In 1947 the great dramatists Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill sat down at their respective kitchen tables and each wrote a play called A Streetcar Named Desire. When they compared notes they discovered that not only were their titles identical, so were their plays. They flipped a coin, Williams won, and the O’Neill manuscript was tossed into the fireplace.
On July 7, 1999, the weekly Tri-State Defender in Memphis published an article headlined “Poison in the System.” It was written by a Larry Reeves, and it began:
But “plagiarized” barely hints at Reeves’s performance. John Branston of the Memphis Flyer, another local weekly, put the matter bluntly in a recent column. He called the Defender “a thief,” the Larry Reeves stories “fraud.” A week later Branston reported that a second Tri-State Defender byline, “Reginold Bundy,” was also fraudulent. And he’d located a former managing editor of the Tri-State Defender willing to say that the probable source of the bogus stories was Picou himself.
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My own LexisNexis search found about 140 “Larry Reeves” stories (and 60 “Reginold Bundy” stories) in the Tri-State Defender going back to 1994, when LexisNexis began tracking that newspaper. Branston traced a dozen Tri-State Defender stories to other papers but he didn’t pretend that his list was complete. One story he missed was John Conroy’s. Here’s another that got by him, most likely because the Tri-State Defender carried it without a byline.
Virginia Porter, the paper’s managing editor until she was laid off last year, says Picou, working from Chicago and communicating by phone, was responsible each week for creating pages one and three–the Tri-State Defender’s main news and features pages. When she’d ask about the prolific Larry Reeves, “he never really had a reply, but it was as though it was him.” She said Picou would call from Chicago for local detail–for example “a certain locality in Memphis for the prostitutes”–that would then show up in a story, like Brooks Road did in the tale of Danielle Adair.
The Memphis Flyer’s Branston spotted Harper’s column and followed it up with a couple of his own. Picou told Branston that Reeves was “a white guy, probably about 80 years old now,” who submitted stories electronically, didn’t get paid for them (hence no payroll records), and hadn’t talked to Picou since 1996. Branston said he asked why Reeves would write so prolifically for nothing, and Picou explained, “Some people just like to write.”
Who’s the Defender’s new editor? I asked him then.
