An Excerpt from 'Murder in Mississippi' by John Safran

Back in 2008, while filming an episode of Race Relations in Mississippi, John Safran met a white supremacist named Richard Barrett. Well spoken, politically wily, and savvy in matters of the law, he seemed a prototype for the established Far Right. That image ended when he was stabbed to death and set on fire by Vincent McGee, a 23 year-old black man he had hired to work in his garden. After that, cracks began to show. Or maybe the cracks were there already.

In writing Murder in Mississippi, which attempts to find answers to the many questions arising from Barrett’s murder—Why was he found in his underwear? Why was a young black man invited into the house of an avowed segregationist?—John spoke to many Mississippians. This excerpt contains his encounter with Jim Giles, the white separatist behind Radio Free Mississippi (it’s theme song: “Amerika” by Rammstein). According to Jim, Barrett was not the upstanding racist he claimed to be.

Portrait of Jim Giles - by Benjamin Thomson

It’s 7 a.m. and I poke my face out the window of my room. Jackson still insists on being sunny enough to burn your eyes while cold enough to wear gloves.

‘If it pleases the court this is Jim Giles and you’re listening to Radio Free Mississippi,’ Jim says, live from my laptop. ‘I have an inquiry from someone. I’ve mentioned him to you before.’

‘!’ I say.

‘His name is John Safran. He wants to talk regarding Richard Barrett. I don’t know exactly what he is expecting and I’ve some concerns about him. And if he’s listening, well, I’ll just air them now.’

It was my impression the first time I looked at him that he engages in pranks. Well known for pranks and indelicate handling. I believe this is from his Wikipedia page.

So, this might be an attempt on his part to make me look bad. John, that ’s real hard to do. I do a good job with that myself. I don’t really need any help from you.

I’m not so much like probably anybody you’ve dealt with. I’m certainly no Richard Barrett.

Barrett was not a legitimate voice for the local people here in Mississippi. I don’t know the facts for certain, but I’ve long suspected him of being a police informer. Something that—John, I hope I don’t hurt your feelings—but honestly, I think that’s probably what you are as well, John—a police informer.

Let me just break this to you delicately if you are listening now. I do not use the J word here because it confers upon those folks two things I don’t think they deserve. That is: victim status and a religion. Rather, I use the term Israeli. Stripping them of both their victim status and their religion. It’s my argument here, John, that Israelis are first and foremost a foreign and alien race of people.

And that’s who you are.

I’m not trying to hurt your feelings, I’m just trying to be direct and honest.

John, don’t get your feelings hurt. I’ll still be nice and respectful to you if you want to talk with me. You can ask me a question and I’ll answer. And you can chop it up and put it out there and say, This is the redneck from Mississippi I interviewed. Don’t you just love the way they talk down there in Mississippi?

John, I’m used to people making fun of me. Thinking low of me. Thinking I’m kind of stupid and ignorant. Believe it or not, John, I actually worked on Madison Avenue in New York City and I’ve been around a lot of people like you. That is, highly educated Israelis. And you all seem to have a view of Mississippi and Mississippians.

Okay. I am gonna go get some orange juice and then I will try to reach Mr Safran if he’s reachable. Mr Safran, if you are listening, I am about to try to reach you as soon as I get through getting some orange juice.

Jim hunches over his microphone in his trailer. I hunch over my laptop on the coffee table in the ‘Sleep Inn and Suites’.

‘Alright, let ’s give Mr Safran a ring-a-ling,’ Jim says. ‘Ha-ha, I think he has got a gun and a baseball bat over his shoulder.’

I forgot about my Skype profile picture. I’m photoshopped as Bear Jew from Inglorious Basterds.

My laptop bleeps and bloops.

‘Good morning, Mr Safran,’ Jim says, like a coyote feeling out another coyote who has wandered onto his prairie. And for all I know he may be dressed as a coyote—his video is flicked off.

‘Good morning,’ I say. ‘So, do you want me to tell you about my connection to Richard Barrett?’

‘Well, before you do that, let me address a concern I have,’ he says. ‘Is this one of your spoofs?’

‘No, no. That ’s why I should tell you my connection to Richard Barrett. Because it ’ll explain why I’m calling you.’ I take him through the whole Race Relations story, how I announced at the Spirit of America Day that Richard had African DNA.

‘That ’s funny,’ Jim laughs. ‘That ’s actually funny.’ He takes a sip of something, I suppose his orange juice, and laughs some more. ‘You might have a bestseller on your hands, given the market out there. There seems to be a hardy appetite for this sort of thing.’

Jim starts one of his trademark pauses, which make you think his equipment has broken, or yours.

‘Richard Barrett, even in death, lives on,’ Jim says, finally. ‘And so my concern about your focus is he continues to haunt and do that which the media used him for best. And that is tar and tarnish anyone who is—and I hate, I don’t use the W word here—I use European. W is just…  I have concluded that W, to use the W word, is just too frightening for most people.’

Jim claims he’s no Richard Barrett, but he can’t come out and say what he means, either.

I tell Jim that there was something that didn’t stack up about the Spirit of America Day. Not everyone seemed in on the deal.

‘He was forever doing that,’ Jim says. ‘That was his MO. All geared around young white males too. He was forever clinging to young white males. And one of them got charged with…  some kind of bomb crime.’

‘Oh really? Who is that?’ Immediately I scribble down Bomb Crime.

‘I’ve forgotten the boy’s name, but… And I knew another young boy that was associated with him, very troubled boy, and yeah, he is just, you know, the whole thing with Barrett—nothing smacked of wholesome, he was anything but wholesome. Richard never failed to make Europeans look stupid and goofy. Richard Barrett was tampering with something that was very important to the lives and fortunes of the people who live here in Mississippi in a hurtful way. He has made my tasks harder.’

‘Is your family from Mississippi?’ I ask.

Jim pauses.

‘I am a very open and direct person, there is nothing that I shirk from talking about.’

Jim tells me how he got to be a white separatist living in a trailer.

One thing about poor folk, you don’t always know about your past. My father was illegitimate. He didn’t know who his father was.

So any kind of knowledge certainty is cut off there. I’m pretty sure my father and his mother were born in Wayne County, Mississippi. And I’m pretty sure my mother’s parents were born in Mississippi. But I couldn’t begin to tell you who my people are beyond those simple facts. And I’m not even sure about that. That’s the plight of people who aren’t landed aristocracy. I heard my mother say not long ago they live hand-to-mouth. It ’s not a bed of roses. They struggle in their life and they do good to put food on the table. So they’re really ill-equipped when it comes to organising themselves politically.

I live in a trailer. I have got a barn behind my trailer. That ’s just a barn for my cows. I’ve got four Jerseys. Three Jersey cows and a Jersey bull. That ’s where I keep my puppies, under there. I have ten bluetick coonhounds. I have two puppies I am not counting in that number. I’ve got six Great Pyrenees.

One route to my home is the road where my mother’s mother lived. There is squalor there that you won’t see anywhere. There is nothing that looks any worse in Haiti.

I’ve been coming down here to this farm ever since I was about seven or eight years old, when my grandparents first bought this property and built the house.

My mother lives next to me here on our ten acres, in the two-storey house that I speak of. Her home is a very nice home.

I had a pretty regular childhood. They integrated the schools when I was about in the fifth grade. My recollection when I was a kid in school, the classrooms, the hallways, they were quiet places. A school is a place where you go and study and it ’s suppose to be quiet. Slowly after integration everything seems to be very loud. And I think that is a function of Africans just being basically, you know… their natural tendencies come out—they are loud people.

My father was killed in a car wreck when I was eleven.

I talked about Madison Avenue before. After I finished school that was the job I sought and obtained. I was working for IBM, the computer company, in the capacity of a systems engineer, which is somewhat of a technical sales job.

Anytime you would open your mouth in New York they would look at you kind of funny. They would say, Where are you from? and draw attention to it. Some did it in a friendly nice way and others were rather malicious in their views of Mississippians.

Aged nineteen, I went to Paris for one year. I was studying French at the Sorbonne. Mitterrand had just been elected and I recall running through the streets of Paris going from one bonfire to another, because they didn’t like the policies he enacted as president. They turned over those little French cars and set them on fire. But we don’t have that kind of activist group here in Mississippi.

You ask about my wife. I have spoken about all of this on the radio in a very open way. There is nothing that I don’t talk about. My lack of a woman. My ex-wife. My mother. My ex-friends, who have abandoned me because of my political views.

My wife was a beautiful Swedish-German woman that I met when I was working for IBM in New York. And being a young insensitive husband I screwed that relationship up. That was my fault.

We were married a year.

Did I have an affair? No, no. Really, a lot of it had to do with us moving multiple times with IBM and her ending up in Atlanta, unhappy, and me being insensitive to her unhappiness. Those young brides, there’s a make or break point in there where you have to treat them right. And if you don’t act right, you can lose your girl. And I didn’t act right, so I lost my girl.

I have run for Congress three times: 2002, 2004 and 2006. I was ignored by the media. But I did capture people’s attention with the large trailer I pulled around. Had the Confederate battle flag on it.

This was when I was arrested for pointing my finger at that black cop. She said I pointed a loaded 357 at her, when in point of fact all I did is point my finger at her.

I did not have a good showing at the polling booth.

I didn’t move here into this trailer until 1996. When my grandfather got so old he couldn’t see well enough to go to the doctor and I had to come home and start shuttling him and my grandmother, really, basically, taking care of them. And that turned out to be a fifteen-year, sixteen-year job.

My grandparents have both now died. The death of my grandfather is a rather recent event. And now I have to go out and get a real job. I existed off of their pensions. I was able to stay here and care for them. They didn’t have to go to a nursing home. That was really my job in large part even though I have engaged in organic farming here and I have done internet radio.

I am working now on finding another girl. I have put in a concerted effort – I have joined dating sites and I am diligently pursuing an attractive female as we speak. But honestly there are two things holding me back. Number one, I have very high taste in regard to women. Number two, I have a lot of baggage in regard to all this public speaking. Most pretty girls, most people in general, I don’t think necessarily want to be associated with somebody who is so out there and so vocal on such a controversial subject as race.

I soon will be fifty-two years old.

Jim begins dialling a number, live on air.

‘Well, if it’s meant to be a straight book,’ Jim says, ‘and you are looking for somebody who actually knew Barrett, I have a friend in particular, to this day, who sings Richard Barrett’s praises. And I don’t understand him and I am a little, to be honest with you, worried about him. His name is Joe McNamee. One second, Mr Safran.’

Jim gets through to Joe.

‘Hey, how are you doing Jim?’ says Joe.

‘Good. I am on air now,’ Jim says. ‘I have got this writer from Australia and he is writing a book, so he says, about Richard Barrett. And he is Jewish. He is not a friend of… he is not a, you know… he is not one of us, Joe, is all I can tell you! But he comes across as real nice and he has got a reputation for playing pranks on people. What would you have to say to a Jewish book writer on Richard Barrett, who is in Mississippi right now?’

‘Well, I got nothing about… I got nothing against Jews,’ says Joe, ‘other than what they are doing to us over here. Me and Richard was long-running buddies. He had done a lot of stuff with me and I had done a lot of stuff with him. Richard was really my attorney.’

‘Why did you need an attorney?’ I ask.

‘Trying to have my voice, my opinion,’ Joe says. ‘And now’days they claim you can’t say nothing.’

Joe says he struck trouble fighting to keep the Confederate flag at Ol’ Miss football games.

I ask Joe what he knows of Richard’s life before he came to Mississippi. Joe says he knows nothing—it never came up.

‘Hey Joe,’ Jim laughs, ‘let me tell you the prank he pulled on Barrett. He came down here and got a saliva sample from Barrett and he went and contended he found out that Barrett had African ancestors.’

‘Oh yeah,’ says Joe. ‘I know who I’m talking to now. He came to Barrett ’s Spirit of America. Yeah, that was a bad day. I don’t even want to talk to him. He’s crazy.’

‘Well, he’s back here in Mississippi, Joe,’ Jim says, quite delighted.

‘Were you there, Joe?’ I ask.

‘I was there,’ Joe says, darkly. ‘I remember all the lies you come up with. You were buddy-buddying up to us then turned on us like a goddamn snake.’

‘But Joe,’ says Jim, ‘Mr Safran and I have had a very congenial conversation thus far. And one thing that he was critical of Barrett was pointed the finger and, Joe, I think he’s kind of right about this. Barrett would tell white Mississippians, Y’all come to this event, it’s for “The Spirit of America”, when in fact it was something totally different.’

‘But Jim, you just wasn’t there,’ Joe splutters. ‘He got up and said Richard was half-black!’

Jim laughs.

‘Well, one difference, Mr Safran,’ Jim says, ‘between me and Joe, is Joe contends that he never suspected Barrett of being bad.’

‘Well, I’m not saying that he is a good guy,’ Joe says. ‘I am saying that I never see anything about him being queer. I don’t believe anyone can come out and prove he’s queer. And I was ’round him all the time.’

‘Did you always notice he was around young boys?’ Jim asks.

‘Yeah I did. That didn’t look good,’ concedes Joe. ‘I heard on radio—but you have to understand this was a black radio station—that he was running around with dresses on in his neighbourhood. But I know three people who lived in the neighbourhood and they never saw it.’

‘But Joe, wouldn’t you admit that in terms of being a regular Southern guy, Barrett was the opposite? He didn’t come across as one of us.’

‘No he didn’t,’ admits Joe. ‘I talked to his sister.’ (I reach for my ballpoint again.) ‘And his sister said the reason he came down here, he wasn’t getting no attention in the North. So he came down here where he could get some attention. From the news media and all. That was what Richard liked.’

‘Joe, you said you knew his sister?’ I say. ‘Did I hear right?’

‘I didn’t know her,’ Joe says. ‘I didn’t even know he had a sister till he died. I spoke to her over the phone. I never even met her. She did say that Richard had a girlfriend for ten years. And I didn’t know Richard had a girlfriend. That’s what looked bad.’

‘How did you contact her?’ I ask.

‘Well, she really contacted me,’ Joe says. She did that through the executor of Richard’s will. Joe doesn’t have this man’s name or number on him but he might be able to find them.

‘Let me get off the phone, because I am at work right now,’ says Joe.

‘Goodbye, Joe,’ says Jim. ‘We got to go and eat some catfish here one of these days.’

Joe hangs up.

‘Promise you won’t hang up when I say this,’ I say to Jim. ‘But because you didn’t get back to my Facebook  message, because you didn’t reply to that, and because I had come here, and I wanted to interview you, and I didn’t have your phone number, yesterday, I drove to your farm.’

‘Well, that ’s no problem,’ he says. ‘You see my coonhounds? Did you see the bee yard?’

‘I saw the dogs but not the bees. So have you got that costume that you wear, so you don’t get stung by the bees?’

‘I do. You are welcome to come down here. We will go collect eggs and I will show you my birds and you could see my pack of dogs and my bee yard.’

‘Oh, I’d love that,’ I say, sealing the playdate.

‘I’m ready to get out of here. I am getting hungry. I got to get in my pushups and sit-ups.’

Jim finishes his glass of orange juice.

‘This is Jim Giles and you’re listening to Radio Free Mississippi.’

Jim pulls up Rammstein and I shut my laptop.

I’m pumped about the sister lead. My favourite bits in the true crime books are when you find all about the baddies as little kids. And in my months Googling Richard, I’d seen no mention of any family member. I put this alongside the boy with a bomb. And what I saw at the Spirit of America  Day. These pieces form a strange picture. Richard seems both a buffoon and a danger, someone running his own agenda for his own curious, confidential ends.

I look out the window of my room.

I decide that when I do the movie of the book I’ll have a scene where there’s a mix-up. People spy Jim in the distance on his farm in his beekeeper suit and think it’s a Klan uniform.

Extract from the book Murder in Mississippi by John Safran published by Hamish Hamilton rrp $29.99

More John Safran on VICE:

Peace Be Upon You - Is Australia a Christian Nation?

Peace Be Upon You - Can Greek People be White Supremacists?

Follow John on Twitter: @JohnSafran