June 20th, 1987. Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, 10:47 p.m. Judge Vincent Sherry, 60 years old, a former law partner, a man who had shaken hands with governors and sat on the bench of a state court, was watching television in the living room of his home at 335 Hickory Hill Road. His wife, Margaret, 55, was nearby.
They were just two people winding down on a Sunday night. The man who walked through their door that night had been paid to kill them. His name was Pete Halat’s former law partner. His employer was sitting in a maximum security prison cell at Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, 700 m away. And the chain of command connecting that prison cell to that suburban living room in Mississippi, ran through smuggled phones, coded messages, and a decade of cold calculation.
Both Judge Vincent Sherry and Margaret Sherry were shot to death inside their own home. No sign of forced entry. Execution style. The killer was gone before anyone in the neighborhood knew what had happened. This is the story of Kirsy McCord Nicks Jr., a man who ran a criminal empire from inside a prison cell. A man who bribed guards, smuggled communications equipment, and orchestrated murders across state lines without ever setting foot outside a penitentiary.
And this is the story of how a phone call from the deepest corner of Angola prison put two bullets in a sitting judge and his wife because of a debt, a secret, and a betrayal that went back years. Here’s what most people don’t know. By the time those shots were fired in Bay St. Louis, Kirsy Nicks had already been inside Angola for nearly two decades.
He had been convicted of murder. He had been given a life sentence. And from that cell, he had somehow built one of the most sophisticated long-distance criminal operations in American history. The question isn’t just how he did it. The question is who helped him and why they thought they could get away with it.
You have to understand what the Dixie Mafia was. It wasn’t the Italian-American organized crime families of New York and Chicago. There were no initiation rituals, no formal hierarchy, no maidmen in the traditional sense. The Dixie Mafia was a loose confederation of career criminals spread across the Gulf Coast and the Deep South.
Beloxy, Gulfport, New Orleans, Mobile. These were men connected by mutual interest and mutual fear. Burglars, con artists, gamblers, killers for hire. What they lacked in ceremony, they made up for in violence. Kirsy Nicks was born in 1941 in Oklahoma. His father was a criminal. His uncle was a criminal. By the time he was a teenager, he was already running with men who understood that the fastest path to money ran through other people’s fear.
He was not a big man physically, but people who dealt with him remembered his eyes, cold, calculating. He wasn’t the kind of man who lost his temper. He was the kind of man who remembered everything and settled accounts slowly. His early criminal career was a series of escalating felonies, theft, fraud, armed robbery.
By his late 20s, he had been in and out of state institutions, but it was the murder conviction that defined his trajectory. In 1971, Nyx was convicted of the murder of a Houston man named Gene No and sentenced to life in prison. He entered Angola believing, as many men do, that his real life was over. He was wrong. It was just beginning.
Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, sits on 18,000 acres in West Feliciana Parish. They call it the Alcatraz of the South. It has one of the highest concentrations of lifers of any prison in the United States. For most men, a life sentence at Angola means exactly what it sounds like. You go in, you don’t come out. Kirx adapted.
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That is the only word for it. Within a few years inside, he had begun establishing himself as a man of consequence within the walls. He cultivated relationships with guards. He understood the prison economy. He studied how information moved. He paid attention to which inmates had connections to the outside and which of those connections could be purchased.
But here is where his story diverges from any ordinary prison story. Nicks didn’t just survive Angola. He turned it into a base of operations. By the late 1970s, he had established a telephone scam that was generating what investigators later estimated as hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. The operation worked like this. Nix’s associates on the outside, operating primarily in New Orleans and along the Gulf Coast, would identify wealthy gay men through bar circuits and social networks.
These targets were often closeted, often married, often powerful. The associates would establish contact, develop a relationship over weeks or months, and eventually lure the target into a compromising situation or simply fabricate one. Then the blackmail call would come. The caller would claim to be law enforcement or a family member of a minor. The threat was implicit.
Pay or be exposed. The targets paid. They almost always paid because being outed in the deep south in the 1980s carried consequences that went far beyond embarrassment. Careers, marriages, safety. The men being extorted had everything to lose. Nicks coordinated this operation from inside Angola using a combination of inmate messengers, smuggled correspondents, and critically a contraband telephone.
Prison officials later confirmed that Nicks had access to a phone that was moved around the facility to avoid detection. Through that phone, he directed his associates on the outside. He approved targets. He set payment terms. He ordered retribution when things went wrong. But here’s the thing that makes this operation almost incomprehensible in its audacity.
It wasn’t just small-scale blackmail. By the early 1980s, the network had reportedly extorted millions of dollars from dozens of victims across multiple states. Investigators who later pieced it together compared it to a fully functioning criminal enterprise. The kind of thing you’d expect from an organization with offices and employees, not from a man in a prison jumpsuit.
Remember the name Pete Halat? He becomes critical in about five minutes. By the mid 1980s, Nyx had established a direct relationship with a Beloxy attorney named Pete Halat and with Beloxy’s political establishment more broadly. Beloxy in the 1980s was a city with a problem. Or more accurately, Beloxy was a city that had decided its problem was actually an opportunity.
Organized gambling, prostitution, and crime had operated semi-openly in Beloxy for decades. Local law enforcement looked the other way. Local politicians accepted the arrangement. It was a system of mutual accommodation that had survived multiple reform movements because the money was very very good and the people who benefited from it had very very long memories.
Into this environment came Vincent Sherry. Judge Vincent Sherry was a complex figure. He had been a successful attorney. He had political ambitions. He and his wife Margaret had significant real estate holdings and what appeared to be a comfortable established life. What was happening beneath the surface of that life was considerably more complicated.
Investigators later developed evidence that Judge Sherry and his wife had become entangled in the Nyx scam operation. The specifics are disputed, contested, and in some accounts differ significantly depending on whose testimony you rely on. What the evidence indicates is that a significant sum of money, potentially as much as $700,000 or more, that Nyx’s network had extorted was being held or managed in ways that led Nyx to believe he was being cheated.
That belief, whether entirely accurate or not, was a death sentence. Nyx did not confront the Sheries. He did not send a warning. He did not negotiate. He picked up his smuggled phone and he arranged a murder. The man he hired was John Ransom. Ransom was a drifter with a criminal history who had operated on the edges of the Gulf Coast underworld for years.
He was not a sophisticated hitman. He was a man who needed money and was willing to do what was required to get it. On the night of June 20th, 1987, Ransom drove to 335 Hickory Hill Road in Bay St. Louis. He entered the Sherry home. He shot Vincent Sherry multiple times. He shot Margaret Sherry. He left. Margaret Sherry was found alive. She had been shot in the head.
She was transported to a hospital where she died. Vincent Sherry died at the scene. They left behind five children. The investigation that followed was, by any honest assessment, a catastrophe. Local law enforcement in Harrison County initially treated the case as a potential home invasion robbery. The fact that nothing appeared to have been taken should have immediately complicated that theory.
It did not change the pace of the investigation as much as it should have. For more than 2 years, the Sherry murders went unsolved. The case grew cold. People in Beloxy and Bay San Louie assumed it would stay cold. In a city with deep institutional connections to organized crime, the assumption that powerful people would escape accountability was not paranoia.
It was pattern recognition. But the FBI was watching. Beloxy had been for a while. What the federal investigation was beginning to uncover went far beyond the Sherry murders. It was a network of corruption so embedded in Beloxy’s political and legal establishment that it amounted to a systematic capture of local government by criminal interests.
The FBI called the investigation operation pretense and then a related investigation called Gilded Cage. What they found would eventually result in dozens of indictments and would implicate people at every level of Beloxy’s power structure. Pete Halat, the attorney who had maintained a close personal and professional relationship with Kirxes Nicks, was eventually identified as a central figure.
Halat had visited Nyx at Angola. Halat had served as a kind of liaison between Nyx’s prison operation and the outside world. And critically, investigators developed evidence that Halat had knowledge of and involvement in the financial mechanics of Nyx’s scam operation, including what happened to the money.
Halat had also been elected mayor of Beloxy in 1989 while the Sher murder investigation was still technically open. You have to sit with that for a moment. A man with documented ties to a convicted murderer who was orchestrating contract killings from a prison cell was simultaneously serving as the mayor of a Gulf Coast city. He was eventually convicted in federal court.
In 1995, Pete Halat was found guilty of rakateeering, conspiracy, and fraud in connection with the Nick scam operation. He was sentenced to 18 years in federal prison. He served a portion of that sentence before his conviction was appealed on procedural grounds. The legal proceedings that followed were lengthy and complicated.
The core of what investigators had established, his involvement in the Nicks network, remained on the record. Kirsy Nicks himself faced federal charges related to the murder conspiracy and the fraud operation. The prosecution was complicated by the nature of the evidence. Much of what connected Nicks to the Sherry murders came from cooperating witnesses from the testimony of associates who had their own interests in the outcome.
Defense attorneys challenged the credibility of those witnesses. The trials that followed were among the most complex federal prosecutions in Mississippi history. Nyx was ultimately convicted of conspiracy in connection with the Sherry murders. He received an additional life sentence on top of the one he was already serving for the Houston murder.
The practical effect of this on his daily existence inside Angola was approximately nothing. He was already never getting out. John Ransom, the man who pulled the trigger, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death. He sat on Mississippi’s death row for years. But here is the detail that haunts this case above almost anything else.
Kirsy Nicks never had to look at what he had ordered. He was sitting in his cell at Angola when Vincent and Margaret Sherry were killed. He never saw their faces. He never heard the shots. He issued an instruction over a smuggled phone and two people died in their living room. The physical and psychological distance between the person who makes the decision to kill and the actual act of killing is in organized crime considered a feature, not a bug.
The insulation it provides is the whole point of having a hierarchy. Nyx had absorbed this lesson completely. He was in the most technical sense of the word not at the scene. He would spend years arguing variations of that fact in court. It didn’t save him. But it illustrates something fundamental about how men like Kirsy Nicks understand power.
Power is not about being in the room. Power is about being able to decide what happens in the room without being there. The boy that emerged from these prosecutions was different from the boy that had entered them. The informal accommodation between criminal enterprise and political authority that had operated for decades was finally visibly dismantled.
Not without resistance, not without complications. Several convictions were appealed and modified. Several sentences were reduced. The legal process, as it always does, moved slowly and produced results that satisfied almost no one. The Sherry children spent years fighting not just to see their parents’ killers convicted, but to understand the full scope of what had happened and why.
Margaret Sher’s daughter, Vinsher, became a prominent advocate for the case and wrote extensively about the experience of navigating a system that had been corrupted by the very people who were supposed to deliver justice. Five children, two parents killed because a man in a prison cell decided he had been cheated.
What this story reveals about the intersection of organized crime and legal and political authority is not comforting. It is the story of what happens when the people who are supposed to enforce the rules decide that the rules are optional. When a local bar association, a local judiciary, and a local government all operate in proximity to organized crime long enough, the distinction between the institution and the criminal enterprise begins to blur. Beloxy was not unique.
It was an extreme example of something that exists on a spectrum. The Gulf Coast in the 1970s and 80s was a particular environment. gambling, tourism, cash, businesses, seasonal workers. Limited federal oversight in an era before the FBI’s organized crime division had fully turned its attention south.
All of those factors created conditions in which a man like Kirsy Nicks could maintain a functioning criminal network from inside a maximum security prison, funnel money through a network of lawyers and political figures, and order the execution of a sitting judge without anyone in local authority stopping him. It took federal intervention.
It took years and it took a prosecution that the defense fought at every stage. Kirsy Nicks remains in custody. He is now in his early 80s. He has outlived most of the people involved in his prosecution, several of his co-conspirators and both of the people he ordered murdered. He has spent more of his life inside Louisiana and Mississippi’s correctional system than outside it.
He will, by all indication, die inside those walls. Vincent Sherry was 60 years old. Margaret Sherry was 55. They were watching television on a Sunday night. They had five children and a home and a life that whatever its complications and whatever their own entanglements with the world Kirxy Nicks inhabited was violently ended because a man 700 m away picked up a phone.
That phone was smuggled in. It was never supposed to be there. The guards who looked the other way were in their way as responsible for what happened in Bay St. Louis as anyone who held a weapon. Kirsy Nicks understood something that law enforcement spent years catching up to. The walls of a prison are only as strong as the integrity of the people who operate them.
