For 60 years, SC lawman hunted KKK, killers, smugglers and conmen. He’s not done yet

For 60 years, cops have told stories about Pete Logan.

They’ve talked about his Ku Klux Klan informants, his work on President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 assassination and his investigations into South Carolina kingpin drug smugglers, murders and white collar crime.

To them, Logan, a former FBI agent now with the State Law Enforcement Division, sets the standard.

A prosecutor told an Upstate judge in open court last month how “my friend, Pete Logan, a legend in South Carolina law enforcement,” taught him to consider everything before recommending a punishment.

“He said, ‘As a prosecutor, as a law enforcement officer, you have to be the fairest juror a person will ever have,’” top state Attorney General prosecutor Creighton Waters told Judge Mark Hayes.

That’s how Waters came to realize that a two-year prison sentence for Kevin Marsh, the former CEO of the now-defunct utility company SCANA whose criminal acts helped destroy one of the state’s largest and most successful businesses — was appropriate. Two years might not have seemed like enough to most people, Waters told the judge, but Marsh had also paid a $5 million fine, turned informant and a permissive act of the S.C. Legislature had caused him to think it was OK to drive his company into the dirt.

Told about Waters’ comments, Logan, 86, chuckled.

“Every attorney I’ve ever run into, I’ve told them the same stories,” said Logan, who is attached to a team of SLED investigators for the state grand jury in the Attorney General’s office. That includes the one about being “the fairest juror,” he said.

At a June retirement party for Logan, some 70 well-wishers showed up.

“It’s been a wonderful ride, and I’ve loved every minute of it,” Logan said. “I love the job, and I love the people who I work with, more than you will ever know.”

Logan’s ‘lucky’ trek with the FBI

Logan was supposed to be a doctor.

Born in Upstate New York, Logan’s parents operated a funeral home in a small town, and his mother was also a nurse. His father died when he was 3 years old. At Norwich University, a Vermont military college, Logan made honor society, was a student leader and majored in biology to become a doctor.

He didn’t go into medicine, but he kept a piece of advice from his biology professor that helped define his career.

“If you are truthful about everything and honest and straightforward, you will do fine. Don’t worry about grades. Just do what you think is right,’” Logan recalled. “That impressed me more than anything else.”

Logan graduated from college in 1958 and spent three years in the U.S. Army, much of it in Germany as an artillery officer. Afterward, he applied to the Secret Service, the CIA and the FBI.

He chose the FBI — an outfit molded by its later-controversial director, J. Edgar Hoover — “because it was the first one that contacted me,” he said, recalling the dark suits, white shirts, snap brim hats, low-key ties and black wing-tip shoes agents had to wear.

It was at the FBI, in his first year no less, when Logan first had his big break in a missing persons case in Virginia.

Despite that an exhaustive search had already been done and an East Coast manhunt was underway, Logan and another agent were told to again search for two missing young girls in a large, deserted apartment complex near where they lived. As they searched apartments, Logan discovered a bathroom door locked from the inside.

“I knocked and heard a little whimpering,” Logan said. “Two little girls were in there. They were scared to death.”

How had Logan found them when others had previously searched the building?

“I was lucky,” he said.

The story made major news in area papers. The rest is history.

People like to talk, and ‘I like to listen’

Stories about Logan abound.

They come from his 26-year career with the FBI, where with hundreds of other agents in 1963 he worked Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, and later in the 1960s when he hunted KKK members who killed civil rights workers in Mississippi.

They also come from his time with the FBI in South Carolina, when in the 1980s Logan and other agents worked Operation Jackpot, nabbing some 100 major marijuana smugglers. And the stories stem from getting murderers to confess, and his role in setting up the state grand jury system that today tackles high-profile corruption and financial crimes cases.

Logan has an almost psychic ability to get people to confess, say the people who know him.

There’s nothing psychic about it, Logan said.

“People like to talk about themselves,” he added, “and I like to listen.”

State Attorney General Alan Wilson said as a young lawyer when he first arrived at the Attorney General’s office, people told him, “don’t look Pete in the eyes because you will start to confess to something.”

“He’s like a vampire” they said, Wilson recalled. “You just look at him and start talking.”

When now-current Chester County Sheriff Max Dorsey was a young SLED agent, he and another agent tried but failed to get a suspected drug dealer to confess. Logan — a polygrapher who estimates he’s done “a couple of thousand” lie detector tests in his career — asked the man to undergo a polygraph test and hooked him up.

Dorsey, outside the room, listened in.

He heard Logan gently tell the man the polygraph results.

“You know, you didn’t do so hot. I think you got something on your mind that you want to tell me,” he said.

The man began to cry. He confessed everything, Dorsey said.

“That (people crying) happened a lot,” said Logan, who said that the saddest confessions were always the low-paid bank tellers who’d been stealing a few dollars here and there from the till and would weep when they finally confessed. “A lot of people want to tell the truth, but they just don’t know how.”

Logan’s most legendary confession came from one of South Carolina’s most legendary cases.

Susan Smith was a young mother, who in 1994 killed her two young children by sinking her car with them in it in a Union County pond. For nine days, she lied to law enforcement, spinning a tale that a Black man had stolen her car and kidnapped her children. No one knew where the bodies were, and law enforcement officers were failing to get a confession.

It was Logan and another officer who broke Smith.

“It took days for him to get Smith to tell the truth,” said retired longtime SLED Chief Robert Stewart, 76. “He would go back and spend several hours each day with her.”

It also took a bit of luck, Logan said.

A maintenance worker tipped Logan that a traffic light couldn’t have worked the way Smith claimed. Logan told her to go home, write down what happened and come back the next day. The next day, Logan told her the traffic light couldn’t have worked the way she said.

“It’s time you told us,” Logan said he told Smith. “And she fell on her knees and started crying. ... We tried to calm her down, she was just hysterically crying.”

It’s that skill that’s resulted in a nickname for Logan some use: “the surgeon.”

“He would open you up and get the truth,” Stewart said. “He was smooth, not rude, not aggressive. There was just something about him, kind of grandfatherly.”

Logan said that in interviews, he stays courteous and tries to understand his subject’s point of view. His interviews rarely go less than two hours and can go four or five hours.

Joe McCulloch, a Columbia attorney who heads the South Carolina Innocence Project — a group that investigates mistakes made by prosecutors and police that lead to wrongful incarcerations — called Logan’s reputation “impeccable.”

Years ago, two FBI agents, not including Logan, visited McCulloch’s office. They accused the attorney of leaking confidential information to WIS-TV and demanded he take a polygraph test. McCulloch said he’d take the test, but only if Logan administered it and only if then-Lexington County Sheriff Jimmy Metts took the test first.

Metts never took the test. Neither did McCulloch.

McCulloch said he wouldn’t have minded being polygraphed if it were done by Logan.

“I had nothing to fear,” he said, “and I have the highest respect for Pete Logan.”

‘His middle name is integrity’

After the FBI, Logan joined the State Law Enforcement Division in 1987, South Carolina’s top law enforcement agency.

The late SLED Chief J.P. Strom assigned Logan to the new state grand jury operation. Unlike a traditional county grand jury with limited powers, the new statewide grand jury had wide jurisdiction and subpoena powers to call witnesses and subpoena bank and other records anywhere in the state..

Cameron McGowan Currie, the state grand jury’s first prosecutor, asked for Logan to be assigned to the state grand jury.

A former federal prosecutor and magistrate judge, Currie knew Logan from his FBI days. She also knew a state grand jury needed a topnotch investigator to make it function.

“There was only one agent I was willing to risk my career on, and that was Pete Logan,” said Currie, now a U.S. District judge based in Columbia. “Pete had the respect of law enforcement officers, the FBI, SLED, judges, prosecutors and the defense bar.”

Logan became the go-between for prosecutors and investigators making state grand jury cases. He organized what was going to be presented to grand jurors and made sure narcotics agents kept proper records, Currie said.

“For it to work, we had to have somebody who was above reproach, who was respected by everybody, and that somebody was Pete Logan,” Currie said.

At its beginning, the state grand jury could only investigate drug and pornography cases.

Because of its initial successes, the Legislature over time passed laws giving it power to prosecute numerous crimes, including public corruption, criminal gangs, human trafficking, environmental and computer crimes, election fraud and money laundering.

It was with the state grand jury Logan worked cases such as the 2000s Home Gold case — the largest white collar criminal scandal in South Carolina at the time — and the investigation of former Lt. Gov. Ken Ard.

In Home Gold, some 12,000 people lost all or part of their life savings in Upstate investor fraud scheme. Seven Home Gold officials went to prison.

And Ard used $75,000 worth of campaign money for personal expenses. He resigned his office in 2015 in a plea deal in which he was spared prison.

Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott, who has known Logan more than 30 years, called Logan “the ultimate professional.”

“From the way he dresses, his demeanor, his investigative skills,” Lott added. “He doesn’t do things halfway. He’s going to do the right thing all the time, and his middle name is integrity.”

Federal Judge Sherri Lydon keeps a card in her wallet Logan gave her in 2003 when she began leading prosecutions in state grand jury cases.

“Making a mockery of justice is a dangerous thing to do,” the card reads in part. “If ‘winning’ is more than justice, we are on a treacherous road. Justice for all is still a goal for which we should continue to strive. It is essential to our survival as a democratic republic.”

Police officers aren’t known for handing out cards stating justice’s ideals, said Lydon, a former U.S. attorney for South Carolina.

“Pete was the only one,” she said.

In 2011, when Mark Keel became SLED’s new chief, he decided to keep Logan on staff.

Logan was 76 years old.

“He had more experience than I had, and he’d worked all kinds of cases in his career,” Keel said. “For me, he’s been somebody I could count on as SLED chief, somebody to whom I could always go to and get good advice. When it comes to confidence among politicians and legislators, if Pete was involved in it, then they had confidence in our investigation. That’s big, to have somebody with that kind of reputation.”

Logan’s love of the job

No one knows Logan better than his wife of 51 years, Fairey Belle.

Their first date never happened because Logan stood her up, needing to dash off to a bank robbery in Charleston.

On vacations, Logan’s known to find someone to chat with almost anywhere.

“Pete would talk to anybody and everybody. We’d be sitting on chairs down by the water and say, ‘Look at Pete talking to that stranger. He’s being interrogated by Pete, and he doesn’t even know it,” she said. “He’d come back with all kinds of information about the guy. We’d say, ‘How do you know that?’ He’d say, ‘Just in conversation.’”

She continued, “everything they say about him, it’s true.”

His commitment to the job hasn’t changed.

Logan said he stayed an agent as long as he did because he likes people and likes to see them open up.

“That’s my nature,” he said. “You have to get people to trust you, and to have confidence in what you tell them. Believe it or not, a lot of people who commit crimes like to get it off their chests. I’ve had guys who were in prison call me and say, ‘Pete, I appreciate you getting the truth out of me, and I’m going to correct my life.’ Whether or not they do is another matter.”

Ironically, Logan said, “If I can show somebody didn’t commit a crime, I enjoy that as much as I do getting a confession.”

Last June at Logan’s retirement party, his well-wishers gifted him an oil portrait of Logan in his younger days.

“I never looked that good,” Logan protested.

It was vintage Logan.

Some in the crowd joked the celebration was “another Pete Logan fake retirement.”

After all, Logan is said to have retired at least a half-dozen times. Once, he was even given the state’s highest citizen award for lifetime achievement, the Order of the Palmetto, by Gov. Henry McMaster. That was nearly four years ago.

As for retiring this time, by August Logan was back at the state grand jury, following up on some voter fraud cases.

Logan said retirement is looming. For real this time, he said.

“I’ll work through December,” he told The State last week. “I’ll have everything finished. If Chief Keel doesn’t make me stay, I’ll be gone.”

He’s welcome to stay, Keel said.

“As long as Pete Logan wants to work, I’m going to keep him working.”

This story was originally published November 14, 2021 at 5:00 AM.