Judge brushed with bootleggers, madams, moonshiners and Dixie Mafia in East Texas
From The Eat Texas Journal
By Hudson Old, Publisher
They worked the same arena. They knew the same players, on both sides.
A lawyer, a liberal, a rebel, for an operator who loved taking on the system, you could wonder that late Mark Lesher so admired Gibson “Hoot” Hadaway, a law-and-order cop turned country politician.
Law enforcement generates criminal cases, maybe.
Here’s the real link, I think.
Both thrived on cat-and-mouse, adrenaline-rush investigation work. It was a game and both understood the law as the rule book.
Hunting cyberspace for any news of the late lawyer’s old friend pulled up Hoot’s obituary, and no more, but there should be more.
So here it is, ready for launch into cyberspace eternity, a part of the Mark Lesher legacy from the day he introduced me to Bowie County Justice of the Peace Hoot Hadaway, lawman from another time.
For 30 years he roamed the underbelly of 15 counties as the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Control’s man in East Texas. Things are different now.
As a green deputy in the 50’s, he found broader latitude concerning a lawman’s discretion in the use of force.
Similarly, courts exercised a wider range of considerations. Take search warrants.
“In those days, sometimes you needed one, sometimes you didn’t,” said the Judge.
A strapping 6-foot-3-inch veteran in 1958, Judge Hadaway was straight out of the Navy when he hired on with Sheriff T.L. “Hop” Hopkins, who’d campaigned on the promise to drive the bootleggers out of Delta County.
Following their opening raid, it took 83 stitches to sew up one of three brawling suspects surrendering to the crowd of two lawmen.
“We’d gone in to investigate a sour-mash beer cooking operation at Kinsang,” Judge Hadaway said. The trio of suspects had no initial appreciation of the authority represented by a pair of lawmen.
“Sometimes, you have to work out terms of surrender before everybody understands the authority you represent,” he said.
North of the county seat at Cooper, Kinsang was a remote community where the two forks of the Sulphur came together on the northern border of Delta County.
Kinsang’s broader population had lived for generations with an undeserved reputation as a community of outlaws. Living in Kinsang meant living under a general cloud of suspicion.
“When you see good people turning a blind eye, it’s likely all they need is seeing somebody stand up for them,” Judge Hadaway concluded his account of the day a fight gave rise to the legend of “Hoot and Hop.”
Like other details missing in vague notes, I lament having no information explaining an intriguing note that Hoot had only one pants leg left at the end of the fight.
His Texarkana Funeral Home obituary says he played some minor league baseball.
In 1961 he had a chance to advance his career with a choice between service in the border patrol or the state’s Alcoholic Beverage Commission.
Pausing at intervals to think back through the bottleneck of years since he’d gone into politics, Judge Hadaway remembered law enforcement as a game. Often as not, it was seen the same way by the strings of career madams, whiskey runners, gamblers, moonshiners and bootleggers intersecting his line of duty.
“It was a game of matching wits,” he said. “I never had any personal issues with anybody who understood that they were fair game and didn’t question the consequences. We got along well enough.”
Same as the understanding at Kinsang, he later expanded the standard to include tenacity and a gift for turning problems inside out. The Mississippi-based Delta Mafia associates oozing into Texas through Texarkana were better funded and better organized.
As coyly expressed by an advance agent, the history of organized crime spoke of an underworld brotherhood understanding the logic of rewarding a lawman with broad jurisdiction likewise understood the value of mafia services, for a price.
“I’m cheap,” Judge Hadaway answered. “Just tell ‘em to quit.”
His reputation sent lousy cops slinking away the same way it pulled the good ones his way.
“These were some federal boys,” he said, offering a faded photograph of four men posing in the dark interior corner of a concrete block building, a picture made when the Judge was 50 years younger.
Rather than uniformed officers they’re men in blue-collar working clothes with a scruffy edge, deadpanning the lens with flat cop stares.
“This boy here,” he gestured, “died young. Got killed over in Florida.”
“I spent the night before we made this picture of the four of us crawling in the dirt under a house, listening through the floor,” he said. “Whatever way you find an edge, that’s what I like.”
Odd thing, sharp as his memory could cut through the years to a moment in a night, names of both cops and robbers met in passing slipped his mind.
“They don’t matter much,” he said, a thought at once cold blooded and it is humble.
Working a tip concerning a Mt. Pleasant bootlegger’s stash under a doghouse, it was the length of stout chain holding the snarling dog at bay that gave him opportunity one afternoon to test notions concerning the best way to back down a riled but innocent dog he had no particular interest in shooting.
“Can’t say why, instead of waving my hat at him I decided to put it between my teeth and it backed him up,” he said.
In Mt. Pleasant he caught the way of things from officers who passed quiet word that his work was sometimes frowned upon in local offices.
“I knew as well as everybody else who the bootleggers were, but every time I’d come to town they’d cleaned house,” he said.
A low-ranking officer passed him a copy of a list of phone numbers without names.
“I got some boys I trusted to stake out the places of the bootleggers we knew and got another to call the numbers on the list and give them the tip they’d come to expect when I came to town,” Judge Hadaway said. “When they came out to move the hooch, they showed us right where to look.”
For a man walking down the middle of the street and willing to shoot out the windows on either side, Mt. Pleasant wasn’t unique as a place where the lines between law and lawlessness blurred.
A set up news clipping photo showed him swinging an axe into a slot machine while standing atop a dice table believed to be part of the gambling operation of a Bowie County elected official they didn’t arrest the night they spent busting the place up.
“It was a touchier than usual thing,” he said. “When you can’t be absolute in pinning a thing down, sometimes the best you’re going to do is delivering the message.”
For a while, Tyler was a good training ground for a straight arrow learning to be savvy enough to avoid a setup. Considering the possibilities of an order to destroy liquor in the evidence room, he shot pictures documenting his carrying out the assignment.
“So I had what I needed the next morning when it went up the line that I’d passed it out among my friends,” he said, though anybody who knew him knew better.
He’d kept a feature clipping from the Texarkana Gazette, a tale he told to dress up local police news.
He said he gave up drinking before he ever started.
The story had to do with his father’s sipping apricot brandy while lamenting that he didn’t have the money to buy Hoot a bicycle. While Hoot said he later regretted embarrassing his father by asking why there was money for brandy but none for a bike, it was a defining moment.
Another moment that reshaped the commission he represented left a tragic mark in Smith County, triggered a suicide followed by months during which shoals of officers were dismissed or resigned.
“The whole thing went in motion in about three days,” he said, opening into the tale of his being transferred to Austin after stepping on the wrong Tyler toes.
“I was down there a year before the right man watched long enough to like the way I worked,” he said. “He told me not to tell anybody I was coming, just head back to East Texas and not to report to anybody but him.”
Backed with the right authority, he waded directly into the offices he knew best.
It didn’t take long.
“That officer pulled up one afternoon in front of the funeral home and put a gun to his own head,” he said.
His work in the backwaters of Delta County honed him for service in Northern Titus County where he interrupted the work of a sassy redhead from Louisiana who dubbed him “Deacon Hadaway.”
Aggravated once that he couldn’t get the goods on a joint his informant said as running under the radar near DeKalb, he tried a new gambit.
It was summer.
Noting the establishment had a big exhaust fan drawing a cooling draft through open windows, he came up with a plan.
“I went a little crazy,” he said, “just marched in the door, threw my hat in the floor and did a little dance around it while I called down a voodoo hex on the place.”
On a sultry night two days later, with the fans drawing a fine draft through the place, he slipped up from outside let the cooling draft through the building pull a spray can of mace through the house, sending workers and patrons gagging through the door, gasping for clean air.
The place burned to the ground within days and word was the operators set the fire in hopes of purging themselves of the hex.
Before Coors was sold in Texas, Judge Hadaway could have been a script consultant for director Hal Needham’s breakout film, Smokey and the Bandit.
Starring Burt Reynolds, Jerry Reed, Sally Fields and Jackie Gleason, the tale of bumbling keystone cops, a runaway bride and slick truckers running a tractor trailer load of Coors from Texarkana to Georgia was the top grossing movie of 1977.
The real life version of it was a farm truck with a cattle trailer making routine runs hauling Oklahoma Coors across the Red, running southbound down U.S. 59 where Judge Hadaway finally made the connection one day while scouting the Cass / Bowie County line store at Domino.
“I liked watching places,” he said, which was what he was doing when the truck with the cattle on the trailer pulled in.
“That trailer had a false floor over 500 cases of Coors,” he said.
The best way to shoot out tires or luck into an occasional radiator shot while driving with your right hand is leaning just far enough out the window to get a good line of left-handed fire bouncing bullets at an angle off the pavement so they come up under a suspect fleeing a lawful stop.
Not something that was often the best course of action, but everything was just right one night on the back roads out of Gladewater. He’d been lying in wait when the pickup he was looking for passed. Old acquaintances, the whiskey runner recognized the lawman. The chase was on.
“He got away that night but the next day he knew we both knew all I needed to know about the bullet holes in his tailgate,” Judge Hadaway said.
If he couldn’t put lawbreakers out of business, he liked at least keeping them on edge.
Having faith in a tip on where he’d dig up a bootlegger’s stash, he rigged an ammo box with a battery, a button and a red flashing light on top.
Arriving with his warrant, he said he would be searching the property with an experimental alcohol detection unit.
“I started walking the property in grid lines,” he said, and when he’d worked his way to the point he’d been told to dig, mashed the button on the underside that turned on the flashing light, started digging and hit paydirt.
He said he never really liked fighting, and other than once in Red River county with a guy who’d shot at him, and once in Morris County when he depended on a hickory club to adjust a man’s overconfidence in the power of martial arts, he was never any rougher than was needed.
The story he liked best in that vein was about the night there wasn’t a fight, the night others watched as he stood down a drug suspect threatening him with a club.
“Nobody had cell phones then and so I got the idea from a phone booth that happened to be on the same corner.
“I offered him a dime and said instead of fighting he should go over to the phone, call the sheriff and turn himself in.”
That one, he said, was told for years at the Kilgore Police academy as an example of officer discretion.
