While I’m elbow deep in this 50-year retrospective of the Gainesville 8 trial, I think it worth revisiting the particularly sordid episode of the two G-men in the broom closet.
When I called Larry Turner he was in his car on the interstate driving from North Carolina to his home in St. Augustine. Larry recently retired after a long and distinguished legal career in GNV, including a stint as circuit court judge.
But when he joined the legal team for the Gainesville 8 trial – in 1972 – he was just a Marianna boy whose UF law degree still reeked of wet ink.
He was, Turner freely admits, the greenest member of what was otherwise a seasoned defense team of lawyers who had flown into GMV from Texas and New York. In fact, he was mainly there because judicial procedure required out-of-state lawyers to affiliate with a local legal eagle.
“I was by far the youngest lawyer and green as can be,” he said. “We had this fine group of outstanding lawyers.
Which is how Turner found himself locked up in a courthouse conference room going over jury screening criteria while the other lawyers were “filing all sorts of motions.”
Then someone else in the room motioned him over to what appeared to be a ventilation vent.
“He pointed to the knee level and that’s when I could see the trousers and shoes of someone on the other side.”
We knew that something was not quite right about that, and we suspected the FBI of course.”
So Turner and the others in the room went to the presiding judge, Winston E. Arnow, to report suspicious doings in the broom closet next door.
“He sent a Marshall down” to investigate, “and we followed him, very quietly.”
Inside the closet, huddled among the mops and buckets and cleaning fluids, they discovered two men, “both clearly FBI agents,” Larry recalled, “with coats, ties..flat feet. They turned in surprise. One was plugged into the telephone system with headphones.”
“When they saw us one of them slipped a paper into his coat pocket.”
All concerned proceeded back to the judge’s chamber. The two mop men “claimed they were doing routine inspection of telephone lines.” The FBI later claimed they were just making sure that the prosecution’s lines weren’t being tapped.
“The judge asked me what I wanted him to do about it. I said ‘we want you to seal the room off. Let us get experts in to see what was going on. Seize the briefcase. And I also saw him put a piece of paper in his pocket, we want that too.’”
“The briefcase had foam cutouts for equipment,” Larry recalled. “It was the most sophisticated looking electronics I’d ever seen in my life.
Heady broth indeed for a Marianna boy.
But the judge didn’t immediately agree. He sent the jury home for the rest of the day.
The next morning Judge Arnow, apparently having reconsidered, did order the room sealed and the briefcase confiscated.
“How about the piece of paper,” Turner asked. “I’m not going to do that,” the judge told him.
Thus it was that the purloined piece of paper, like a lost clue to the whereabouts of the Ark Of The Covenant, would vanish into the void of history never to have its secrets revealed.
One might imagine that the government, having been caught so, um, flat-footed, might have suffered some sort of judicial sanction for the two feds stashed in the broom closet to spy on the defense team.
But that was not to be.
The judge “was a “government man,” Turner said. “He would not believe that his government would do the things we said they were doing.”
So no harm, no foul as it were.
Except that many years later, Turner happened to run into Arnow at an event where “he apologized to me…I had no idea,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it.”
Listen, they didn’t call the guy pulling all the strings behind the curtain Tricky Dick for nothing.
And clearly, that rotten apple didn’t fall far from the Gainesville 8 prosecutorial tree.
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