Neil White (3:30)

70S in the 1970s on the Mississippi coast. I was a teenager when the Dixie Mafia was really operating at its peak. And I think they went on into the 80s before they fell apart in the 90s. But Mike Gillich was a presence, even though we never had any personal interaction with him.

Garrett (3:52)

If you listened to season two of this show, you may remember Mike Gillich. He was a Biloxi strip club owner and the Dixie Mafia's financier. He was also a close friend of Kirksey Nix, the group's de facto leader, and helped orchestrate the hit on Vince and Margaret Sherry in Biloxi in 1987. Neil remembers spotting Gillich at a local donut shop.

Neil White (4:14)

I was president of the student council in junior high school and we used to do monthly donut fundraising and we would buy the donuts from Krispy Kreme and we would go on Saturday mornings at 6am to pick them up. And there was always the same man sitting in the same booth with a bunch of guys talking about what they were going to do and drinking coffee. I didn't realize it at the time, but that was where they met as the Dixie Mafia and the Krispy Kreme on Highway 90 in Biloxi.

Garrett (4:45)

Neil and his high school buddies also spent time at the Golden Nugget, one of Gillich's strip clubs that served as a kind of Dixie Mafia headquarters.

Neil White (4:53)

And Gillich would always sit at the end of the bar. Same guy that you would see during the day at the donut shop. He would be sitting at the end of the bar just watching people come in and back then spending $8 to buy, you know, a six ounce can of beer. And he was always around and that's how he ran his domain. I remembered Gillich because he was clearly in charge, and everybody else was a lieutenant or a soldier that worked for him. But he was the only one that I knew and could recognize.

Garrett (5:26)

But that was the extent of Mill's interaction with criminals. As a teenager, he won the Mississippi state debate championship, advocating for drug trials on convicts. He majored in English at Ole Miss, and rather than go to law school, he decided to pursue a career in magazine publishing.

Neil White (5:43)

I was pretty good at writing, pretty good at design, pretty good at marketing and sales, But I was terrible at handling money. I used to tell people that it was like I'd been sprayed with cash repellent. All this money would come in and so much more would go out.

Garrett (5:59)

And where was all the money going, Neil? Like, repelled from you, but where was it ending up?

Neil White (6:04)

Oh, gosh, I was overpaying staff. I was buying the best paper. My stationery was foil stamped and embossed. We had offices on the top floor of the tallest building in town. We took everybody to lunch two or three times a week to tell them what a great job they were doing. You know, I was a great motivator and cheerleader, but really a terrible manager when it came to delivering any hard news or any boundaries. And so during the course of that, I sort of stumbled upon a technique when I ran out of money to buy a few days. It was called kiting checks, where you wrote a check to yourself from yourself, and it took a day or two to float through the fed back in those days, and you could create a temporary false balance in your checking account. And I did that off and on for years. It's a crime you really can't commit anymore because of electronic clearance. But I was doing that off and on.

Garrett (7:04)

Eventually, the FBI figured out what Neil was doing. It was 1993, and he was in his early 30s with a wife and two young kids. Neil figured he could explain the situation and the problem would go away.

Neil White (7:18)

So I invited the FBI over to the house and put on coffee and showed them all of my paperwork. And I said, you guys understand I had planned to pay this back. And they said, what we understand is you were going to go to jail for a couple of years. I was like, oh, my God, you're going to be kidding me. So it just so happens that a friend of mine was owner of New Orleans magazine, and he called and offered me a job. And I said, well, Bill, I'm being investigated by the FBI. And he said, oh, hell, our governor's been indicted four times. Come on over. So I went over to publish New Orleans magazine.

Garrett (7:51)

Neil had been the publisher of New Orleans magazine for less than a year when he pled guilty to bank fraud charges. The judge sentenced him to 18 months at what he described as an experimental prison in Carville, Louisiana, a small town just south of Baton Rouge and the birthplace of Democratic political strategist James Carville. In fact, the town is named after Carville's grandfather, Louis Arthur Carville. But as far as Neil was concerned, Carville was where he was going to be locked up for a year and a half, and that's about all he knew.

Neil White (8:23)

Now, keep in mind, this was 1993. This was pre Internet, so I had no idea where I was going. I packed a leather bag with tennis shoes and racquetball rackets and books, and my wife dropped me off at the entrance to the prison. And as I was waiting there for a guard to come to collect me, I looked up and I saw a man walking down a hallway. And when he got to the window closest to me, he waved. And he didn't have any fingers. So I was a little bit confused. And I asked the guard out front about it, and he said, you'll find out. A minute later, another guard came to collect me, strip searched me, let me keep two books, handed me a number with my room assignment, and I said, I saw a man with no fingers. What was that? And he said, that's Hansen's disease. And I said, I don't know what that is. And he said, they used to call it leprosy. So that was the first time that I knew anything was awry.

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Peyton (10:25)

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Peyton (11:46)

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Garrett (11:58)

When Neil White was convicted on fraud charges, he was sentenced to the only minimum security prison in America that also housed leprosy patients. Founded in 1894, the facility was once known as the National Leprosarium, so the.

Neil White (12:15)

Leprosy patients For most of the 20th century, anybody in the continental United States who contracted leprosy was sent to this colony in Carville, Louisiana. Sometimes they were brought at gunpoint, sometimes by a bounty hunter. They came in shackles. When they arrived, they were made to change their names. They were given an inmate number. They were not allowed to vote. They were not allowed to marry. If a romance struck up and a woman did become pregnant. The child was taken by the nuns immediately and placed in a foster home. And when they died, oftentimes the bodies weren't collected by the families because of the stigma associated with leprosy. So they were buried in a cemetery in the back of the colony. Sometimes the tombstones had their aliases or inmate numbers only.

Garrett (13:09)

For thousands of years, people believed that leprosy was highly contagious and incurable. This belief was propagated by the Bible, which described the disease as divine punishment and a source of impurity. The film Ben Hur perpetuated the myth, portraying leprosy as an easily transmittable disease. In truth, it spreads only through close prolonged contact over months or years, likely through respiratory droplets, not through touch. 95% of people are naturally immune to it and it's easily treated with antibiotics. But it wasn't until the 1950s that people figured this out. Only then did things start to change.

Neil White (13:49)

Now what happened was in the 1950s there were close to 600 leprosy patients there. And by the time the 1990s came around, it was down to 130. And a fiscally responsible bureaucrat suggested that they put non violent and infirmed inmates in those empty beds to save taxpayers money. And the healthy inmates could keep the grounds and work for the leprosy patients and run the cafeteria and do all the things that needed to be done at this colony. So this experiment, for two years between 1991 and 1993 were 500 inmates, 130 victims of leprosy, the last Americans to be imprisoned for a disease, about 150 prison guards, an ancient order of nuns, and a Franciscan monk all thrown together into one colony. A convergence of cultures like you've never seen before or after.

Garrett (14:50)

On his first day inside, Neil was wandering the hallways in search of his room when an elderly black woman with no legs wheeled past him in an old wooden wheelchair.

Neil White (15:00)

And because this was an all male prison, I knew she wasn't a prisoner and I assumed she wasn't a prison guard. So I did what I think anybody would have done. I stepped back and held my breath. And as she cranked by me, she said, there's no place like home. And after she turned the corner, another inmate came up to me and said, did you see that lady? She was dropped off here when she was 12 years old and her family never came back to see her. He said she just turned 80. And then he asked me if I was feeling sorry for myself.

Garrett (15:32)

Whatever self pity Neil was feeling lifted when he saw the rest of the Grounds because the facility was initially designed to heal people, not punish them. It was perhaps the cushiest federal prison in the country at the time.

Neil White (15:45)

It was as cushy as you could ever have possibly imagined. There were no bars. We were living in dorm rooms formerly occupied by leprosy patients. The doors had just been taken off. There were eight TV rooms. There was a walking track, shuffleboard courts, horseshoes, volleyball courts, basketball courts, weight room, a music room, an activities room with ping pong, Nintendo pool, musical instruments. There were intramural games during the particular seasons for softball and football. The first weekend I was there for Memorial Day, one of the inmates had a video camera filming inmates doing dizzy Izzy around baseball bats and running relay races. It was the damnedest waste of federal dollars you have ever seen in your life.

Garrett (16:42)

Though the facility housed both inmates and leprosy patients, the two groups were strictly segregated. Prisoners were supposed to have no direct contact with patients who remained under medical care in their own designated areas. Neil's roommate happened to be a well known criminal named Nicholas Bashinsky.

Neil White (17:00)

And as I walk into the room, there's a gentleman lying on one of the cots with a medical journal on his chest, covering his face. And I walk into the room and he drops the medical journal down. And I introduce myself. And he said, my name's Nicholas Pashinki. Everybody calls me Doc. And I said, where do I put my stuff? And he showed me my locker. And then I went and opened the closet and there was no room for anything because it was filled with what I can imagine is probably 600 medical journals.

Garrett (17:34)

Bashinsky was a former physician who'd operated weight loss clinics in Texas that used a hazardous chemical known as dnp. The drug had been used by Russian soldiers in World War II to raise their body temperature and help them avoid frostbite. But the FDA never approved it for weight loss. Bashinsky had gotten 15 years for racketeering and tax fraud.

Neil White (17:55)

He said, what'd you do? And I said, well, I'm in the magazine business, or was magazine and marketing. And he said, well, I think you might be able to help me. I've invented a device. And I said, okay. And he started describing this device. This was pre Viagra that cured impotence. And I said, wow, that's pretty amazing. He said, yeah, there's only one problem. And I said, what's that? And he said, well, you got to inject it in the base of your penis. And I said, yeah, that's her real problem. He said, it doesn't hurt, really. I've tried it and I just kind of tried to get out of that conversation as fast as I could. Unpacked all my stuff.

Garrett (18:34)

Bashinsky wasn't the only interesting prisoner in Carville. Just a few rooms down was a guy named Dan Duchene. Duchenne was known as the steroid guru for his work promoting anabolic steroids to American bodybuilders. In the 1980s, he was at Carville for distributing another dangerous chemical, GHB, which the FDA had banned a few years earlier. Then there was Frank Regano.

Neil White (18:59)

And Frank was a self proclaimed mob lawyer. He represented mobsters from all over the south. His primary client was Santo Trafficante in Tampa and St. Pete. And he was part of a nationwide group of mafia folks. He was very close to Carlos Marcelo and he had a book that was going to be coming out right after Carville called mob lawyer and he was telling us the stories of representing these guys. At the time, none of us had ever heard these stories. Since then the files have been released and a lot of them proven to be true.

Garrett (19:40)

For example, Rugano told Neil and the others that after Fidel Castro took over Cuba, the CIA had given Santo Trafficante a ziploc bag full of poison pills and paid him $100,000 to poison the leftist revolutionary.

Neil White (19:56)

And over the course of months, they kept checking in with Santo and he said, I tried, he didn't take them. I've tried, he didn't do it. I tried, he didn't work. He told Frank he just took the money and flushed the pills down the toilet. Years after being released, the files were made public. And that in fact, is exactly what the CIA did.

Garrett (20:14)

Rigano also claimed to have overheard mobsters in New York plotting the assassination of jfk.

Neil White (20:20)

And there was a proposal thrown out there to kill Bobby Kennedy. And Carlos Marcelo said, if you want a dog's tail to quit hitting you in the face, you cut off its head. And then he said, and if we kill the brother of a sitting president, the wrath that will rain down on us is unfathomable. And so rather than kill Bobby, they decided to get rid of the president because they also knew that lbj, who hated Bobby Kennedy, would fire him right away. And I don't know who shot him and who paid for it, but there is no doubt in my mind that the mob was definitely involved. And that was the rationale and reason behind it. And that's what Frank told us pretty much firsthand.

Garrett (21:10)

As someone who works in journalism, I often feel like I have two competing personalities, the journalist and the human being. These two personalities were alive in Neil White during his days in Carville. The human being missed his wife and kids terribly and couldn't wait to finish his sentence and get back to them. The journalist couldn't believe his luck at the story he'd been handed. He immediately began taking notes for a book. Neil initially envisioned the book as an expose about the federal government's dangerous experiment to expose inmates to leprosy patients and vice versa. But over time, he got to know some of the patients himself, an experience that changed Neil's life and the direction of his book.

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N/A (22:27)

Are.

Neil White (22:27)

You still quoting 30 year old movies? Have you said cool beans in the past 90 days? Do you think Discover isn't widely accepted? If this sounds like you, you're stuck in the past. Discover is accepted at 99% of places that take credit cards nationwide and every time you make a purchase with your card, you automatic cash back. Welcome to the now it pays to Discover. Learn more@discover.com credit card Based on the February 2024 Nielsen report.

Garrett (23:00)

Inmates at the Carvel facility were technically not allowed to talk to or communicate with the leprosy patients, but in reality the two groups interacted all the time. They had social stigmas in common, one for being locked up, the other for a disease that people feared. Neil got to know many of the patients well, so I was given a.

Neil White (23:20)

Job in the leprosy patient cafeteria. I spent all morning from 4am to noon over there serving their dishes, helping them clean up. And I think I got the job because I had pretty good penmanship and I did the menu board for them about what was going to be for breakfast, lunch and dinner. And so I had a lot of opportunity to get to know them, to talk to them, to interact with them and mingle when they were eating.

Garrett (23:45)

One inmate Neil got to know was named Harry. Harry was from the island of St. Croix and had been sent to a colony at age 6. He was later transferred to Carvel when he was in his 30s and they.

Neil White (23:58)

Used to sneak out in what they called this hole in the wall and they would go to town and buy beer. So they would escape, much like prisoners would want to. And I asked Harry about it one time. He said I finally quit going to the bars. Even though he was a young single man, he said people always wanted to know what happened to me. And I would tell him that I was burnt in a fire. And then I would tell him that I was in a terrible car wreck. He said I couldn't tell him the truth, but I got tired of fibbing, so I just didn't go back.

Garrett (24:32)

Another patient he became close to was Ella Bounds, the same woman who'd wheeled past him in the hallway on his first day and said, there's no place like home. Ella was in her 80s and had been in Carville for more than 60 years. One day she told Neil how she'd wound up there.

Neil White (24:50)

Ella, she was in a one room schoolhouse in Louisiana and a doctor had come by to administer some shots. And they noticed a blotch on her leg. And he pricked the leg, the spot, with the needle. And Ella didn't feel anything. With leprosy, people are confused about it, but you lose all sensation in your extremities. You can't feel anything in your hand, your feet, your legs, your nose, your ears. And so the next week, a bounty hunter came to her one room schoolhouse and took her away. They used to pay bounty hunters to collect leprosy patients and bring them to the colonies. And he went to Ella's house to put a board up on the house. It said quarantine. And Ella's father, who apparently was a strong big man, took Ella from the bounty hunter's truck and said that he would take her. And he put her in her yellow dress that she had for Sunday school and made a long trek in 1927 to the colony to drop off his 12 year old daughter. And from what I heard, nobody from her family ever came back. Now, you think that sounds very cruel and very mean spirited, but you have to remember, if you were a farmer or a grocer or a merchant and people knew that your family had leprosy, they wouldn't buy your goods, they wouldn't buy your fruit, they wouldn't buy your vegetables, they wouldn't buy your crops. It was sort of a death knell for any family, for any member who contracted leprosy. So she and all these others who had been hidden away in this colony, they called themselves the Secret People, were for the most part leading these dignified monastic lives, in spite of the facts, had found some happiness and all the inmates who had pretty much all committed crimes and taken money they shouldn't have taken and sold drugs and ruined people's lives, were complaining about the amount of time that they got, while just across the hall there were 130 people who had been imprisoned for being susceptible to a bacterial infection.

Garrett (27:00)

Despite the cruel and unjust treatment of the leprosy patients, they found ways to entertain themselves. According to Neil, they celebrated Mardi Gras each year and even organized their own parades with floats and costumes. They even designed and handed out doubloons, some of which featured armadillos. As Neil would later learn, the armadillo is one of the only other mammals that can naturally contract leprosy. Scientists at Carville and elsewhere had studied armadillos for years to better understand the disease and develop treatments which later led to the cure. The patients held the animals in high esteem. Of course, the federal prison in Carville wasn't all fun and games.

Neil White (27:40)

Well, you know, there was a stabbing at the end. A man in a wheelchair. An inmate in a wheelchair stabbed another inmate for coughing too loud in the TV room. He couldn't hear his show. And if it wasn't like a bad Charles Adams cartoon, the wheelchair bound guy took off for the exit in his wheelchair. He was going to escape and get out of the, out of the prison. We had a prisoner there who was a former alligator wrestler. And he ran the guy down and tackled him and took his knife away from him and held him until the prison guards were there.

Garrett (28:16)

Neil also lost inmates and patients whom he considered friends.

Neil White (28:20)

You know, a lot of men died there because there were sick inmates there. And you would hear a helicopter come in late at night to transport somebody to a hospital. And the next morning you knew somebody was going to be gone, either in ICU or dead.

Garrett (28:35)

But as far as prison experiences go, Neil couldn't have asked for a better one. He was released in 1994 after serving a year of his 18 month sentence. He moved back to Oxford to rebuild his life.

Neil White (28:47)

When I got out, I had $1,000 in restitution and $600 a month in child support to pay. And I couldn't go to Burger King and get a job because I had to check that box that I'd been convicted of a felony. So I set up a card table in my kitchen in Oxford and I called my friends and I said, you know, I lost my money and some other people's too, and I lost my freedom, but I didn't lose my mind. If you need anything done a press release, a brochure, some marketing strategy. I'll never take any money up front. If you don't like what I deliver, don't pay me. And damn if my first two clients weren't banks. And then it kind of went from there.

Garrett (29:27)

Neil went on to found his own publishing company without borrowing money. In his spare time, he worked on his book about Carville.

Neil White (29:34)

And so I spent about 10 to 15 years studying the craft of writing, going over the notes, learning about leprosy not from an uninformed inmate setting, but from sitting in a classroom with leprologists from all over the world to match those Polaroids I had in my mind with what actually was going on with their bodies. And you know, I'm kind of a slow learner to search for meaning. So I spent a lot of time figuring out how to write this book and tell this story. Because, you know, it might not be the only book I ever write, but I sure hope I don't have this kind of material again anytime soon.

Garrett (30:16)

Today, Neil White runs the Nautilus Publishing Company, writes plays and essays, and teaches memoir writing. The national leprosarium was officially closed in 1999 and turned into a Louisiana guard installation, but the government allowed some former patients to continue living in housing on the property. As Neil put it, they had no place else to go.

Neil White (30:39)

Foreign.

Garrett (30:47)

If you have information, story tips or feedback you'd like to share with the Gone south team, please email us@gonesouthpodcastmail.com that's gone southpodcastmail.com and for bonus content, you can follow us on Facebook, T TikTok and Instagram at Gone South Podcast. You can also sign up for our newsletter on substack. Gone south with Jed Lipinski Gone south is an Odyssey original podcast. It's created, written and narrated by me, Jed Lipinski. Our executive producers are Jenna Weiss Berman, Maddie Sprung Keyser, Tom Lipinski, Lloyd Lockridge, and me. Our story editors are Tom Lipinski, Maddie Sprung Keyser, and Joel Lovell. Gone south is edited by Chris Basil and Perry Crowell. It's mixed and mastered by Chris Basil. Production support from Ian Mont and Sean Cherry. Special thanks to J.D. crowley, Leah Rees, Dennis, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Sh.

Margo Gray (31:56)

College holds a mythic place in American culture. It's often considered the best four years of your life and hailed as a beacon of integrity and excellence. But beyond the polished campus tours, there are stories you won't find in the admissions pamphlets.

Neil White (32:12)

The higher ups are concerned about one.

Neil White (32:14)

Thing, and that is avoiding scandal.

Margo Gray (32:16)

It's no wonder that college campuses capture the nation's attention, especially in moments of upheaval. Margo I'm Margo Gray. Each week on the Campus Files podcast, we bring you a new story.

N/A (32:29)

It was the biggest academic scandal in the history of college sports and probably in the history of academia.

Margo Gray (32:35)

On Campus Files we cover everything from rigged admissions to the drama of Greek life.

N/A (32:41)

A chancellor having a pornographic double life is an extremely rare case.

Margo Gray (32:47)

Listen to and follow Case Campus Files, an Odyse original podcast, available now on the free Odysee app and wherever you.

N/A (32:54)

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