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Larry Langford, puffing on a Salem cigarette, looked around his backyard and then up toward the sky.

Sitting in a screened-in gazebo, Langford knew he would only have a few more opportunities like that at the ranch-style home he has lived in since 1982.

Until October, Langford was the mayor of Birmingham, a flamboyant former television reporter who had become one of the state’s most powerful politicians.

Today, stripped of his office, he will enter a prison about 125 miles east of Lexington, Ky. A federal inmate, he’ll be identified by little more than a number: 27349-001.

It was numbers that destroyed Langford’s career and will, unless his appeal is successful, keep him behind bars for the next 15 years.

In December 2008, a grand jury indicted him on 60 counts, including bribery, money laundering, and conspiracy. The charges stemmed from allegations Langford took $236,000 in bribes from Bill Blount and Al LaPierre to maneuver a bond contract to Blount’s investment company while Langford served as president of the Jefferson County Commission.

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Langford, who said the session was both his last interview and exclusive to The Crimson White, was not accompanied by his attorney.

‘I still can’t believe this has happened’

More than five months after the verdict, Langford said he remains in shock. “I still can’t believe this has happened,” he said.

He said he doesn’t understand how a jury convicted him or why Judge Scott Coogler, who presided over the trial, didn’t dismiss the case outright.

“LaPierre and Blount both said ‘We never talked to this man about anything,’” Langford said. “If I never forget anything else in my life, I will never forget these guys truthfully saying from the stand, ‘We never talked to Langford about this, and there was no quid pro quo.’

“I don’t think it ever should have gone to a jury to begin with. I just knew that the judge was going to throw the case out. Boy, was I wrong,” he added.

However, the testimony of Blount and LaPierre was the centerpiece of the prosecution. “I bribed Larry Langford,” Blount was reported to have said during the trial.

Jim Phillips, the acting U.S. attorney for the Langford case, said, “We and the jury obviously disagree with Mr. Langford’s interpretation of the evidence.”

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Langford said he did not testify in his own defense because he was confident of a forthcoming acquittal. “I didn’t take the stand because the two main witnesses said they didn’t talk to the guy. Otherwise, I would have taken the stand,” he said. “It couldn’t have been any clearer.”

‘The victim of my own government’

For months, Langford has argued that his prosecution was motivated by race and partisan politics.

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To the end, though, Langford remained defiant about his legal problems. “I have unfairly lost my freedom,” he said.

http://cw.ua.edu/2010/04/06/larry-langford-one-last-time/