Who is FBI Agent Tom Ross?

[Warwick Hayes]

by James Ring Adams
THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR July 1996

Why is this Hot Springs G-man antsy about Jerry Parks?

Questions about the death of Luther Gerald Parks seem to have
touched a raw nerve somewhere in the federal government. Parks,
readers will remember, was the owner of a firm providing security
and janitorial services in downtown Little Rock; he was gunned down
in an unsolved homicide in September 1993 (see "Jerry Parks and the
Teachers' Pensions," TAS, June 1996).

This wouldn't seem like a national story were it not for two things.
First, Parks provided security for the Clinton-Core campaign's
national headquarters in 1992 and appears to have had repeated
dealings with Clinton's inner circle. And second, recent efforts by
TAS to research his background have drawn a strange response
from a noteworthy agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

In working on last month's story, a TAS researcher requested the file
on Parks at the Arkansas Board of Private Investigators and Private
Security Agencies. The next day, our researcher was visited at home
by Agent Tom Ross of the FBI's Hot Springs office. Ross tried to
interrogate our researcher's wife and two sons, one of whom is
severely handicapped. Without mentioning Parks, Ross said he was
looking into "obstruction of justice." He left after our researcher
referred him to his family attorney. The next day, however, says our
researcher, Ross showed up at the community college attended by
his son and called him out of class, flashing his badge at the teacher.
Ross wanted to know if the student, aged 22,worked in his father's
private detective agency.

This wasn't the first time Tom Ross had dogged our researcher. A
year earlier our man had made some inquiries about Parks for
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, a reporter for London's Sunday Telegraph.
Within a week, Ross showed up at our researcher's home, along with
a second agent from the Hot Springs office. Their ostensible concern
was Guatemala. Although our man had once been posted with the
U.S. military in Central America, he had worked in an entirely different
country. The two FBI men asked him to take a polygraph, but they
went away after he referred them to his lawyer.

Our researcher says modestly he "doesn't know what to make" of
these visits, but it surely looks to us like a pattern of harassment. Our
interest in the Parks case was aroused last month by new evidence
of his political clout; Parks's company was able to dip into the
Teachers Retirement System for a loan backed by the Small Business
Administration. But that was economics. Now we have the menacing
figure of an FBI agent showing inordinate curiosity about our look into
a matter of state jurisdiction.

What is it about the deceased that makes him so interesting? The
answer might lie in the coincidence of Ross's first visit with the work
of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. The British-born Evans-Pritchard has a
flair for sensational aspects of the Whitewater affair that scare away
most American journalists. He has won the confidence of sources,
like Bill Clinton's former girlfriend Sally Perdue, whom apparent
Clinton agents have forcefully attempted to dissuade from speaking
out.

Evans-Pritchard has also become the confidant of Jerry Parks'
widow, Jane. Mrs. Parks, 42, is suffering from advanced multiple
sclerosis, and her son Gary says she no longer feels strong enough to
give interviews. So her talks with Evans-Pritchard in early 1994 stand
as the definitive account of her family's dealings with the Clintons. As
Evans-Pritchard reported in the Sunday Telegraph on July 17, 1994,
those dealings began when she worked as manager of an apartment
complex in Little Rock called Vantage Point. For a time in the summer
of 1984, the corporate suite B107, next to her office, was occupied by
then-Governor Bill Clinton's younger brother Roger. A would-be rock
musician and playboy, Roger was at the time a raging drug abuser,
and Mrs. Parks could hear him and his guests clearly through the thin
wall. In fact she and her staff sometimes had to tell him to be quiet
when tenants complained about the noise.

A frequent visitor to that apartment, Mrs. Parks told Evans-Pritchard,
was Governor Clinton himself She said she could distinguish the two
brothers' voices as they chatted about the quality of the marijuana
she said they were smoking. She said she also heard them talking
about cocaine in a way that made her believe they were passing it
back and forth. After Roger moved out, she said she found drug
paraphernalia in the kitchen and traces of cocaine on the furniture.
But what bothered her most, she told Evans-Pritchard, 44 were the
young girls going in and out of there." She said she believed the girls
shared drugs and sex with both the Clinton brothers.

Later that year, Roger Clinton was arrested on drug charges, and
cooperated in a subsequent investigation that brought down a circle
of prominent Little Rock bond dealers and Clinton campaign
contributors. When the arrcst became public, Governor Bill Clinton
called a press conference to say that the bust had saved his brother's
life.

When Jane Parks told her husband what she was hearing, he began
to worry about her. Jerry, a former Little Rock police officer, was
then branch manager of a private security firm, and he began to keep
his own eye on Roger Clinton's apartment. Mrs. Parks told
Evans-Pritchard that her husband kept a handwritten log of the
visitors until the day Roger moved out. She said they kept the notes in
a file in their bedroom dresser, where it lay without incident over the
next few years.

The Parkses began to move up in the world. In 1986, Jerry launched
his own business, American Contract Services (ACS), in a 50-50
partnership with another licensed private detective, John D. McIntire.
In 1989, the partners received a $47,000 SBA-backed loan. But the
partnership didn't work out. The Parkses accused McIntire of
misusing company money. According to their son Gary, they cashed
in their IRAs in 1990 to raise the money to buy out McIntire.

Then, in September 1990, a dark shadow fell over the company. A
woman formerly employed as an ACS security guard, Margie
Thompson, was taken from her home in Jacksonville, Arkansas,
driven to an isolated gravel road by the city's water works, and
dragged to death behind a car. For a time, reporters thought the case
was the work of a serial killer then terrorizing the area. (Jacksonville
is a surprisingly cosmopolitan city of 28,000 just a 20minute drive
northeast of Little Rock, and is home to the Little Rock Air Force
Base.) But Jacksonville police say they apprehended a suspect in the
other murders, leaving the Thompson case unsolved. In late 1991,
their investigation shifted to Margie Thompson's former employers
Jerry Parks and John McIntire.

In September 1991, McIntire wrote a letter to the Arkansas State
Police charging that unnamed officials in his former company were
involved in Thompson's death. Sgt. Bill Eddins, administrator of the
Board of Private Investigators, launched an intense investigation of
ACS. Parks responded by producing a letter, said to have been written
by Margie Thompson a month before her death, that accused McIntire
of sexual harassment. Eventually, the state police found no evidence
against either McIntire or Parks, and closed the case in February
1992. No action was taken against the firm.

But the bad blood between the men soon spilled over to Pulaski
County Chancery Court, where McIntire sued Parks, who responded
by counter-suing. The two agreed to a settlement by July, just as a
major opportunity fell into Parks's lap. American Contract Services
held the security and janitorial contract for the Little Rock building
that came to house the national Clinton-Gore campaign headquarters.
Toward the end of the campaign, ACS replaced Pinkerton as security
for the campaign offices themselves. It might seem strange that a
company in so much turmoil could win such a sensitive contract, but
Parks had two advantages. One, the lurid suspicions in the Margie
Thompson case weren't widely known, and, two, he was a personal
acquaintance of leading figures in the Clinton campaign. David
Watkins, chief administrator at campaign headquarters, lived near
Parks. Watkins later sold his house to Lee Bowman, the
brother-in-law of Vincent Foster, and Parks and Bowman became
friendly, Bowman told TAS that on first meeting him, Parks reminded
Bowman that he had provided security for Bowman after a fire at
Bowman's house. Bowman didn't remember hiring him, but later
realized that the security had been arranged by his brother-in-law,
Vince Foster.

In spite of these connections, however, Parks ran into an unexpected
problem: he couldn't get paid. According to his son Gary, he had
assigned four full-time employees to the headquarters and had to
meet their payroll. Through early 1993 repeated calls to the White
House failed to get results. Gary told The American Spectator that his
father spoke first to Margaret Jane (Dee Dee) Myers and toward the
end to Betsey Wright, formerly Governor Clinton's chief of staff and by
this time a Washington lobbyist and Clinton troubleshooter. "I
specifically remember him talking about how much of a bitch Betsey
Wright was," Gary said. (The two women did not return phone calls.)

Parks finally received payment, a check for $83,000, just two days
after the death of Vincent Foster. (Gary said that agents from the
Independent Counsel's office interviewed him about rumors that his
father had flown to Washington the day of Foster's death, but that he
was able to produce an American Express receipt showing that he
and his father had been together in Little Rock that day.)

Yet somehow, in the course of Parks's collection efforts, things took
a sinister turn, and his wife's mid-eighties file on Roger Clinton's
apartment came back into play. Mrs. Parks told the Sunday
Telegraph's Evans-Pritchard that just days after the payment finally
came through, the handwritten log was stolen from their bedroom
dresser in a burglary in which nothing else was taken. Soon after,
Jerry Parks was deeply shaken by two phone calls. "He took a pistol
with him everywhere," Mrs. Parks told Evans-Pritchard, "even to
collect the post from the end of the driveway." This state of nerves
persisted to his day of death, two months later.

This strange story has received little circulation in the United States,
even though Evans-Pritchard vouches for Mrs. Parks's sober
reputation. Since she has never talked as freely to American
reporters, the U.S. press has largely ignored the case.
Evans-Pritchard's work might even have been forgotten-if not for the
intervention of FBI agent Tom Ross.

Ross made his first contact with the TAS researcher on April l0, 1995,
not long after our man had had a long discussion with Sgt. Eddins of
the Board of Private Investigators. Ross and his colleague Floyd
Hayes, also of the FBI Hot Springs office never mentioned Parks,
leaving our man mystified about the point of the call. (Two months
later, Sgt. Eddins died in a violent accident on Little Rock's main
highway, Route 630, when his state government car swerved under a
tractor-trailer. The official report said he was intoxicated, but his
family maintains he had become a teetotaler. The Parks connection
re-emerged this May, when our researcher paid another visit to the
Board of Private Investigators. Ross came calling two days later,
apparently renewing his inquiries of the previous April. The
coincidence was too obvious to miss.

Perhaps what's most remarkable about Ross's apparent interest in
TAS's researcher is that he's no ordinary FBI agent; along with his
colleague Floyd Hayes, he raises eyebrows in law enforcement
circles throughout the state. The two men have held long-time
positions in the Hot Springs office, even though the FBI usually rotates
its field agents frequently. (Hot Springs is the home town of Bill
Clinton.)

Even more curiously, Ross and Hayes have been connected to several
sensitive cases, each time playing a role that is hard to define. One
such case is the joint federal-state investigation of drug-money
laundering at Mena, Arkansas, which closed down with a curious lack
of indictments in 1985. The two principal investigators, IRS criminal
agent William C. Duncan and Arkansas state policeman Russell
Franklin Welch, later gave sworn depositions to the state attorney
general, describing the ambiguous role Ross played as the FBI agent
assigned to the joint investigation. "Usually when Russell and I were
going to conduct some credible interviews," Duncan said, "Tom Ross,
from the Hot Springs FBI office, would suddenly appear on the scene."
It was never clear why the Hot Springs office even handled the case,
since Mena lies in the jurisdiction of the FBI's Fort Smith office. It
appears the two FBI outposts communicated very little. Welch, the
state policeman, testified that an FBI agent from Fort Smith even
asked him once for an informal briefing on the investigation.

Two years after the Mena investigation closed down, Welch had
further reason to wonder about the role of the Hot Springs agents.
Barry Seal, the drug smuggler at the heart of the Mena investigation,
had been convicted and put in a halfway house in Baton Rouge,
Louisiana, where he was later assassinated by a team of Colombian
hit men. A new group with C-130 transports had started using Mena.
Welch testified that Ross and Hayes "showed up one Friday afternoon
and asked to have coffee with me." At the coffee shop, they told
Welch that a friend of theirs at the Hot Springs airport who was with
the CIA had relayed a message to them from a current CIA employee
in Miami: "And the Miami agent told the Hot Springs Airport contact
that they had something going on at the Mena Airport involving
Southern Air Transport .... And they didn't want us to screw it up like
we had the last one."

Welch said he wasn't sure if he were being asked to investigate the
goings on or to stay away. When he asked Ross and Hayes, he said,
"They said they didn't know." Welch added: "Later on, when they
were asked about that conversation, they both denied it."

One could surmise that in the Parks and Mena cases, the role of Ross
and Hayes was to keep people from finding things out. But it is not
clear who they work for, or why. The office of Independent Counsel
Kenneth Starr grows positively testy when asked about Parks, saying
that it won't comment on a current investigation. But it makes clear it
is not using the Hot Springs FBI office for field work. We reached Tom
Ross at the Hot Springs number and asked about his visits. He took
our home number and disconnected. He called back a short time
later. "I'm not in a position to make any comments," he drawled.
"You know that. I won't make a comment about anything."

We can't say yet why Parks is suddenly such a hot-button topic for
the government. But someone up there is feeling a twinge along the
synapses, and the reflex reaction has our interest piqued.