Part 50, page 188

Transcript

The scan is the source; the transcript is machine-generated from it.

"He claims that he has been a professional gambler for years and in fact that he has never earned an honest dollar. He denies guilt on the current charge and states that fully half of his prison sentences have been based purely upon his record and were therefore unjust."

At Atlanta Pen Coffelt met my father, James Brown, a former Air Force pilot. Brown had worked as a reporter during his younger days and was a good writer, often compiling and editing the prison magazine single-handedly, while Coffelt was the press operator who printed it. They became good friends and spent three years filling the dreary days together by working on a long writing project about Coffelt's early life. My father was paroled in 1952. After his friend was gone, Coffelt trans- ferred to Leavenworth Penitentiary in Kansas to finish out his sentence, and there, on July 20, 1955, he was "conditionally released" — pending parole restrictions. He would be in a few small-town jails after that, but never another "awful" penitentiary.

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In his new life on the outside Jack Coffelt emerged for the first time as a human being rather than a number. He was immensely proud of the book he had written with my father. Entitled Cleave The Liquid Sky, the novel, a colorful and spellbinding account of Coffelt's boyhood years in Oklahoma, was never pub- lished. But nevertheless, "with a book under my belt," as Jack told people, he had "finally achieved something." He had greatly matured and no longer wanted to be merely a petty thief. Instead, he would become a shrewd con-man.

As a result of one scam in Memphis, Tennessee, in the late 1950's, Jack came into a pile of money — around $50,000 — and with a healthy bank account to bolster his ego he grew courteous and extremely generous. He always grabbed the check when he took friends out to expensive restaurants and plush night- spots. He was charming, a "hell of a salesman" said one companion. He drank and smoked heavily. He often fascinated and regaled people with preposterous accounts of his past criminal exploits: wild tales of blowing open safes with nitroglycerin (carrying it in a vial around his neck so it would stay at body temperature), and dramatic holdups during drunken sprees of cross-country travelling. ("I'm gonna put you in the news — bang!")

Coffelt was always a chameleon — wonder- fully gifted in producing a vast range of personalities to suit the mood of any occasion. Referring to the same period of time, one person who knew him remembered, "He was really a remarkable man. Very kind, very generous, very colorful, almost like a kindly uncle," while another recalled, "I always had the feeling he could easily tear the room apart!" But he was steadfastly hypnotic. "The average person had no defense to him. He just

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