Sergeant Smack, page 23
TWO DAYS AFTER Mrs. Waters received the package from Bangkok, another one with a Bangkok return address arrived at the Goldsboro post office. It was addressed to Delores Burney, a woman local and federal authorities had had under close surveillance for some time on suspicion of heroin trafficking.
The package was brought from the post office to the Sheriff’s Department for examination. Authorities noticed that the color of the wrapping paper was the same as that used to wrap the package sent to Mrs. Waters. Moreover, the manner in which the box was wrapped was similar. A search warrant was served on the package, and Durward Metheny came to the Sheriff’s office once again to examine the handwriting on the package in order to gather evidence for a warrant. The authorities found another two AWOL bags with clothing just as they had with the package sent to Mrs. Waters. At this point, the authorities decided to make a “controlled delivery,” meaning they would rewrap the package and put it back in the postal system for delivery to the intended addressee.
Every effort was made to pull the masking tape off the box without disturbing any possible fingerprints. The authorities were careful, too, with the four plastic bags in the AWOL bags that contained a white powdery substance. Although the authorities were certain the white powdery substance was heroin, they put the plastic bags back into the bag, the false bottom was re-attached on top of them and a heat sealer was used to seal the seam across the top. The clothing was put back in the false bottom of the AWOL bag, and the package was rewrapped.
The next day, the post office delivered the package to Burney’s residence and the authorities served a search warrant. But when law enforcement entered Burney’s house, they found Burney and an open package, but no heroin. The authorities turned the house upside down but could not find the dope. They questioned Burney about the missing heroin; she claimed she did not know what they were talking about.
Surveillance of Burney’s house continued. On July 26, shortly before midnight, the authorities stopped Burney’s car on a Goldsboro street and found four pounds of heroin they estimated to have a street value of $3.35 million. One federal agent later described the heroin haul as the largest ever seized on the eastern seaboard. Burney and Jessie Thomas Horton, the other person in the car, were charged with possession of heroin with intent to distribute, and each was placed on $500,000 bond, which the court later reduced to $50,000 for Burney.
Meanwhile, the authorities questioned Mrs. Waters some more and learned that she had observed Horton driving slowly by her home while the mailman was delivering the package she had reported to the police. During the subsequent Burney-Horton investigation, law enforcement also discovered that Horton had visited Ike Atkinson on several occasions.
THE POSTAL DELIVERIES continued. A third package arrived at the Goldsboro post office on January 27, 1975, addressed to a Mr. Dallas Lewis. The package looked exactly the same as the first two the authorities had seized.
The Sheriff’s Department took custody of the package and obtained a search warrant so they could legally open it. Matheny was running ragged as he came once again from Raleigh to Goldsboro to help obtain this search warrant. The recently intercepted package contained the same contents as the previous two: a black AWOL bag with a false bottom that had the plastic bags filled with the powdery substance. Once again, law enforcement tried to make a controlled delivery, but they had learned their lesson. This time they replaced all but a small amount of the white powder in the plastic bags with confectionary sugar and delivered the package to the intended address. But nobody was home, so the postman took the parcel back to the post office, while the authorities maintained surveillance of the residence.
In a bizarre twist, later that day Nancy Brooks, who resided at Dallas Lewis’s house, went to the post office and denied that she knew anything about the package delivered to Dallas Lewis. But in an interview with authorities, Mrs. Brooks admitted that Lewis was her son and resided with his grandmother at 625 Isler Street, Goldsboro. Mrs. Brooks also revealed that on January 24 or 25 she received a call from a male who told her that he was forwarding a package to her address through the mail and that he wanted her to hold on to it until someone came by and picked it up. Mrs. Brooks became suspicious and refused to accept the package when it arrived.
Brooks later implicated “Peter Rabbit” (Herman Lee Gaillard), one of Ike’s old friends and associates from his military days, as the person who had mailed the package to her residence. The authorities, however, were unable to prove it. The authorities also suspected that Peter Rabbit was responsible for having the packages sent to Dallas Lewis and to Mrs. Waters. Later it was determined that Peter Rabbit was the uncle of Dallas Lewis and that he had a girlfriend who was Waters’ daughter. On March 21, 1975, DEA agents interviewed Peter Rabbit, who acknowledged Waters’ daughter was his girlfriend, but denied any knowledge of the heroin from the postal deliveries.
“Peter Rabbit screwed up the delivery of the package to the Waters residence,” Ike revealed.” He was supposed to be watching the house and waiting for the postman to arrive so he could get the package. But no, he was off somewhere with his girlfriend (Mrs. Waters daughter).”
The original plastic bags containing the white powder were sent to the SBI lab for chemical and finger print analysis. The lab personnel found that although the powder contained trace amounts of caffeine, it was almost 100 percent pure heroin. They also found some interesting prints.
IKE VIVIDLY RECALLED the postal shipments to Goldsboro. He had actually helped pack the heroin in AWOL bags, although he was not supposed to do it. That was Rudolph Jennings’s job. But Ike’s drug ring was quite busy preparing the packages for shipment and, like a good boss, Ike came over to the stash-house to give Jennings a hand. He had to press hard on the plastic bags to get them to fit the false-bottoms of the AWOL bags. Of course, he was wearing latex gloves to ensure that he would not leave fingerprints on the package, but he forgot that a few days before he was to get out of the Army in 1963, the military had taken impressions of his palm prints. He did not use anything to protect his palms. It was his palm prints that the SBI found on the plastic bags containing heroin in the Delores Burney package and on a piece of cardboard used to support the false bottom in the package sent to Mrs. Waters. Having Ike’s palm prints on file with the military made it easy for the SBI to find a match. With such solid evidence, authorities were confident the “Teflon” drug kingpin would have a hard time beating this case.
The DEA believed that Houseton, who had watched Ike pack and press the plastic bag into the AWOL bags, was involved with Ike’s postal scheme. In May 1975 law enforcement determined that Houseton was responsible for sending the three packages to the residences of Waters, Burney and Lewis. They did this by matching the postal meter tape numbers on the packages with the postal meter assigned to Houseton. An informant told the DEA that he had attended a poker game on two consecutive weekends during which Houseton lost $15,000. Yet, despite losing the money, Houseton seemed happy and even celebrated after the poker games at the Windsor Hotel.
ON FEBRUARY 6, 1975, authorities executed a search warrant on Ike’s Neuse Circle home and arrested him on a heroin conspiracy charge. The way Ike reacted to the arrest made it seem as if the authorities had come by to pick him up for a social event. Ike was polite and chatted with the agents, even revealing a few details about the drug trade in Thailand and how he was getting his heroin supply.
Nine days before, Frank “Superfly” Lucas had been arrested at his home at 933 Sheffield Road in the well-to-do neighborhood of Teaneck, New Jersey. But the authorities involved in the Lucas arrest did not find the experience as pleasant as the one their colleagues had in Goldsboro. Acting on a tip from two East Harlem members of La Cosa Nostra, a strike force of 12 DEA agents and 12 NYPD (New York Police Department) officers, all heavily armed, surrounded Lucas’s home. They kept a watch for any drugs or any other incriminating evidence that Lucas might throw from a window. Once inside the house, strike force members quickly broke up into teams of three. One team member looked for drugs, guns, and money. A second acted as a witness. A third took notes and documented the search.
As the teams began searching the house, suitcases filled with money came flying out of the bathroom window. The suitcases were brought into the house and put on the floor. The strike force then made a big circle so that everybody could see what was happening and they began counting the money. “We went into the wee hours before we finished,” recalled Joe Sullivan, a retired DEA agent who was a strike force member. “Lucas made most of his drug buys on the streets, so the money was in small denominations of $5, $10 and $20. But the important thing: Everybody in the room could see everybody else.”
As the money was counted, it was bundled into $10,000 lots and put into specially-designated bags in the center of the room. When the count was finished, each strike force member was searched before he could leave the house. “At the time, I was insulted, but now I realize that searching us was the smart thing to do,” said Sullivan. “The strike force told Lucas that the money they were confiscating totaled $585,000, and he did not appear to have a problem with the count. “
Later, however, once Lucas had a chance to talk to his lawyer, he changed his tune. Superfly claimed a lot of money from the house was missing—millions, in fact. Later, Lucas recalled his version of events for New York Magazine. “Five hundred and eighty-five thousand. What’s that? Shit. In Vegas I’d lose 500 Gs (grand) playing baccarat with a green-haired whore in half an hour.”
“Lucas lied,” Sullivan said bluntly. “No way could any money be missing. We had strict safeguards in place because management was sensitive to recent corruption scandals in New York law enforcement and the publicity surrounding the Knapp Commission, and we wanted to protect the strike force against any charges of corruption.”
On August 27, 1975, Julie Lucas, Frank’s wife, pled guilty to charges related to throwing the $585,000 from the bathroom window while agents were searching the home. Two days after the raid on Lucas’s house, the authorities indicted the drug lord and 18 other people. According to the indictment, Antonio De Lutro delivered a package of about 11 pounds of heroin to Anthony Verzino in November 1973 and received, as payment, $250,000 in two installments. Then in December 1973, Mario Perna and Ernest Maliza delivered a package containing 22 pounds of heroin to Lucas at the Van Cortlandt Motel in the Bronx.
Records of the bust showed that Lucas was getting heroin from the La Cosa Nostra. Lucas faced a maximum penalty of 40 years in prison and a fine of $50,000.
MEANWHILE, IKE WAS arraigned before U.S. Magistrate Martin Lancaster for heroin trafficking and incarcerated in the Wayne County jail under a $500,000 bond. Federal authorities also charged Ike with heroin trafficking. In all, the authorities had seized six pounds of heroin worth about $5.1 million in potential street sales. While Ike awaited trial, he got more bad news. The IRS was after him again for allegedly failing to report income from Jack’s American Star Bar. This time, Ike was convicted of under-reporting his income for 1969 by $34,937.63; the government claimed he owed the IRS $11,421 in additional taxes. The IRS’s investigation determined that while Ike’s bank deposits totaled $4,744.09, his cash expenditures exceeded $88,000. U.S. District Judge John D. Larkins, Jr. gave Ike a five-year suspended sentence and fined him $10,000 plus court costs as a condition of Ike’s probation. He pleaded no contest to the charges and agreed to pay all of his 1969 taxes.
On March 27, 1975, a federal grand jury indicted Ike on a charge of importing two of the six pounds of heroin that had been seized coming into the United States from Thailand. The press noted that Ike had been previously indicted four times for importing heroin into the U.S., and each time he was found innocent of the charges. Facing the legal battle of his life, Ike hired Stephen Nimocks, a top-flight lawyer out of Fayetteville, North Carolina. Nimocks was White, but Ike heard through the grapevine that he had successfully defended some young Black soldiers who had fragged a White officer in Vietnam. Ike also believed Nimocks was close to Judge Larkins. He had heard that Nimocks had served in the judge’s unsuccessful 1960 campaign for the governorship of North Carolina as a Democratic candidate. “I knew Nimocks would give me the same type of excellent representation that he would a White man,” Ike explained.
THE TRIAL BEGAN in early June 1975. Ike had pleaded not guilty at his arraignment, but he changed his plea to no contest after Stephen James, the SBI’s chief fingerprint examiner, testified that he found Ike’s palm prints on one of the plastic bags containing heroin and on the false bottom of one of the AWOL bags. On June 12, 1975, in the Eastern District Court of North Carolina, Judge Larkins sentenced Ike to 19 years in prison. The judge divided the sentence into 15 years for the charge of importation of heroin and four years for using the U.S. postal system to smuggle the contraband. The prosecution was upset with Judge Larkins acceptance of Ike’s plea of no contest and the length of sentence he imposed. They were well aware that Ike had a lot of money to hire the best defense lawyers who would use the law to get him free in a relatively short period of time. Indeed, Ike was convinced he could possibly get out of jail in 18 months.
That was why Ike was surprised to learn that the authorities claimed they had evidence indicating he was preparing to leave the country to avoid serving his prison sentence. On June 12, 1975, U.S. Attorney Tom McNamara told the Raleigh News and Observer: “Certain members of his (Ike’s) family were seen transporting two suitcases full of cash by private charter flight to some place in the Grand Bahamas. With a man facing a 19-year prison sentence, especially when we’ve been after him as long as we have Atkinson, I’m just afraid now that he has been caught, he might not want to go to jail.”
When McNamara made this statement, Ike was free on $1 million bond, and he still had eighteen days before he was to report to jail, for up to 19 years. So he had plenty of time to flee. But the drug kingpin punctually appeared before the court to begin serving his sentence in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, confident his lawyers would get him out of prison within a reasonable period of time.
IKE’S TRIAL AND conviction spurred the DEA to take much more aggressive action against him and his drug ring. On October 1, 1975, three months after Ike went to prison, the DEA established Central Tactical Unit (CENTAC) 9 whose overall objective was to destroy Ike’s drug ring once and for all. The DEA had created the first CENTAC unit in April 1975 to concentrate enforcement efforts against major drug trafficking organizations. The first eight CENTACs investigated heroin-manufacturing organizations in Asia, Lebanon and Mexico. CENTAC 9, which included eight DEA agents and one NYPD detective, operated, for the most part, from the DEA’s Wilmington, North Carolina District office, but it worked closely with other offices in Bangkok, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York City, Pittsburgh, Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia.
“When I came to North Carolina, everybody in law enforcement considered Ike to be untouchable,” explained Don Ashton, who headed the DEA’s Wilmington office, beginning in 1974, and coordinated the CENTAC 9 investigation. “He had an amazing ability to get people to work for him. I asked someone we believed to be connected to Ike’s organization who was the closest person to him in the organization? They all said the same thing. “I am.” We really had to focus our effort if we were to smash Ike’s organization. That’s why the DEA created CENTAC 9.”
CENTAC 9 estimated that between 1968 and 1975, Ike’s drug ring had smuggled heroin into the U.S. at a rate of one thousand pounds per year, an amount that could be worth as much as $400 million on the street. Two independent sources told CENTAC 9 investigators that Ike may have as much as $80 million in the Cayman Islands. “This may well be an exaggeration,” one CENTAC 9 investigative report conceded, but one investigation has identified two particular shipments of money to the Grand Cayman Islands in a two-month period of time accounting for an estimated $500 thousand to $1 million dollars. Ike was behind bars, but the DEA knew that he was still pulling the strings of his drug ring.
chapter TWELVE
The Teakwood Connection
WHEN IKE ATKINSON was imprisoned in the Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta on July 1, 1975, he hoped his crack team of defense lawyers would get him out soon. “I was in a serious situation, but I felt confident I could get out of it and not have to serve more than a third of my sentence before going up for parole,” Ike recalled. “I’d never been convicted of a serious crime. I could prove I was a good family man. All I had to do was keep my conduct in prison clean.”
Meanwhile, Ike was determined to make the best of his bad situation. Opened in 1902 as the country’s second federal prison, Atlanta Penitentiary had the reputation of being one of the country’s toughest. In the mid-1970s, the Federal Bureau of Prisons had six security levels, five and six being maximum security, two to four being medium and one being minimum security. At the time, the Federal Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, was the only level-six prison in the system. The Atlanta Penitentiary was level five.
Arriving at the gate and entering the bleak-looking structure, Ike had no doubt that he had arrived at a prison. The transfer-holding unit was large and imposing and devoid of natural light; the hallways were dark, cold and dangerous. At the Receiving and Discharge (R & D) Department, Ike had to turn over all of his possessions and clothing to the prison guards, who reminded him of some of the drill sergeants he had met in the military. He was strip-searched, fingerprinted, photographed and given some drab gray garb that every prisoner had to wear. Ike had come prepared, though; he brought an extra pair of glasses and enough money to open a personal account that he could use to buy items not supplied by the prison authority or to bribe favors from underpaid but corrupt guards.
Ike quickly noticed one big change since he was last incarcerated in the Atlanta pen for the tax conviction in New York City. “In the early 1970s, the Atlanta pen’s population was mostly White,” Ike recalled. “Now I saw many more Black faces. You could see that the U.S. government was waging its war on drugs, and Blacks were bearing the brunt of it.”
