Rex Armistead

In 1976, Armistead became director of the Organized Crime Strike Force in New Orleans, Louisiana.[3] In an interview, he characterized the Dixie mafia as more ruthless than Cosa Nostra: "There wasn't a well from Mississippi to West Texas that didn't have a dead body floating in it. The big difference was the lack of ceremony. It was just 'I'm going to get rid of Ambrose today; I don't need permission; and I go out and do it.' As simple as that. And that's the end of Ambrose. It hasn't changed much either.".[10]

On leaving the police, in the late 1970s, Armistead ran a non-profit crime-fighting organisation[11] called the Regional Organized Crime Information Center in Memphis, which received a $2.3 million-a-year grant from the Law Enforcement Assistance Agency to help local police and prosecutors track the movements of habitual felony offenders across state lines.[3] Former Memphis police director E. Winslow 'Buddy' Chapman has said that he never found evidence of what the center did; Justice Department accounting officials have said records of Armistead's grant proposal and other documents no longer exist. The ACLU raised concerns that the center was spying on private citizens.[3]

He later became a private detective "specialized in political dirty tricks on behalf of Republican candidates".[9] Most notably he was involved in the smearing in 1983 of Democratic Party gubernatorial candidate Bill Allain, having fostered rumors that Allain had had sexual relations with three transvestites,[3][12] a plot eventually uncovered by ABC's 20/20 program.[9] Allain went on to win the election anyway by defeating Republican nominee Leon Bramlett. Armistead was hired to investigate (and solve) the organized crime-related murders of Biloxi judge Vince Sherry and his wife (and former city councillor) Margaret.[13]

Armistead was funded by Scaife to investigate rumors of Bill Clinton's involvement in helping cocaine runners in rural Arkansas.[15] The substance of the allegation was that Clinton had turned a blind eye to cocaine smugglers operating out of an airport in Mena, Arkansas, because a wealthy campaign contributor was said to profit from the illicit activity, and also because proceeds from the smuggling were allegedly funding a covert CIA operation.[8] These rumors had originated earlier in the decade with talk radio shows in Arkansas funded by the conservative Citizens for Honest Government organization associated with the Virginia evangelist Jerry Falwell.[16] This organisation had also been involved in payments to witness in the Troopergate affair. Armistead travelled across North and South America purportedly gaining information, which he supplied to the House Banking Committee. Three federal investigations found that these allegations had no basis whatsoever.[8]

Under questioning, Armistead also misled Federal Drug Enforcement Administration officers twice about the source of his funds (which was Scaife), claiming alternately funding from the Republican National Convention (who later denied all contact) and from the House Banking Committee.[8] David Runkel, House Banking Committee spokesman, admitted that they had met with Armistead on a number of occasions, but denied he was a primary source for allegations that they were investigating.[17] Armistead's report also formed the basis for articles in the American Spectator.

Armistead also investigated allegations that Bill Clinton had once used cocaine himself, providing material for R. Emmett Tyrrell, editor of the American Spectator, who published the (unsupported) allegations just before the 1996 presidential election.[11]

On July 20, 1993, in Fort Marcy Park, Virginia, Vince Foster, a deputy White House Counsel during Clinton's first presidential term, was found with a gunshot to the head, a day after contacting his doctor to get treatment for depression. Several official investigations concluded unequivocally that the death was a suicide. However, as he was a law partner and friend of Hillary Rodham Clinton, it was alleged by a number of anti-Clinton conspiracy theorists that his knowledge of the Clintons' financial affairs (which the Whitewater theorists claimed would reveal their illegal dealings) had led them to have him killed. Former conservative journalist David Brock recalled being summoned to a meeting with Armistead in Miami, at an airport hotel. Armistead laid out an elaborate "Vince Foster murder scenario," Brock said – a scenario that he found "implausible".[14]

Armistead was also found to have been spying on CNN journalist John Camp, after Camp had reported that the cocaine ring allegations against Clinton were groundless.[17] The results of his efforts, a dossier containing information on Camp's private life and that of two of his family members, were passed to the Senate House banking committee.[17][18] This was not the first time Armistead had spied on journalists; as part of his work for the Sovereignty Commission he had placed television news commentator Howard K. Smith under surveillance.[5]

Salon reporters also discovered that Armistead had met several times with the head of the Starr investigation team in Little Rock, Arkansas, Hickman Ewing; some of these meetings were attended by federal agents, who have confirmed them. Ewing's association with Armistead went back to the 1970s, when they had known each other and worked together when Ewing was a federal prosecutor in Memphis and Armistead headed a nonprofit crime-fighting organization there.[11]

When former military intelligence specialist turned progressive writer Steve Kangas committed suicide less than sixty feet from Richard Scaife's office in February 1999, Scaife hired Armistead, along with Richard Gazarik, a reporter from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review (a newspaper owned by Scaife), to investigate the circumstances of Kangas' death.[19] Kangas had been critical of Scaife on online forums including Kangas' own website Liberal Resurgent. He had accused Scaife of being head of a vast right-wing conspiracy, and of persecuting Bill Clinton, whom Kangas considered to be a moderate Republican.[20] Kangas was found with a pistol and forty-eight rounds of ammunition. Armistead and Gazarik were investigating whether Kangas had been out to kill Scaife.[20] They spoke to his family, reviewed his Internet postings, and checked both his apartment and place of employment. It has subsequently been claimed that Scaife's use of Armistead and Gazarik has fuelled conspiracy theories about Kangas' death.[19][21]

In 2002, Armistead lost a libel case against the Mississippi journalist Bill Minor. In a 1998 regular "Eyes on Mississippi" column, Minor referred to Armistead's "odoriferous background in Mississippi, ranging all the way from head-bashing of black civil rights workers to concocting a bizarre homosexual scandal in an attempt to defeat a gubernatorial candidate." The column was ruled by an 8-0 decision to be "substantially true". This case was heard on appeal because a lower court had ruled that Armistead was "libel-proof, meaning that his reputation was so bad that defamatory statements could not hurt him [any] more", a decision overturned by the appellate judge.[12]