Story time while waiting for Milton: Coke-convicted lawyer, crooked neighbors, and stolen land

In the early 1980s, my parents were purchasing two plots of land from the son of a former prominent woman that owned half of the city's land and ran cattle all over until her passing. Her son owned several lots of land, the water tower she built was given to the city, and the rest of the land was given to the Baptist Association.
When it came time for us to purchase both lots, the son found out that one of the neighbors had put his well on their property. He told my parents that, because he promised the land to us, he would honor his word, to sell it to us but just let us know. My parents decided to be good neighbors and offer that lot of land to their neighbors, so that they could legally own the land that had their well on it. Now, it probably wouldn't have been a terrible thing not to do this, because by then, city water was available to everyone.
Unfortunately for my parents, the neighbors, who had permission from the seller to use part of the second lot of land, for his garden, and when he found out about the sale to us, he stormed over to the seller, to complain. When that did not work, he got a lawyer and filed a suit against our parents, claiming adverse possession and lied to the lawyer, stating that he'd actually put the cattle fence up that the deceased mother of the seller actually put up long before the neighbor moved in, I believe in the end of the 1940s, maybe 1949.
So, adverse possession is when you DON'T have permission to use a property but you fence it up, in clear view (he did not put the fence up at all) (and in defiance of) and after seven years, you may be able to claim said property as your own. So, you could put a fence up, plant a garden, and call it your own.
Unfortunately, it did not matter what the law stated, because if you can't afford to fight a lawsuit and/or the value of the property isn't worth what the lawsuit would cost, and you can't get assistance for low-income real estate lawyer because you don't live on said property, then you may just have to forego pursuing action to gain said property back.
Also unfortunately, the lawyer my parents hired said that he would need $5,000 to fight the case, when the property value was less than $200, and my parents asked to drop the case. So, his response was to give him $500, sign a statement saying that they're going to let the neighbor borrow the property until they die, and it would come back to us afterward. My parents had no reason to be suspicious of what the lawyer asked them to sign at the time, and somehow, the property got completely turned over to the neighbors.
As far as we know, both the neighbor and us could have hired the same lawyer, and if they would have known all of the stuff being said about this lawyer around town, they probably would have consulted someone else first. He would later be convicted of cocaine-related incidents, where at least 15 other people were indicted. He was sentenced to seven years in prison, albeit I'm not sure if he ever served them or appealed somehow. He was apparently well-known for his cocaine parties.