Covington Hitman led rampage after Angola pardon
On January 19, 1973, after a storm in Atlanta, Georgia littered Mrs. Rose Thrash’s Lenox Road lawn with tree limbs, she got a call from her neighbor, 14-year-old Steve Gish. Steve said his mom just bought a new gasoline-operated chain saw, and he offered to bring it over and help clear the debris from her yard. Mrs. Thrash agreed, thanking him, and Steve said he would drop by around noon the following day.
However, Steve never arrived. As he and Peter Carr, a 14-year-old friend he recruited to help, walked to Mrs. Thrash’s home, a man in a ski mask stopped them. Pointing a pistol at Steve’s chest, the bandit said, “Okay, man, hand over that saw.”
Mr. and Mrs. Charles Olan Thrash moved back to New Orleans the same day.
Unfortunately, saw theft was the smallest of dozens of crimes law enforcement suspected South Louisiana hitman Charles Thrash of committing after Louisiana Governor Edwin Edwards released him from Louisiana State Penitentiary in Angola.
At dusk, November 20, 1974, hunters discovered what they initially thought was a department store mannequin in a wooded area northeast of Hammond. Bobbye Randall Bond, 27, of Amite, was shot once in the head and once in the chest, days after a New Orleans grand jury subpoenaed her to testify about a narcotics operation extending from New Orleans into Tangipahoa Parish.
Police found her locked car one mile away. They found her car keys near the body. The homicide is still unsolved today. Law enforcement attributed the hit to the “Dixie Mafia.” In 1970s southeast Louisiana, officials understood that to mean “Charlie Thrash.”
Two years before the Bobbye Randall Bond hit, in June 1972, New Orleans police got a call about the body of a 25-year-old man dead from gunshot wounds, his body tossed out on a residential street in Gretna. At 5:45 that morning, Mrs. Irene Cocker, driving her son to school, spotted the corpse of Charles F. Boze, III, in front of 625 Burmaster Street, far from the man’s residence at 3425 Dauphine.
Finding the body face down and his back drenched in blood, Coroner’s Investigator Sam Moran believed someone shot Boze through the heart and abdomen with a small-caliber handgun. He told newspaper reporters that police found no blood on the road or gravel shoulder, suggesting someone killed the man elsewhere and dumped the body in Gretna.
Boze joined the Army with only a Simple Burglary charge on his record and returned to New Orleans in 1970. In April 1971, NOPD busted him for narcotics possession and Contributing to the Delinquency of a Juvenile. However, two months later, Boze took a job on Bourbon Street, and the New Orleans District Attorney dropped both charges.
In June 1971, New Orleans Narcotics Agent Albert Leininger led a seven-month undercover narcotics probe that netted forty-nine alleged associates of organized crime figures in New Orleans, including Boze, who had worked as a Confidential Informer for Leininger. Police charged Boze with Simple Possession and released him.
One year later, a similar sting operation made news in Lafayette, and again, Boze was among those apprehended. A retired investigator who worked the case said that bust got Boze killed, and word-on-the-street said Charlie Thrash did the job.
Two weeks after the Boze hit, NOPD foiled the robbery of a Wells Fargo armored vehicle as the occupants exchanged cash with the Schwegmann’s supermarket at 1325 Annunciation Street. The three bandits, AWOL soldiers from Ft. Leonard Wood, admitted to robbing a similar truck at the Schwegmann’s on Airline Highway of 26,000 dollars one week earlier. That week, police picked up the man who recruited them and planned their first job. NOPD nabbed Charles Thrash as he robbed Camp Street Automotive at the store’s new location on Magazine Street.
In jail, Thrash grinned at his interrogator and asked if NOPD had any leads on Charles Boze’s killer.
In July 1973, the man prosecuting the group picked up in the second Boze sting, Lafayette District Attorney J. Nathan Stansbury, coordinated another series of narcotics raids by Lafayette police, resulting in the arrests of three dozen persons. Besides the narcotics busts, the raids shut down nine gambling operations and three houses of prostitution.
One week after the last arrest, Monday evening, July 23, as Nathan Stansbury drove home from his office, two men in a 1973 Ford Torino 2-door hardtop pulled next to the DA’s car and blasted the driver’s side door with shotgun pellets, shattering the windshield. Stansbury drove over a sidewalk, flattened a newspaper vending machine, and crashed his car into a roadside bush as his attackers sped away.
At the hospital, riddled with glass, the wounded DA described his attackers, and his description matched those provided by a bartender, describing three men who robbed his club two nights earlier: three white men in Afro wigs, wearing brown gloves.
Thursday night, December 14, 1973, Shreveport police found the Afro wigs and gloves, along with two Spanish-made sawed-off 12-gauge shotguns, in the trunk of a newly repainted 1973 Ford Torino 2-door hardtop, reported stolen months earlier in Mobile, Alabama.
Jean Scott, a woman who identified herself as Thrash’s girlfriend, told police Thrash did not steal the Ford Torino. She said Thrash routinely borrowed cars from Bolton Ford locations across the South. The dealers, she claimed, would leave cars for Thrash to use when he came through town. After a job, he ditched the vehicles, allowing the dealer to report the car stolen and collect from the insurance company. She did not explain why Thrash drove the Torino for two months.
Two months earlier, on October 3, 1973, a man wielding a shotgun killed 44-year-old Newspaper Editor Arch B. McKay as he climbed into his Volkswagen parked across the street from his office at the Mobile Press-Register in Mobile, Alabama.
According to an FBI forensics report, the “possibly custom-made” shotgun pellets removed from the journalist’s head “could not be significantly matched with test projectiles from American-made shotguns.” The report said the weapon used was “most likely manufactured overseas.”
The only witness to the murder, Newspaper Artist Peggy Peterson, described McKay’s assailant as a tall, thin white man with reddish hair, carrying an “odd-looking sawed-off shotgun.”