Sergeant Smack, page 13
Ike assured the agent that he would tell just Jack and brother Edward and nobody else about the $50,000 “fee” for doing business. Hart had no problem with that.
During the next several weeks, Hart called Ike to check on his progress in raising the money, Ike told him that he and Jack had their portion of the money, but his brother Edward, whom Ike asked to contribute, had reservations about the deal. Edward doubted that Hart had the power to take care of the case so that everybody charged could walk.
On October 8, Ike had the first of several meetings with Hart at the Drop-In Inn on Clove Road in Staten Island. Hart thought Ike would bring the money, but Ike disappointed him again. They continued to talk on the phone, sometimes twice a day. Hart was showing remarkable patience, but he kept sounding like a broken record. “You’re running late, Ike. You better get the money.”
On November 3, Ike was in a New York court, attending one of several hearings at which Howard Diller, his lawyer, was trying to suppress evidence in the case before it went to trial. When the court recessed, Ike and Hart met in the latrine. The broken record asked: “ Do you have the money?”
“Yes, I have it in my hotel room,” Ike said.
“Bring it to the Drop-In (Inn),” Hart ordered. But Ike failed to show again. The next day at the courthouse, Hart asked Ike why he didn’t show up with the money. “I was sleepy,” Ike said. Again Hart told Ike to show up at the Drop-In Inn with the money. Hart was exhibiting remarkable patience; his aggressive demands for the money were free of overt threats of violence. Still, Ike knew Hart was a dangerous individual.
Ike showed up, but again, without the money. This time Hart came with Patch. Hart told Ike to get in his car and follow them. They drove about ten miles before stopping at a white brick building on a West Side pier. Ike didn’t know where he was, but he was certain that the agent would not do something stupid and try to physically force him to turn over the money.
Hart and Patch walked over to Ike’s car and told Ike to get out. Patch began searching the car. After a few minutes, he turned to Hart and yelled: “I may have something here.” Hart ordered Ike to put his hands on the building and stay put while they examined what Patch had found.
“Did you bug the car?” Hart snapped.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Ike said.
A device stuck in the car’s lighter is what had caught Patch’s attention, but after examining it more closely, the agents concluded it was not a bugging device.
Frustrated by Ike’s stonewalling, Hart yelled at Ike: “We’re tired of the runaround. You got the money in the hotel room?”
Ike looked at red-faced Hart and said: “Right.”
“Then we are going to get it now!”
“Can’t you wait until tomorrow night to pick it up,” Ike had the temerity to ask.
Fatty and Skinny looked at each other in disbelief. Hart yelled: ”Hell, no! We will get it now!”
The three men in their two cars drove back to the Americana Hotel where Ike and Jack were sharing a room. While Patch and Hart waited in the car, Ike went to his room to get the money.
Jack was lying in bed, relaxing. Ike explained what happened and said he was going to give the agents the money. “Do what you think is best,” Jack advised.
Ike went back outside and gave the agents $20,000.
“Get the rest of the money as fast as you can,” Patch ordered. “I’ll be calling you.” Hart informed Ike that the amount of money he and Jack owed the two agents was now $60,000, not $50,000.
ON NOVEMBER 7TH, Ike was in court again. Hart was there, too, and he told Ike: “I’m working for you. Go see the lawyer about the tax charge. I think you’re going to like it.” To Ike’s surprise, he learned that the court had dropped the very serious trafficking in heroin charges, which had the heavy mandatory penalties, in exchange for Ike and Jack agreeing to plead guilty to the lesser charge of failing to pay a duty on heroin imported into the US—the tax charge to which Hart had alluded.
The deal did sound fishy when reported by the press, but prosecutor Denis Dillon, who had served as the Assistant U.S. District Attorney for the Eastern District since 1966, maintained that Hart had never actively intervened in the negotiations that produced the plea bargain.
More importantly, though, the case against Ike and Jack already had a serious problem. “Clemons was a key witness in the case,” recalled prosecutor Dillon. “I told Dennis Hart that I was putting Ike and his people before the grand jury, and I needed to put Clemons before the grand jury as well because he was the key witness. Hart said: ‘Oh, really?’ He seemed a little surprised and said: ‘I can’t produce Clemons right now, but I can produce him for the trial.’ I said: ’That’s okay. When we get a date for the trial, you got to produce the informant.’ He said: ‘Okay, let me find him.’ Hart called back in a couple of days and said: ‘I can’t find him but give me a few days and I will.’ Another couple of days went by and Hart called again: ‘It’s going to be tough to have Clemons testify. We found him with two bullet holes in his head.’ I said to Hart: ‘That’s kind of redundant. One bullet would have been enough.’ Hart said: ‘I guess we can’t go forward with the case.’ I said: ‘Yeah, we can.’ Hart sounded surprised, but he didn’t object.”
On October 27, Bobby Clemons was found dead in the back seat of a Buick parked in Brooklyn beneath the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Clemons had two bullets in his head and another four in his neck; he had been dead for at least four days. Two NYPD detectives assigned to the Clemons murder investigation came by Dillon’s office. “I told them that Hart told me Clemons had taken two bullets to the head. One of the detectives said that only the murderer could have known how many bullets were in Clemons head. A lot of mystery surrounded Clemons death, but we never suspected Atkinson and Jackson of killing him. The NYPD had Patch and Hart as the prime suspects.”
UNBEKNOWNST TO HART, Ike was fed up with the Fatty and Skinny show and wasn’t going to take it anymore. “During the suppression hearings, Ike had come up to me in the courtroom,” Dillon recalled. “Ike said: ‘Mr. Dillon, we are guilty. I’m not denying that, but Patch and Hart are telling you a story. It hasn’t happened the way they said it did.’ Yeah, yeah, I thought. I was listening to Hart, but I began to have my doubts about him and his investigation.” Being suspicious of Hart and Patch and curious about what happened to Ike’s and Jack’s money and dope, the authorities came to Goldsboro to talk to Ike about it. At first, Ike was reluctant to tell the Feds anything, but finally he did.
In early December, John Thompson, a BNDD agent who had been with the Feds since 1955, made several trips to Goldsboro to interview Atkinson and Jackson and to find out what they knew about Patch and Hart. Ike told the BNDD agent all about the shakedown.
After the plea bargain, Hart continued to call Ike and press him for the money. In early December, Ellis Sutton was staying at Ike’s house, and he suggested that Ike tape record his conversation with Hart. On December 19, Hart called while Ike was in bed with the flu. They had agreed to use the term “information” to refer to money whenever they talked on the phone. The tape recorder was on. Hart told Ike: “You can’t come up with too many more fucking excuses. You ought to have run out of them by now.” They agreed to meet on December 23, but Ike was still not feeling well and he failed to show.
Ike and the BNDD worked out a strategy to bust Hart and Patch. By this time, Hart was no longer a BNDD agent. On December 5th, he quit after two-and-a-half years of service, and moved to Springfield, Illinois, where he became an agent for the Alcohol and Tax Division of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). But Hart still wanted the rest of the $60,000, and to collect it, he arranged a meeting with Ike for December 26.
The BNDD gave Ike about $500 in $1 and $5 bills and wrapped the money in a package to make it look like a substantial amount. The plan—the BNDD would arrest Hart once he picked up the money. Hopefully, Patch would be with him.
Hart did call Ike on December 26. “Look, I’ll tell you what I want you to do,” Hart explained. “You got all the information, right?
“Don’t do no rush job,” Ike protested.
“Well, yeah, a rush job. I’ll tell you what to do. You get all the information, right?”
“Yeah,” Ike replied.
“Okay you hop in the car there, one of those three or four cars sitting out in front of your house. You take a right. You know where the Pure (Oil) truck stop is down there?”
“You mean (the one) right here in Goldsboro?” Ike asked.
“Yes. In about five minutes.”
“God almighty!”
“I just drove here from New York,” Hart retorted.
“Well, you are going to have to hold where you is (sic),” Ike said. “I gotta go pick it up. It won’t take about a minute.”
“Where you gotta go?” Hart asked.
“I got to get it where I got it. It’s in town.”
“Okay, how long are you going to be?”
“Ummm, maybe ten or 15 minutes,” Ike advised.
“I’ll tell you what,” Hart said. “Why don’t you come here and I’ll follow you. You know, that way, I won’t have to come back here or wait.”
“That won’t put you where my stash is, will it?” Ike asked.
“Nah, no,” Hart replied.
“I’ll be down in about five minutes,” Hart said.
Hart came with Patch and they did meet Ike at the Pure Oil truck stop, where the BNDD agents had the rendezvous under surveillance. Patch and Hart were busted and indicted on three counts of bribery and one of conspiracy. Patch was fired from the BNDD after rejecting an offer to resign.
It looked as if the prosecution had a slam duck case, but Patch and Hart hired F. Lee Bailey, one of the country’s best criminal lawyers. Born in 1933, in Waltham, Massachusetts, Bailey was just 38 years old, but already he had made a legal name for himself defending such high-profile defendants as Sam Sheppard and the Boston Strangler. In 1954, Sam Sheppard was found guilty of murdering his wife, Marilyn. Hired by Sam’s brother, Stephen, Bailey successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court that Sheppard had been denied due process. Bailey won a retrial and Sheppard was found not guilty. The Boston Strangler was Albert DeSalvo, and Bailey tried to argue an insanity defense for him, but he was found guilty. Later, Bailey would also defend Patty Hearst and be part of the defense team for O.J. Simpson.
Ike and Jack were two of the 12 witnesses who testified for the prosecution, which was headed by Marvin R. Loewy, an attorney for the organized crime and racketeering section of the U.S. Department of Justice. In cross examination, Bailey got Ike to admit that he was a drug dealer who was smuggling heroin into the U.S. from Thailand, so the jurors would have to weigh the veracity of his testimony against that of two former law enforcement officers. The defense had 10 witnesses, including Patch and Hart, who testified that Ike’s and Jack’s version of events had been fabricated in order to obtain a light sentence on the tax violation charges. Although Ike and Jack had pleaded guilty to the tax violation, they still awaited sentencing.
Hart and Patch were tried twice, and twice Bailey managed to get the judge to declare a mistrial. In the first trial in November 1970, Federal judge Orrin G. Judd refused to accept the jury’s verdict of guilty after a poll of jurors revealed that two of their members were unconvinced of the defendant’s guilt. Bailey had polled the jury of seven women and five men after the foreman qualified the judge’s guilty verdict with a plea of clemency at the close of the seven-day trial. Bailey’s questioning then disclosed that two jurors, a man and a woman, had doubts about the defendants’ guilt, but they agreed to go “along” with the other jurists provided that the verdict included the recommendation for clemency.
When the court questioned the woman juror about her decision, she said: “After I said ‘no’, they get together and explain to me again—not really, (they) forced me, made me say ‘clemency’.”
Bailey then asked: “And those other people explained to you their views and so forth to try to persuade you to find them (Patch and Hart) guilty?”
“They didn’t exactly do this,” the juror revealed.
Bailey pressed: “Were you, in fact, persuaded to change your vote because they all agreed to recommend clemency?”
“That’s right,” the juror acknowledged.
Bailey asked: “If they told you the man would go to jail for years and years, would you have voted guilty?”
The juror said: “ I would have said ‘not guilty.’”
The judge declared a second mistrial in March 1971 when Ike, under intense pressure from Bailey’s questioning, blurted out that he had submitted to a lie detector test. “Ike was an inexperienced witness, and Bailey managed to maneuver him into revealing he had taken a lie detector test,” Dillon recalled. “Bailey then asked the judge to admit the test results into court. Lie detector tests are not very reliable, but the case really started to go downhill from there.”
Judge Judd subsequently ruled that the defense could introduce into the court proceedings the polygraph tests that the witness (Ike) had failed to pass. This was the mistrial that broke the back of the government’s case. On December 7, 1971, on a motion by Loewy, Judge Mark A. Constantino dismissed without comment the charges against Patch and Hart. The Federal government had concluded there was no “realistic possibility” of convicting the two former agents in the pending third trial. Prosecutors knew it would take more than the testimony of two admitted drug traffickers from Thailand to convict two former law enforcement officials from New York City.
“The case got really screwed up,” Dillon conceded. “I did my best to rescue it, but in the end the only thing we could do was ask the court to dismiss all charges against Hart and Patch.” And the murder of Bobby Clemons was never solved. Ironically, while Hart and Patch walked, Ike was in jail and waiting to see if the Appeals Court would overturn his ten-year sentence and $2,500 fine.
Ike as a teenager growing up in Goldsboro.
Ike's military ID card that he used to travel the world.
Ike in the U.S. military–During his 20-year military career, which began in 1942, Ike attained the rank of Master Sergeant and served his country honorably at military bases in the U.S., Europe and Korea.
Ike’s Military Days
Ed Atkinson—Ike’s brother who also served honorably in the U.S. military.
Ike on the move in Europe after he retired from the military in 1962. Ike was living the life of a gambler and hustler until he moved to Bangkok, Thailand, in 1966.
Ike after his retirement in 1962. He is on his way to Madrid to gamble.
Ike arriving in a town in West Germany in mid 1960s after his retirement from the military.
Ike examining a deck of cards in West German apartment after he retired from military.
William Herman “Jack” Jackson, Ike's main partner in crime until Jack was busted in 1972.
Jimmy Smedley, Ike’s buddy who managed Jackson’s American Star Bar in Bangkok and then joined Ike as partner in the Thai heroin trade.
Luchai “Chai” Ruviwat–A Chinese-Thai who was a key associate of Ike, both as a partner in Jack’s American Star Bar in Bangkok and later, after Jack was busted, as Ike’s main source of heroin.
Robert Johnson–Band of Brothers member from Greensboro, North Carolina, whom Ike considered a supreme hustler.
Thomas “Sonny” Southerland–Ike’s friend and band of brothers member who joined Ike on the infamous flight in 1972 from Thailand to the U.S. that led to Ike being branded as the instigator of the heroin-cadaver connection.
Charles Murphy Gillis, an associate of Ike from Goldsboro.
Larry Atkinson–introduced Ike to Frank Lucas. When Ike visited Lucas for the first time, Ike found the ‘American Gangster’ hiding from La Cosa Nostra in the closet.
Jimmy Atkinson, Ike’s nephew and son of Dallas Atkinson.
Chuck Lutz–DEA special agent who spearheaded the investigation of Ike’s drug ring in Thailand.
Scene from inside Jack’s American Star Bar, late 1960s or early 1970s.
Lew Rice—New York-based DEA special agent who investigated Frank Lucas.
Frank Lucas (left) and Jack Toal (right), retired DEA agent, on the set of a History Channel “Mobsters” documentary segment about Lucas.
Ike Atkinson as he looked in the early 1970s during the height of his trafficking activities.
Seymour Air Force Base, located outside Goldsboro, played a role in Ike’s drug trafficking organization.
All that’s left of Neuse Circle, Ike’s old neighborhood in Goldsboro
Ike met New York City drug kingpin Leroy Nicky Barnes in the Marion Federal Penitentiary.
Rudolph Jennings—Ike brought Jennings to Bangkok to stitch the AWOL bags that were used to transport heroin to the U.S.
According to DEA, Frank Matthews, one of the legendary 1970s drug kingpins, bought heroin from Ike, according to DEA.
Ike Atkinson with Tolbert Smith, one of his many lawyers, at Otisville in late 1980s.
Andrew Price (left), brother of William Herman Jackson, and Larry Atkinson (right), Ike’s nephew.
Ike in Bangkok in early 1970s.
