Black Bird: How James Jimmy Keene inmate brought down serial killer Larry Hall

A young football star who ended up on the wrong side of the law has opened up about the sickening moment he came face-to-face with a depraved serial killer as part of a daring, top secret undercover mission that saved countless lives.

A young football star who ended up on the wrong side of the law has opened up about the sickening moment he came face-to-face with a depraved serial killer as part of a daring, top secret undercover mission that saved countless lives.

James “Jimmy” Keene’s incredible life story is portrayed in the award-winning Apple TV+ true crime series Black Bird, featuring stars including Taron Edgerton, Greg Kinnear, Ray Liotta in one of his final roles, Paul Walter Hauser, who won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor – Television Limited Series/Motion Picture for his performance in Black Bird.

Now, the former sports star-turned-prisoner-turned-hero is speaking out about the incredible experience that changed his life, telling news.com.au about the huge personal sacrifice that could have cost him his own life.

Keene had a tough upbringing in the south side of Chicago as the eldest of four children, with the young family forced to rely on his mother’s part-time waitressing salary following his parents’ divorce when he was 10 years old.

His father went on to remarry and start a second family, and money was tight for many years.

“We were dirt poor at that point, not to mention that I’m from the south side of Chicago, which had the highest crime rate in the nation through this era, and when I was growing up it had the highest unemployment rate in the state,” Keene told news.com.au of his early days.

“The options for any kind of success in that place were limited … So where did that lead me?

“We had nothing. I was a decent-looking guy, but that doesn’t really give me automatic privileges.”

Keene eventually got involved in the marijuana business, and by the time he was 17, he was making serious money, deciding to turn down scholarships to universities in other states and instead remain in the Chicago area to attend a junior college while still playing football and wrestling and continuing his business.

“It wasn’t even a conscious thought at that age – if I’m making half a million, a million a year, and eventually way more, why would I walk away from the business when I could just go to college here in Chicago and build up my savings?” he said.

“I went to college … and had a blast and the weed business grew and grew.”

Keene is adamant that he believes in individualism and allowing others to do as they please, although he personally never uses drugs.

“If a person wants to do something, then who am I to tell you no? But I was into my sports, with football, wrestling, martial arts, track and field and hockey keeping me busy all year, so I didn’t want to be smoking weed,” he explained.

Over the years, Keene’s weed business grew, and he eventually became minimally involved in “blow” (cocaine) too – as well as a string of other legal businesses, including a real estate firm, high-end car dealerships, a restaurant and Italian food company and a strip club.

The businesses grew from strength to strength, and he was able to buy a “mansion” at the age of 20 overlooking Lake Michigan, where he hosted epic parties attended by celebrities.

“I was a very entrepreneurial guy, a businessman by nature. I was making millions and millions as a 20-year-old,” he said.

But in the mid-1990s, when he was in his early 30s, things came crashing down when he was finally arrested on hearsay conspiracy charges as part of Operation Snowplow, a major police operation tackling drug offences which resulted in more than 170 arrests.

In the end, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison after two former lifelong friends turned on him, claiming he had sold them drugs – but failing to recall specifics such as quantities and when and where the alleged deals took place.

“The judge had to calm me down four times in my evidentiary trial … I was arguing, saying ‘she the hearsay witness is lying, she can’t remember a single thing – times, dates, places, so called amounts’. But I got railroaded anyway and shafted and sent to prison.

“But I still had four appeal options, and they knew I was probably going to get something reversed back on appeal, get some time knocked off my sentence. They knew I’d find a way to get out of there.”

Then, not too long into his sentence, Keene was approached by Assistant US Attorney Larry Beaumont, who had one hell of an offer for him.

Initially, Keene believed the authorities wanted him to snitch on local gangsters or cartel members – something he refused to ever do.

“I didn’t snitch on nobody, and I could have told on everybody and their brother and never spent a day in jail,” he said.

“I was never going to tell on someone – that’s not the cloth I’m cut from.

“All the mobsters in the Chicago area – the mafia was real, and they were very powerful people, and I was involved with them as a young guy. They loved me, they said ‘Jimmy man, you’re the most stand-up guy we’ve ever seen.”

But the offer being made to Keene was beyond anything he could have imagined – to become an undercover agent, transfer to the Springfield maximum-security prison and befriend notorious serial killer Larry Hall in order to extract a confession out of him – in exchange for having his sentence waived and his record scrubbed clean.

Initially, Keene wanted nothing to do with the bold plan, but was finally convinced after his beloved father had a stroke, and he realised he wanted to be able to spend as much time as possible with him.

“I broke down and cried – this man was superman to me for my whole life, I thought … I have to do something,” he said.

“Unlike [what was shown] in the Black Birdseries, there were no other candidates – Beaumont wanted only me. Beaumont came to me and wholeheartedly wanted me and only me to do this.”

At the time, Hall was preparing to appeal his sentence, and according to Keene, he would have won as there were a string of paperwork mistakes that likely would have seen his sentence overturned.

“There were plenty of technicality issues because the Feds were in such a rush to arrest him they messed up, and he definitely would have had his case overturned,” he said.

Keene recalls being shown a thick accordion file with photograph after photograph of dead and mutilated young girls – Hall’s victims – and being told he was the only one who could help keep the monster behind bars.

“I said, ‘I’m not a serial killer hunter, but how can I help?’” he said.

“Beaumont said ‘If he gets out, he’s going to kill again, and I’ve been watching you for 20 years – you’ve got charisma from the street level to the boardroom unlike anyone I’ve ever seen before, you’re trained in martial arts so you can protect yourself in a dangerous environment, you have an IQ of 168 so it’s hard for people to get something over you, and you’re trained in police counter surveillance. Hell, you’re an outlaw James Bond. You’re the only guy I can think that can do this and I know you can pull this off’.”

Keene said it wasn’t an option to send in undercover FBI agents as their true identities would be obvious within seconds in prison, although they attempted to train him in “FBI 101” in the lead up to his transfer to the new prison where he would come face-to-face with Hall.

However, while Keene wasn’t looking forward to “befriending” the cold-blooded killer, he was confident that if he could pull it off – it would be on his own terms.

“I definitely didn’t want to be in his presence because he repulsed me,” he said.

“But my biggest apprehension was that he was so cagey, so if I said one wrong little word, he would go into his turtle shell and he would never be coming out. My fear was that I had to be so smooth – if he didn’t want anything to do with me, then we were screwed and it would be all over.”

Within his first hour in the prison, Keene spotted Hall and felt himself being drawn to him “like a magnet” as his mind played out different scenarios of how they might meet – and how he could win the murderer’s trust.

In the end, he deliberately bumped shoulders with Hall and apologised, before introducing himself and asking for directions to the library – and throwing in a healthy dose of flattery.

“I slapped him on the arm and said ‘thanks a lot, I appreciate it coming from a cool guy like you’, and he said, ‘you think I’m cool?’” Keene recalls.

“I said, ‘f*ck yeah man, I knew right when I saw you that you were the kind of guy I could relate to’.”

They ended up heading to the library together, and Keene observed Hall pick up a copy of a local paper – a fact he filed away in his mind to use later.

Over time, Keene took Hall under his wing and protected him, which made Hall feel safe and comfortable around him, and they struck up a “friendship”.

“I played buddy with him and protected him in a few situations, and I’d go sit in his cell at night and make small talk, making it seem as if I was interested in him as a friend,” he said.

“But I was laying in my cell one night thinking that this was going nowhere and that I had to speed things up, and it dawned on me that he goes to the library to read that hometown paper.”

It turned out that Keene’s mother grew up in a small town near to Hall’s own hometown, and he decided to use that fact against him via a “slick and smooth way to get him to confess to everything”.

“I came into the library acting like I was pissed off at him, and he said ‘what’s up James?’ I said ‘you know what Larry? I don’t even want to talk to you’. He said ‘what do you mean, I thought you and me were friends’ and I said ‘no, we aren’t friends, friends don’t lie to each other’.

“’You told me you were in here for weapons charges, and my mum said she had been reading the news – the same paper you’re reading right now – and it says you killed all these girls. I don’t want to be friends with someone who lies. I don’t care what you’ve done, I just want you to be honest’.

“He was really scared he’d lose the friendship, and he said ‘James, it’s not like they said – those girls liked me, they wanted to be with me’.

“I said ‘I don’t care about your situation, you had your reasons for doing whatever you did, you don’t have to lie to me, you have to trust me’. And he just started opening up, and telling me a little then, and a lot more later.

“I couldn’t believe he was going into this depth, trying to justify everything. For every girl he killed he said he had a good reason, he said they would meet him in the afterlife and that he had an out of body experience when he met them.

“He spilt his guts, acting like it was all justified. You’ve got to go along with it in that moment, because if you don’t he will shut right up.”

Keene claimed Hall was simply “born evil”, but said he never felt nervous being alone with him.

“Some people are just born evil, they’re just bad seeds, and Larry is one of them. He’s just an evil cat, but when you talk to him, he doesn’t seem that evil until he starts unloading what he’s done and trying to justify it,” he said, adding that then, it becomes “crystal clear that Larry Hall is a killer”.

“That’s what really got me – this guy is nuts, saying things like he will meet the girls in the afterlife, that he did them a favour, that they were destined to be together in the afterlife,” he said.

“Seriously, he killed a 12-year-old girl – many 12-year-old girls – and he thinks it’s justified. “But I had four black belts and had been doing martial arts training since I was five years old. I was a national wrestler … I will kick your ass. If you look at a Van Damme film, I can do all that stuff for real.”

However, he said what did concern him was just how perilous the wider prison was.

“The prison was dangerous – it was something that made me feel on guard every single minute of every single day, because I could be killed at any time – someone could just come up and start stabbing me out of nowhere,” he said.

“In real life it was 1000 times more dangerous [than in Black Bird]. Especially all the crazy deranged killer inmates in Springfield. The walls were constantly closing in all around me, in many different ways, and time was running out. I had to beat Hall’s appeal date without scaring him off or getting killed by the other deranged prisoners.

“That was my big fear, but I was not scared of him [Hall] at all.”

Ultimately, Keene’s countless conversations with Hall weren’t enough to locate the victims’ bodies, as they had been dissolved in an “acid cocktail” and buried within a sprawling woodland area – but his confessions ensured Hall would be locked up for life – and prevented him from claiming any more victims.

“The best we could do was stop him getting out to kill again, and what I succeeded in doing makes me some kind of a hero, it certainly does make me brave, the things I accomplished,” he said.

“Jimmy was supposed to be this bad boy – even though on my [court] forms it said I was nonviolent and that it was a victimless crime – but somehow the bad guy turned his life around.

“Yes, I was a sports and martial arts hero, but I fell.

“This happened to me when I was 33, when I started going down, before having a new beginning like a phoenix … I saved lives, definitely.”

Keene’s sentence was fully commuted with no conditions and his record completely erased, with not even a traffic ticket left after he pulled off the epic feat, leaving prison just 17 months into his 10-year sentence.

“I’m not convicted of anything anymore. It happened, I paid the price and got out completely scot-free. I did a good deed for society. Larry Hall will never, ever be able to kill any other young girls again, and that’s what’s really important, for people to understand my heroism and bravery – at any time I could have said I didn’t want to do this and relied on appeal instead [to get out of jail],” he said.

“The ironic thing is the people who snitched on me were still under house arrest for another eight years with felonies and convictions on their records and years of parole and huge fines. “And I came out with nothing, zero – a totally free man.”

To this day, Keene continues to work with the FBI by providing important information about what makes murderers and serial killers tick.

He has already released his memoirs, In with the Devil: A Fallen Hero, a Serial Killer, and a Dangerous Bargain for Redemption and Black Bird, and also has a new book coming out, The Chicago Phoenix: Jimmy Keene’s Untold Story(details here) as well as a new movie.

He said he was content with what he had achieved.

“The hero of the story stopped this guy from being able to kill other young girls, and that should be the focal point, not that I was involved in drugs,” he said.

He added that he was “elated” that the late, great Ray Liotta had portrayed his father “Big Jim” – a policeman and fireman, who Keene personally witnessed saving countless lives – in Black Bird.

“This man was a hero. I love him endlessly. I learnt more from my dad than I ever did in any college or out on the street, he gave me the best education of my life. He was my best friend,” he said.

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“Having Ray Liotta play my dad was huge. He was a legend. I was elated and I’m very sad he’s since passed away.

“Having him play my dad was an honour of a lifetime and it touched me deeply and I couldn’t have thought of a better person to play dad.”

Black Bird won the Rotten Tomatoes Award for top-rated show of 2022, with Paul Walter Hauser winning the Critic’s Choice Award and Best Supporting Actor – Television Limited Series/Motion Picture at thew Golden Globes for his performance.

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