A son of the late Mobile City Commissioner Lambert C. Mims came forward in late July 2009 with a lengthy letter challenging a widely read account of the city’s era of political indictments, arguing that the wave of prosecutions between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s had been shaped as much by a struggle over municipal contracts as by any wrongdoing at City Hall.
The letter was written by Dale Mims, a Mobile Realtor, in response to an article by John Robb published in the Sunday edition of the city’s daily newspaper. Mims wrote that he did not dispute that corruption had existed. He disputed, he said, its nature and its source.
A personal denial
Mims took direct issue with what he described as an implication that his father had received money stolen from the Municipal Auditorium in connection with the case of former City Commissioner Gary A. Greenough. Mims wrote that he had picked up the envelope in question himself, from an assistant auditorium manager on the auditorium steps, and that it contained a campaign contribution his father knew nothing about until afterward.
It was routine, he wrote, for supporters to telephone campaign headquarters offering money and for him to collect the contributions around town and deliver them to headquarters to be recorded. He said he was carrying four or five other envelopes at the time. Any suggestion that auditorium money was disbursed to his father, he wrote, was “patently false.” Mims stressed that he had no direct knowledge of the Greenough case itself and had neither heard the evidence nor attended the trial.
The backdrop, as Mims described it
Much of the letter was devoted to setting the period in context. Mobile in those years was a city under strain, Mims argued: Brookley Field had closed, taking a large share of the local economy with it; the civil rights movement had brought thousands of Black voters into the electorate; the University of South Alabama was in its infancy; and downtown was emptying as commerce moved west.
The 1973 election of Gary Greenough to the City Commission, Mims wrote, marked the first time a majority of the commission was not originally from Mobile — a moment he called a signal one in the city’s history, pitting older monied interests against a middle class that had arrived during and after World War II and expected a more responsive local government.
What was truly at stake, in his telling, was control of the money. Before his father’s election in 1965, Mims wrote, city business had been concentrated in a very small number of hands:
- Virtually all city revenues were deposited in a single bank.
- Virtually all city insurance business went to one company.
- Virtually all legal work for the city and its boards was performed by two law firms.
- Virtually all city engineering work, including work for the water and sewer board, went to a single firm.
- All city revenue bonds passed through one attorney, generating what Mims described as potentially millions of dollars in fees.
By the early 1970s, he wrote, that had changed: deposits were spread among numerous banks, engineering fees went to many firms, bond work was no longer the province of one lawyer, and legal and insurance business was diversified. Those changes were good for the city’s finances, Mims argued, but they came at the expense of people who had been formidable politically and who were not happy about it — precisely as Mobile was entering its greatest period of expansion, with streets, bridges, schools, firehouses, libraries, drainage projects and retail centers all coming up for design and construction.
An argument about the prosecutors
From there Mims advanced his most pointed contention: that federal prosecutions in the South during that period, including in Mobile, were pursued with an eye to political effect. He argued that the appointment of Jeff Sessions — by 2009 a U.S. senator from Alabama — as U.S. attorney continued that pattern, and that Sessions received support from some of those who had lost city business. Mims wrote that trial transcripts in at least one case, his father’s, showed Sessions had discussed a possible indictment with a bond attorney who was not an officer of the court, which he called inappropriate.
Mims noted the irony that many defendants of the era were charged under the Hobbs Act, which bars public officials from using their office for personal gain, while, in his view, prosecutors advanced their own careers on the strength of those cases. He wrote that he was not asserting the innocence of everyone who was prosecuted, but that many of the cases were, at a minimum, suspicious in timing and nature.
The claims in the letter are Mims’s own, and he acknowledged as much, writing that he had deliberately named no one other than Sessions out of fairness to the families of the dead. His stated purpose was to give readers enough of the political atmosphere of the period to weigh the facts and decide for themselves “how much and from where the corruption actually occurred.”
The dispute is a reminder that Mobile’s civic memory of those decades remains contested. The indictments were real and public; the question of what drove them has never been settled to everyone’s satisfaction, least of all to that of the families who lived through them.