The real man that the character of Sheriff Ed Earl Dodd is based on.
T.J. "Jim" Flourney, was elected sheriff of Fayette County in 1946 after being the chief deputy sheriff for former sheriff Will Lossein (who had a good relationship with Miss Jessie).
He had a direct line put in at the Chicken Ranch to make nightly calls in order to see if there was any suspicious behavior going on there that day. (This was in the tradition of Lossein's nightly visits to do the same)
Physically assaulted Marvin Zindler when he came to do a follow-up story in 1974, ripping off his toupee and breaking 2 ribs. Zindler sued for $3 million and they settled out of court. The townspeople raised a good deal of money for Flournoy's defense.
Flournoy resigned from office in 1980 due to the amount of publicty the Chicken Ranch story recieved (his wife was sick of hearing about it) and died in October of 1982.
Marvin Zindler writes about his confrontation with Flournoy in 1974:Eighteen months after the Chicken
Ranch closed, I went to La Grange to show that the business economy
didn't suffer from the closing of the Chicken Ranch. But I never got to
do that story. The sheriff broke my rib, ripped the film out of the
camera, exposed it to the sun, but didn't know to destroy the audio
track....
..."He began immediately to yell obscenities at Marvin and he began to
punch Marvin," said Mark Vela, a former assistant DA. "He grabbed him
and was beating his head up against the car door, the window. I was
sitting in the back seat. At that point he grabbed (Marvin's)
hairpiece. He was in a rage! (He) began waving the hairpiece around and
threw it out in the middle of the street."
Houston attorney Richard "Racehorse" Haynes defended Sheriff Flournoy after I sued the sheriff.
Marvin discussed the case with Haynes years later. "Racehorse, you
represented Sheriff Flournoy back then, almost 25 years ago when he
broke my ribs."
"Well, now, you said he broke my ribs and you sued him. I'll assume he broke your ribs," allowed Haynes.
"Well, ok. I sued him. Was he upset with me?" "Marvin, he not only was
upset with you, he was disturbed about it," recalled Haynes. "And I
don't know if you knew this, but Sheriff Flournoy was a long-time law
enforcement officer. You worked with him before. He knew you, you knew
him. I don't know if you knew, though, he had seven notches on his
pistol handle. And they were real notches, not put there just to ensure
the grip, but they were there because he had dispatched seven citizens
on the other end of that revolver. And here you are joining issues
against him in his own venue by taking videotape of his courthouse.
So& Plus, add that to what you'd already done to him by terminating
a long-established best little whorehouse in Texas. "
We settled out of court and I donated the money to charity.
From the 1973
Texas Monthly article
"Closing Down La Grange" :
Old
Jim Flournoy looks like he leapt full-bodied from one of Bobby Seale's nightmare
visions of a county sheriff, a pot-bellied, gun-totin', hulking incarnation of
Frontier Justice. Slow-talking, in keeping with his thought patterns, Big Jim's
style of dealing with the world is based largely on Threat, and is generally
successful. His brother Mike, who is the sheriff over in Wharton County, has a
reputation for carrying out his threats, but big Jim's never gone overboard with
that sort of thing.
Like
his predecessors, Big Jim was easily accommodated to the existence of the
Chicken Ranch. Back in 1958 he'd even had a Hot Line installed to connect the
Ranch and the Sheriff's Office, and he's one of the biggest defenders of its
operations. "It's nevrah caused no trouble round here," he says, "no
fights or dope or nothin. I ain't i nevrah got no complaints."...
...He
goes on to tell you about the $10,000 that Edna contributed to the Hospital
Building Fund, her other munificences, the economic benefits to the community,
the low rate of venereal disease afforded by having county-inspected hookers on
hand. As Larry Conners puts it, "He makes that whorehouse sound like a damn
non-profit county recreational facility."
Most
of Big Jim's arguments are pretty specious as well. His figures on rapes, VD,
pregnancies and dope (all of which he says there are none of, excepting for
niggers) are all bogus, and the $10,000 bequest about equals the annual take on
the jukebox. As for the local impact, one local shopkeeper easily dismissed
that: "They only got a payroll of a dozen out that. Now how much money you
figure a dozen whores're gonna spend in this town?"
