FAMILY SO CROOKED, IT MAKES THE MIND ‘BOGLE’
Generation after generation, clan took pride in relentless spree of scummy, thuggish crimes
The family that preys together, stays together.
That’s the twisted lesson of Fox Butterfield’s “In My Father’s House,” a study of the Bogles, whose cornpone criminality spread out over generations. It’s the kind of clan where Jesse James was considered a hero, and a nice outing meant stealing salmon from the local fish hatchery.
Butterfield previously wrote about African-American criminals in “All God’s Children,” and during the research for that book discovered as few as 10% of families account for two-thirds of all crime. The greatest predictor of whether someone ends up in prison is whether a parent did time.
Later Butterfield was concerned that people might misread the book and simply link criminals and blacks. With “In My Father’s House” he focuses on a white family.
The Bogle clan began in Paris, Texas, with the 1921 marriage of Louis and Elvie, transplants from rural Tennessee. Elvie worked in the five-and-dime. Louis didn’t even have a dime.
So they ran away to join the circus — or, at least, the carnival. Louis did odd jobs; Elvie was the breadwinner, racing a motorcycle up and around high, curved walls for five bucks a week and all the tips she could grab.
At night, the couple slept in railroad cars and drank. Winters, they returned to Texas and slept where they could. Their shocked families shunned them as trash. Meanwhile, Elvie raised five boys, all of whom would grow up to have records. Louis ran stills. He was caught but received a suspended sentence. The prisons were already stuffed with bootleggers. Living outside society, the Bogles took pride in being outlaws. They showed off an old photo of the 19th-century gunfighter John Wesley Hardin, claiming he was a relative. (He wasn’t.) They bragged about the time the gangster Pretty Boy Floyd used their shack as a hideout. When he left, he gave Elvie money to buy her kids shoes.
Those were the first shoes they ever had.
When carny work dried up in the ’30s, Louis got a job in a junkyard. Elvie grifted, mostly faking slip-and-falls. Their growing boys made their own crooked way, hijacking trucks as soon as they could see over the steering wheels.
More cocky than clever, three of the boys once stole a safe. With no idea of how to open it, they cut through the top with a torch, splattering molten metal on the bills. As soon as they started spending the marked money, they were arrested.
Rooster, the spoiled baby of the brood, wound up on probation for that caper. He was later sent to the penitentiary for shoplifting. Released at 19, he married 14-year-old Kathy Curtis. His refusal to get a job drew the unwelcome attention of his parole officer.
So Elvie — the Ma Barker of the family — took charge and announced they were all moving to Oregon, where another ex-con son, Charlie, had become an ironworker.
They settled in Salem. Thirteen days into his job on a mushroom farm, Rooster staged his own slip-and-fall, pocketing $928 from the insurance company.
Later that year, in the spring of 1962, while on a family drive, Elvie told Rooster to sideswipe a passing truck. They then blamed the accident on the trucker, claiming he injured the heavily pregnant Kathy. That scam brought a $10,000 settlement.
Meanwhile, Rooster continued to do everything but work.
He went on welfare. He had more kids with Kathy. He was arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and received a suspended sentence. So he turned around and seduced another girl, Linda White, a 16-year-old migrant worker.
He promised marriage, but instead moved her into his and Kathy’s home. She told the teen she didn’t mind. “That way I’ll see more of Rooster,” she said, “because he won’t be out so much at night chasing after you.”
What had already been chaos soon became hell. When a drunken Rooster wasn’t having sex with the women, sometimes at the same time, he was beating them. And the family kept growing. Linda had two children with him; Kathy, four more. All in all, Rooster sired nine.
Like their uncles, every one would end up with a record.
But what choice did they have? As soon as the boys were 6 or 7, Rooster got them drunk. By the time they were 11 or 12, he took them along when he picked up women, even offering them their turns when he was done.
It was a strange approach to sex ed; then again, what was normal for the Bogle family? When one of Kathy’s sons, Bobby, turned 16, she took him to a strip club. She laughed at his shock when the star turned out to be his sister Melody.
Rooster spent most of his time teaching his boys the one thing he valued: Stealing.
He never bought them toys, but one Christmas gave 4year-old Bobby a wrench. When the boy used it to break into a market and steal a case of Coke, his father cheered. He taught 6-year-old Tony how to steal bikes and where to fence them.
Soon, the children’s crimes outpaced his.
Tony, the oldest, tortured dogs and cats, once setting so many on fire that a nearby field burned. The arrests began when he was 12 and ended a decade later with a murder trial. Tony protested that the victim had tried to rape his wife, and he only choked him after she had already bashed in his skull. He wound up with 26 years to life.
And just like the theft, the violence was passed from generation to generation. Convinced a man cheated him on some shady business deal, Bobby and his kid brother, Tracey, stormed the man’s house. They tied up the man and his girlfriend, then beat them. Tracey tried to force the woman to give him oral sex, but he was too drunk. Finally they stole the woman’s purse, car and some jewelry. They were arrested the next day.
Bobby wound up with 30 years, given that he already had eight felony convictions. Tracey, who had no adult record, came off with a lighter sentence of 16 years, and the lifetime label of registered sex offender. As a result, when he was freed and started a family, Tracey was barred from being around his own baby. Since his release, he’s been back to prison twice.
“We did it all as a family,” Tracey said later, looking back on a childhood of helping their father break into neighbors’ houses, with mom driving the getaway car. “We had pride in our family doing these robberies, so it was fun. We were a crime family.”
The Bogles’ story may be only anecdotal evidence of crime as a hereditary disease, but Butterfield finds other factors. Mental illness certainly ran in the Bogle family. And some scientists have suggested there’s another physical component, a genetic marker that indicates how well we handle stress.
Meanwhile, the book ends with a fourth generation, Ashley, great-granddaughter of Louis and Elvie. She had a few missteps, but nothing criminal. To her credit, she earned an associate’s degree, becoming the first Bogle to graduate college. She’s determined to be the one to finally break the chain.