MAYERSVILLE — District Attorney Ricky Smith said it all might have gone differently if the thieves hadn’t gotten greedy.

In a series of night raids last spring, court documents show, Alton Lee and Robert Hals made off with thousands of bushels of feed corn from grain bins in Issaquena County.

“The Great Corn Caper,” Smith called it, saying he believes Lee, 50, of Rolling Fork, and Hals, 43, of Anguilla, might have hit several farms before a chance discovery last spring by Chris Mahalitc, 35, whose family farms land along Mississippi 1.

“We hadn’t moved out any corn all winter,” said Chris’ father, George Mahalitc, 54. “But we were down here starting to plant, and sure enough someone called and wanted corn. I called my son and told him to get the bins ready.”

Strangely, they already were, Chris discovered. The electrical connections were hooked up to power the unloading. He found fresh truck-tire tracks and fresh spilled corn on the ground at the family’s complex of grain bins.

Ordinarily, once bins are filled farmers have no reason to climb to the top and check what’s inside, George Mahalitc said, but that day his son did. He found the level lower than it should have been, and the funnel shape that forms when corn is pulled from the bottom.

Believing three to four truckloads of their corn was missing, the Mahalitcs began calling around to see if any unusual loads had been purchased by nearby grain elevators in Mayersville, Greenville, Hollandale and Valley Park.

Valley Park had purchased some in the last month from Alton Lee, they were told.

Chris Mahalitc called Issaquena Deputy Sheriff Wade Windham and the Mississippi Agriculture and Livestock Theft Bureau and asked them to visit — with a camera.

Two days later, on April 10, both Lee and Hals were arrested and charged with grand larceny. Hals had no record, but Lee had a 2007 conviction for burglary in Mississippi for which he was out on parole, as well as a record in Louisiana.

In the course of the investigation, Hals agreed to cooperate. In a videotaped interview with Smith, DA of the 9th Circuit Court District that comprises Issaquena, Sharkey and Warren counties, Hals said Lee approached him. “He said he just recently got out of prison, he was down and out and needed some money,” Hals said. Lee had a plan but needed a truck.

Hals delivered chicken feed locally and outside the area, as a truck driver for Issaquena County Deputy Sheriff Willie Peterson, who owns a number of tractor-trailers. Drivers usually keep the trucks even when a run is finished, Hals said.

Hals agreed to help Lee, using the truck without Peterson’s knowledge.

Lee, known not to be a local farmer, devised the ruses to make Valley Park employees believe the loads were legitimate. He made a phone call to Valley Park in which he impersonated Peterson verifying a load, Hals said. He claimed a woman decided against raising pigs and was selling her feed corn. He said he was cleaning grain bins.

For one load, Lee told Hals to just make up the name and address of a farmer, supposedly from Anguilla, who was selling corn. Hals scrawled a note on the back of an envelope and signed it, “James Johnson, 1601 Riverbend Road.”

Valley Park’s manager, David Wansley, and its attorney, Bobby Bailess of Vicksburg, declined to comment.

Court documents show that between March 7 and April 7, Valley Park Elevator wrote to Lee seven checks totalling $29,013.50. Hals said Lee gave him $400 in cash after each delivery, saying they were splitting $800. Where the rest went he did not know. “He never gave me anything more,” Hals said.

Lee had no bank accounts to audit, Smith said, and once the checks were cashed the money could not be traced.

Most of the checks were for truckloads far larger than the 950 to 1,000 bushels that George Mahalitc said is normal. Smith said, “They were filling it up all the way to the top until it started falling out” — as Chris Mahalitc discovered.

The trial was set for Jan. 5, but the Mahalitcs learned the day before that Lee and Hals had pleaded guilty. “I’ve never even seen him,” George Mahalitc said of Lee.

“They made him an offer he had difficulty refusing,” said Lee’s lawyer, Al Rhodes, of Jackson.

Lee was also facing grand larceny charges in Sharkey County for the theft of irrigation pipe in December, Hals was going to testify against him in Issaquena, and Smith said Lee was told if he went to trial the DA would seek a conviction on “repeat offender” basis, which would make him ineligible for parole.

Their guilty pleas netted Lee a 10-year prison sentence, with eligibility for parole, and Hals the 128 days he had already served in the county jail. Presiding Judge M. James Chaney also assessed Hals $2,000 in restitution to the Mahalitics — about 10 percent of their estimated loss. Now he is working for a relative and hopes to get back into driving a truck, Smith said. Of Lee, Smith said it’s often pointless to order restitution when a defendant can’t pay it.

George Mahalitc, part of three generations of a family that’s farmed near Mayersville since 1961, said they’ve begun “doing a few things differently” to try to prevent future thefts.

The agriculture bureau never discovered who owned the other loads Lee sold, Smith said, and no other farmers reported losses.

If it weren’t for the overloaded trucks, the Mahalitcs might never have known either.

“It shows the ingenuity of people sometimes and what happens when they get greedy,” Smith said. “If they did not get greedy they might have gotten away with it. Nobody would have thought any different.”

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Contact Pamela Hitchins at phitchins@vicksburgpost.com