They called it the wickedest city in the United States. It was a place full of rambunctious army troopers on leave, where the “criminal establishment was organized enough to forge de facto alliances with the local law enforcement and legal communities, eventually turning the business of crime into a political, social, and economic maelstrom so fearsome that Gen. George S. Patton speculated the only solution was to level the city.”
Naturally they celebrate that in their restaurants:
So we’re in Phenix City, at a chicken joint, where that picture is hanging on the wall.
Albert Fuller, not pictured, is the bad guy. He joined the Navy, went west, came home with an attitude. He made himself “chief deputy sheriff” and ran protection rackets, among other things. He feuded with the city police, who were running their own schemes. Fuller was implicated in a couple of murders, in a prostitution ring and more.
And in this instance, he was seen after the murder of attorney general nominee Albert Patterson, who’d been shot three times — at least twice in the mouth.
Naturally you’d celebrate that in a chicken joint. If this doesn’t make sense, you don’t understand Phenix City, and you should start here:
Other rackets followed, from prostitution to untaxed liquor, drugs, loan sharking and common theft – among its other distinctions Phenix City was the site of an exclusive safecracking school. The city government was the mob’s private fiefdom; the police, sheriff, judges and jurors all belonged to them. If anyone complained about illegal activity, they were thrown in jail for drunk and disorderly or given a pair of concrete shoes and dumped in the Chattahochee.
The photo has a caption: “Taxi driver said he saw Albert Fuller run from murder scene on night of murder.”
That makes the subject of this photo James Radius Taylor:
Taylor said Fuller, former chief deputy in once sin-ridden Phenix City, ran from the alley “a couple of minutes after I heard three shots.”
[…]
Taylor said he was positive in his identification of Fuller. He said he had known the former police official for six years.
You can read pages 160-162 to get a good sense of what happened that particular night.
Fuller did 10 years of a life sentence, maintaining his innocence throughout. He was paroled and died in 1969, six months after a fall from a ladder. You can read his page one obit on his Find A Grave page. Here’s a letter he wrote to a judge-friend while he was in prison, wishing the family well, hoping the judge will “try and keep from sending a young kid down here, for it does not do them any good just hurts.”
Here’s Fuller at the Patterson crime scene, acting as police officer once again, just before he was one of three arrested for the murder. He was the only one to stand trial. That picture is not in the chicken joint.
There is a picture of the raid on the Manhattan Cafe, which in 1954 featured 12 slots, five horse racing machines, four pinball machines, blackjack, craps and poker. Anecdotes from that place fit the description of notorious.
It was two miles from the restaurant. Less as the chicken flies.
