Whitey Mozingo was no Sunday School teacher, far from it, but he was a good interview — he had an interesting way of putting things.
When I met Mozingo I was a newspaper reporter working on a story about cigarette smuggling. He was in the Wake County Jail awaiting transfer to a federal prison to begin serving a life sentence after pleading guilty to conspiracy to dynamite the home of a district attorney who was after him, the murder of a witness who had turned on him, armed robbery of cigarette smugglers, and conspiracy to obstruct interstate commerce in connection with cigarette hijacking.
In the early 1970’s Mozingo was the head of a gang that hijacked cigarettes being smuggled out of North Carolina, where the tax was only two cents a pack, to high tax northern states, sometimes by the Mafia.
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“You will never find a guy on the street that believes in being a gentleman no more than I do,” Mozingo told me. “I dress thataway and if I tell you I’ll see you tomorrow at 10 o’clock, at five minutes to 10, I’ll be going in your door. I mean, I’ve always lived up to my word. If I say, ‘Pat, I’m going to kick your ass next time I see you,’ next time I run into you, you look for that. Everything I do I try to do in a business way.”
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Mozingo, 45, said he quit school in the eighth grade because he was making so much money working as a lookout for bootleggers.
“My job was to watch the path, me and my dog. You see the liquor still is back here in the woods, I’m watching the path that goes to the liquor still.”
He said he was paid in whiskey, which he sold.
“Saturdays, you know, we’d go into the bank and I’d get my money changed into one dollar bills, you know, so I could sport a roll. Then I got to making so much money, hell, I couldn’t see it. I quit school.”
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Mozingo said he rarely took time off from his “hustle,” which is what he called whatever criminal activity he was pursuing. But he liked to fish and one Saturday, he said, he and a buddy went deep sea fishing. Everybody on the boat put a dollar in the pot as a prize for whoever caught the biggest fish. Mozingo said he caught a big one but not quite big enough. So he dropped lead sinkers down the mouth of his fish — and won. Then he gave his fish to the man he had cheated so when he got home and cut that fish open, cleaned it, he would know that he had been had by Whitey Mozingo.
“Yes, sir, I sneaked the money out of the pot with a hunk of lead.”
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Mozingo said he raised pit bulls, fighting dogs.
He said he named them after outlaws – Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Al Capone.
“Everybody names a dog for some reason, you know, you got a reason for naming ‘Spot,’ he’s got spots on him, that’s the reason you named him ‘Spot.’”
“I gave mine bad names, wanting them to be bad dogs.”
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“A lot of people have asked me why, you know, didn’t I go into business. It’s just one of those things. I guess maybe I got off on the wrong foot. Of course, I’ve seen a hell of a lot of times I could have gotten on the other foot, but things just don’t come fast enough on the other foot.”
Money? I asked.
“Yea. Once you get use to it, Pat, I mean, it’s one of those things. Because if you ever eat ham, ham, ham, damn if you don’t despise fatback.”