Sergeant Smack, page 16
About four or five months after the trial, Cooper put Jack before a grand jury. “I asked him what happened to the heroin in the hangar,” Cooper recalled. “He looked at me and wouldn’t answer. I threatened him: ‘I’ll hold you in contempt.’ Jackson laughed and said: ‘What are you going to do? Put me in jail.’” A couple of the grand jury members couldn’t help laughing. I think I even smiled.”
The missing shipment was never found and the authorities still have no clue what happened to it. Today, Ike is tight-lipped about the matter, declining to talk because the people who helped with the “disappearance” of the heroin are still alive. “The Feds weren’t as smart as they thought they were,” Ike explained. “Our main man at Lowry Air Force Base was tipped off that the Feds were on to Jack’s shipment. Our people said that somebody was working on the lighting inside the hangar where our heroin was supposed to go. My man could tell that the Feds were fixing the hangar for surveillance. So he had to get the box before it went into the hangar. We got the box out, but there was just a small amount of heroin in it. That’s all I’ll say.”
Cooper would have loved to have made Ike part of the conspiracy, but Ike actually knew nothing about the details of the smuggling operation. “I didn’t give Jack any money for it, and I didn’t know who was involved with him,” Ike recalled. “It was a risky operation. We had never gone that route before, and Jack didn’t really know some of the key people he was working with. But it wasn’t a bad idea because it involved a new way to ship our dope. We worked together, but we didn’t need each other’s approval for individual projects.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Nail in The Coffin
WHEN IKE ATKINSON came to visit Federal Prosecutor Paul Cooper in Denver looking to work out a deal to help his partner, William Herman Jackson, Cooper had already heard the rumor that had been rippling through the law enforcement community. In December 1972, the authorities had diverted a military plane, scheduled to arrive at Dover Air Force Base, to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. The plane carried Ike Atkinson and Thomas Southerland carrying bogus military papers, as well as 64 other passengers and the cadavers of two servicemen killed in Vietnam, which, the authorities suspected, contained heroin. The authorities did not find any heroin in the cadavers, but they believed Ike and Southerland did have the contraband on the plane and somehow had removed it from the cadavers while the plane had a 16 to 24 hour layover at Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu before proceeding to Travis and then to Andrews, having been diverted from its orginal destination of Dover AFB. The traffickers were able to get the contraband off the plane because there was minimal security. Or at least that is the scenario the authorities presented to the press to explain why no heroin was found at Andrews.
“The rumor didn’t surprise me,” Cooper recalled. “I believed it could have happened. The Atkinson-Jackson organization was one of the most innovative drug rings in history. I knew from prosecuting the Denver case that Atkinson and Jackson had many exotic ways of getting dope into the country. I figured using cadavers was just another way they were doing it.”
Fueled by the sensational news reports surrounding the incident at Andrews and the desire to uncover the shocking scheme that allegedly used the dead bodies of brave American soldiers to smuggle narcotics into the U.S., many other journalists and other law enforcement officials came to believe the reports. “Oh yeah, I remember those reports about drug-laden dead bodies,” recalled Haney Howell, who worked for CBS News in the early 1970s and was based in Bangkok. “It happened; CBS did a story about it. The traffickers were well connected and they were moving large quantities of heroin using cadavers and coffins.”
One retired U.S. Air Force colonel recalled a meeting he attended at the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover building in Washington, DC, after the incident at Andrews became public. The theme of the meeting—“Is the Military Airlift Command (MAC) the largest heroin smuggling organization in operation?” “I first heard about the (Andrews Air Force Base) case at that meeting and that is why I knew it did, in fact, happen,” the colonel explained. “The answer that came out of the meeting was ‘No’. MAC was not directly involved with drug trafficking. It was decided that drug cases, like the Andrews one, were rare.”
Michael Marr, the Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Maryland, who was involved with the investigation of the Andrews incident and later prosecuted Southerland, recalled getting a briefing from the BNDD agents assigned to the case. “We were surprised that we didn’t find any heroin when we searched the plane,” Marr recalled. “Later, we came to believe that they (the Atkinson-Jackson ring) had removed the heroin in Hawaii.” Marr characterizes his explanation of what happened to the heroin as a “reasoned assessment,” explaining that “when false documents are involved in a case but no contraband is found, it heightens your awareness and raises the question: Why are the suspects carrying false documents?”
Several leading publications and press agencies, including Time magazine, The Washington Post, the Associated Press, United Press International and the U.S. Armed Forces Stars and Stripes newspaper published unquestioning press reports about the Andrews incident. Without conducting a serious investigation, Time magazine concluded that, while authorities did not find any drugs, “they did discover that one of the two bodies that had undergone autopsy earlier had recently been re-stitched.” The Pacific edition of the Stars and Stripes reported that anonymous officials said, “The heroin is believed to have been sewn inside the bodies of servicemen and in the lining of their caskets in plastic packages from 5 to 25 kilos (31 to 51 pounds).” No explanation was given or any follow up story ever written to explain how this could have possibly happened or if, indeed, it could have happened at all. A July 7, 1973 Washington Post report suggested that the arrests of those responsible for the cadaver connection were “imminent.” But that never happened; no arrests were made; and no retraction or follow up story was ever published.
Even William “Dog” Turner, whom Ike did not meet until his incarceration in the late 1980s at Petersburg Federal Penitentiary, was dragged into the conspiracy. When he was convicted of income tax evasion in 1975, the Associated Press reported that Turner was a man who “Federal authorities said took part in smuggling heroin in the bodies of Vietnam War dead.”
Over the years since December 11, 1972, the date the C-141 was detained at Andrews Air Force Base, sloppy media reporting and conspiracy theorists kept the cadaver-heroin connection story alive. When Ike was tried and convicted in 1976, the press reports mentioned teakwood furniture but not cadavers and coffins as smuggling methods used by Ike to traffic heroin. Former Assistant Attorney Joe Dean, who prosecuted the 1975 Federal case against Ike and several of his associates in North Carolina and Thailand, said that he did not bring up the caver-heroin connection at the trial because there was no evidence it ever existed and to present it would have hurt the prosecution’s case.
But in 1987, when Ike was arrested again for heroin smuggling and doing time in Otisville Federal Penitentiary, the rumor appeared as fact. Ike became the man who, according to a Washington Post press report, was responsible for “masterminding a heroin importation ring that shipped the drugs from Southeast Asia to the United States in dead servicemen’s bodies.”
Since the December 1972 incident at Andrews Air Force Base, the so-called “cadaver-heroin connection” has become the grist of conspiracy theories. After all, what could be more shocking, more criminally innovative and more disgusting than having heroin smuggled via coffins and in the bodies of soldiers who gave their lives for their country? It is remarkable that Hollywood has not made a horror movie called “The Cadaver Connection,” incorporating a ghoulish plot with ghoulish characters.
In 1977, noted investigative journalist Brian Ross did a report for NBC Television about “ The Black Mafia” in which he presented a mystery man who claimed to be a part of the cadaver-heroin connection. Then in the 1980s, the Atkinson-Jackson drug ring was connected to the sensational Jeffrey McDonald murder case in North Carolina in which McDonald, an Army medical army doctor stationed at Fort Bragg, was convicted of murdering his wife and two children. The connection is based on the recollections of a deceased police informant named Helen Stoekley who claimed to have belonged to a cult.
Two retired DEA agents have claimed with authority that the cadaver-heroin connection did, without a doubt, exist. One of them, Dan Addario, has written how he uncovered heroin in the bodies of a dead GI in a Bangkok hospital in the fall of 1974. Mike Levine, the other DEA agent, who has found some fame as an author and radio show host in New York City, claims that the usual suspect, the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), was involved with smuggling heroin in cadavers via Thailand. And in 2004, a man named Bob Kirkconnell claimed in an e-mail to a conspiracy web site that he had first-hand knowledge of the legendary flight that was diverted to Andrews Air Force Base in 1972, or was it 1973?
Like all conspiracy theories, the cadaver-heroin smuggling story has had a viral life of its own. But did it really exist? What truth is there to the story? Let’s go where no journalist has gone before and actually investigate the details of the alleged conspiracy and what it would have taken to make it work.
AS WE READ in the prologue, after Thomas “Sonny” Southerland was arrested at Andrews Air Force Base, he was brought to trial for impersonating a military non commissioned officer. Convinced that the cadavers on the plane carried heroin, the authorities grilled Southerland for hours. “They put me in a room and kept asking me all kinds of questions, trying to break me,” Southerland recalled. “They threatened me by saying I was going to spend 150 years in jail. I told them that I didn’t have anything to do with no (sic) coffins. They didn’t believe me. They kept hammering away. They wanted me to tell them what we (Ike and Sonny) did with the dope.”
After Southerland pleaded guilty to charges of impersonating a military officer, the alleged cadaver-heroin connection played a role in Southerland’s sentencing. “We presented the evidence (in court) about what we knew of the heroin and the cadavers, and the judge was impressed because of the use of military aircraft and the horrendous way the drugs were being smuggled,” Marr explained. “The judge gave Southerland the maximum sentence: four five-year sentences, to be served consecutively.”
Marr still believes that, in the words of Time magazine, “One of the two bodies that had undergone autopsies had recently been re-stitched.” But was it? What really happened when the authorities detained the plane and examined the two bodies?
IN 1971 AND 1972, Howard Wright was the Senior Research Agent in the U.S. Customs office at Wilmington, North Carolina. He was investigating the Atkinson-Jackson drug ring and heard several rumors about how it was using cadavers to smuggle heroin from Vietnam. “I remember going to Goldsboro to check out a funeral home that was supposed to be a part of the alleged conspiracy,” Wright recalled. “But I didn’t find anything. We had to investigate the rumors, of course, but none of them ever panned out.”
On a cold December night in 1972, officials at U.S. Customs headquarters in Washington, DC ordered Wright to come to Andrews Air Force Base for an important meeting. “When I got to Andrews, a pathologist was already present, and he was examining the two cadavers that had been on the plane,” Wright recalled. “Looking at the stitching on the cadavers, you could tell that they had been autopsied. I was there when they opened the bodies and looked inside; we didn’t find any heroin and the pathologist sewed the bodies back up. Nobody at that meeting said anything about how one of the bodies had already been re-stitched. We looked at the coffins as well—picked them up, checked their linings. We even tore the linings open to see if there was any heroin behind them. Nothing about those cadavers or the coffins was out of the normal.”
Wright was not your ordinary observer. He was a licensed mortician who had graduated from a mortuary college in Nashville and knew what he was looking at. He did not see any evidence that either of the bodies had been re-stitched. “The re-stitching would have had to have been exactly right not to notice it, but that’s a difficult thing to do even for a trained pathologist. There was no evidence that the bodies had been tampered with. I didn’t notice anything unusual about the cadavers.”
THE NIXON ADMINISTRATION was upset by the possibility that drug traffickers were using the military system and the bodies of dead GIs from the Vietnam War to smuggle heroin into the U.S., and it put pressure on Ellsworth Bunker, the U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam, to have an investigation conducted into the Andrews incident at his end. Two U.S. Customs agents based in Saigon were sent to the mortuary in Tan Son Nhut Air Force Base near Saigon to check out the story.
Initially, the Tan Son Knut facility was the only mortuary that the U.S. Army used to process the remains of its servicemen killed in Vietnam. The number of fatalities, however, continued to climb, and, by 1967, the Army realized that Tan Son Nhut was inadequate to carry the entire load. So on June 20, 1967, a smaller mortuary was opened at the Da Nang Air Base in the northern part of South Vietnam. The Da Nang mortuary remained open until early 1972 when the U.S. withdrawal from the northern provinces of Vietnam began and the responsibilities and personnel of the Da Nang mortuary were transferred to the Tan Son Nhut facility. By early 1973, increased Viet Cong activity in the Saigon area, together with the drawing down of U.S. forces from Vietnam, led to the closing of the Tan Son Nhut mortuary and its move to Thailand.
“We interviewed several people and took a good look at the (Tan Son Nhut) mortuary,” explained one of the investigating Customs agents. “About 20 people were working there, and they were obviously puzzled by the cadaver-heroin connection rumor. In our report to the ambassador, we concluded that it couldn’t have happened, given the amount of people who would have been involved. Thinking back to our investigation and what we found, the alleged conspiracy really didn’t make any sense.”
The U.S. Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID) conducted its own investigation. In December 1972, Lebert Baxter was on leave vacationing in the U.S. from his dual position as both Base Commander and Head of the Personal Effects Department of the Tan Son Nhut Mortuary. It was Baxter’s second tour of duty at the mortuary. He had served previously from January to December 1969 as operations officer, meaning he was responsible for overseeing the processing and identification all remains of dead U.S. servicemen in Vietnam. Baxter’s leave was well deserved. He had been working twelve-hours days, seven days a week, and slept in his office at the mortuary. The job was his life. Until the call from his superiors, Baxter did not recall any rumors about cadavers and heroin during his two tours. “My men and I were too busy to pay attention to any rumors,” Baxter said.
He had already enjoyed ten of his thirty days of leave when he got the call a few days after Christmas from the Mortuary Affairs head office in Washington, DC. “I was told: ‘You’ve got a problem at Tan Son Nhut,’” Baxter recalled. “’We don’t know what happened and we don’t believe it, but the only way to clear it up is to have an investigation.’ When I returned to Tan Son Nhut on about December 29 or 30 (1972), the situation was quite tense. It was a serious charge that reflected badly on everybody at the mortuary. We realized, though, that the only way to clear it up was to have an investigation. But it was like having to go to court to prove you are innocent because a lot of fuss had been made.”
The CID investigative team spent six weeks at Tan Son Nhut and did an exhaustive investigation. Working around the clock, the investigators talked to everyone possible. “ The investigators might show up at the mortuary at two in the morning, five in the afternoon or nine in the evening,” Baxter recalled. ”They were spot checking, doing a thorough job. They literally looked under every rock.”
Investigative teams were also sent to Okinawa and Kyoto, Japan; Honolulu, Hawaii; Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines; the army fort in Oakland, California; and Dover Air Force Base in Delaware — that is, any location that could possibly be part of a cadaver-heroin smuggling connection. After its investigation, the CID produced a 350-page report that concluded there was no conspiracy to transport heroin via coffins and/or cadavers. To make it work, the report noted, the criminals would have needed at least 250 co-conspirators, given the logistics and the smuggling route that stretched from the outskirts of Saigon to the cities and small towns of America.
“Think about it,” Baxter said. “With so many people needing to be involved, it would have been impossible for everybody to keep their mouth shut. Somebody would have made a mistake. Somebody would have gotten drunk in a bar and said something. Somebody would have spilled the beans to the wrong person. Yet, there is absolutely no evidence that anybody ever used cadavers to ship heroin.”
In the early 1970s, Al Dawson was working in Vietnam as a journalist for the United Press International (UPI), when he got wind of the rumor about the cadaver-heroin connection. Dawson thought he might win the Pulitzer Prize if he could prove the story true. “I investigated but never wrote a word because the story turned out to be just a rumor,” Dawson recalled. “It never happened. It’s like the Lock Ness monster story. It makes for great reading, even if it’s not true. In my selfish way, I wish the story was true. I would have been on the front-page of every newspaper in the world. But today I’m convinced beyond a doubt that it never happened.”
This author’s investigation has not found one instance where someone has been arrested, let alone convicted, for participating in the cadaver-heroin connection. Given what I know about drug trafficking, it is reasonable to assume that some drug trafficker may have tried to use cadavers. After all, they have tried every conceivable smuggling method, from body cavities of living persons to shaving cream cans, and from concrete posts to tanks containing tropical fish. But if it was done on the scale suggested by the sensational media reports, there would be some record or document that provides concrete information about the conspiracy. Yet, there is absolutely no documentation.
