Jimmy Merritt ruled by intimidation. He didn’t seek respect, he sought fear, and when he threatened to hurt you, it was not an empty threat. Most of the time he got what he wanted, and sometimes it cost him. He was shot and stabbed more than once. And once someone put enough sodium pentothal in his drink to kill him, but he survived.
Merritt also did three stretches in prison and one in a Springfield, Missouri mental hospital when he was facing eight life sentences but was found not guilty by reason of insanity. When he wasn’t locked away he was a fugitive.
On a Sunday morning almost 15 years ago this ruthless and merciless man went through an astonishing transformation that changed him completely from the hardened criminal he had become. And a decade ago, he told me his story over coffee at Starbucks.
Merritt committed his first major crime—armed robbery—at 14. And at the top of his game, he figures he was making $200,000 a month selling drugs, running girls in strip clubs and massage parlors, most of them prostitutes, committing robberies and related crimes and selling “protection,” often to drug dealers who were making big money.
He proved the adage that there is no honor among thieves. A case in point was his treatment of other drug dealers. His position was that they were making a lot of money and should give some of it to him for protection. When they said they didn’t need his help, he threatened violence. They coughed up the money but got no protection.
It would be fair to say that Merritt, like an Ozarks version of John Gotti (with whom he had some connections), was involved in organized crime. He and his gang traveled all over the United States, Canada and even abroad, leaving in their wake the victims of a variety of scams and thefts.
“Crime pays,” says Merritt, a big man with sandy hair and a disarming smile, “but not in the long run. If it did, I would have kept some of it.”
The fact is, he made it, but because of bad decisions coupled with his own addictions, he lost it. He was addicted to alcohol—scotch and tequila were his favorites—and drugs—including heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine. He was also hooked on gambling and women.
One time he spent a long weekend in a Little Rock gambling house playing poker, dropped $10,000 and ended up in a cab to nowhere in the dead of winter, shoeless and dressed in nothing but his shirtsleeves and pants.
Merritt was bred for crime.
Born at Granite Mountain, surrounded by gallon jugs of moonshine, he made his first trip to prison at age five to visit his father, a “career criminal.” At seven he saw his first murder while sitting in a booth with his father and two other men in a southwest Little Rock restaurant. One of the men pulled a gun and shot to death the man sitting across from him.
“I thought my father was a very cool guy,” Merritt says, recalling a childhood where criminal behavior and violence were the norm. His mother, he said, knew what was going on but felt powerless to do anything about it.
Merritt, the youngest of four boys, began as a petty thief and ultimately made serious lawbreaking his career. He was not the only one. His brother Joe, he says, was one of the nation’s great safecrackers. Joe had been “saved” three years prior to his death from a heart attack.
Jimmy began his life of crime stealing and selling Sunday papers off of doorsteps and boosting merchandise off the back of trucks. He participated in his first robbery at age 14 and made the decision then that he would become the most dangerous and successful criminal he could be—a “gun slinging alpha dog” who gave no quarter.
He went to prison for the first time when he was 20 on an armed robbery charge and returned two more times. His final confinement was the mental hospital. All told, at 53 he has been locked up for 14 years of his life.
Then came the transforming event.
In the early Sunday morning hours of December 20, 2002, Merritt’s 17-year old stepson (Jodie’s other son), Joshua, died from an overdose of methadone and other drugs.
Merritt, who had seen him the day before and was completely thrown, didn’t know where to turn.
“I knew God existed,” Merritt said. “I had cursed him every day of my life, but I had only prayed a few times, and I was at a loss.”
Then he remembered his meeting during the previous week with Wendy Snead an old friend who had been in and out of his life and was perhaps the only person he had ever completely trusted.
“ When I saw her she radiated health,” Merritt said, “It was obvious something major had happened to her. And she had told me about the Assembly of God church in Ferndale and urged me to go.”
As he thought about that in the dark early morning hours, Merritt said, he began to pray. At first he wanted to get revenge on the people who did this to his son and then he thought, “I need to be stronger and a lot smarter than ever before.”
Meanwhile, people were gathering in the living room of his house. At shortly after 7 a.m. Merritt, who had been praying steadily, got the guidance he had sought.
“God told me to take these outlaws to church that Sunday morning, and they didn’t want to go, ” Merritt said.
Summoning the powers of persuasion that had served him well over the years, Merritt insisted, and the guests, grumbling but compliant, piled into their cars and trucks and headed for the Assembly of God Cornerstone Church in Ferndale, Arkansas.
Randy Wood, pastor of Cornerstone, remembered Merritt leading a group of 15 to 20 rough looking characters descending unannounced on his church. Despite their appearance, they were respectful, and almost all of them came forward at Wood’s call during the service to accept Christ as their savior.
Recalling St. Paul’s conversion two thousand years ago, Wood said for Merritt it was “a Damascus road experience.”
For many in that group, including Merritt, it became a life changing experience. This man who had gotten what he wanted by inflicting pain on others or by threatening to inflict pain has become an upstanding citizen and a man of God.
He has had to work at it. For one thing, he entered Teen Challenge in Hot Springs, a Christian discipleship program with a close affiliation to the Assemblies of God Church, to deal with his addictions. Teen Challenge teaches that recovery means abstinence from drugs and that the key to abstinence is a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
Later, as an outpatient at Little Rock’s Serenity Park treatment center in 2003, Merritt got to know Don Blair, president of Serenity Park at that time and founder and Minister of Recovery of “Growing in Grace” (GIG) at St. Andrew’s church.
Like an apostle, Blair a recovering alcoholic, is a “fisher of men” who corrals panhandlers, prisoners, veterans hospital patients and anyone else he thinks might have a problem with drugs and alcohol, and brings them in his van to the Wednesday night meeting he launched with his wife, Donna.
Don told me the other day that Merritt was struggling with some health issues but doing okay. He remains in our prayers.
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