A real Man of God Malice in Wonderland a real man of god

RESERVING

JUDGMENT

FRANKFORT

1993


Lives hang in the balance on lonely stretches of the Mountain Parkway near Slade and in the bottleneck known as U.S. 23 at Prestonsburg and along Interstate 64 near Winchester.

Except for fully loaded coal trucks, the roads aren't especially treacherous -- unless you're guilty of something. This is where U.S. District Judge Joseph Martin Hood sometimes ponders the fate of those who have broken the law.

Hood, who travels about 17,000 miles each year as he shuttles among courtrooms in the Eastern District of Kentucky, has plenty of time to consider sentences while he's behind the wheel of his car. "When you drive a lot, you have a lot of time to think," he says.

Hood, a federal district judge since April 30, 1990, recently has presided over a spate of high-profile cases, including:

•The April trial and July sentencing of former Kentucky Speaker of the House Don Blandford, convicted of bribery, misusing campaign money and lying to FBI agents.

•Gov. Wallace Wilkinson. He was convicted of taking a $20,000 bribe to fix a horse-racing arbitration decision and sentenced in May to three years in prison.

•The July trial of Fayette County Attorney Norrie Wake, convicted of mail fraud, theft of government money and conspiracy. Wake will be sentenced next month.

•The ongoing extortion and tax-fraud trial of Dr. Bill Collins, husband of former Gov. Martha Layne Collins.

•The June guilty plea and sentencing last week of former state Sen. Art Schmidt. He was put on two years' unsupervised probation and fined $2,500 for concealing from the FBI that he took $200 in cash from then-Sen. John Hall while attending a 1990 Jockeys' Guild convention in Las Vegas.

Like any judge, however, most of Hood's work is done away from the public eye -- out of the robe and free of the spotlight. Hood, 50, writes and reads pertinent opinions and decisions in his chambers, at the kitchen table, on the back porch, by the swimming pool.

And he presides over many cases that don't make statewide headlines but that he considers at least as important as those stemming from Operation BOPTROT -- the wide-ranging federal investigation of corruption in state government.

"I don't think anything is particularly earth-shattering," Hood says. "To me, a case is a case."

For better or for worse, however, Hood's involvement this year in so many high-profile cases has made him something of a household name in Kentucky -- especially after the Blandford trial. The uncommon sentence Hood gave the former speaker of the house -- one provided for by federal sentencing guidelines -- drew rave reviews from a public outraged by the evidence of corruption and betrayal brought out at the trial.

"Hooray, Judge Hood! Hooray, Judge Hood! Yay! Hooray, Judge Hood!" began one letter to the editor of the Lexington Herald-Leader.

"We applaud U.S. District Judge Joseph Hood for the sentence given to former House Speaker Don Blandford," another said.

Hood, who at 5-foot-7 sometimes looks lost in the big, high-backed chairs in which he must sit in many courtrooms, has not heard that kind of cheering since his teammates at Holy Family High School in Ashland carried him off the basketball court for scoring 4 points in a game.

Hood built an imposing reputation by sentencing Blandford to 64 months in prison -- and ordering him to pay for it out of his own pocket. Blandford is appealing.

Not everyone is convinced that making Blandford pay for his punishment is a good idea. Some attorneys have said Hood might have set an ill-advised precedent.

But federal guidelines allow a judge to order those who can afford it to pay for their own prison stay. It is not cheap. Blandford's stay at the minimum-security federal prison camp in Manchester would cost him $56.84 a day. The Ramada Inn just down the highway in London costs $10 less -- and has HBO.

No wonder Art Schmidt appeared stiff and nervous last week as he stood before Hood awaiting sentencing.

Had Schmidt and Hood met under different conditions, they might have gotten along famously. Both are renowned for their warmth and sense of humor, Hood having made slack-jawed jurors burst out laughing during Bill Collins' trial hours before.

"I was just trying to wake everybody up," Hood said.

But Schmidt, fresh off a 25-year career in the Senate during which he passed especially slow days by shooting rubber bands at red-hot light fixtures to "stink up the place," would rather have been somewhere else than in front of Hood in a federal courtroom.

"You got a raw deal," one of Schmidt's lawyer friends had told him when he discovered the former legislator would be sentenced in Hood's court: "Hood's tough."

But Hood took no pleasure in seeing Schmidt before him. "I'd just as soon not have grandfathers before me under circumstances like that," Hood said afterward.

"Deciding the appropriate punishment in a case is an awesome responsibility."

As with Blandford, Hood was bound by federal sentencing guidelines in Schmidt's case. But within those parameters, the sentences showed that the judge is both tough and compassionate.

Although Hood seemed to bristle at published reports of Blandford's calling the charges against him "crap," he spoke to Schmidt in an almost comforting voice, citing the legislator's long record of public service and calling his brush with the law a "blip."

Hood, known for his ability to break the tension in a courtroom or to add a dash of dry humor, freed Schmidt from the jitters in a completely different -- and unintended -- way. He brought tears to Schmidt's eyes by talking about the retired legislator's record of public service.

Schmidt pulled out a rumpled handkerchief and wiped his eyes as Hood lauded his dedication to his family. Schmidt cares for his elderly mother and his wife, who is ill.

Hood said he thought putting Schmidt in prison would be a "tragic mistake."

"I do feel a need, however, for punishment," Hood said. "Hopefully so I don't have to see anybody else in your situation here, Mr. Schmidt."

Hood, who jokingly admonishes attorneys at the outset of trials to avoid making reference to "bald allegations" or "short questions," might not take himself seriously, but he takes his job very seriously.

His sense of justice is keen. When pressed into talking about his tour of duty in Vietnam -- a subject that Hood, a decorated member of the Green Berets, does not enter into lightly -- his almost perpetual smile fades and his face grows dark.

He saw things that just weren't right -- like the platoon leader who was killed before he could testify at the court martial of a deserter. As a result the deserter went free.

"A good man dies," Hood says, "and a piece of..." His voice trails off as he searches for the next word. When he says it, it is barely audible: "flotsam..."

Schmidt, after being sentenced, said he thought Hood had treated him fairly.

"I was really impressed with what he said. I could not believe he knew as much about me as he did. He does his homework."

Schmidt was relieved. "He had the power of life and death over me," he said of the judge.

Justice and mercy must go hand in hand, Hood said. "You'd have a hard time doing this job if you didn't have a sense of what's right, if you didn't have any compassion."

Schmidt might not have been so nervous had he known about a barely publicized case Hood handled that ended recently after four years in the courts.

On June 22, Ricky Holcomb of Eminence stood before Hood.

Holcomb was arrested in February 1990 and charged with selling rifles illegally while working part time at a sporting goods store.

While he waited for federal prosecutors to bring their case against him, Holcomb, an ex-convict who had served time for assault, joined Eminence Baptist Church. Members elected him a deacon, asked him to lead a youth group and wrote letters on his behalf.

He began coaching Little League football and started working toward his master's degree in social work at the University of Louisville.

Still, Holcomb feared the worst as he walked into Hood's courtroom with the Rev. Michael Duncan and five fellow deacons from the church. Prosecutors were pushing for a prison sentence of 10 to 20 years. "My lawyer kept telling me there wasn't any way I wouldn't go to jail," Holcomb said.

But Hood put Holcomb on probation for two years and sentenced him to home incarceration for two months.

"You have effectively rehabilitated yourself," Hood told Holcomb. "I mean, looking at this pre-sentence report, it's one of the most unusual situations that I believe I have ever seen."

To Hood -- devoted family man, devout Catholic, product of a stable home in a shaded middle-class neighborhood in Smalltown, America -- the show of support and faith from Holcomb's friends was important. And it rang true.

Justice is not blind. Justice sees a bit of the judge in the defendant.

Hood has done time himself: He was forced to stay away from his beloved family for long periods the first three years he was a federal judge. Carol, his wife of 23 years, and their children, Marty, 20, and Betsy, 16, lived in Ashland while Hood traveled around the eastern half of the state presiding over trials and other court-related matters.

At night Hood would call his wife. "It was kind of mushy, actually," said his sister Katie Starkey, whose home in Lexington often served as Hood's home.

"He was terribly lonely."

This summer Hood and his family moved into a house in Lexington with a big yard in which Hood can putter around.

The judge is a free man.
JACK

NEVITT’S

RIDE
LEXINGTON

1993

Amoody summer dusk, thick with billowy clouds, hangs like smoke over the Belle Reve barn at The Red Mile. Jack Nevitt of New Hope is trapped in a fire nobody else can see.

Nevitt, 52, a saddlebred trainer with soft eyes set in a hard face, is a man haunted as he sets about his business at the Lexington Junior League Horse Show. In a few hours he will ride a world-champion horse called The Groomsman -- the same horse he saved from a burning barn just eight days before.

"I've been nervous all evening," Nevitt says. His hands shake whenever they're unoccupied, so he stands outside the barn playing idly with a wing nut on The Groomsman's tail brace.

The fire, fast and wicked, killed five horses and destroyed a barn June 6 at actor William Shatner's Belle Reve Farm in Woodford County.

Tonight, the flames are flickering again in Nevitt's mind, illuminating unwanted memories in their ghastly glow.

"I was really sorry to hear," Bill Grace tells Nevitt. "If I got anything you can use, you're welcome to it, Jack."

Nevitt nods absently, as he did moments before when Jennifer Barnett, a groom for The Groomsman, walked out of the barn holding aloft a tin can of Kiwi shoe polish for the trainer to see. He had approved: Yeah. Black. Good.

Getting a saddlebred horse ready to show takes time. Barnett has spent hours sanding old polish off The Groomsman's hoofs, bathing him, gently pulling the tangles out of his long, black tail by hand.

It's a special night. "We almost didn't even have him," Nevitt says of the horse, owned by Heather Greenbaum of Scottsdale, Ariz.

The trainer enters the barn, ties a black shoelace around the tail brace as he holds it between his knees. "He's got so much doggone hair it drags on the ground and gets heavy," Nevitt says.

His hands are steady, steady . . .

Nevitt heard the grooms first, heard them yell fire. Businessmen in downtown Lexington were eating lunch as Nevitt ran to the front of the barn, grabbed a hose and helped put out the flames.

The trainer was relieved when the fire was extinguished, horrified when the flames erupted again. He watched helplessly as the fire flashed up the wall and across the top of the barn.

"I knew we were in bad trouble," Nevitt says.

Screaming, he ran to the other end of the barn. The Groomsman was in his stall. Nevitt led the big, bay horse out of the heat of the barn, into the heat of July, then returned for another. In no time, the latches on many of the stalls were too hot to open.

Flames as high as a man's knees raced down the main aisle of the barn.

In the ring, show horses are judged on manners, on performance, on presence and conformation and appearance. Comes a day when none of that matters.

"Tell you what, you take so much for granted with equipment and everything," Nevitt says, bent over the tail brace. "Then you look around and you don't have scissors."

He cannot bring himself to talk any more about the fire, not before he rides. "It's only been a week and a day," he says.

In the stall, Barnett wipes shoe polish on The Groomsman's hoofs. Nevitt squats and wraps blue bandages around the horse's legs. The Groomsman stands still as a statue. Nevitt's watch, its hands crawling on his skin, flashes in the barn lights as he wraps, wraps, wraps.

After a while Nevitt ventures out into the drizzle, walks to his truck and takes out a straw hat and a riding coat wrapped in plastic. A far-off train howls.

Nevitt wakes up sometimes, sits bolt upright in bed, thinks: Just tell me it's a bad dream. Horses are his life. "This is the only thing I've ever done."

Tonight, he climbs aboard The Groomsman, bounces out to the ring. The crowd applauds. The lights are bright. Sweat glistens on the necks of both horse and trainer. The horse is tight. "He's been through some trauma," Nevitt says. But for the first time all night, Nevitt is not thinking of the fire.

The flames were extinguished the moment he boosted himself into the saddle.

"That's one reason you ride," he says. "You block things out and don't have to see psychiatrists so often."

Nevitt and The Groomsman win the blue ribbon for three-gaited saddle horses, return to the barn.

Nevitt's graying hair hangs in strings on his face as he lifts a Coors Light to his lips. The beer is sweating, too. Nevitt smiles.

Tonight, The Groomsman has carried him out of his nightmare, has high-stepped over his ghosts, has returned a favor: Tonight, the horse has rescued the trainer from the fire.

ROLLING

ON

THE

RIVER

HICKMAN

1993

As the mighty Mississippi strained against levees protecting low-lying pockets of farmland in Fulton County, Brother Dick Haley said, "Let us pray."

"I would remind you of the flood victims, but I know we've got some other things we need to be praying about, too," Haley, pastor of the First Methodist Church of Hickman, told his congregation yesterday morning.

As choir member Mike Majors knelt in silent prayer for relief from the flood, all of his 2,500-acre farm lay underwater. In this part of Kentucky, farmers and others learn faith and humility in church and at one other altar: the rich bottom lands of the Mississippi River.

By depositing silt that enriches the soil for farming, the river here has given much life, but it also has taken away: This summer, 40,000 to 50,000 acres of farmland in the four Kentucky counties along its banks are underwater, the year's crops lost.

Although the flooding upriver in Missouri has devastated entire towns and washed people out of their homes, in Kentucky it has been a problem almost exclusively for farmers.

But in this flat, sun-baked, rural part of the state, that is enough. About 100 families who grow soybeans and corn in the fertile pockets of bottom land have been affected. And the worst may be yet to come.

The river is expected to crest Friday at 44 feet at Cairo, Ill., and it is rising fast on Wayne Earl Bean's farm in Ballard County, not far from the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers.

In places on Bean's farm, the water stands taller than a grown man.

The strain on makeshift dirt levees, mounded up quickly by farmers trying to save at least part of their crops, has become almost too great. From Thursday to Saturday, the floodwater rose a third of a foot on Bean's farm when a levee beside the river gave way.

It is the biggest summer flood in far Western Kentucky since 1958, farmers say. But the timing of the flood rather than its magnitude is what makes it especially bad.

Flooding is common in the counties along the Mississippi River. In 1973, floodwaters all but washed away Madrid Bend, 10,000 acres of farmland west of Hickman that looks on the map like Kentucky's decimal point.

The Bend, part of Fulton County, is home to all of 18 registered Kentucky voters -- none of whom expects to be displaced by this year's flood. Levees so far have held out the Mississippi, which loops around the Bend.

Although riverboat gambling has been an issue in this part of the world, farming never has come into question. Everybody admits that planting soybeans next to the Mississippi River is a form of legalized gambling, however.

"It's a risk," Rick Majors said. "You're just rolling the dice.

"There's nothing you can do about it. The whole river bottom is like a high-water storage facility, and we don't mind it. It brings in acres and acres of topsoil every year."

Unlike Missouri, which lies low all along the river, Kentucky is vulnerable to flooding only in pockets, said George Frazier, a mechanical engineer from Fulton County.

People moved out of the bottoms long ago to save their homes from the river. Most towns and communities along the Mississippi are perched on bluffs and high ground, and are in no danger of flooding, Frazier said.

The most vulnerable to flooding is Hickman, seat of low-lying Fulton County, which has been hit hardest by the flood. But there is no fear of the river here.

Yesterday as Haley finished his sermon at the First United Methodist Church, three bare-chested young men swam in the river below town, and a fisherman tended to his catch.

The gates were not even in the floodwall around town.

Even the Bend was calm. Kim Whitson smiled and played with her infant in her mobile home.

But the baby's grandfather, Winston Whitson, worried about his crops. Workers sweating beneath a merciless sun used equipment supplied by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to pump slimy, green river water back over a levee into the Mississippi.

The water had leaked through the levee and crept to the edge of Whitson's farmland.

Farmers can only work and wait and wonder. Whitson, who farms 650 acres in Madrid Bend, has been able to protect almost all his land -- so far. But he does not know whether the levees he and his son have built will do any good should the river rise to 32 1/2 feet around the Bend, as expected.

If the river makes it over the levees, Whitson, who grows soybeans, expects to lose all but 150 acres of crops.

"It'd probably be a disaster," Whitson said. "I'd probably have to stop farming. I got a lot tied up in that crop."

Farmers whose fields are flooded stand to lose not only the money they would have received from selling their crops. They also will lose what they had invested in seeds, herbicide, fuel and labor for the year, Majors said.

Bean, who has held floodwaters off 450 of his 1,100 acres with hastily built dirt levees, said he stood to lose $250,000, including all his crops, if the river crests as predicted.

Most farmers have no crop insurance, said U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, who visited the flood-stricken area Saturday. Only slightly more than 17 percent of farmers buy the insurance, McConnell, R-Ky., said.

Farmers rightfully expect the federal government to bail them out of disasters such as floods, said McConnell, a member of the Senate Agriculture Committee.

"I don't think anyone in this area I know of has crop insurance," Majors said. "It's a pretty high expense."

"Maybe helping crop insurance will be one of the things that will come out of this," said McConnell, whose car sloshed through floodwater up to the manifold as a staff member drove him Saturday along Ky. 123 in Hickman County.

Many farmers who agreed before the growing season to sell their crops to a certain grain company will be obligated contractually to buy back their own crops. Because market prices have risen since the start of the growing season, the farmers owe buyers the difference, Majors said.

Many of the crops grown in the bottoms eventually are sold to the federal government for export, Mike Majors said. The flood could have far-ranging economic effects, some of which remain to be seen.


There is little left to be done except wait. Many of the farmers who attend the Methodist church in Hickman were absent yesterday morning. Many had decided it was time for a vacation.

"It's good to see a lot of our farmers are on vacation," the Rev. Haley said. "Some of them have nothing else to do anymore but take a vacation. And they all deserve it."

"Now," Rick Majors said of the flooding, "you just hope it goes down pretty quick." Some farmers might still be able to grow green beans or some other crop that requires only a short growing season, he said. But it is unlikely unless the water recedes soon -- and quickly.

"It's getting worse every day and every hour it goes on," said Paul Wilson, a Fulton County farmer whose 750 acres are almost three-fourths underwater. "And nobody knows when it's going to stop.

"I think we'd all like to get back to square zero."

ON

A

RIDE

TO

IMMORTALITY

LEXINGTON

1993


Randy Romero has ridden in more than a half-dozen Derbies, but watching him yesterday morning you would think he never had seen a horse before.

"They even got the horseshoes and everything, huh? You see that?" he said, pointing to the bottom of a hoof.

Romero could hardly contain his admiration for the lifelike fantasy world of artist Gwen Reardon, who sculpted the bronze statues of seven horses and jockeys straining toward an imaginary finish line in Lexington's Thoroughbred Park.

Romero is one of seven successful jockeys who served as models for the figures forever frozen in Reardon's make-believe race. He and three others -- Don Brumfield, Jerry Bailey and Pat Day -- visited the year-old downtown park yesterday to see the statues and meet their maker.

Despite making their living astride racehorses, the jockeys marveled at the detail of the sculptures and passed their hands appreciatively over those things they long ago had lost sight of in the busy rhythm of days at the track: The lustrous feel of a leather riding boot; The rough weave of a blanket under a saddle; The stiff strength of the bridle.

"It's got everything in there," Romero said, peering up through the arms of one of the doubled-over bronze jockeys.

He was looking into his own face.

Reardon, who lives in Lexington, looked on in delight. She had invited the jockeys so she could watch their reaction. Day and Bailey had not visited the park before. "I wanted to meet them, and I wanted to see how they felt about this," she said. "They wanted it, too."

Bailey was taken with the park. "I think it's pretty neat," he said. "She did a great job. Everything looks authentic."

Reardon chose the week before the Derby to invite the jockeys to the park because all but Bill Shoemaker and Brumfield still ride.

"There aren't that many times in the year you have them all in one place," she said. "Derby time will do it."

Reardon had the jockeys all sign posters depicting the park, then gave a copy to each. She spent a lot of time explaining to them how the statues were made -- a complicated process using wax, clay and ceramic to make a mold.

"Un-bee-lieve-able," Romero said.

Reardon also spent some time explaining why the jockeys and their nameless mounts were placed in the order they appear in the park.

Then-Lexington Mayor Scotty Baesler drew the jockeys' names out of a hat to determine their spot in the race. Park visitors see the horses from the vantage point of a spectator in the infield, Reardon said . . .

At the wire, it's Romero on the outside, in a dead heat with Shoemaker! Day is in third, with Bailey and Craig Perret fighting for fourth! Brumfield is sixth, followed by Chris McCarron . . .

"I've got one horse beat, but this is the first time around," Bailey said, smiling. "I haven't even got my stick (whip) coiled yet."

The jockeys represented by Reardon's statues have more than 70 Derby starts and eight wins among them. At least four -- Romero, Day, Bailey and McCarron -- will ride in the Derby this year.

Each jockey who showed up at the park found his likeness by checking the rear waistband of the statues' pants, which customarily bears the rider's last name.

Brumfield, noting his horse lagging near the rear of the pack, said he preferred to think of the race as having just started.

"Did you find yourself?" Reardon asked him when he arrived.

"Yes, ma'am," Brumfield said. Then, nodding toward the horse-and-jockey statues, he added in a deadpan voice: "This is their first time around isn't it?"

As Romero arrived, he smiled when he realized he was in first place. "I hope to be that way the first Saturday in May," he said.

Day asked which horse was his, then spotted it and grinned.

"That's my nose," he said, stepping toward the horse and rider in third place.

The jockeys wandered among the statues, so taken by their detail that they hardly believed Reardon when she told them she had not created the sculptures by pouring bronze over the personal items they had sent her: riding boots, silks, saddles, goggles.

None of the articles could have withstood the intense heat of the molten metal, Reardon said. The statues are bronze -- nothing more, nothing less.

Bailey and Day lingered, running their fingers over boots and bridles, shaking their heads at how everything even felt right.

"You ride the first race, don't you?" Bailey asked Day, breaking the spell with a suggestion that maybe they should leave soon so they could put in another day's work at Keeneland.

Day was up in the first race, on a 7-2 pick called Sowhat'smyname. But he didn't seem in a hurry.

Day has ridden lots of great horses: Easy Goer. Unbridled. Distaff. Lil E. Tee. But the one in the park, the one that never will finish better than third, is the horse carrying him to immortality.

"There aren't an awful lot of people on this planet," Reardon said, "that are cast in bronze."