Sergeant Smack, page 18
Stoekley claimed high-ranking Army officials, including two Fort Bragg generals, were involved in drug trafficking, along with members of the Army’s CID and the Fayetteville (North Carolina) Police Department. Stoekley was aware of Ike’s drug operation and she claimed that, because of corruption, his organization had a high level of protection. She also claimed that many members of Ike’s network were involved in satanic cult activity and they had threatened her with death if she talked. According to proponents of this conspiracy theory, local drug dealers hated McDonald because he was pressing them while in his drug treatment program to name suppliers.
As the conspiracy is spun, Everette Beasley, who served on the Fayetteville Police Department from 1953 to 1973, gave a statement to now-retired FBI agent Ted Gunderson on May 5, 1986, sixteen years after the murder, and nearly three years after Stoekley’s death in January 1983. According to Beasley’s statement, Stoekley made the familiar claim that heroin was being smuggled into the U.S. in the body cavities of dead soldiers being returned by air from Vietnam to the U.S.
Beasley’s statement reads, in part: “Helena told me after the McDonald murders that there were contacts in Vietnam who put the drugs in the GI bodies, in plastic bags after the autopsies were completed. The bodies were sewn up and shipped to Pope Air Base, Fort Bragg, (Seymour) Johnson Air Force Base and other bases which she (Stoekley) did not name.”
“When the bodies arrived in the U.S., they were met by a contact in the United States at one of the military bases, and, after the drugs were removed by this contact, the bodies were sent to their final destination. The person who met the bodies at the respective Air Bases knew which bodies to check, based on a pre-determined code. Although I believe Helena knew their identities, she never gave me this information. Helena told me that people who handled the assignments in Vietnam and those who met the planes in the United States were military personnel. She stated most of the drugs came from Thailand. Helena stated that the drugs and pickups were made at the base at Fort Bragg.”
This unverified informant testimony has passed as “evidence” of the cadaver-heroin connection conspiracy. In reality, the McDonald conspiracy as it relates to the cadaver-heroin connection conspiracy is not true. The cadavers were not shipped to Fort Bragg or any base other than the Dover Air Force Base or Oakland Army Base. And at Dover and Oakland, many people would have been needed to make this conspiracy work, but no contact person who would have had to meet the planes and to help move the bodies to “their final destination” was ever identified or arrested. Moreover, what possible “pre-determined code” would have worked, given the logistics of the alleged cadaver-heroin connection? How could the drugs come from Thailand if the bodies are being shipped directly from Vietnam?
No one has ever stepped forward to support Stoekley’s claims. She died of liver failure in 1983, but not surprisingly, some conspiracy theorists even claim that her death is suspicious. As for Ike having anything to do with a satanic cult, does the man featured in this book sound like he would waste his life worshipping Satan? Besides, there is not one iota of evidence.
MICHAEL LEVINE, A retired DEA agent and author of Deep Cover, a scathing critique of U.S. drug policy, has tried to link the cadaver-heroin connection to the usual suspect—the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Levine claims that the CIA had a “heroin factory” in Chiang Mai, Thailand, which the agency used to produce and then smuggle massive amounts of heroin into the U.S. in the bodies and body bags of GIs killed in Vietnam. Levine claims he has evidence of the scheme but says the U.S. government killed his investigation. He is vague about the details of this sensational charge. When I telephoned Levine and asked him to be a source for this book, he said he was planning to write a book about the alleged cadaver-heroin conspiracy and declined to talk about it. Levine did not respond to my question: Why would the CIA use the cadavers of GIs in Vietnam in a complex scheme to smuggle heroin via Thailand? After all, if the CIA is the so-called “Invisible Government,” whatever has been said about the agency’s competence or lack of it, doesn’t the agency has the means and power to use much easier methods to smuggle heroin if they wanted to do that? Also, why would the CIA do it, where was the heroin going, and to whom was it sold?
Levine has an essay in the book, Into the Buzz Saw, which contains a footnote (USA versus Jackson et. al) that does not include a date or any identifying information. It’s obviously a reference to a court case. When I asked him what the date of the citation was and its significance, Levine said he did not know the date for sure but thought it was 1970 or ’71. Levine claimed that one of the informants he handled, while working undercover in Bangkok, made a “full statement” implicating William Herman Jackson in the trafficking of heroin in cadavers, and this “explosive” information came out in that court case. Jackson was in court in 1970 and 1971, defending himself in the New York City heroin case and testifying in the Patch-Hart alleged corruption case. They were the only court cases in which Jackson was involved during those two years. A thorough perusal of the transcripts of those court cases found no mention of the cadaver-heroin conspiracy, a fact confirmed by Dennis Dillon, the New York City prosecutor in the Patch-Hart case.
BUT WHAT ABOUT Dan Addario, another retired DEA agent, the one who had been head of the DEA office in Bangkok from 1975 to 1978? Surely he should know the truth. Addario published an article titled “Super Narc” in the “ Image” section of the September, 25, 1988 issue of the San Francisco Examiner. Warren Hinckle, a well-known San Francisco journalist and political radical, actually ghost wrote the article. Addario, too, is trying to get a book published, which will incorporate his sensational “findings” about the cadaver-heroin connection. In the article, Addario claimed that in the autumn of 1974 he personally discovered heroin inside the chest cavity of an American GI’s corpse in a military hospital in Bangkok. Its discovery would have potentially put him on the fast track to higher positions within the DEA. Yet, he did not share this information with the American Ambassador or the CIA station chief, claiming that, “when it comes to stopping narcotics, they (the U.S. government) often have other—and higher-—priorities.”
Addario’s article, unfortunately, has had a lot of impact. Two decades after it appeared in print, some sources remembered the article and assumed its assertions to be true. To check out the accuracy of Addario’s article, I shared it with DEA agents and journalists who were in Bangkok in 1974. Retired DEA agent Chuck Lutz, who served under Addario during this period, summed up the prevailing sentiment that my sources unanimously shared about Addario’s article. “Dan appears to have written a fictionalized account of the Atkinson-Jackson case, while confusing some parts of the case, sensationalizing others, making some up, using great literary license and assigning pseudonyms for all but himself and General Pow Sarasin (who, by the way, was not Director General of the Thai Police at the time, but the head of the Police Narcotics Suppression Center).”
But if Addario meant to use pseudonyms, he certainly did not inform the readers of his intentions. Nowhere in the article does he indicate that he is using this literary device. And if he did, he had a strange way of doing it. For instance, Jack and Ike become Carl Jackson, not William Herman Jackson, and Milt Atkinson, not Leslie “Ike” Atkinson.
Sources point out several other inconsistencies about Addario’s article that support the conclusion it is a work of fiction. While there are too many to catalog in full, here are some of the major ones. In the fall of 1974, there were no Vietnam War dead. So who is the dead GI in the Bangkok morgue? There were still some GIs stationed in Thailand as late as the Fall of Saigon in 1975 who may have died from injuries unrelated to Vietnam, but none that Atkinson’s drug ring or any other trafficker could reasonably have predicted. Journalists who were working in Bangkok in 1974 say that Addario’s discovery in the hospital would have been a sensational story, making a major leak to the media inevitable. At the time, Bangkok was the main listening post in Southeast Asia for U.S. journalists and journalists from other countries, and it was one of the worse places in the world to keep a secret. Moreover, some DEA agents who worked with Addario at the time, those whom I was able to locate and interview, said they heard nothing about a cadaver that contained heroin in a Bangkok hospital. Also, Addario was the head of the Bangkok field office at that time, and, given his administrative position as Regional Director, he would in no way have been out in the street conducting an investigation.
THE ADDARIO ARTICLE perpetuates the myth of the cadaver-heroin connection; it is a story unsupported by evidence or even common sense. Bill Slaughter, a retired North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) agent interrogated Jackson for hours and had the opportunity to ask him numerous times about the alleged cadaver-heroin conspiracy. “Jackson adamantly denied having anything to do with it,” Slaughter recalled. “He would get really upset when I brought it up. I could tell from my interviews with Jackson that he had nothing to do with any coffins or cadavers.”
Slaughter’s assessment of the cadaver-heroin connection is the same as the opinion of every other law enforcement official who investigated the Atkinson-Jackson drug ring and was interviewed for this book. There is no evidence that the cadaver-heroin connection ever happened.
Ike is upset that false rumors have tied him to the bogus cadaver-heroin connection and wonders if people will ever be persuaded that he had nothing to do with it. “Why would I do something so awful as move heroin in cadavers?” he asked. “I had so many easier and more effective ways of moving my dope. Besides, whatever wrong I did, I was still proud of my (military) service, and I would have done nothing to harm the memory of our brave soldiers who died serving the country.”
Ike is right when he says that the cadaver-heroin connection is the biggest hoax in the history of the international drug trade. The hoax gives credible conspiracy theories a bad rap. The bottom line—despite the hype, the claims and the hundreds of articles discussing the conspiracy as if it happened, there is not one shred of evidence to confirm that it ever did. Case closed.
CHAPTER NINE
American Gangster Revisited
FRANK LUCAS, THE drug trafficker whom Hollywood has made famous as The American Gangster, has done more than any other individual to propagate the cadaver-heroin connection hoax. Along the way, Frank Lucas has not only distorted Ike Atkinson’ story but has literally stolen parts of his life. Lucas has been able to do this because in 2000 he got lucky and emerged from obscurity when New York Magazine, a major print publication, wrote a long article about him. The article made the old gangster appear to be the second coming of the Black gangster from the 1970s “blaxploitation” movie era. Written by Mark Jacobson and titled “The Return of Superfly,” the article profiled Lucas’s life story entirely from Lucas’s point of view and allowed him to portray himself, in the words of Jacobson, as New York City’s “biggest, baddest heroin kingpin in the original O.G. in chinchilla.”
“Superfly” made many boasts in the article: that he was the first Black drug dealer to become independent of La Cosa Nostra and that he was the Black gangster who established the Asian heroin connection, which allowed him to sell “Blue Magic, a special type of heroin that, he boasted, was the purest smack on the street. Lucas told New York Magazine that Ike Atkinson was related to him because Ike married one of his cousins, which made him “as good as family.” Lucas said he went to Bangkok and visited Jack’s American Star Bar where he learned that “Ike knew everyone over there, every Black guy in the Army, from the cooks on up.” As the New York Magazine article progressed, Lucas’s claims about his Asian experience got more outlandish. Lucas, supposedly independent of Ike, managed to transport heroin “almost exclusively on military planes to the eastern seaboard bases.” “Superfly” met a mysterious English-speaking, Rolls Royce-driving, Thai-Chinese man with the sobriquet of “007” a “fucking Chinese James Bond 007,” who took Lucas to the Golden Triangle where, during his first trip, he purchased 32 kilos for $4,200 a kilo. On the way back, “Superfly” and 007’s men, “Bruce Lee types,” according to Lucas, “fought off bandits hiding in the trees.”
Lucas claimed to be so clever and bold that he was able to transport heroin via a plane used by Henry Kissinger, U.S. President Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State. As “Superfly” explained to Jacobson: “I mean who the fuck is going to search Henry Kissinger’s plane?”
But how did Lucas get his heroin back to the U.S.? It was “Superfly’s” most controversial claim, comprising a mere paragraph of the article, but it helped to parlay the former drug trafficker to notoriety as the man behind the so-called cadaver-heroin connection. Not only that, but Lucas also dragged Ike into his claim to infamy. According to Lucas’s fabrication of history, Lucas and Ike Atkinson brought over a carpenter from North Carolina who made 28 copies of government coffins, whatever they are, and fixed them with false bottoms so each coffin could contain six to eight kilos of heroin. Lucas tells his New York Magazine biographer that the coffins had to be snug because “you could not have shit (heroin) sliding around. Ike was very smart because he made sure (that) we used heavy guys coffins. He didn’t put them in no skinny guy’s.”
How big of a drug dealer does Lucas claim to be? According to “Superfly”, he could sell his “Blue Magic” on 116th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenue in the evening and by 9 p.m. all of it would be gone. Superfly would have a million bucks, which he then packed in his beat-up Chevy, which he called Nelly Belle, and then drive to his home in New Jersey.
THE NEW YORK magazine profile made for a helluva read, but that should have been the extent of its impact. In another month or two, many of the magazine’s readers, no doubt, would have had just a dim recollection of the article. But “The Return of Superfly” caught the attention of some big wigs in Hollywood with imaginations as fertile as Superfly’s. Universal Studios struck a lucrative deal with Lucas, Jacobson and Richie Roberts, the former New Jersey state detective then prosecutor who helped put Lucas in jail in 1976 and later became his friend. It was a big break for Lucas who, despite claiming to be a legend and the biggest, baddest drug trafficker in New York during the early 1970s, was reportedly on welfare.
Having a movie made about his life must have seemed like a dream even for a hard-bitten old drug dealer like Frank Lucas. Mega Hollywood star Denzel Washington portrayed him in the movie, which had international distribution and reportedly grossed more than $180 million. “Superfly” got to wear his sunglasses, looking bad for interviews with mainstream media publications (New York Post, New York Times), hip hop magazines and web sites (for example, hiphopremix.com, Hiphopdr.com and allhiphop.com) and television networks (Black Entertainment Television, History Channel and Dateline NBC).
The American Gangster movie is based on Jacobson’s article, but it stretched his story even more. For instance, it glossed over the fact that Lucas was a big-time informant who had to seek refuge in the Federal Witness Protection Program to avoid potential violent repercussions for snitching on his criminal colleagues. At the movie’s end, Hollywood had transformed him into a good snitch who turned in only corrupt law enforcement officials. In doing so, the movie presented a totally boldfaced lie at the end of the movie by stating that Frank Lucas’s and Richie Roberts’s “collaboration led to the conviction of three-quarters of New York City’s Drug Enforcement Agency.” The truth—not one law enforcement official was ever arrested because of the collaboration of Frank Lucas and Richie Roberts. “Superfly” only snitched on his fellow gangsters.
What kind of informant was Frank Lucas? Jack Toal, a retired DEA agent had a chance to work with Lucas in the late 1970s after he decided to inform. “He was good at giving up lower level people on the street,” Toal recalled. “He did everything by phone and never left the prison. He was in prison at the MCC (Metropolitan Correction Center) in Lower Manhattan and was kept there for a long time. He was good. Here Frank was in the Witness Protection Program, but was able to convince people on the street that he would never give them up.”
Ike appeared as a character in the movie—as Lucas’s cousin Nate who is living in Bangkok. Nate is portrayed as a “gofer” for Frank Lucas in the movie and improbably introduces Superfly to the Chinese general in the Golden Triangle who supplied him with heroin. I say improbably because no way would Ike—or any drug trafficker, for that matter—give up his heroin source. Neither would any big time dealer—and Lucas claims to have been one—risk life, limb and bankroll to go blindly into the wilds of the Golden Triangle and buy his heroin supply. Only in Hollywood!
As the plot of American Gangster unfolds, one could almost hear the wheels in the minds of the movie viewer grind. How is big, bad Superfly getting the heroin into the country? As the movie reached its climax, Richie Roberts, played by Russell Crowe, inspected a military plane carrying the corpses of dead GIs from the Vietnam War that had landed at a Newark, New Jersey, airbase. Roberts opened a casket and the shocking truth—as Hollywood spins it—is revealed. Much to the horror of the audience, our hero has uncovered packets of heroin in the coffins of the dead GIs, exposing what we know as the cadaver-heroin connection.
