Anita Lee reports that Pete Halat is in a half-way house in Hattiesburg, looking to a release in April of next year after serving 15 years:
Fresh from prison, former Biloxi Mayor Pete Halat is working as a handyman at St. Thomas Catholic Church on the University of Southern Mississippi campus in Hattiesburg.
The Rev. Tommy Conway said Halat has been painting, doing yard work and performing any other chores requested.
“He’s doing very well,” Conway said. “He’s looking forward to getting home and being with his family some time in the new year.”
Halat served 15 years in prison for participating in a conspiracy that led to the murders of prominent Biloxians Vincent and Margaret Sherry in 1987.
Testimony and evidence later presented in federal court indicated an inmate at Louisiana State Prison ordered the murders after he discovered money missing from a trust account Halat managed while he was an attorney. Halat blamed his former law partner, Vincent Sherry, for taking the money. Sherry was serving as a circuit judge when a hitman gunned down him and his wife, former Councilwoman Margaret Sherry, in their North Biloxi home.
Margaret Sherry had run unsuccessfully for mayor in 1985. Halat won the election in 1989, then was identified a month after he took office as a suspect in the Sherry case. He spent his four years in office adamantly denying he had anything to do with the murders of his friends, whose eulogy he had delivered. Halat stood trial and was convicted in the Sherry case in 1997.
Should we expect an application for readmission to the Mississippi Bar in the near future? Halat must be about 70 now. I can see his trying to regain his credentials.
Best wishes to him. You do your time, you’re entitled to another, uh, shot.
Was the contractor found and convicted?
I believe the hitman testified for the government.
Mississippi Mud is a good book about the killings, although i never believed that Kirksey Nix would have accepted Halat’s word when he blamed Sherry for taking the money. As an aside, Mike Gillich died earlier this year.
The Government’s primary witness in the second trial was Mike Gillich, who hired the hitman. The hitman died in jail.
I’m not sure who the Government had testify in the first trial (the one that convicted Gillich). I don’t think the hit man ever flipped, though.
I think it was Bobby Fabian who testified in the first trial. He was a Dixie Mafia member, serving time with Nix at Angola and participating in the lonely hearts scam.
There were two hit men involved. The first, Ransom, i think, back out after his driver got busted and he feared that him having knowledge about the plan would lead to his exposure. Good thinking. I think I read where he died a couple of years ago. His presence in Biloxi as part of that conspiracy was a big part of the case, however.
Bobby Joe Fabian died a year or so ago. Other than Kirksey Nix and Peter Halat, there’s not much left of the old gang ….
The BoP says that Nix, age 69, is in a medium security prison in Marion, Illinois, where he will presumably live out his days. He had been serving LWOP at Angola for a murder during a home invasion in New Orleans.
Given his history, I was a bit surprised he’s in medium security.
Wasn’t it Governor Barbour, on his way out, who explained to us that murderers are the most docile prisoners? Would this explain or compel medium to minimum security or, perhaps, immediate release for this chap?
Here’s a link to a report of Fabian’s death:
http://theadvocate.com/home/3108299-125/miss-judge-murder-informant-dies
The article provides a dramatis personæ and a quick summary of events in the Sherry murders.
The article concludes with this curious (to me) statement: “Former U.S. Attorney George Phillips, Bell and the Sherrys’ daughters tried unsuccessfully in 2007 to win a sentence commutation for Fabian, but the Louisiana Pardon Board turned him down.” There was only one place on Earth fit for Bobby Joe Fabian: prison. I think it would be the height of folly to seek a commutation or any other diminution of his sentence.
NMC, wasn’t the daughter of one of the Dixie mafia leaders in law school with you. I seem to recall my brother mentioning it. He said she was very nice.
Mike Gillich’s daughter, CRS
NZS, it’s woman-killers in particular who are the salt of the earth, according to Barbour.