In the 1960s, as head of the highway patrol, he was sent to work for the Sovereignty Commission,[3] a state body established to develop a legal method of maintaining Mississippi's then racial segregationist laws.
He was selected to investigate the "Dixie Mafia" (a term Armistead apparently coined himself) by the then-Governor John Bell Williams, a Democrat.
[9] On leaving the police, in the late 1970s, Armistead ran a non-profit crime-fighting organisation[10] called the Regional Organized Crime Information Center in Memphis, which received a $2.3 million-a-year grant from the Law Enforcement Assistance Agency to help local police and prosecutors track the movements of habitual felony offenders across state lines.
[2] Former Memphis police director E. Winslow 'Buddy' Chapman has said that he never found evidence of what the center did; Justice Department accounting officials have said records of Armistead's grant proposal and other documents no longer exist.
Armistead was hired to investigate (and solve) the organized crime-related murders of Biloxi judge Vince Sherry and his wife (and former city councillor) Margaret.
[7] Armistead was funded by Scaife to investigate rumors of Bill Clinton's involvement in helping cocaine runners in rural Arkansas.
[7] These rumors had originated earlier in the decade with talk radio shows in Arkansas funded by the conservative Citizens for Honest Government organization associated with the Virginia evangelist Jerry Falwell.
[7] David Runkel, House Banking Committee spokesman, admitted that they had met with Armistead on a number of occasions, but denied he was a primary source for allegations that they were investigating.
[10] On July 20, 1993, in Fort Marcy Park, Virginia, Vince Foster, a deputy White House Counsel during Clinton's first presidential term, was found with a gunshot to the head, a day after contacting his doctor to get treatment for depression.
[16] The results of his efforts, a dossier containing information on Camp's private life and that of two of his family members, were passed to the Senate House banking committee.
[16][17] This was not the first time Armistead had spied on journalists; as part of his work for the Sovereignty Commission he had placed television news commentator Howard K. Smith under surveillance.
[4] Salon reporters also discovered that Armistead had met several times with the head of the Starr investigation team in Little Rock, Arkansas, Hickman Ewing; some of these meetings were attended by federal agents, who have confirmed them.
He had accused Scaife of being head of a vast right-wing conspiracy, and of persecuting Bill Clinton, whom Kangas considered to be a moderate Republican.
This case was heard on appeal because a lower court had ruled that Armistead was "libel-proof, meaning that his reputation was so bad that defamatory statements could not hurt him [any] more", a decision overturned by the appellate judge.