Standing Tall and Speaking Out

Erwin Jackson recalls the approach he took 10 years ago in teaching, as a volunteer instructor, a business class at Florida State University made up of students pursuing master’s degrees in business administration.

“I said to the class, ‘I assume you are all here to get rich,’ and everyone said yes, they were,” Jackson said.

Hearing that, Jackson, who earned a doctorate in counseling psychology at FSU, told the students that it is important to have goals but pressed them for specifics.

“When will you know you are rich?” he’d asked.

One student equated being rich with earning a million dollars. Another said he would want to have sufficient millions such that the annual interest on his money would total a million bucks.

Then, as Jackson anticipated would happen, a “wise guy kid in the back” asked him what he considered rich to be.

“When I can tell anyone I want to kiss my ass and I can easily live with the consequences, that’s rich,” Jackson readily replied. “So, I’m pretty rich.”

He did add, in the course of a recent interview, one exception.

“I would bite my tongue if I were speaking to the IRS during an audit,” he said.

Jackson grew up on a farm outside Decatur, Illinois. He recalls arriving in Tallahassee to check out the doctoral program he would later complete. It was, per The 5th Dimension, the Age of Aquarius, the moon was in the Seventh House and Jupiter had aligned with Mars.

Streaking was a thing.

Photo by The Workmans

The visiting Jackson, wandering about campus, joined a group of students assembled on Langford Green near Doak Campbell Stadium. It wasn’t clear to him what was going on, but he was assured, “They’ll be coming out in just a minute.”

“They” proved to be members of the FSU Flying Circus. They dashed onto the green and offered the informal crowd an impromptu performance. Juggling clubs filled the air. Women were passed between men. All were naked.

They weren’t Jackson’s only reason for choosing FSU and Tallahassee. Nor did they discourage him. He has never left.

Jackson would practice as a psychologist for 20 years while acquiring rental properties and eventually campgrounds. As a new Tallahassee resident unable to find a place to rent, he scraped up enough money to buy a small house. And so his career as a collector of real estate began.

Today, he collects rents each month from some 500 students and between 500 and 700 campers.

“I don’t have just four contracts,” he said. “I don’t have just one business. That gives me a lot of flexibility, and it makes it easier for me to speak out than it is for many others.”

Jackson has been smelling rats and blowing whistles and serving as an FBI informant since 2010. He has exposed unethical conduct, bidding irregularities and self-enrichment schemes involving more than a handful of public officials.

So dogged has he been in those pursuits that the FBI once undertook an investigation of him.

“The FBI told me they were going to know everything about me,” Jackson recalled. “They wanted to discover what my motivations were. Was there a business deal that had gone badly for me? They figured there had to be a reason.

“Yes, there is a reason, and that is that I don’t like it when people steal from the public and me, in particular, and from the college students who I collect rent from.”

Indeed, Jackson and area FBI agents have gotten to know each other well. Always, he is amused by the manner in which agents deal with sources. Never do they direct him to do anything.

“What they do say is, ‘It would be interesting if someone would ask this and this and then if they were to say this and this, a good follow-up question might be this.’” Jackson explained.

Agents may choose to speak metaphorically by referring, for example, to the “fruit of the poisonous tree” when an initial crime enables the perpetrator to acquire additional rounds of ill-gotten gains.

By way of a hypothetical, Jackson said an individual might steal funds from a government agency with which he starts a successful business. Law enforcement might then seek to redress the theft (the tree) and seize the business’s assets (the fruit).

↗ Erwin Jackson has been smelling rats and blowing whistles and serving as an FBI informant since 2010, when John Marks was Tallahassee’s mayor. He has exposed unethical conduct, bidding irregularities and self-enrichment schemes involving more than a handful of city officials.

Jackson, who bills himself as the “Tallahassee Truth Teller” on his Facebook page, was a highly interested observer last spring when former mayor Andrew Gillum stood trial on public corruption charges and a charge of lying to the FBI. The jury acquitted him of the latter charge and was unable to reach a verdict on the corruption charges, which were later dismissed.

He had a hard time reconciling the results of the trial with the fact that Gillum, in 2019, paid $5,000 to settle an ethics complaint filed by Jackson. But the psychologist was not without a theory.

“The jury was made up of citizens of Tallahassee,” he said. “This was a local mayor who did a lot of favors for a lot of people. Jurors may have thought he lied, but they were unwilling to convict him of a crime because he is a politician and that’s what some politicians do.” (Or the jury could have found there was insufficient evidence to convict.)

Jackson had been disappointed before.

You win some, you lose some. Jackson never expected to bat 1.000. He doesn’t do what he does so that he can put notches in a gun.

Rather, he has worked to create a climate in which public officials will watch themselves. In that, he believes he has succeeded, at least for now.

“It could last 10 years and then go back in the other direction,” Jackson said. “We have to stay after them. But for the moment, they have a conscience they didn’t use to have. I don’t minimize what it takes to stand up and speak out, but it’s worthwhile and it makes for a better Tallahassee.”