Joseph Paul Franklin, the Hunter

Unvarnished · 02-08-2010, 01:20 pm

http://blogs.kansascity.com/.a/6a00d...85de970c-400wi

"Killing Jews should be legal." JPF

By The Associated Press
January 27, 2010, 8:01PM

Joseph Paul Franklin faces execution in Missouri for a series of racially-motivated murders in the late 1970s.

Missouri's attorney general on Tuesday asked for execution dates for a white supremacist who killed people in several states and for a stalled motorist who killed the man who helped him.

Attorney General Chris Koster asked the state Supreme Court to set execution dates for Joseph Franklin and Allen Nicklasson after a federal appeals court last month cleared the way for Missouri to resume scheduling executions by rejecting a lawsuit from eight inmates over the training and competence of the state's execution team.

Franklin was a drifter from Mobile, Ala., who said he tried to start a race war by moving throughout the country killing people. He was sentenced to death in Missouri for the sniper shooting in 1977 of Gerald Gordon in the parking lot of a synagogue.

When Franklin confessed in 1994, he already was serving life sentences in a federal prison for killing two black joggers in Salt Lake City, an interracial couple in Madison, Wis., and bombing a synagogue in Chattanooga, Tenn.

He also claimed to be the shooter who paralyzed Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt.

Nicklasson was one of three people involved in the 1994 killing of Excelsior Springs businessman Richard Drummond, who stopped to help when their car broke down on Interstate 70 in Callaway County. Drummond was forced to drive the three west, and then marched into a field in rural Lafayette County and shot twice in the back of the head by Nicklasson.

Nicklasson and accomplice Dennis Skillicorn who was executed last year for Drummond's murder then drove to Arizona and killed a couple after their car broke down in the desert.

Attorney Jennifer Herndon, who is representing both men in separate cases, said further appeals are likely.

neintoten · 02-08-2010, 03:04 pm

Here's Joe:

Vektor7 · 02-08-2010, 03:14 pm

Pornographer Larry Flynt Before

And After

Unvarnished · 02-08-2010, 07:33 pm

Vernon Jordan: Master Fixer (AP)

FIRST FRIEND
Jordan Is Comfortable With Power.
And With Himself.

By Marc Fisher
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 27, 1998

He is a presidential adviser without title or salary.

He is a lawyer who rarely steps into a courtroom, who seldom writes a brief or motion.

He is a lobbyist who does not lobby, at least not in the official sense of the term.

He is a civil rights leader who some say has forsaken his early ideals in a successful quest for a place at the seat of national power.

He is a black man who has achieved an unprecedented, unparalleled stature as a Washington power broker, reaching the pinnacle of one of the most obstinately white workplaces in the nation, the K Street megafirm.

He is an apparently devoted husband whose reputation as a ladies' man crosses generational, racial and social boundaries.

Clinton and Jordan/ap
Vernon Jordan with Clinton on the golf course at Martha's Vineyard in August. (AP)

Vernon Eulion Jordan Jr., grandson of a sharecropper, is a multimillionaire who lives in a Washington mansion and hobnobs with Cabinet members, CEOs of the world's largest corporations, and TV anchors.

Once, he risked shouts of wrath and even bodily harm to help make a revolution against racism. Then, following a decade running the National Urban League, he joined one of Washington's most powerful law firms. Now, he sits on the boards of 11 major companies and spurns an opportunity to become the first black attorney general of the United States because he says he'd rather not open his accounts to public view and because being the first black is "no reason for me to take a job."

But Jordan, 62, needs no title to wield the same kind of influence in the public sector that he has in corporate America. Jordan is, by all accounts, not only a master fixer, but President Clinton's closest confidant, a man with whom the leader of the Free World spends time on the links, on vacation on Martha's Vineyard, in workaday conversation, at Christmas Eve dinners with just the two men and their wives, and most of all, at moments of crisis.

While Clinton is, as president, the visible leader in the relationship, the two men's friendship is as close to equal as can be in a bond involving the chief executive, friends of both men say. After all, it was Jordan who first introduced then-Gov. Clinton to world leaders at their annual Bilderberg gathering in Germany in 1991. Plenty of governors try to make that scene; only Clinton got taken seriously at that meeting, because Vernon Jordan said he was okay.

Now, the two friends face the gravest crisis they have met together. Yet just when Clinton would seem to need Jordan most, they are in touch, aides say, only by phone, and it is not even clear whether that much contact has happened. Appearing together in public would only aggravate the popular suspicion that Clinton and Jordan have done something untoward to hide the president's alleged relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

And so both men must appear to be conducting business as usual. The president, largely staying out of public view until tonight's State of the Union address, has made only brief, if forceful, statements about the storm raging around him. And but for a clipped statement to the press last week in which he denied any wrongdoing, Jordan has been seen only as a smiling, carefree pedestrian, entering or leaving work as if nothing had happened.

That is Jordan's strength. His cool, his command of himself and his surroundings even under the most relentless pressure, is one of the primary sources of his authority.

Even in a fateful hour, Jordan need not speak out. He has people who will do that for him – or who will remain silent, whatever he wishes. More than 20 of Jordan's closest friends and associates declined to speak for this story.

"Vernon would not want me to add to the noise on this," says one of the city's most prominent lawyers. Even

Dick Morris – once a presidential confidant, now a radio commentator willing to discuss virtually anything – offers only apologies this time.

What Jordan possesses most of all, as he has often said, is his connections. His job, more than anything else, is to know people, and to know just what it takes to motivate them, whether to do a favor, complete a task or simply be there for a client or friend.

"Vernon attracts clients and he handles their business with integrity and effectiveness," says

Robert Strauss, the longtime Washington power broker who brought Jordan to Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld in 1982. "He offers judgment and integrity and confidence in himself. He has a manner about him that is warm and attentive."

"Vernon might ask a friend to see someone, and if that person says no, so be it," says Carolyn Peachey, a Washington event planner who frequently socializes with Vernon and Ann Jordan. "There's no pressure, just a warm friendliness."

When Jordan explained his attempt to find a job for Lewinsky at two New York corporations by saying that "I believe to whom much is given, much is required," the remark was ridiculed as a smoke screen for a coverup.

Whatever the facts in the Lewinsky mess, the remark is a perfect statement of what it is Jordan does.

"I have seen Vernon – too many times to count – help not just young people, but any people," Strauss says. "There are individuals in this country leading corporations and financial institutions, and laboring in the vineyards because Vernon has been there to help and to make a few phone calls for them. That's why people respect him."

Executives at companies Jordan serves as a director say he routinely calls looking for work for recent graduates of Howard University, where Jordan attended law school, or for young interns he's come across at the firm, in the government or elsewhere around town.

"It would not surprise me at all that a young intern would be referred to Vernon for some help in a very innocent way, and that that may have resulted in him making some calls for that person," Peachey says. "I've heard about that hundreds of times."

Boardrooms and Back Rooms

Jordan's playing field is extraordinarily broad – from the NFL, which once considered him for commissioner; to IBM, which turned to him for advice on picking a new CEO; to the president, who used Jordan to probe whether Colin Powell would accept an appointment as secretary of state. Jordan ran Clinton's 1992 transition team, just as he had handled then-D.C. Mayor Sharon Pratt Kelly's entrance into office two years earlier (even if Jordan hadn't voted in several District elections).

Jordan plays a role nearly every president has found necessary in one form or another. Some presidents turned to party sages for a blueprint to the capital; others just want a pal who will keep confidences and keep them sane. For decades, Clark Clifford and Robert Strauss served Democratic presidents, just as Eisenhower adviser Bryce Harlow and Nixon playmate Bebe Rebozo have helped Republicans.

"Presidents need to have somebody they can relax with," says former White House counsel

Lloyd Cutler. "He is a good loyal friend."

Presidents also need friends with whom they can escape from the formalities of office and just be themselves. Jordan, friends say, fulfills that role.

Like the president, [COLOR="Red"]Jordan is given to eyebrow-raising remarks on the looks of pretty women. At a 1995 state dinner, Clinton joked to Jordan that he ought to keep his hands off the comely blonde seated next to the president. "I saw her first, Vernon," the president said[/COLOR], according to an account in Washington Monthly.

"Nothing wrong with a little locker room talk," Jordan once told a reporter.

One woman in a mid-level federal position describes Jordan as the man who made her career. He picked her, enticed her into standing for the position, and paved her path through confirmation, the woman has told friends. It all happened as smoothly as cognac slipping into a glass, she says – but for one thing.

"When you're a woman, an attractive woman, and Vernon Jordan does something for you, there is an expectation that there will be some extracurricular activities," the woman says. She adds that she did not sleep with him, and those extracurricular activites could be as simple as attending a party with him.

"He's flirtatious; that's just his style," says a Washington woman who has known him for years. "I don't remember anybody hostilely saying, 'Vernon hit on me.' I just can't think of a time people were angry about it. People roll their eyes and say, 'Oh, that's Vernon.'‚"

Jordan's eye for women is a regular topic of conversation among reporters, lawyers and others who have been on the receiving end of his comments. Over the years, Jordan has declined to address the subject, saying only that "I like people."

His second wife, Ann – first wife Shirley died in 1985 after a battle with multiple sclerosis – told The Post in 1992 that "I'm sure women find him attractive. I do." (Ann Jordan, an active partner in the couple's busy social and political life, was co-chairman of the 1996 Clinton inauguration.)

In 1980, Vernon Jordan was shot in the back by a white supremacist who said he was out to kill "race-mixers." The Jordan shooting occurred at 2 a.m. as he was returning to his motel with a white woman. The shooter was acquitted at trial but later admitted the act...

Staff writer Ann Gerhart contributed to this report.

© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
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It has been reported that what might have saved Jordan from being killed by Mr. Franklin was that the bullet that hit him was deflected somewhat by a chain link fence.

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