“I’m not big on talking,” he responded.Īt the time, one of the old hoodlums from his era, a safe-cracker named Daniel Warren, had driven down to Molena, a small town an hour south of Atlanta, and committed a double shotgun murder during a robbery. In 2001, I wrote to Birt, trying to interview him about the Dixie Mafia. Aging Dixie Mafia criminals whom I contacted years ago denied the existence of such an organization, calling it a tale dreamed up by law enforcement.īut the region where they operated was so corrupt that Floyd Hoard, the crusading prosecutor of Jackson County, was blown up in 1967 by dynamite planted in his car outside his home. The “Dixie Mafia” had no real hierarchy like the Mob it was a loose configuration of thugs and ne’er-do-wells who carved out their illicit niches and banded together when crimes needed committing. “It was a natural progression from moonshining to drugs,” Webb said. Northeast Georgia became a haven for chop shops, robbing crews and safe-crackers and, of course, drug trafficking. “But the government cut into their business,” Webb said, explaining that moonshine business dried up when northeast Georgia counties went wet. Instead, he drove fast cars and delivered the product to retailers. Birt didn’t brew moonshine that was hard work. It was born from extreme poverty (a familiar theme), where desperate folk brewed moonshine to eke out a living. The so-called Dixie Mafia is a crime wave from another place, another time. “What are you talking about?” Birt responded, annoyed. The family could give the man a decent burial, they said. Once, Webb and other lawmen tried to prevail on Birt to give up the location of one of his victims’ bodies. Some of them liked to kill, but not like Billy. “I worked the Mob most of my career in the FBI, but he was the worst I’ve seen he was a true sociopath, no remorse,” Webb told me. Retired FBI agent Ronnie Webb, who worked for the GBI in the early 1970s, solved a couple of murder cases connected to Birt. The one surviving member of the murder crew, now 81 and still in prison, ‘fessed up. Even though he was sent to prison for life in 1974 and hanged himself in 2017, his wake still ripples.Įarlier this year, while researching his book, Shane Birt and retired GBI agent Bob Ingram, who put his dad in prison, connected Billy Sunday Birt and three others to a 1972 triple murder of a North Carolina car dealer, his wife and son. Mention of his name instilled terror and silence in the 1960s and early 1970s. Birt, considered Georgia’s most prolific killer, was a real-life boogeyman.
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