On the surface this seems like a laughable story, the misadventures of a country goofball. I can say country because I'm from Mississippi and I can say goofball because maybe it takes one to know one except that I don't go to titty bars or have half a million dollars to leave around in a truck. I'm drawn to stories, though, of people whose dark need for respect or drink or vengeance or redemption (it's all the same monster) brings out their most interesting demons. Southerners are particularly good at this. We dig our graves with the most colorful shovels.
These are often tragicomic figures worthy of Shakespeare, to be pretentious about it, and while some might consider a story like Jack Whittaker's a cautionary tale I would say no; we learn our own lessons by our own hand and simply note-with pity, awe, compassion, resentment, gratitude, whatever you're made of-the fatal flaws of others. Jack's fatal flaw, I believe, was a need to stand big- to be reckoned with, to be awed. In America but especially still in the rural or uneducated or undereducated American South nothing does this quicker than dollars. Everyone may not understand the rest of the known world, or want to, but a particular band of Southerners relates solidly and with Pavlovian reliability to money. A Ph.D. means nothing, and an MD everything. John Grisham is a literary hero for his zeroes. I could tell my family this story appeared in GQ and they would say,"That's nice." I could tell them GQ paid me $25,000 for it (which they certainly did not) and my family would love and celebrate me forever. A price tag legiti-mizes-or illegitimates-everything.
I wish I could say everything worked out for Jack Whittaker but I'm not sure that will ever be true. From the time we closed on this piece and the day it hit the racks,Whittaker's life got perhaps predictably worse. An eighteen-year-old friend of his granddaughter Brandi Bragg overdosed at Whittaker's house; the kid's father is suing Whittaker for not having had better "control" over Brandi. (A lot of people thought Whittaker spoiled her. He paid her $109,000 a year to work at his construction company. She was seventeen.) Then,Whittaker was charged with yet another DUI, and with carrying a pistol concealed in his left boot, after his Hummer hit a concrete median off the West Virginia Turnpike. He had $117,000 in cash on him at the time.
Some said winning the Powerball was the worst thing that ever happened to the guy but then the worst thing actually did happen. Brandi was found dead. Her body was discovered the day our issue appeared on newsstands. The timing was sickening. It took months for the details to emerge but basically Brandi and her boyfriend partied one night with cocaine injections and methadone pills and Brandi died in the boyfriend's bed. The boyfriend freaked. He wrapped Brandi in a sheet and a tarp and dragged her out to the yard and left her beneath a junked van. She lay there all through the manhunt, for two long weeks. Finally the boyfriend showed the state police where he'd put her.
They buried Brandi on Christmas Eve, nearly two years to the day Jack Whittaker won big.
As for the Pink Pony debacle, that one apparently has yet to be resolved. In the Billy Sunday's case Whittaker pleaded no contest to misdemeanor assault but later asked the judge if he could take it back and stand trial because he decided the sentence of unsuper-vised probation and weekly AA meetings was too harsh (answer: ah, no).
And on it goes.
Big Jack apparently now lives in Virginia yet has been gilding and gilding the little Tabernacle of Praise, which isn't so little anymore. It's grown from a $4 million church to a $10 million 13.5-acre "campus."
Not long ago he told the Beckley Register-Herald: "I don't have nothing to live for since my granddaughter's dead." But then he said he will use his millions to establish West Virginia rehab centers for teenage girls (Brandi twice went to rehab, out of state). He told the Charleston Gazette: "That's what I'm spending my life doing." I suppose we'll see.
Mary Battiata : Blood Feud
from the Washington Post Magazine
The word was, Perry Brooks' s bull-all 2,000 fence-bending pounds of him-was loose again. And the word, as is sometimes the case in a small farming town, was right.
On that Saturday,Wick Coleman, a farmer and friend, had seen Brooks cruising the edge of the Food Lion parking lot in his old, gold pickup, where the lot bordered Brooks's fields. He had his head out the window, and he looked worried, Coleman said. One of Brooks's beagles was along for the ride, and it peered out the passenger window, as if it were searching, too.
There was nothing new about this. At seventy-four, Brooks was retired from full-time farming. He'd sold most of his cattle, and his remaining herd of twenty didn't seem enough to keep the herd's bull at home. From time to time, the bull, a black-and-white mongrel known as a "hundred-percenter" for its breeding prowess, would throw its front legs up against the pasture fence and slowly rock it to the ground. Free at last, it would lumber off in search of fresh female companionship.
Over the years, Brooks's wandering herd had become a source of entertainment among some of his neighbors around Bowling Green, Virginia, an hour-and-a-half drive south of Washington.
"Perry would call and say, 'I've lost a cow, would you keep an eye out for it?' " said Frances Hurt, a neighbor. "It was a riot.We'd call each other and say: 'Where's Perry's cow today? Is he in your yard?''No, is he in yours?' "
Once the prodigal had been located, Brooks's habit was to fire up his truck and go retrieve it, loading it into the back or just tapping it home on foot with the aid of an old hoe-handle and whoever was around to help. That could be a sight to behold. Brooks was worn and bent as an old tree root by decades of hard labor. In recent years, he'd endured open-heart surgery and two hip replacements and had crushed his right hand in a front-end loader. To keep his hip from popping out ofjoint, he sometimes wore a complicated plastic brace over his dungarees. In combination with the tattered clothing he favored, it gave him the look ofJed Clampett crossed with the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz.
But this time, on the third weekend in April 2004, Brooks's bull had crossed into the 675-acre purebred cattle operation of Brooks's neighbor and longtime nemesis, John F. Ames.
Ames, sixty, a Richmond lawyer and CPA turned part-time cattle breeder, had spent more than a decade developing a large herd of prized, pedigreed Black Angus cattle. In the years since he'd come to Caroline County, Ames had acquired a reputation as an exacting and ambitious cattleman, a demanding, somewhat aloof figure. Most people who knew him in Caroline were keenly aware that he'd filed more than a dozen lawsuits (and threatened more) against neighbors and business associates since taking over Holly Hill Farm. That reputation for litigiousness left many of his fellow townspeople wanting to keep clear of him.
The bad blood between Perry Brooks and John Ames, however, was in a class all its own.The sheriff's department policed it, the newspapers covered it, the local court was openly weary of it, and the families of at least one of the men had learned to tiptoe around it. The feud had even led Ames to apply for a permit to carry a concealed weapon. In his application, Ames told the court that he needed the gun, a Czech-made 9mm semiautomatic pistol, because he carried large amounts of cash for business, but also because he was afraid of his neighbor.
The feud started like this: In 1989, about four years after he'd arrived in Caroline, Ames sent each of his neighbors a registered letter announcing his plans to build a new fence. He informed them that, under an 1887 fence law, they would be required to pay for half of whatever section of it ran along their shared property line. Some neighbors would be on the hook for $6,000, some for $12,000. Perry Brooks's share would be more than $45,000.
The first reaction among the neighbors-several of them retired schoolteachers and nurses living on Social Security and pensions, who kept no livestock-was consternation."What kind of a person moves to a small town and starts suing his neighbors?" said Hurt, whose elderly mother, aunt, and cousin all received bills.