Phenix City: The Town Across the River

Cross the Fourteenth Street Bridge west from Columbus and you are in Alabama. You are in Phenix City. And for most of the nineteen forties and early nineteen fifties, you were stepping into what investigators, journalists, and eventually federal authorities agreed was one of the most comprehensively corrupt municipalities in the United States.

The geography made it easy. Fort Benning was five miles south of Columbus, generating a constant flow of young soldiers with cash and free time, and Georgia had stricter liquor laws than Alabama. Phenix City's Main Street, just over the state line, filled the gap with a thoroughness that attracted organized crime from across the South. At its peak, the city ran gambling operations so dense that slot machines on the Alabama side of the river reportedly outnumbered those in Las Vegas. Brothels operated openly. The local government, elected officials, police, judges, was so thoroughly interlocked with the vice economy that prosecution from within was impossible.

What ended it was a murder. Albert Patterson was a Phenix City attorney who ran for the Alabama Democratic Party nomination for attorney general in nineteen fifty-four on an explicit platform of cleaning up the city. He won the primary. On June eighteenth, nineteen fifty-four, eight days after his primary victory, he was shot and killed outside his law office in a parking lot.

The murder was so brazen that the governor of Alabama declared martial law. The National Guard occupied Phenix City. Within months, the entire city government had been removed from office and the gambling and prostitution operations had been shut down. Patterson's son, John Patterson, won the general election for attorney general and later served as governor of Alabama.

The Phenix City story was considered so extraordinary that a feature film was made about it in nineteen fifty-five. Columbus had watched all of it from across the river.