MARCH 1, 2021 – (Dedicated to the memory of my late brother-in-law, Dean Rhodes, tax accountant (etc.) extraordinaire)
What finally tripped up the murderous gangster Al Capone was . . . tax evasion. He was convicted at the surprisingly young age of 32 and sentenced to 11 years in the Big House. After his conviction, Capone fired his lawyers and hired actual tax attorneys to handle an appeal. They gave it the college (“law school”?) try but failed.
When Martin Luther King, Jr. was 31 (1960), he too was charged with tax evasion though by the state of Alabama, not the Feds.
In both cases—Capone and King—the charges were a back-door means of getting the man off the streets. Capone, of course, was a violent bad guy who’d managed to evade (or corrupt) law enforcement. King was a threat to the white establishment, but for the most part by 1960, he’d managed to dodge conventional, Southern white means of dealing with Black “trouble-makers.”
Capone-King parallels continued with the lawyers. Capone’s defense team lacked the expertise to deal effectively with tax evasion charges. Likewise, MLK’s lawyers were unschooled in tax law. They were prominent civil rights attorneys and ordinary criminal defense lawyers. They approached the state’s case more as an attack on MLK’s civil rights mission—which it was, of course. This strategy put their client at huge risk, since they lacked the ability to address . . . the numbers. They bickered among themselves, and for all their efforts had little to show except exorbitant legal bills.
King was beside himself. He was needed more than ever in the growing struggle for desegregation, but his legal mess threatened to overwhelm his mission. If he negotiated a plea, it’d be viewed as an admission of guilt and destroy his reputation. If he refused to strike a deal, the best evidence in his favor—very sloppy accounting—was not likely to achieve acquittal in front of a white jury. He hadn’t helped his case by telling reporter, “There may be some little unintentional mistakes on my returns.” Several of his lawyers feared they’d lose at trial; others even suspected that King was hiding the truth and laughed at his claims of innocence.
As his trial approached, one of the lawyers brought in a junior partner who’d started off as an accountant. Smart move—finally. The junior guy, Chauncey Eskridge, asked King how he’d prepared his returns. King said with embarrassment that he’d relied nearly entirely on his diaries. Diaries! Upon reviewing them, Eskridge discovered that sure enough, the civil rights leader had tracked meticulously every penny of income and expense—a practice that “Daddy King” had insisted upon from the time Martin, Jr. was a kid. The lawyer told co-counsel that King was more honest than anyone he’d ever hoped to meet. After painstaking work with the diaries, Eskridge beat the charge.
The one-time accountant-turned-lawyer wound up wholly captivated by the civil rights movement and totally devoted to King. On April 4, 1968 Eskridge would be standing beneath the balcony of the Lorraine Motel exactly when the bullet struck.
(Remember to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.)
© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
