BILOXI – (AP) Mike Gillich Jr., a former Biloxi striptease lounge owner who helped plot the 1987 Dixie Mafia murders of a judge and the judge’s wife, has died.
Bradford O’Keefe Funeral Homes in Biloxi confirmed Gillich’s death. His funeral service will be private, said funeral director Whitney Lang.
Gillich died Saturday, April 28 of cancer, Gulfport attorney Chet Nicholson told The Sun-Herald, which reported he was 82.
“Although he did some things in his lifetime that I know he later came to regret, he experienced a religious conversion later in life,” Nicholson told the newspaper. “While nobody can know what is in the heart of another person, I hope that he was sincere and that he is in a better place.”
Gillich was convicted in 1991 of conspiring to kill Circuit Court Judge Vincent Sherry and his wife, former Biloxi councilwoman Margaret Sherry.
He, John Ransom, Kirksey McCord Nix Jr. – a Dixie Mafia figure who was serving life in a Louisiana prison during the plotting – and Nix’s girlfriend, Sheri LaRa Sharpe, were convicted in 1991 on a federal conspiracy charge.
Gillich turned government witness after being caught in taped telephone conversations urging his girlfriend, Frances Salisbury, to pay a trial witness to change his testimony.
Both Gillich and Salisbury were charged with bribery of a witness. Federal prosecutors dropped those charges and Gillich was the chief prosecution witness when Sherry’s former law partner, former Biloxi Mayor Pete Halat, and three others were convicted in 1997.
Gillich said he and Nix arranged the murders because of missing profits from a prison scam run by Nix. Halat had accused Vincent Sherry of taking the money and also offered to pay half of $20,000 of the hit man costs, Gillich testified.
He gave numerous details about the crime, including that he bought the bullets at K-Mart.
Gillich was released from prison in July 2000, after serving nine years of a 20-year sentence.
After convictions in both Sherry trials, Nix was transferred to a maximum-security federal prison in Florence, Colo.
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