From the Editor: What happens when the feds are wrong?

As I’ve written before, old reporters like to tell old stories.
But here’s one that seems to have some relevance to today’s news. It’s about what happens when a federal bomb investigation lands on a small town, and when the feds decide you’re guilty.
And they’re wrong.
Cesar Sayoc has been accused of mailing homemade bombs to several political officials and media people last week. Aside from the presumption of innocence to which Sayoc is entitled, I've seen nothing to suggest that federal authorities didn't lay on a swift, effective investigation.
But that's not always the way things work out.
The events I'm thinking about began just before Christmas 1989. I was the news editor at the Enterprise, Alabama, Ledger, the daily paper in a small town with which some of you may be familiar.
Enterprise shows up in Ripley’s because the town’s main street features a statue of a Greek goddess holding up a boll weevil. The idea is that the weevil wiped out the local cotton production and forced farmers to grow what turned out to be more profitable crops, mostly peanuts.
The local hotel’s restaurant made a chocolate pie with a little peanut butter boll weevil on top. It was — excuse the expression — the bomb.
Enterprise also is next door to Fort Rucker, the post where the Army trains all its helicopter pilots. Lots of those pilots end up in Louisiana, flying back and forth between south Louisiana and offshore oil platforms.
I was alone at the office late on a Saturday night, finishing up Sunday’s paper. Just before deadline, The Associated Press moved a story about the death of a federal judge near Birmingham.
He and his wife were sitting at their kitchen table, opening a package that had arrived in the mail. The package exploded, killing U.S. District Judge Robert Vance and seriously injuring his wife.
Around the same time, another mailed bomb killed Robert Robinson, a civil rights attorney at an NAACP office in Georgia. Somewhere along the way, the FBI linked the bomb to a letter from thing called Americans for a Competent Federal Judicial System.
The NAACP bombing, the animus toward the feds and an unsuccessful NAACP bombing in Florida led investigators to think they were after a racist wacko.
A month later, on Jan. 22, 1990, then-Attorney General Richard Thornburgh held a press conference to announce a major break in the Vance case. That day, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, 150 agents strong, dropped on Enterprise like locusts, bringing the national press with them.
Their target was Robert Wayne O’Ferrell, who was in his 40s then. He was a junk dealer with a beaten-up shop full of not much of anything at all.
Two years earlier, O’Ferrell had sent a typed letter to a federal court, complaining about the outcome of a lawsuit he’d filed against a former boss. The feds seemed to believe his letter and the Americans for a Competent Federal Judicial System letter were typed on the same machine.
So the FBI picked up Enterprise, population 20,000, and gave it a good shake as they searched for the typewriter.
Agents held and questioned O’Ferrell. They searched his shop. They searched his house in nearby New Brockton. They searched under his shop and house.
O’Ferrell’s customers complained that they were being questioned by the FBI.
Agents even searched O’Ferrell’s septic tank. The Coffee County sheriff at the time, Bryce Paul, had a puckish sense of humor. He gave each of the FBI agents involved in the septic tank search a T-shirt saying, “Sewage Handling Investigation Team.” The artwork emphasized the acronym.
The Ledger ran a cartoon in which the boll weevil atop the famous statue was replaced with a typewriter. The artist made a couple of bucks from selling T-shirts featuring the artwork.
But for O’Ferrell, the episode wasn’t so funny. His name was connected with a heinous crime. Many of those customers who got hassled by the FBI never came back to his shop. O’Ferrell lost his business.
It’s easy to say now, but I had my doubts at the time that O’Ferrell was the bomber.
I talked to a young man who had been trained by O’Ferrell to be one of our paper’s motor carriers. The young man is black, and he told me he never heard O’Ferrell make disparaging remarks about African-Americans.
That’s one thing about bigots. Usually, they won’t shut up about it. That didn’t sound like O’Ferrell.
He was never charged but never really cleared, either, until the feds convicted someone else. In 1991, Walter Leroy Moody of Rex, Georgia, was found guilty by a federal jury in the death of attorney Robinson. Later, Moody was convicted of killing Vance.
Moody died by lethal injection in April 2018 at age 83, the oldest person to be executed in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated in the 1970s.
It’s still not clear why Moody sent the bombs.
His wife was badly hurt by a pipe bomb in 1972, but federal authorities couldn’t convict Moody directly. They did manage to put him away for a five-year prison sentence for possessing the bomb.
After Moody got out, he went on a letter-writing crusade, telling appeals court judges that his conviction was unfair and that it should be reversed. His campaign went nowhere.
To get his message across, Moody turned to pipes, powder and postage.
The NAACP bombings may have been a fake-out to point suspicious at white power groups.
As for O’Ferrell, he sued the federal government for $50 million. He even attracted some sympathy in 1996, after William Jewel was falsely accused of setting off a bomb at the Olympic Games in Atlanta.
But O’Ferrell’s lawsuit seems to have petered out. A story in Alabama’s Southeast Sun last April said O’Ferrell, in his 70s now, lives on his Social Security in a mobile home near the local senior citizens center.
Reporter Michelle Mann noted that there was a typed message in a typewriter in his trailer. The message begins, “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. …”
Bill Decker is managing editor of The Daily Review.