Tennessee’s Criminal Syndicate Includes Washington, DC

CORRUPT OFFICIALS SNAG INNOCENT VICTIMS IN DECADES-OLD DRAGNET

by Sharon Rondeau

(Apr. 13, 2014) — On Friday, The Post & Email reported that a victim of the organized criminal judicial system in the Tenth Judicial District of Tennessee was told that neither U.S. senator from the state will assist him in seeking justice.

Marvin Young called the senators’ offices last week and spoke with their respective staffers about the false charges leveled against him by corrupt prosecutors in the Tenth District and was told that there was nothing they could do, advising him only to consult with an attorney.

The Tenth Judicial District includes the counties of McMinn, Monroe, Polk and Bradley.  In that region as well as others in Tennessee, misconduct and law-breaking on the part of judges, court clerks, sheriffs, their deputies, prosecutors and local police have been well-documented by The Post & Email over more than four years.  There has been some recent mainstream media coverage of a small percentage of the crimes reported by citizens.

Like Young, The Post & Email and its readers have contacted Tennessee state and federal legislators about the systemic corruption in their districts on numerous occasions but never received a response.

Attempts to bring the problem to the Knoxville FBI have resulted in no response or an agent stating, “We wouldn’t know where to start.”  “We could claim distress,” the same agent told Walter Francis Fitzpatrick, III,  who had himself become a victim after discovering endemic corruption within the Monroe County grand jury.

Four years ago this coming Sunday, local police, Tennessee Highway Patrolmen, Monroe County Sheriff Bill Bivens and his deputies, TBI agents, FBI agents, a SWAT team, sniper team and bomb-sniffing dogs participated in “The Madisonville Hoax,” which deployed more than 100 of the law enforcers into Madisonville, the county seat of Monroe County, to face an “armed” enemy which did not exist.  On the days preceding April 20, 2010, hoaxsters called in false threats to then-Madisonville Mayor Alan Watson of militia groups allegedly planning to “take over the courthouse” when there was no such plan.  The result is that an innocent man, Darren Wesley Huff, has served three years in prison of a four-year sentence for a crime he did not commit.

Further revelations about the hoaxsters’ connections with the Obama regime imply that the orders to deploy such a show of force without cause came from the White House.  Local and federal judges have participated in prosecuting Fitzpatrick and Huff out of retaliation.

The Obama regime has targeted groups for political reasons by using the IRS, Justice Department, FBI, and EPA to stop the activities of journalists and critics by respectively silencing them; collecting their phone records and surveilling their email accounts without their knowledge; swearing out false affidavits and withholding information from FOIA requesters; and putting them out of business by draconian regulations stemming from their radical ideology.

The Post & Email is in the process of contacting national news media to raise awareness of the lawlessness in Tennessee, as contacting a corrupt U.S. Department of Justice would prove fruitless.

In April 2013, Marvin Young was indicted by the Monroe County grand jury for two crimes which he did not commit.  Evidence was fabricated and then recanted, but the charges have remained in place.  Young has already paid a considerable amount to an attorney and received what he describes as no benefit at all.  “When I told him that I didn’t have any more money to pay him, I never heard from him again,” Young told The Post & Email.

Of the response Young recently received from his U.S. senators, he said, “They were put in power to take control and take care of people like us, because unfortunately, we can’t do it for ourselves.  It’s all by design.”

In 2011, Young discovered that his father’s last will and testament had been created fraudulently and his father’s signature forged (7:00-8:00 in video).  Seven months after his father died, Young’s stepmother, Deborah Jean Grey Young, remarried a man named Larry David Godwin.  Seven months after that, Deborah Jean mysteriously passed away, resulting in Young’s father’s ample estate being left to Godwin.  Young described Godwin as “a friend” of Monroe County Sheriff Bill Bivens, who is part of the criminal syndicate operating in eastern Tennessee, although Young did not know that at the time.

In an attempt to report the evidence of the crime to the authorities, Young faxed his documentation to Tenth Judicial District Attorney General R. Steven Bebb, who, after examining the documents, agreed with Young over the phone that a crime had most likely been committed.

Young did not hear back from Bebb.  After recontacting him in 2012, Young said that Bebb “denied” what he had declared in his first conversation with Young wherein he agreed that there was evidence of a crime in regard to his father’s will.  When Young reminded Bebb that that was not what he had said before and that he had the conversations recorded, Bebb abruptly said, “This call is over,” but then said that he would have his deputy prosecutor, Calvin Rockholt, follow up.

Young met with Rockholt for approximately 40 minutes, showed him the documentation, and recorded the conversation.  Tennessee is a “one-party” state regarding recordings of conversations, meaning that both parties do not need to consent to being recorded.  During the meeting, Rockholt promised Young that he would investigate the matter of the forgery of his father’s will.  When Young asked Rockholt for copies of his notes, Rockholt refused, saying, “Oh, no, this is state’s evidence; I can’t let you have these.”

Young never heard back from Rockholt.  On March 18 of this year, Rockholt signed false indictments against Walter Francis Fitzpatrick, III which charged him with “stalking,” “harassment,” “aggravated perjury,” and “extortion” against the former McMinn County grand jury foreman, Jeff Cunningham.  Fitzpatrick had attempted to show evidence of criminality on the part of the court clerks, Cunningham, and Criminal Court judges to the newly-seated grand juries on seven occasions and was arrested while sitting quietly on a bench in the courthouse reading a book.

After Tenth Judicial District prosecutors failed to take up the case, Young decided to approach Larry David Godwin, the de facto inheritor of Young’s father’s estate by his brief marriage to Deborah Jean (Grey Young).  Young says in his video that during the meeting, he believed Godwin to be an honest man.  “He was more than willing to help and make things right,” Young said at the 26:00 mark.

However, Young declared that, to his complete surprise, in “less than an hour,” Godwin had him “locked up on criminal charges” because Young had “undisputed proof that everything he [Godwin] had he was going to lose.”

A year after Young’s last phone call with Bebb, in April 2013, Bebb signed two indictments issued by the Monroe County grand jury charging Young with “Especial aggravated burglary” and “Especial aggravated kidnapping.”  Regarding Bebb’s signature on the indictments, Young told The Post & Email, “Mr. Bebb took care of that himself.”

Bebb was recently accused of assault by a co-worker, and a six-part series was published on allegations of misconduct and abuse of his office by The Chattanooga Times Free Press in August 2012.  After an investigation was allegedly carried out by the Tennessee Attorney General, State Comptroller, and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation (TBI), the attorney general declared that Bebb’s actions did not rise to the level of criminality.

Ethics complaints filed by members of the Tennessee legislature with the Board of Professional Responsibility (BOPR), the body charged with reviewing complaints against attorneys, were dismissed last month.

In Tennessee, the judges, court personnel, attorney general’s office and the BOPR protect one another to maintain a criminal racketeering operation which has been ongoing for at least six decades. Feeding off of the local citizens through the collection of bond money and often, the confiscation of property and other assets from their victims, the victims are thrown into jails on trumped-up charges and frequently incarcerated for years after a show trial completely lacking in due process.

In August 1946, a confrontation termed “The Battle of Athens” took place between a group of World War II veterans who returned from overseas to find that the election process in McMinn County had become completely corrupted by cronyism among the sheriff, his deputies and other local politicians.  Several veterans sought to run for office that year to oust the corrupt political machine from McMinn County, but deeply-entrenched operatives used force and intimidation in an attempt to prevent any challenge to their stranglehold on public offices.

Writing in The Daily Post-Athenian, which is still in print today, former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt said of The Battle of Athens:

“Any local, state or national government, or any political machine, in order to live, must give the people assurance that they can express their will freely and that their votes will be counted. The most powerful machine cannot exist without the support of the people. Political bosses and political machinery can be good, but the minute they cease to express the will of the people, their days are numbered.

“This is a lesson which wise political leaders learn young, and you can be pretty sure that, when a boss stays in power, he gives the majority of the people what they think they want. If he is bad and indulges in practices which are dishonest, or if he acts for his own interests alone, the people are unwilling to condone these practices.

“When the people decide that conditions in their town, county, state or country must change, they will change them. If the leadership has been wise, they will be able to do it peacefully through a secret ballot which is honestly counted, but if the leader has become inflated and too sure of his own importance, he may bring about the kind of action which was taken in Tennessee.”

Roosevelt’s op-ed is significant in that the corrupt leadership of McMinn County, as exemplified by Sheriff Paul Cantrell, aligned itself with the Roosevelt administration and principles, and complaints of corruption to Roosevelt’s Department of Justice were never addressed.

In a haunting description of a situation which continues to this day, “American Heritage” wrote of the deeply-ingrained corruption:

The laws of Tennessee provided an opportunity for the unscrupulous to prosper. The sheriff and his deputies received a fee for every person they booked, incarcerated, and released; the more human transactions, the more money they got. A voucher signed by the sheriff was all that was needed to collect the money from the courthouse. Deputies routinely boarded buses passing through and dragged sleepy-eyed passengers to the jail to pay their $16.50 fine for drunkenness, whether they were guilty or not. Arrests ran as high as 115 per weekend. The fee system was profitable, but record-keeping was required, and the money could be traced. It was less troublesome to collect kickbacks for allowing roadhouses to operate openly. Cooperative owners would point out influential patrons. They were not bothered, but the rest were subject to shakedowns. Prostitution, liquor, and gambling grew so prevalent that it became common knowledge in Tennessee that Athens was “wide open.”

Modern-day corruption includes rigging of grand juries so that judges obtain the desired results of indictments and, later, prosecutions and incarcerations.  As it did in 1946, the state pays county jails and prisons a set amount for each inmate.  Overcrowding; lack of sanitation, heat and decent food, and abusive treatment have been reported by inmates at the Monroe County jail over the last four years.

The rigging of ballot boxes was the method of control used in 1946.  Several veterans attempting to act as poll-watchers were beaten, threatened and expelled from the area where the votes were cast by deputies working for McMinn County Sheriff Pat Mansfield.  A judge siding with the veterans was jailed without cause and denied visits from reporters.  Several other GIs were reported taken as “hostages.”

Mansfield was closely aligned with State Senator Paul Cantrell, who had served as McMinn County Sheriff just prior to Mansfield.  The Mansfield/Cantrell political machine was termed “the Gestapo” by one of the veterans, who lamented the lack of arms and munitions to fight against those attempting to steal the election.  However, the veterans procured the arms they believed they needed at the local armory, returning them after the Battle of Athens ended in the ouster of Mansfield and other corrupt politicians.

Gunfire began on August 1, 1946, when the Democrats in control took the ballot boxes to the McMinn County jail for “protection.” When the veterans demanded the ballot boxes in exchange for the “safe exit” of the deputies, the deputies shot two of them.  A local radio announcer at the time told his audience, “They had no choice but to meet fire with fire. In the precincts where the GI candidates were allowed watchers, they led by three to one majorities.”

A descendant of Tennessee “veterans of every major conflict in defense of American Liberty from the American Revolution forward” describes those who took part in The Battle of Athens as “noble.”

On May 3, 2012, in recounting her memory of The Battle of Athens in which her father was a veteran participant, Lill Coker said:

I was so proud of all the veterans and my father for taking a stand and doing what had to be done to make sure Rule of Law was restored. They had to go against those who were supposed to be upholding law and order. The vets had gone to fight for our country in World War II and came home to find that a political machine had robbed their fellow citizens of their rights. We must be eternally vigilant against corruption of our electoral process. I am very proud of our Tennessee legislators for passing the voter ID law. We can lose our freedom just as the people of Athens did during the war years when no one stood up to the sheriff’s bullies at the polling places.

Today, however, no one will take a stand in the Tenth Judicial District other than a few citizens who have been victimized by the ongoing corruption, after which the corrupt “public servants” redouble their efforts to silence them by creating more false charges to push through their corrupt grand juries.  In addition, one attorney has shown extraordinary courage in representing Fitzpatrick in his quest for justice for the people of eastern Tennessee.

The charges against Young were brought by Larry David Godwin, the illegal inheritor of Young’s father’s estate. The wife of Godwin’s brother, James, worked at Jenkins Realty, where Young was arrested on April 10, 2013.

Young further told The Post & Email:

That’s the reason why Larry David Godwin went by Jenkins Realty; he had family members who worked there. That’s the reason he picked that place to go by.  As soon as he walked in the door, he made his hand gestures, and they called the law.  Jeb Brown, who used to be a Monroe County sheriff’s deputy and is now the chief of police in Tellico Plains, came after he got the call from Corinna Ash saying that “There is a man being held at gunpoint.  It’s even in the police report:  “There is a man being held at gunpoint.”  But Jeb Brown came in that front door; he never even had his gun pulled; he came by himself.  That’s not protocol, #1.

No. 2, when we went to court and they testified under oath in the preliminary hearing, they actually testified that they had never seen a firearm.  So now, here I am:  I’ve been thrown in jail on a $100,000 bond because the woman lied under oath, and absolutely nothing has been done to her, nor have my charges been thrown out.  She could say anything she wanted to, of course, because Larry David Godwin was family; she could say anything she wanted to get me put in jail.  Then when she had to come to court and had to testify, she told the truth that she didn’t see a firearm, and nothing was done about it.  Nothing.

“Did they try to say that you had a gun and were holding up someone at gunpoint?” The Post & Email asked.

I did have a firearm, but it was in my pocket, and nobody saw it until the chief of police frisked me.  I told him where it was before he even found it.  He asked me, “Do you have a weapon?” and I said, “I have protection in my front pocket.”  He searched me, he found it; he held it in his hand, he went back inside the real estate office, and that’s where Larry David Godwin, Jimmy Godwin, Corinna Ash, her assistant – that’s where everybody saw the firearm for the first time, which is completely against the law; it should have been locked up as evidence.  Instead, Jeb Brown, the chief of police, took it back inside and showed it to everybody, and they collaborated their stories, and you know the rest.

Young’s arraignment was conducted by video “inside the booking room” of the Monroe County jail. “I never went to court.  I understand that I’m supposed to go before the magistrate within 24 hours; that never happened.  I was arraigned over video-conference between the judge’s chambers and me.  I could barely hear him; I could hardly understand anything he was saying, which I feel was ‘convenient,'” he told us.

We asked Young whether or not the practice of arraignment by video link is normally done only with prisoners who might be considered dangerous or in high-profile cases, to which he responded, “In Monroe County, everybody does it.  You don’t go to court; you come out of your cell and you go to the booking room.  You go behind the counter and you sit in your little chair and you look at the TV screen, and the judge comes up on there…a big, heavy-set judge with his leg took off came on…”

“Was it J. Reed Dixon?” The Post & Email asked.

Yes, Dixon.  They took a leg off.  He actually uses crutches to come into the courtroom.  He was sitting in his chambers and asked me a few things.  He asked me if I understood the charges, and I said, “No,” because I know that “understood” was synonymous with “stand under.”  I told him, “No, I don’t understand why I have these charges.”  And he said, “Well, we’re not here to debate this issue; I need to know if you understand what is being charged against you.” And I said, “Well, yeah, I guess I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t understand how it can be,” and that was the end of that.

He set a bond at $100,000, and I said, “That’s going to be virtually impossible for me to come up with; is there not a chance that you can reduce that?” and he said, “You have a right to a reduction hearing, and that will come at a later date if you so desire it.”  It was $100,000 and “take it or leave it.”

I put up 10%, which is $10,000.

“How long did you spend in jail?”

I went to jail a year ago, April 10, 2013, and I spent four days there.

“How did you find the conditions?”

Terrible.  The food was terrible.  I was made to sign off on a contents list of the things they gave me, and they didn’t give me half of it.  They didn’t give me any trouble that anything was missing when I handed it back in, but the point is that I didn’t get a pillow; I didn’t got a pillowcase; I never got a blanket; I got a sheet, a bedroll, a pair of slippers, and the nasty orange clothes that they give you, and that’s all I got.

I was put into Cell 9, which is the Pink Room; it’s painted pink from one end to the other.  I was in there with 11 or 12 other people, which is way, way more people than ought to be in there.  We got our toilet flushed two or three times a day.  The food was terrible, it was cold, and I didn’t eat for four days.  Nothing.  I didn’t eat or drink or go to the bathroom for four days.

The Post & Email responded, “This is exactly what I’ve heard from other people.  The Monroe County jail has been ordered to close and build a new facility, but they haven’t done it.”

Young replied, “There’s a big debate going on here about building a new jail, but of course, the monies are not there because they’ve been stealing from the coffers or something…”

Young said that Monroe County is “one of the few counties in the state left that has constables,” all of whom he said he has contacted.  “They don’t want to do a thing,” Young said.  “The main constable here actually does not get along with Sheriff Bill Bivens at all. If there’s anybody at all who would go against Bivens, it would be him.  But apparently, he is ill-informed or has been intimidated.  He is our direct link to the governor.  He is the one who should contact the governor with this information.  I have contacted him twice on the phone; I have emailed him my executive brief as well as my video, and he’s not doing a thing.  He won’t even return my calls.”

Young has witnesses who are willing to testify at his upcoming court date on June 26 (30:00).