Okay, so it wasn’t just frivolous nonsense. Those of us
(present company included) who hastened to argue that ex-mayor
Willie Herenton had gone off the edge and was more to be pitied
than scorned were (somewhat) guilty of a rush to judgment.
It would appear that there actually was some reasoned thinking
involved when the former mayor sauntered down to the Election
Commission last Thursday morning and pulled a petition to run as his
own replacement.
Reasoned, but not rational. Serious, but not sensible.
So Herenton is concerned — as he insisted in a lengthy, live
impromptu interview with WMC-TV news anchor Joe Birch —
about the direction mayor pro tem Myron Lowery and Lowery’s CAO
Jack Sammons wish to take city government on such specific
issues as Beale Street litigation and Fairgrounds development.
So, as a sideshow to the main event, as we learn from Channel 5
reporter Kontji Anthony, the former mayor may be engaged in a
power struggle of sorts with his onetime bud, Richard Fields,
the lawyer whom Herenton (not without reason) dubbed a “snake” and
accused of attempted blackmail back in 2007.
So the man who ran Memphis for the last 18 years isn’t just running
an ego trip.
Except he is.
Inasmuch as Herenton voluntarily surrendered the reins of government
and couldn’t get back in until after what is now a mandated special
election on October 15th, why doesn’t he choose, instead, to express
his dissatisfaction by publicly venting the details of what he insists
are bad deals? Why doesn’t he get behind one of the declared candidates
for mayor — his former campaign chairman A C Wharton, say,
or his former campaign manager and legal factotum Charles
Carpenter?
bianca phillips
Willie Herenton
The fact that Herenton has fresh motive to intervene in the affairs
of a city government he supposedly left behind does not mean that he
isn’t being narcissistic and
irrational and heedless of the trouble
he’s putting the city to. Is he really as oblivious to the
million-dollar special-election bill he’s causing the city to run up as
he indicated in his interview with a stupefied Birch?
Not to mention the horrific P.R. he’s inflicting on the city.
And Fields …
The term “gone off the deep end” hangs on this sad-sack Deacon Blue
as if made for him. Yes, as Anthony has noted, Fields has an iron or
two in the fire — including his representation of a collection
agency that wants a share of the business accruing to the city’s
Emergency Medical Services and has sued to get it.
And yes, as we all know, Fields has something to avenge. He owns the
deep hurt belonging to any wax-wings case who flies too close to the
sun and plummets to earth, as Fields, who had begun to fancy himself a
kingmaker par excellence, did in 2007.
Did he really think that the canny Herenton would sit still for
Fields to make a fool of him with the sometime strip-club employee
Gwendolyn Smith, whom the then mayor co-opted for his own
purposes and turned into exhibit number one against the ambitious
ex-courtier?
When Herenton told his version of the snake story two years ago, he
seemed to relish that part of the tale which had Fields trying to show
him out the door of City Hall, telling him that he, “Willie,” had to
leave to protect his legacy.
Willie. The sardonic grin affected by Herenton, whom everyone calls
either “Mayor” or “Doc,” was not one of amusement. Though a Ph.D.,
Herenton may not be exactly at home with the term “hubris,” but he had
just related to the media a first-class example of it.
And just who did Poor Richard have in mind to be the replacement
mayor back in 2007?
“Dear Ex-Mayor Herenton: As a former friend and unjustly accused
citizen, I was heartened by your resignation but saddened by the mess
you have left behind. The City of Memphis is bankrupt. The pension plan
is 50 percent of its value to cover all of the people who will be
eligible soon. You have 500 people employed who are not doing anything
and should be fired … .”
This is the beginning of a relatively brief two-page letter, much
rumored of late but first duly noted by the Flyer online last
week. Dated July 30th, it was dispatched to the freshly resigned
Herenton from Fields, the lawyer who had been friend and confidant to
Herenton as candidate and then mayor for years until their highly
public falling-out in 2007.
Though the tone of the first paragraph of that missive (an
unexpurgated version of which is now available via a diligent search of
the blogosphere) is caustic enough, it gets worse from there, going
downhill both in civility and, alas, in quotability (short of a full
and careful vetting by a libel attorney).
jackson baker
Richard Fields
In the body of the letter, Fields makes a number of accusations
against the former mayor, his family members, and his closest aides,
alleging a full catalogue of sexual irregularities and, as described,
patently criminal activities. Indeed, Fields employs the word
“criminality”as a catch-all phrase for his allegations. For all that,
the letter is notable more for its down-low gossip than for anything
that might hold up in court.
Among the few passages that are quotable without legal risk is this
statement: “Your friends that you hired will desert you because there
is nothing you can do for them. Without being mayor, you have no
power.”
Another relatively tame broadside, coupled with a threat: “The
infamous annual Christmas party was a bold-faced lie. No one who paid
$1,000 per person knew you were receiving funds personally. I am filing
a class action lawsuit for you to refund personally all monies you
received from the party donations.”
And there is this spiteful and, to Fields’ remaining friends who
know of the letter, troubling conclusion: “I am so glad you resigned.
We will see each other in court many times over, and I will look down
upon your sufferings in the hereafter. Yes, I do pray, and God has
answered my prayers.”
As recently as the middle years of the current decade, Fields
appeared to be riding high. The California native, who arrived in
Memphis in the 1960s as an anti-poverty activist and ultimately became
a well-known civil rights attorney, had launched a new career as a
political arbiter of sorts, disseminating widely read open letters at
election time which praised selected candidates and damned selected
others — in the case of the latter, freely citing details of
known or alleged personal and professional failings.
The would-be kingmaker, who had been an early supporter of mayoral
candidate Herenton in 1991, had evolved into a kingbreaker by 2007, or
so alleged the then mayor, in whose version of the tale the
aforementioned Smith had been delegated by Fields and his alleged
co-conspirators to entangle Herenton in a sexual liaison to force him
out of office.
No legal action was taken against Fields, though he was later
censured by the state Supreme Court for alleged dereliction toward a
client in another matter. (He later had the censure reversed.)
But Fields saw his reputation take a nosedive that has continued
until the present. He had already been expelled once from the Shelby
County Democratic executive committee for his collaboration with state
Republican Party lawyers in making the case against the legality of
Democratic state senator Ophelia Ford‘s suspect first
election.
In the wake of Herenton’s accusations, Fields, who had managed to
get himself reelected to the committee, was forced to resign once again
at the insistence of then party chairman Keith Norman.
Fields had led a relatively low-profile existence the last two
years, but he surfaced unexpectedly at a recent meeting of the Shelby
County Commission, where he interrupted a routine commission vote to
adjourn, asking to be allowed to speak.
Permitted to do so, he began a rambling discourse in a quavering
voice. He began with an attack on the Alabama law firm Beasley Allen,
which had been hired by the commission to counter firms thought to be
abusing their foreclosure options against local property owners.
Fields then began to justify himself as the victim of “false”
accusations of being “off the wall” and concluded his remarks to the
commission with a vow to “start again,” as he had with his earlier
election interventions, to “scour the earth for the kinds of things
that we don’t need in our politics.”
Ironically, it may be that both Fields and the object of his curses
for the hereafter now belong in that category.
