had connections to some other Dixie Mafia folks,

but also to Carlos Marcello in New Orleans, who's a famous gangster in his own right. He was essentially the head of the Italian-American or the Sicilian-American in the in the south for decades um so yeah there's some interesting ties there yeah i mean let's let's take a step back i mean i'm interested in how you start to you know when you've got this cold case laid out in front of you um you know working with bellincat doing the kind of sort of open source investigations that bellingcat does i don't know if a listener is about how listeners will surely be of favor of what you do but um where do you start because you you you

you're looking at a kind of pinballed of a million different things at that point. So where are you looking for the, I guess, the weaknesses in the information and how do you start chipping away at that? Yeah. And in some ways, this was very different from the type of investigations that we normally do at Bellingcat. Like, to give you an example, I was part of a group that figured out that Christopher Kinnahan had a Google reviews profile where he was reviewing restaurants and stuff like that. That's the normal type of story that I'd work on.

And this case is about crimes that happened before the internet, right? This is, we're talking 1969, 1971, you know, way, way back, 50-plus years now. But oddly enough, you can use some of those same tools to kind of start filling in some of the gaps. Not all of them, definitely. There's a lot of holes. So I kind of started out just by looking at what had been written about it, looking at old newspaper articles. There was one book by a Texas Ranger who worked on the case that had like a single chapter about this murder and about Randy Ferenthold.

So I could kind of see what had been published, at least, by other journalists in the 70s about this case. And then there was just nothing out there after that. There's no article about this murder. All of the information about the suspects was buried in digital newspapers. So a lot of the initial work was just figuring out what's known and what's not known to this day. And then from there, I kind of got more creative.

I started just blasting out foias all over the place to the FBI, to the National Archives and Records Administration, to every county sheriff in the area and the Corpus Christi Police and the Fort Worth and Dallas and Houston Police, like all over the place. Is that pretty seamless? Because it's such an old case, there's no one trying to hide at anything particularly? So many of the requests came back, and they would say, hey, we don't have any records from that far back.

I had a few people come back and say, our records were destroyed in a flood or a fire, or we have no record in that case. There's a lot of that. But every now and then, I'd get this really clutch response to my request, and it would be someone like, hey, here you go, here's an autopsy report. And every now and then someone would find something relevant. And so this was really, it's almost like digital archaeology.

You're using the internet to try to like just claw out any fragments of information you can get about this case that haven't been published yet. And that's why it took me like, this took me three years off and on. I was working on other stuff too, but it was three years of digging and just scrounging up any little bit I could and sort of slowly stitching that into the story. What kind of stuff do you think that you were able to uncover then that was truly, I guess, missed at the time. or kind of like paints, you know, that much more of a detailed picture about what actually happened that night that he was killed. I think some, I think for me, what stood out was the connections between people around him. I'm talking about his friends, his fellow gamblers, and some of the people who were accused, or at least persons of interest in his murder. There were a lot of, if not a lot, there were some really interesting ties between them and old FBI,

records, including from the JFK assassination files, there were some interesting ties between them and wider organized crime groups. So his good friend, and strangely enough, the ex-husband of Bill Richardson's wife at the time of his murder, had some connections to the Dallas and New Orleans crime families, for example. He came from a big Italian family in Texas. I was told he's sort of always grown up in an environment where there was gambling. It was just sort of part of his family back then. But this friend, Jerry LaBarba, who I talk about in the article quite a bit, he's one of the first people at the crime scene.

His son witnesses the murder and is a key witness at the trial. He was accused a year after the murder of working with one of the alleged conspirators in the murder on behalf. of the Dallas and New Orleans crime family. So he was accused of being like a money man for this Dallas nightclub owner. He's this really colorful guy Tony Caterine. So there were

a lot of stuff like that in the records where if you start searching for names of his friends, names of his associates, you see them popping up as having alleged ties in these old documents to the Italian American mafia, but also to

for lack of a better, to the Dixie mafia, to circles of folks who we would call the Dixie Mafia. How many discounts does USAA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount. Safe driver discount. New vehicle discount. Storage discount.

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This should be tons of fun. Marvel television's Daredevil, Born Again, now streaming only on Disney Plus. Yeah, did it change your kind of view on what you thought the Dixie Mafia even was then, kind of diving into this sort of very bizarre connection between high and low and kind of street crime and high crime? I guess in a part of the country that wasn't hugely... covered by the national press at the time because there were things happening on either coast, which I guess, you know, plus so Sean. But it's, it kind of flew under the radar slightly, I'm assuming, at the time.

It did. Until Randy Ferenthal's murder, which I think was covered in the New York Times and stuff. But that was really what surfaced all of this other information. But absolutely, I always, when I first started learning about the Dixie Mafia, I thought they were sort of one structured crew of guys in Biloxi and Mississippi. there's a famous murder there, again, that was that Jed talks about, Jed Lepensky talks about on the episode with Danny about the Dixie Mafia, where a judge and his wife had been murdered in Biloxi in the late 80s.

So the Dixie Mafia is often talked about as like this one specific crew of them that operated out of Biloxi. There's a guy named Kirksey Nix who's very famous in the South. And the Dixie Mafia is often talked about as like this one group of guys. And it's a lot more complicated than that because, like I was saying earlier, it's more of this sort of criminal subculture and these circles of guys in different cities who did know each other. Like some of the people in my story from Fort Worth were hanging out in the same circles that Kirksey Nix was hanging out when he was in Fort Worth. He was actually even arrested there around the time of the story. And so there's overlap between these different groups.

But this, what's compelling to me about this one is it looks to me. at least from what we know about the case, which is not everything, that there was this crew of professional gangsters, professional Dixie Mafia or Southern Gangsters, who were living and based in Corpus Christi, who had figured out that they could make enormous amounts of money off of these oilmen, off of these pigeon shooters, off of these land-owning ranchers who love to gamble.

And it seems like for a couple years at least, you know, we're talking probably late 60s to mid-70s. They were making money off of, them. And they had it pretty good, it seems like. They were throwing big parties. That's in some of the FBI documents. There were these huge parties at hotels with strippers that had been brought in from Houston, with women who had like uniforms and ran the gambling tables. And these were entirely illegal. These were illegal parties that the police would bust, and there would be hundreds of these wealthy Texans. They called them stag parties. And they were thrown by like the Junior Chamber of Commerce

at the time in Corpus Christi. And the people involved in this story were very much a part of that and we're running that and we're organizing that. Yeah, that's several degrees fancier than the stack do's that I've been on in my life. I mean, I might be a bit polyanarish, but does Colombeer pigeon shootings still happen today in the South? And I mean, I assume people still bet on it if it does happen. Yeah, I have heard that it is a lot more hush-hush. And that's largely because of animal rights organizations like PETA and a few others are like, have even including back then, by the way, that I think there was a famous PETA campaign to, you know,

shine a light on pigeon shooting even back then. I do think it's changed a bit. I think now it's more hush-hush. I don't think it's necessarily solely like the sport of the Uber wealthy anymore. I think that there are folks who aren't quite. as wealthy who kind of do this on the side as more of like a hobby. Yeah. But I've heard, for example, there was a Republican lawmaker.

I think I'm going to blank on who it is. He's a famous one from Arkansas or Oklahoma who would throw these pigeon shooting tournaments like on his ranch on the weekends. They were invite only. They were word of mouth. And oddly enough, it's also big in Pennsylvania still to this day. So I don't know why. I don't know anything about the Pennsylvania shooting scene.

but I do know that it happens there. Yeah, I mean, having been to the kind of pencil-tucky part of that state, I can believe that that's going on there still. So tell me about there is a hitman who had a pretty illustrious or sad life and suffered a pretty ignominious end, right? So tell me about him. Absolutely. One of the new findings that I found through public records request

to a small sheriff's department outside of Fort Worth, was that this gangster who went by the name Tommy Gibbs was the alleged getaway driver in the Richardson murder. So this character, this Gibbs character, was roommates with Sam Mina, one of the alleged shooters. And the reason he showed up on my radar is that at one point before the murder trial where Hammond was acquitted for the murder, Sam Mina tried to hire this, his roommate, and this Gibbs character, to come down to Corpus Christi from Fort Worth and shoot the maid, Mary Chavez, before she could testify against them at trial. So the police heard about this through a jailhouse informant. They posted detectives, this is like something out of Miami Vice,

they posted detectives to the maid's house who are hiding inside with shotguns, and they see this hitman slowly cruised down the street multiple times, casing out her house. the hitman, Gibbs, notices the cops there and abandons the plan. He's just like, fuck this, heads off to Fort Worth. And then he's found in a ravine six weeks later with six shots to the face at close range dead. He's wearing a suit. He's got a cigarette burn on his leg. He'd been shot a couple weeks before that mysteriously.

And the police, when I requested records about the murder, they did not even realize that the case was still unsolved. It's a small sheriff's department. So when I requested records from them, they were like, hey, we actually, here's some of our records in the case, but we have to presume this is still unsolved because we don't have any records of prosecutions. So they ended up giving me like the autopsy report and a couple other pieces that identified him also as the getaway driver in the Richardson murder. So he was shot such close quarters that you mentioned in the story that he had sort of gumpowder burns, right, on his face. Yes. It's really interesting. He was found by a deer hunter in a park. outside of Fort Worth. And he sees this guy in a suit and tie, you know, clearly his head is destroyed beyond recognition. He's got six entry wounds in the face. One of them's got gunpowder burns.

And then when they did his autopsy, they saw that he'd been shot a couple weeks before in the leg. And he also had some signs of torture. He had like a cigarette burn on his leg and a couple other things, I think. And he told them that he had done that himself, right? It was an accident. A couple of weeks before, yeah, he had been shot in the leg, and when the police asked him about it, he said, oh, I just did that to myself. It was an accident. Don't worry about it. And the night before his murder, another Fort Worth gangster had been murdered in his yard by a shotgun blast to the chest when he came home from dinner, which is very similar to Richardson's case. And unfortunately, the records for that murder are gone. They were lost in a flood, so we'll never know. But the modus operandi in that murder is, is, pretty suspiciously similar to the way Bill Richardson was killed. And the other protagonist in this murder, Sam Mina, tell us a bit more about him. Yeah, he had a, I mean, everyone in the story has a pretty wild life, but him in particular. In a lot of ways, Sam Mina is the more interesting of the two alleged shooters to me.

Because whereas Hammond has this colorful criminal career, he's covered in newspapers a lot. Mina is a lot harder to read. There's a photo of him coming out of court in a suit. He's just posted bond for $45,000, which is an enormous amount of money in today's cash. And he's walking with these two other guys in sunglasses, and he just screams professional contract killer. Like something out of No Country for Old Men or Woody Harrelson's dad. That's the same type of guy. And interestingly, when I reached out to somebody who knew Mina, who was sort of associated with him,

They refused to speak on the record about him. And all they did was they double-checked with me that Mina was dead. And then they said, Sam Mina was a ruthless motherfucker, and I'm not going to talk about any of that. And that was in. And he was later on, he was accused of accepting a contract to kill a district attorney up in Fort Worth. And then, of course, in the 80s, I talked about this to my article. The police in Houston arrest him, and he's wearing a Canadian tuxedo, all denim.

He's got a mustache. Yeah, what a great detail. Yeah, loaded 38, a young girlfriend in the passenger seat, and he's dealing Coke in Houston by the 80s. So, interesting guy. I'm sure he committed all kinds of crimes we'll never even know about. Yeah. He and, I mean, he and Hammond live on, right? I mean, like you say, they go into the 80s.

But they just dive straight back into organized crime, right? Yeah, they're back. They're committing burglaries. They're dealing drugs. you know, they're back at it pretty soon after. And then Bruce Bass, actually. So Bruce Bass, I should have clarified this earlier too, but Bruce Bass is convicted of the Farrenthold murder.

In the process of being convicted for that murder, Snitch basically says, hey, Bruce Bass actually also had Richardson shot. He was angry at him over a gambling dispute. They were rigging dice games and winning a ton of money, off of this Georgia gamblers. This is the allegation. And the snitch says, yeah, Bass felt like he was being pushed out of this little gambling operation they had going with dice games. And so he had Richardson killed because he was pissed at him. He was furious with him. He felt like he's being excluded from their little click. So he had him killed. And the snitch says that he threw a shotgun away for Bruce Bass

into a river. But the police can never corroborate any of that. They do know that Bass and Richardson and were friends. Richardson's daughter told me she personally knew Bass and remembers him well. She even pushed Bass into a pool one time when he was drunk, and he started drowning in the bottom of the pool. This is after a pigeon shoot. Bruce Bass was so drunk. He was pissed and just drowning in the bottom of the pool, and Richardson dove in and pulled him up from the bottom. This is years before the murder. So it's kind of an ironic, dark situation. But yeah, in the end, Bruce Bass is convicted. He gets out of prison. immediately is back in Jackson, Mississippi, where he's shot in the gut with a 380 in a motel bar.

And the guy who shot him basically says, oh, he was trying to take over this little gambling thing we had going. So I shot him. He survives that. I can't imagine that. It must have been pretty painful. He survives that. He's back in Corpus Christi. And then in 1984, a friend of Farenthold, and I assume a friend of Richardson's, who's

bar owner, takes Bruce Bass out into the parking lot of his bar and puts five 22 magnum slugs into his body, the little revolver, just shoots him five times, claims that Bass pulled like a pocket knife on him and that it was self-defense. He gets acquitted on self-defense charges. And what several people told me off the record is that they heard rumors basically in Corpus in the later years that this was basically like a form of Texas community justice where the community kind of took care of Bruce Bass because he had been put away in prison and was already back out,

and so they kind of took care of things. So I heard, for example, that friends of Farenthold and Richardson might have paid for the legal defense of the guy who shot Bass, for example. So I thought that was a frontier justice in the end for Bruce Bass, yeah. Did you come away from this reporting then? thinking anything other than the guys who were put on trial for Richardson's murder did it, and they just had this sort of miraculous defense, or were there other sort of possibilities there?

Man, there's so much we don't know, and I tried to be really clear about that, too, in the article. I have a lot of questions about Jerry LaBarba, with some of his connections to, alleged connections to, you know, Italian-American organized crime. I have a lot of questions about, yeah, about the sort of the hit team and the shooters. I mean, I heard after I published my article, I heard again off the record that the hitman who'd been watching Bill Richardson at the shooting tournament before they killed him were concerned because he was such a good shot. They were really worried about carrying out the hit and Richardson having a gun on him.

So they actually called, this is just hearsay and rumors, but I heard. heard that they called Bruce Bass and said, if Richardson has a gun on him, we're not going to do it because he's a damn good shot. And they'd be screwed. And tellingly, they shot him when he was unarmed. He was walking out of an RV and they just blew him away. He had nothing in his hands.

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He knows teamwork and BJ's knows savings. This is your home, coach. Home of the Save. Join for just $20 at BJs.com slash SW Fort Worth and save 10 cents a gallon on gas for six months. Now open, limited time offer new members only. BJ's Home of the Save. Tell us before, you know, before we go today, Peter, I think it would be interesting to hear about some of your other work as well and kind of how you use sort of open source information to do investigations.

I mean, tell us about the Kinnahann thing that you worked on then, because that was a pretty recent piece of work that you did, just a couple months ago. Tell us, so what the brief was on Christy Kinnahann and sort of how you dove into that. Yeah, so I work in a small team at both Bellingat and the Sunday Times of Ireland. There's about four of us. And a couple of years ago, one of my colleagues at Bellingcat stumbled across, what he was pretty sure was a Google reviews profile for Christy Kinnahann. And he got that off of a simple Google search

that he then verified in three different ways, basically showing down to like the device he was using to post the reviews, showing that this is Christopher Kinnahann and he's posting restaurant reviews, hotel reviews, airport lounge reviews. They're hysterical. If you haven't read them, some of them are,

some of them are very mundane, and others are like very nitpicky. And yeah, it's a trove. It's a trove of data because it shows us where Christopher Kinnahan was at certain points. He stopped posting these reviews, I think a couple months before we published the article. But yeah, he left a data trail of places he'd been. And it was important because we could line that up with places that we knew he was at from other reporting, like a conference in Zimbabwe and a few other places.

We could line it up and sort of use that as an entry point to look at how the leadership of the Kenahan cartel is working, how they're traveling, what they're like. For example, he gave a Carl's Jr. in Dubai, I think, three-star review, which is interesting. Okay. That's quite generous, I would say, for Carl's Jr. The one that stands out to me is he can. complained about a server at a restaurant calling him boss. She would say, here you go boss and bring him his plate of food.

And he asked her not to call him boss and to call him Mr. Vincent or Chris. And when he was leaving the restaurant, she turned to him and said, like, bye boss and called him that again. So there's so many good little moments like that from their reviews. But yeah. You can sort of extrapolate this into sort of real. real hard-hitting data about where these, you know, incredibly powerful criminals are doing business, right? Absolutely. Yeah. And it's, man, I don't even know where to begin. The story is just,

for me, one of the biggest takeaways was, we had a lot of people who were like, is this really Christopher Kinnahann? How do you know it's really him? And aside from the, the myriad ways that we showed that, you know, this was his account. It puts him at these times and places that it was him posting. As much as you want to think he's this criminal mastermind and he apparently is in many ways, he's also a guy who likes to review restaurants while he's waiting for his next flight. And it kind of just showed me that even when you're a top international level crime boss, you're still a person. And whether he was doing this as a way to like connect with people or if he was just bored, I'm not quite sure, but I just am imagining him in an airport lounge and Johannesburg

opening up his phone, leaving four stars for a restaurant at the airport. Yeah, but it tells us it tells us about his travel partners, his travel patterns, the way he speaks about himself, the way he kind of views himself as this international, almost like an international consultant or something. That's kind of the way that he writes and kind of, you can see how he, what his self-image is like a little bit. Yeah, it's super interesting. and a real world example of don't Instagram your crimes, obviously.

Don't Google review your crimes at an airport when you've just done a massive drug deal. I would probably recommend people doing. Peter, thanks so much for joining us. This story is really, really interesting. You know, there's so much kind of vivid detail that you flesh out through, you know, court documents, articles written at the time, interviews with people who know the kind of protagonists. it's just such an interesting way to approach a kind of cold case that I don't think people do a lot, especially in sort of the big magazines. And yeah, I'll put links to all of your work here.

Are you working on anything that you can tell us about at the moment that we should keep an ear to the ground for? I've got quite a few projects. Hopefully you'll be hearing from me soon on those. And, you know, I want to keep working in cold cases because like you're saying, in some ways it's really hard. hard to work cold cases with open source, just research. But in other ways, in a case like this, where most of the folks are dead, it's kind of the only set of tools that we have to look into these. And if you're looking at a cold case that's tied in with organized crime, it means there's more of a paper trail for you to potentially discover. So I think there's a lot of room for folks

in our space who, like, for better or worse, reading and living in this organized crime journalism sphere. I think there's a lot of room for looking into some of those older, unsolved mob-related murders using open sources. And I encourage anyone and everyone to give it a shot yourself and look at it. It's fascinating. When I've had, it's kind of, when I've had time to sort of, you know, sit down for, say, a week and think, what am I going to do next? You know, what's going to be another big project. You can go through the Pacer court documents like the website and you find some unbelievable things that have happened that have never been solved or that have gone to kind of like civil cases or sort of like petered out in really weird

ways or even things that have been convicted especially and this is a kind of little nod to any journalist wanted to do this go for huge dates in American history type in those dates to pay-set and see what came out on those days because on September 11th 2001 for example there were other things happening right right and when JFK was killed there were other cases happening. You know, and you will find some extraordinary things that made no headlines back in the day. But anyway, yeah, that's maybe too much for prying to my sad personal life. No, no, no, actually. It's looking really interesting. Now that you mention that, one thing that I'd like to look into that I can talk about briefly is with Pacer, I did not know about

this until I was just, like you're saying, sadly, perusing Pacer the other day, looking for anything to entertain myself. So I just learned that Eastern box turtles, which are really a pretty common turtle here in the Northeast in the U.S. You see them in ponds and lakes and rivers. They go for like 2,500 apiece in Hong Kong, and they're being smuggled out en masse via the U.S. mail to markets in Asia. And I had no idea until I saw this on PACER and saw that they've arrested a few folks for trafficking them in large quantities. So that's just an example. There's some weird stories buried in there in court records and documents you can FOIA.

And yeah, they're just kind of sitting there, even in really old cases like this one. Yeah, just to finish on a pretty bizarre note, before we go, I found a story from the 90s about a lawyer for a kind of diet guru who was arrested trying to sell condoms to the former Soviet Union in return for chickens. Amazing. Why not? strange fraud. Yeah, why not? So we started with pigeons, we're ending with turtles and condoms. But, Peter, thank you so much for joining us. It's a wonderful story.

Thanks, Sean. And, yeah, we'll hope to reach out to you soon for more stuff that you're working on. Awesome. Sounds good. And, yeah, I love you guys' work. And if your motto is don't Instagram your crimes, our motto at Belancat is please Instagram your crimes. Please do it. Yes. Do it as much as you possibly can. Absolutely. Cool, man. Well, yeah, thanks to joining us. And we'll stay in touch.

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