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Hi, everyone.

It is Thanksgiving and we are taking the week off, but we wanted to highlight an original Odyssey podcast and we're going to feature it today.

Yes, it is called Gone South and it is an award-winning true crime documentary podcast.

Season four is out now and it tells a different story about one of the South's most interesting crimes.

You can tune in every week as writer and host Jed Lipinski takes you through one of these crimes.

You will hear from the person who committed the crime, the person who solved it, or both.

Gone South not only sheds fascinating insights into the criminal mind, but also into human nature.

Enjoy this preview.

If you ever have a chance to visit the Louisiana State Penitentiary, and I hope you don't, you'll notice something unusual on the way in.

Right outside the front entrance, there's a gift shop, a prison gift shop.

They sell various trinkets and posters, and you could even walk away with a t-shirt, a t-shirt with a picture of the prison entrance, and a caption underneath that reads, a gated community.

Louisiana State Penitentiary sits on 18,000 acres just south of the Mississippi border.

The prison is better known as Angola because the land it occupies used to be a slave plantation and a majority of the people enslaved there were taken from the West African country of Angola.

The plantation became a prison in 1880, but an outside observer would have noticed almost no change.

Inmates lived in former slave quarters.

They worked the fields just as slaves had.

They lived short and brutal lives.

Conditions hardly improved in the 20th century.

After a plague of murders, stabbings, and sexual assaults got the attention of the press in the 1960s, Angola was named the bloodiest prison in America.

And it was almost impossible to escape.

Angola is surrounded on three sides by the Mississippi River.

It's hemmed in on the other by dense, snake-infested swampland.

Guards patrol the grounds on horseback, armed with 12-gauge shotguns.

Its layout is devilishly complex.

Multiple outbuildings, barriers, and sniper towers are designed to prevent escapes.

Even if an inmate did escape, they often drowned in the Mississippi's rushing currents, or succumbed to exposure, or got bitten by a rattlesnake.

And according to those who tried, a failed escape could be a fate worse than death.

The punishment for escaping included months, if not years, in solitary, or what inmates called the dungeon.

Conditions one one visitor in the 1970s described as medieval.

And yet, in the 1980s, one inmate successfully escaped from Angola not once, but twice.

I don't know if you can even fathom it, but it's a big thrill when you successfully escape incarceration.

It's undescribable, man.

Better feeling than any narcotic I ever had.

I'm Jed Lipinski.

From Odyssey Podcasts, this is Gone South.

In this episode, I'm going to tell you the story of Jimmy Cox.

You won't find any books, podcasts, or movies about Jimmy.

His story has never been told, at least not in that way.

I met Jimmy during the making of Gone South Season 2 about the Dixie Mafia, a loose-knit group of criminals who roamed the South in the 60s and 70s.

If you listened to that season, you probably remember a guy named Kirksy Nicks Jr.

Unlike Jimmy, Kirksy is an infamous criminal.

Some people believe he was the leader of the Dixie Mafia, though Kirksey disputes that.

He's been locked up for over 50 years.

When we were making that season, I had trouble getting in touch with Kirksy.

For months, my letters to him went unanswered.

Then I got an email from a guy named Jimmy Cox.

Jimmy said he was a close friend of Kirksy's, dating back to the mid-70s when they'd served time at Angola together.

He told me Kirksy would be willing to speak with me if I spoke with Jimmy first.

A week later, I was talking with Kirksy Nicks.

Jimmy made only a small appearance in season two of our show, but I thought his personal story was worth telling.

I used to be a crime reporter for the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, and I'd been to Angola before.

It was hard to imagine how someone could escape that place and live to tell the tale.

We'll get there, don't worry.

But first, I want to tell you a little bit more about the escape artist.

Jimmy Cox grew up on the north side of Chicago in the 50s and 60s, the second youngest of 12 kids.

His father had ties to the Chicago mafia.

So did some of his older brothers.

He started hustling at a young age.

When we were little kids, I can remember we used to break into the freight trains.

And one time we broke in, one was full of beer.

We had beer stashed all over the neighborhood, different places, you know.

And we didn't drink all of it, you know, but it was just fun to do it.

We stole a half a train car full of beer.

And we're little kids, I'm talking about nine, ten years old, probably.

That was our mentality.

And you got to figure, I come from the area where you see gangsters walking around, you know, nice clothes, diamond rings, driving nice cars, having nice women.

So that's what you aspire to.

When he wasn't robbing freight trains, young Jimmy shined shoes at a local social club where his father's friends hung out.

A bunch of old Italian guys hung out in there and everything.

Well, I was allowed to go in and shine the shoes for them.

That was my turf.

One of the gangsters who hung out at the club was a guy named Big Polly.

Well, Big Polly was the boss, and he'd sit in his barber's chair, and I'd shine his shoes.

And when I'd get through, he'd reach in his pocket and pull out his big old roll of money and whatever bill was on the top, he would hold it over his shoe.

And if he could see his reflection, he'd give it to me.

So I was shine the shit out of those shoes.

One day I was down there shining them, and a dude reached over my shoulder,

shot Paulie four or five times in the head.

The old man hustled me out of there and told me, Don't tell nobody nothing, just go home.

I remember I used to keep my shoe shine box in the basement, and they had a big washtub down there.

And I went down there and I washed the blood out of my head.

I mean, there was stuff everywhere.

It traumatized me.

I ain't too proud to say that.

Jimmy says he never told anyone, including his dad, about what he'd seen.

He figured the guy who shot Polly must have known him well enough to walk straight into the shop unaccosted.

So therefore I felt that I should never trust a soul.

And it was the catalyst to put me on.

If I felt that you were a threat, I was going to eliminate you first.

Because I wasn't going to let you eliminate me.

Jimmy dropped out of school in sixth grade.

He says he learned to drive by stealing cars.

By his early teens, he developed a reputation as a solid getaway driver.

These guys were going to go do a bank job.

They wanted three stolen cars and they wanted me to place them at certain spots for them, right?

Switch cars, they call it.

And I told them I'll do the driving.

I was like 14 years old and made $17,500, which was a lot of money back then.

A whole lot of money.

It was a whole lot of money, about $170,000 today.

In the late 60s, when Jimmy was in his early 20s, he moved to Hollywood, where his father ran protection rackets for the local mob.

You know, Chicago people run L.A.

Jimmy and his friends did errands and odd jobs for him and his associates.

One day my dad told me, said, I want you to take your crew and go bust this Chinese restaurant up, but right at lunchtime when it's most busy.

He said, just pull up front, go in with some baseball bats.

Don't hurt nobody if you don't have to.

He said, but break shit up.

Because the dude wasn't wanting to pay his street tax.

So we jacked a limousine, pulled the limousine right up in front of it.

About four of us bailed out of it with baseball bats, went inside, started breaking up tables and generally causing chaos and scaring the heck out of people.

And the guy got his mind right and started paying his taxes.

Before long, Jimmy was an established player in L.A.

He bought a small nightclub near the corner of La Brea and Sunset and named it the Wii, spelled O-U-I, after the adult magazine of the same name.

It was a place where hustlers could come in there at the end of the evening, had the cops paid off.

You could buy cocaine right there at the table, a little glass vial for $100,

and they'd bring it to you right with your drinks, you know?

And it was a place for hustlers and thugs and gangsters to hang out and be comfortable.

In LA, Jimmy developed an addiction to heroin and PCP, and he had plenty of run-ins with the law.

He was arrested for armed robbery, assault, and car theft, among other things.

Yeah, it's hard to remember, but, you know, because I'd go to jail sometimes three times in one week.

But Jimmy always avoided significant jail time until 1975, when he was sent to New Orleans to do a job.

Jimmy told me what happened next.

It's a harrowing story, but he didn't want to go into it on the record.

Suffice it to say, the cops tracked him down in LA a year later and charged him with robbery and two counts of first-degree murder.

Jimmy's days as a flashy LA gangster were over.

He was given two life sentences without the possibility of parole.

And since Jimmy's crimes were committed in New Orleans, those life sentences would be served at the Louisiana State Penitentiary.

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When Jimmy arrived in Angola in 1976, it had only recently been dubbed the bloodiest prison in America.

He remembers his first day inside.

When I got there and I'm walking to Chow, I noticed a kind of a little traffic jam down there because it's a long, long walkway you have to walk on.

You have to walk maybe almost a quarter of a mile to the chow hall.

When I got up to where the traffic jam was happening, I noticed a dude was laying on the walk all stabbed up and people were just stepping over him.

Wouldn't he paying him no mind, wasn't seeing if he needed, you know, the help if he was dead or what.

So that set the stage for me right there.

And what did you think when you saw that?

What I thought, I'm in the jungle.

Oddly enough, it was probably the safest time to be an Angola inmate in the prison's 100-year history.

Between 1969 and 1974, 53 prisoners were murdered by other inmates.

The federal government responded by instituting a series of reforms.

But Jimmy wasn't impressed.

And besides, he had only one goal in mind when he arrived.

Your plan was always to escape, right?

Oh yeah.

No human being is supposed to be confined.

I don't even put my dogs in cages.

My main focus was on trying to get away, but we're sitting on an 18,000 acre farm surrounded by the Mississippi on one side and the Tunica Hills and panthers and bears and rattlesnakes on the other side.

So I knew I had to do something with a little more finesse to it than just trying to run through the bushes.

Jimmy knew the stories of other men who tried to escape.

In 1975, the year before Jimmy showed up, four men escaped after taking a prison guard hostage and shooting another with a smuggled.22-caliber pistol.

But bloodhounds for the prison's chase team quickly overtook them.

Two of the men surrendered and were told to lay on the ground.

According to one of the survivors, a guard executed them both with a submachine gun.

The guard was never charged with the crime.

Jimmy spent his first four years at Angola debating different escape strategies.

Then he found one he liked.

One day I was on the yard and I walked up on these friends of mine talking and they were talking about this guy that had just escaped from charity hospital in New Orleans.

And I asked them, I said, well, how the hell he do that?

And they said, well, they don't even hank.

They just shackle you to the bed and leave, Jimmy.

I said, well, hell, I'm out of here.

How do you get there?

They said, well, he cut his eye.

So I went.

and I tried to cut my eye.

I even paid a guy to do it and it didn't work.

So I came back, did a little more research and i got into the grays anatomy to see where i could mess with it without messing it up and i got these little medical drops that numb your eye i had a dude stick a needle in it

the first part of jimmy's plan worked he was sent to charity hospital in new orleans for treatment he smuggled in a makeshift knife plus a key to open the handcuffs the guards on duty used But when he tried to open the cuffs, the key didn't work.

So Jimmy improvised.

He asked the guard on duty to loosen the handcuffs, claiming they were cutting off his circulation.

Then he slipped out of them when the guard left.

He took his neighbor's dirty clothes out of the hamper, put them on, and waited.

So after I got out of the handcuffs, I got his clothes and put them on.

I was laying underneath the covers, fully dressed, a knife in my pocket, waiting to leave.

But they had this older lady that was always real nice to me.

And she came by and told me, says, Jimmy, I hate to see a nice young man like you locked up like this.

and it's just not right I said well you know mom I got the funniest feeling and I'm not going to be locked up all that longer you know soon as she left to go to the other ward I was gone

Jimmy spent the next year and a half on the lamb he moved from city to city couch surfing laying low when he got back to LA he moved in with a woman he'd dated years earlier He didn't realize the feds had gotten to her first.

I went by her house and they had beds in the house, outside the house, up in trees and everything else, I reckon, because they was everywhere.

Jimmy returned to Angola in 1982.

His first day back, he ran into the warden.

And he said, well, well, well, we got Jimmy Cox back with us.

And I said, yeah, what happened, man?

He said, what do you mean what happened?

I said, you guys are supposed to be protecting me and two people come in and kidnap me out that goddamn hospital, man.

And he started laughing, you know?

and he said well i'll tell you what i'm gonna send you someplace where you ain't gotta worry about nobody kidnapping you and he sent me straight to camp j

camp j was the prison's solitary wing angola's equivalent of a super max it was two years before he was released back into the prison's general population and yet less than a month later jimmy found himself back at charity hospital in new orleans with another eye injury.

As he told it, he'd poked himself in the eye when Angola's medical staff changed over.

They knew, but I mean, they weren't in with the nuts and bolts of what had happened before, you know.

But this time, the staff at Charity were more vigilant.

Before, they had guards just come every two or three hours and check on you, right?

But since my last escape, they started putting what they call a sit-on with you.

That means they have a guard sitting at the bed with you.

Once again, Jimmy had smuggled a knife into the hospital.

At one point, he told the guard he needed a shower, and the guard obliged.

And when he went down to take my shackles off my feet, and I put the knife to his throat and told him, I don't want to hurt you, I just want to go home.

I really didn't want to hurt the old man, you know.

He tried to fight, so I wound up stabbing him about 13 times, I think they said.

What saved me from killing him, I hit him one time in the chest and I come in for the kill shot, but he had stuck both hands up over where I'd hit him at, and the knife went through both hands, and it didn't have enough blade to penetrate any vital organ, which was fortunate for me because I'd have been a dead cracker right now.

They'd have executed me.

This time, Jimmy jumped out a window onto the fire escape, then exited the hospital through a side entrance.

Less than a month later, he said, he found temporary employment in New York.

In August of 84, I was sitting in the Bergen Hunting Fish Club in Queens, enjoying a beer with a very infamous person.

Can you say who that infamous person was?

Gotti.

That's Gotti, as in John Gotti, head of New York's notorious Gambino crime family.

Jimmy said he worked for John Gotti's crew for a few months before relocating to Kentucky.

After getting captured in LA, he figured he'd try to hide out in a small town.

But Jimmy wasn't the type to stay cooped up in his house all day.

Yeah, I'm driving a brand new El El Dorado with New Jersey license plates on it.

And then I had this little hot chick.

She's wearing fur coats and shit.

I was asking for it.

According to Jimmy, a nosy agent from the Kentucky Bureau of Investigation suspected him of robbing a local bank, which he claims he didn't do.

Either way, he came home one day to find himself surrounded again.

They had the state police, the FBI, and all them other idiots.

When I seen him, I took off running.

The dude jumped off a balcony and landed on my neck and stuck a little one of them little mini 14s in my mouth.

Said, run now, run now.

I said, well, get the gun out of my mouth, bitch, and I'll run.

He didn't take it out my mouth, though.

At the time, Jimmy was carrying an ID that identified him as James Aloysius Adams III.

The cops assumed he was just a local gangster.

They didn't realize they had a two-time escapee serving a life sentence at Angola.

After a preliminary hearing, they made the mistake of taking Jimmy out of the courthouse without handcuffs or shackles.

He punched the jailer in the face and ran off.

But in small town Kentucky, he was captured after just a few hours.

You know them country towns, man, they was all on me like white on rights.

Jimmy got seven years at the Kentucky State Penitentiary for the escape attempt.

Luckily, it was nothing like Angola.

When I went to Angola the first time, I was functionally illiterate.

I could write you a note and put all the money in this bag, you know what I mean?

But I couldn't write a formal letter.

While I was in that prison in Kentucky, they were real pro-education.

I wound up getting a college degree, a paralegal degree, and I was working on addiction counseling degree.

Jimmy met a prison psychologist who helped him process the trauma he'd experienced as a kid, specifically Big Polly's murder.

She was the very first person since I was 11 years old that I told that story to.

She worked me through it.

She told me, says, you can't gauge your whole life based on one incident.

We had a lot of conversations and a lot of, you know, it wasn't something that happened overnight, but it was a major breakthrough for me.

It was like kind of shedding a whole lot of weight.

A few years into his sentence, a close friend overdosed on heroin that he and Jimmy were using together.

Jimmy had been using heroin off and on for over 20 years, he says, but he quit soon after.

I just asked God a simple thing.

I said, God, I don't know how to pray, but I'm just asking you to just relieve me of this addiction.

I started shooting heroin in 66, Jed.

That's a long run, you know.

I haven't touched narcotics.

I have a Louisiana medical marijuana card, but I haven't touched any real narcotics since then.

Jimmy changed while incarcerated in Kentucky.

He got an education.

He got clean.

He found a purpose in addiction counseling.

But in 1993, his sentence in Kentucky came to an end.

Jimmy was shipped back to Angola, back to the bloodiest prison in America, where he was due to spend the remainder of his natural life.

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When Jimmy returned to Angola in 1993, after 11 years away, he found it relatively unchanged.

He, on the other hand, felt like a different person.

The change surprised many of his old pals.

I got back to Angola.

I kind of didn't get high anymore.

A lot of guys were disappointed when I come back because when they seen me, they said, oh man, good, we had some good dope.

Now I said, nah, I don't mess around no more, buddy.

And people couldn't believe it because my life had taken on a whole different lane, so to speak.

Not long after his return, director Steven Soderberg shot a scene from his film Out of Sight Inside Angola.

The film follows the story of a charming bank robber played by George Clooney who escapes from prison and kidnaps a U.S.

Marshal played by Jennifer Lopez.

In the scene, George Clooney is planning his escape with other inmates in the chow hall.

According to Jimmy, Soderberg wanted real-life Angola inmates to appear in the scene.

Angola's warden recommended Jimmy, maybe thinking his multiple escapes would bring some realism to it.

Warden Van Oy Oy picked me and told me, he said, Jimmy, we need you to go over there and sit at that table where George Clooney and them other two actors are going to be sitting because we don't want to put one of these idiots over there that would embarrass us.

So I said, okay, boss.

I went over there and I didn't even know who Clooney was.

I remember asking Van O, I said, who the hell is this guy?

He said he played Batman, you know, like I go to the movies, you know.

So the director told me, just said, just talk about whatever you would talk about while you're at chow.

As he described it, Jimmy brought a little little too much realism to the scene.

He suggested some graphic things they could do to the warden before running off.

The scene didn't make the final cut.

And then afterwards, they might have had a little problem from the legal department or whatever, you know?

Because Clooney told me, he said, man, that was good.

And what'd you say to Clooney?

I told him I'm always good.

Despite his supporting role in a George Clooney movie, Jimmy was not happy to be back.

But rather than plot a third escape attempt, he put his new paralegal degree to work.

He began researching ways of getting his murder conviction overturned.

He filed an appeal for post-conviction relief, noting that before his murder trial in the mid-70s, he'd been denied a competency hearing, despite the fact that he was addicted to heroin and PCP.

The New Orleans DA was overwhelmed with caseloads at the time.

Rather than retry Jimmy's murder case, the DA allowed him to plead guilty to attempted robbery instead.

The charge carried a 40-year sentence instead of life.

As part of the deal, Jimmy's murder convictions were wiped from his record.

He'd always assumed he would die at Angola.

Now he found himself with less than 10 years left to serve.

Jimmy stayed in Angola until 1998, when, for good behavior, he was transferred to a number of medium-security prisons, including Washington Correctional Institute, or WCI, in the town of Bogalusa.

At WCI, Jimmy applied to become a trustee.

the inmates who get special privileges, like getting to leave the prison grounds under supervision.

Based on his two prior escape attempts, his request kept getting denied.

So Jimmy finally appealed to the warden himself.

I went and caught the warden named Jim Millard.

I told him, I said, man, look, I'm trying to make trustee.

I said, I go home in a couple years.

I just want to be able to get a little scene of what's happening out there so I ain't going out in a complete haze.

And I said, I haven't had a write-up in 10 years.

I said, I don't even own a knife.

If I wanted to escape, I escaped from Angola twice.

This would be like opening up a tuna fish can here.

And he said, I'll tell you what, Jimmy, you write me a note and tell me, says, check out my file per hour conversation this morning.

He did that.

Next week, I was on reclass and made trustee.

A few years later, Jimmy was in his cell when he and other inmates got word of a massive storm brewing in the Gulf of Mexico.

Hurricane Katrina made landfall the next day.

WCI was hit hard.

The storm knocked down the prison's 10-foot-high perimeter fence.

HVAC systems were blown off the roofs.

Fallen trees made the road into the prison impassable.

If there was ever a time to escape from prison, this was it.

Instead, Jimmy and a dozen other trustees braved the wind and rain to weld the HVAC system back into place.

As the storm subsided, they cleared the main roads in the parish with chainsaws.

They drove forklifts and distributed food and water to people whose homes had been destroyed.

Every day I would go out to the FEMA area, and and I'll be honest with you, man, it brought joy to my old heart to see the happiness and the thankfulness of people.

They didn't see us as prisoners.

They saw us as people that was right there trying to help them.

The story of prison inmates providing hurricane relief made national news.

Reporters gravitated to Jimmy.

Well, the Wall Street Journal and a whole bunch of other news outlets interviewed me.

And the Wall Street Journal had my picture on the front page of his newspaper.

After we spoke, I looked up the Wall Street Journal article.

Sure enough, there was Jimmy on the front page beneath the headline, Warden's Chainsaw Gang.

A few days later, I called him to ask about the article.

The RV park he was staying at didn't have Wi-Fi, so I taped the call on my phone.

How you doing, man?

Hey, Jimmy.

How's the camp?

Oh, it's nice.

I love it up here, man.

It had been years since he'd seen the Wall Street Journal article, so I read him an excerpt from it.

As you said in the article, it's a beautiful statement.

Here, I'll read it.

I have it right here.

This is your quote: I've been a thug since 1966, and this feels good, said Mr.

Cox, a brawny, tattooed 53-year-old.

Quote: When people come up and you look in their faces and see all the sadness, and then they thank you like you're the only one giving this stuff to them, talk to me about that.

Well,

basically, just being out in society and being able to help

you know uh for so many years i was just walked away shunned away

thinking about this even brings tears to my eyes man

yeah i can imagine

you know it felt good to be able to help you know you hurt people all your life and

Then all of a sudden you get an opportunity to help.

And I followed that tradition still.

I get stuck out and messed over helping people, but I'm not giving up.

I feel like I'm on a mission in a sense, you know, man, to show people that, hey, you know, no matter how screwed up you were,

you can be better.

You can come out here no matter how many years you do in prison and succeed.

And that's what Jimmy did.

When he was released from prison in 2006, a friend helped him find work doing offshore construction on oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico.

He got his first legal paycheck at 54 years old.

A framed copy of the pay stub hangs on his living room wall.

Jimmy went on to become a safety consultant for the offshore industry.

In his spare time, he created a prison re-entry program called Phoenix Ministries.

It helped former Angola inmates transition back into society.

Inside the prison, word got around of Jimmy's success on the outside.

Angola's former warden, Daryl Van Noy, talked about Jimmy's transformation at a conference put on by the American Correctional Association.

So, after speaking with Jimmy, I reached out to Daryl.

It turned out the two of them had known each other for almost 50 years.

Daryl was a young prison guard at Angola when Jimmy first showed up in the mid-70s.

When Jimmy got there, he continued to live that criminal life.

When he was young, he was a real deal.

He was a real gangster, you know, he was a real outlaw.

But Van Noy had watched Jimmy rehabilitate himself.

When he got out, the two of them stayed in touch and they eventually became friends.

He's my friend.

Yeah, I consider him a friend.

After he discharged, you know, he never returned to prison, never violated again, and he put his life a crime behind him.

And I would welcome him as my neighbor.

Yeah, you would, huh?

Yeah.

If he moved in next door, I'd be proud to have him for a neighbor.

Jimmy Cox retired in 2020.

He lives with his fiancée and three dogs in Lafayette, Lafayette, Louisiana.

But when I spoke to him last, he was unwinding in a state park not far away.

I was telling someone the other day that I've come full circle.

I got out of prison right there, and now I'm within 20 miles of the prison, and I'm enjoying life laying up in a state park in a $40,000 camper.

Got a beautiful lady.

I mean, it's full circle, you know, Jed.

If you have information, story tips, or feedback you'd like to share with the Gone South team, please email us at gonesouthpodcast at gmail.com.

That's gone southpodcast at gmail.com.

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-Kaiser, Tom Lipinski, Lloyd Lockridge, and me.

Our story editors are Maddie Sprung-Kaiser and Tom Lipinski.

Gone South is edited, mixed, and mastered by Chris Basil and Andy Jaskiewicz.

Production support from Ian Mont and Sean Cherry.

Special thanks to J.D.

Crowley, Leah Rhys-Dennis, Maura Curran, Josefina Francis, Kurt Courtney, and Hilary Schuff.

If you want to hear more of Gone South, please take a few seconds to rate and review the show.

It really helps.

For full episodes, follow Gone South, an Odyssey original podcast available now on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts.

We hope you guys have a great week and we'll see you next week.

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