Sergeant Smack, page 28
Later Thornton explained: “ I asked the authorities while they were talking to me: ‘If I cooperate like this and you don’t press charges, could you or some other agency come up later and press charges on me about this stuff here that you are giving me a break about?’ Don (Ashton) said: ‘We won’t, but that doesn’t mean another agency can’t.’ I found out later that what he meant was that if they found out later that I didn’t tell them everything I knew or something related to that, you know…. (sic) if something that I hadn’t told them that they didn’t know before came up and if another outfit wanted to get me, they possibly could, you know. He (Don Ashton) didn’t explain it that thorough, though. I said to myself: ‘well, it looks like I’m going to jail anyhow. I’ll just go ahead and move this stuff, collect my money, party and then go to jail.’ That’s what I was thinking.”
ON OCTOBER 14, Thornton decided to head for Augusta, Georgia, and see William K. Brown who was now assigned to Fort Gordon and working at the base hospital. He wanted to pick up the 114 pounds of heroin that Brown had shipped July 10th from Bangkok in his household goods. Brown and his family had left Bangkok on September 8th and arrived at Augusta on September 13th. Brown’s household goods, which contained the heroin packed in 30 to 34 plastic bags inside the teakwood furniture, were delivered to him on October 8.
Thornton did not have Brown’s contact information so he went to the Dwight D. Eisenhower Medical Center at Fort Gordon where Brown worked. Located just a few miles southwest of the city of Augusta, Georgia, Fort Gordon is the home of the U.S. Army’s Signal Corp. But, ironically, at the time Fort Gordon housed the Provost Marshal General’s School and trained all of the Army’s military police.
Thornton got the man on duty to look at the staff locator index and give him Brown’s phone number. It was early in the morning and Thornton’s call woke Brown up.
“Do you know who this is?” Thornton asked.
“Yes, I do,” Brown said.
“Could you come down to work a little early? I’m here to pick up the stuff.”
“I’ll be right there,” Brown said.
When Brown arrived, Joyce, William’s wife, was with him. Thornton thought it best that Joyce did not see him, and he stayed out of sight until Joyce drove off.
“When are you getting off work?” Thornton asked Brown.
“I can take some time when I get my break round 11 or 11:30 (a.m.).”
“I need some sleep,” Thornton said. “I’ve been driving all night. Your wife has your car. You can drop me off at the hotel now and take mine. Here’s $200 to buy some luggage for the stuff. I’ll get some sleep. I’ll see you at your break. We can move the dope then.”
Thornton stayed at a dumpy hotel, registering as Frank Scott. Brown picked up Thornton as scheduled and they went to work.
Seven of the pieces of furniture that Brown shipped from Bangkok had false bottoms containing heroin. That first day Thornton and Brown took the heroin from the false bottoms of the three nightstands. They turned the tables upside down, screwed off the false bottoms, took out the plastic bags containing the heroin and put it in the luggage that Brown had purchased. Brown and Thornton could not finish the job that first day, so they put the luggage with the heroin in them and the still empty suitcases in the loft and agreed to meet the next day during Brown’s late morning break. Thornton returned to his dumpy hotel and spent the night.
The next morning, however, Brown was busy at work and did not get free until 12:45 p.m. Thornton picked Brown up and they rushed over to Brown’s house to finish the job. They handled the furniture and contraband in the same way they did the first day. While they worked, Thornton discussed the money Brown had coming.
“I’ve no problem with that,” Brown said. “Don’t worry about it. I’m in no rush.” Brown was more interested in getting the furniture out of the way so his wife could organize the house the way she wanted it-—and stop bitching.
“Let’s put the screws back,” Thornton said. ”We‘ll leave the furniture here. Someone will come in two or three days to get it out of the way.”
“Fine, the sooner the better,” said Brown.
Thornton put the heroin in the trunk of his car and drove the 260-odd miles to Goldsboro where he spent the night at a guesthouse. The next morning he drove over to Gillis’s house and informed him that he had the Brown shipment in the trunk of his car. They took the heroin out and stored it in Gillis’s carport. Later that day, the heroin was taken out to the country down a desolate road to a farmhouse. Here the dope was transferred to one of Ike’s relatives.
Thornton was to be paid $100,000 for the job, but he was given half that amount less $10,000 he owed Ike. Thornton and Gillis returned to Gillis’s house where they drank until Gillis had to go to work. Thornton left for Raleigh where he stayed at the Alamo Hotel on North Boulevard. On the evening of October 17, Thornton drove to Beckley, West Virginia, where he planned to spend the weekend visiting his sister. Thornton had been working hard, but it was not in the service of Uncle Sam.
ON OCTOBER 17TH, the day Freddie Thornton traveled to West Virginia, the Atkinson drug ring was about to make its second big heroin shipment using teakwood furniture and another U.S. serviceman who was relocating from Thailand to the States. U.S. military Customs officials were scheduled to come by Sergeant Jasper Myrick’s residence at 270/23 Soi Ekkamai off Sukhumvit Road and conduct a routine check of the household goods and furniture he was sending to Fort Benning, Georgia, where he was being re-assigned. Fort Benning, a U.S. Army installation south of Columbus, Georgia, is home of the U.S. Army Infantry School.
Myrick had agreed to help out his friend Jimmy Smedley by taking some of his teakwood furniture back to the U.S. with him. The furniture contained false bottoms that hid 94 pounds of heroin. This would not have been a problem for Myrick except for Charles Winchester Thomas, one of the Customs officers inspecting the furniture, who took his job seriously and did it well.
The shipping list Thomas had with him showed that Myrick planned to ship six pieces of furniture: a teak desk, two china cabinets, a cedar chest and two end tables. Thomas and his assistant first inspected the household goods on the ground floor. Finding everything in order, the agents told Valerie Myrick, Jasper’s wife, that she could start packing the goods. Then the agents went upstairs to check the furniture in the bedroom. Valerie did not accompany the agents upstairs because she was occupied with a Thai man who had come by to collect some money. Valerie did not fully understand the man, and she wanted her husband to come downstairs and translate for her.
Meanwhile, Thomas was inspecting an end table in the bedroom when he noted that the marks in the woodwork indicated the end table had been tampered with. “What’s this?” He asked. Myrick started to get nervous. “Hey brother,” he coaxed the inspector, holding his arm. “You don’t need to look at that, do you?” Thomas, who was African American, tall, heavy and imposing, looked at the young GI and said, “Step aside.” Thomas drilled through the bottom of the end table, and when he pulled it out, the drill bit had white powder on it. When he unscrewed the bottom of the end table and plastic bags filled with white powder fell out. He took a closer look and had no doubt. It was heroin. When Winchester began unscrewing the bottoms of some of the other pieces of furniture, he found more plastic bags filled with white powder.
When Valerie Myrick went to the bedroom to get her husband, she saw Thomas holding two plastic bags containing white powder. Thomas asked Valerie if she knew what it was.
“No, I don’t,” she said.
“Well, it’s heroin,” Winchester explained.
Valerie turned to Jasper and asked: “Where is this from?” Her husband was as silent as the sphinx.
The Customs officers went downstairs and rechecked the other pieces of furniture and found more heroin. A routine inspection had become a major heroin bust, up to that point the biggest in Thai history. The Thai authorities estimated that the heroin found in Myrick residence, if cut and sold on the streets of the U.S., would be worth $22 million.
Thomas phoned the Thai police and the DEA and told them to come to the house. The police took Myrick into custody where he denied any knowledge of the heroin and insisted that he was shipping the furniture as a favor to Smedley. A few days later, investigators from the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Division (CID) interrogated him and administered a polygraph test. Myrick failed.
Gary Fouse, a retired DEA agent, was working in the DEA’s Bangkok office when the Myrick bust went down. Fouse interviewed Myrick. “He wasn’t a bad kid but he struck me as naive,” Fouse recalled. “He was in his early 20s, from Montgomery, Alabama, and a religious family. When we were taking Myrick in, he whispered in my ear: ‘come visit me in prison.’ I went to see him at the Klong Prem Prison, where I met with him in a small room that had a caged wire separating us. He told me Smedley had recruited him.”
Myrick came clean and gave a statement to the Thai police. The heroin in the furniture belonged to Smedley, who had hired him to ship it to the U.S. after Smedley learned Myrick was being re-assigned Stateside. Myrick said Smedley and Rudolph Jennings had bought the teak furniture at a furniture shop on Sukhumvit Road. The Thai police were able to find an employee of Sukhumvit Furniture who identified Smedley and Jennings from photographs as the two men who came to order some furniture that would have “a lot space at the bottom.”
Fouse had the opportunity to interrogate Smedley, but unlike many people who warmed to the man many considered to be the “Black Ambassador to Bangkok,” Fouse was unimpressed. “Smedley was an asshole… just a big-time drunk. Yes, he was affable, but shifty. He denied to the end he was involved with the heroin shipment.”
IN THE WAKE of the Myrick bust, the Thai police widened their net. They claimed to have found seventeen witnesses, both American and Thai, who stood ready to testify against Smedley and Myrick. Police Lieutenant Kulachart Singhala told the press that he believed some “American VIPs were behind the heroin trafficking.” “The police knew some of them,” he said, but conceded that, “although the police were willing to make more arrests if they could find witnesses willing to testify, it was difficult to do that in major cases since the witnesses feared reprisals.” Bail was set at 2.7 million baht ($135,000) each for Myrick and Smedley. The Thai authorities felt certain no one could raise that kind of bail money.
WHEN THE THAI authorities expelled Thornton in early September 1975, they searched his house and, among other things, found a permanent change of station order transferring Sergeant William K. Brown from SEATO (Southeast Asian Treaty Organization) to the Dwight D. Eisenhower Medical Center at Fort Gordon, Georgia. Not much was thought of the find at the time. But when Myrick’s orders were found in Jimmy Smedley’s briefcase, after he was arrested for arranging the Myrick shipment, it clicked. Was Brown also involved with the Atkinson drug ring? Could this be the heroin shipment Thornton had mentioned to Nerney and Stewart when they interrogated him on September 9th in San Francisco?
“I was in San Francisco when I got the call from Bangkok about the Brown orders,” said Addario the DEA Special Agent-in-Charge who oversaw the investigation of the Ike Atkinson drug ring in Thailand. “I immediately called Don Ashton {of the Wilmington, North Carolina and a CENTAC 9 field coordinator} and flew the next day to Augusta. Don picked me up at the airport. It was a rainy day. CENTAC 9 agents had already set up surveillance at Brown’s house in Fort Gordon.”
A large pile of furniture covered with canvas was sitting outside on Brown’s patio. Could that be the teak furniture from Thailand? When Ashton and Lutz arrived at the scene, and Lutz saw the furniture sitting outside, he got a sinking feeling that they had arrived too late. Ashton got a search warrant from the United States Attorney’s Office in Augusta while the other DEA agents maintained surveillance. When Ashton returned, the agents served the warrant.
Fortunately for the DEA, Thornton had still not gotten the furniture removed and out of Joyce Brown’s hair as he said he would. The DEA began examining the furniture out on the patio that was listed on the search warrant. They found that the false bottoms had been removed from the furniture, and that the furniture contained no heroin. Still, they spotted traces of white powder on the furniture and Thai newspapers that apparently had been used to pack the bags of heroin in the false bottoms had traces of white powder on some of the pages as well. Brown was read his rights and asked to produce the shipping documents for the furniture he had sent from Bangkok. Brown complied. The furniture and newspapers were delivered to the Criminal Investigation Division (CID) forensic lab at Fort Gordon and the traces of white powder were analyzed. Bingo! The analysis indicated that the white powder traces were 90 to 100 percent pure heroin. Sergeant William K. Brown and his wife, Joyce, were on their way to jail.
IN OCTOBER 1975, Chai and his drug courier Chalermphol Phitakstrakul were indicted in San Francisco for trafficking heroin intended for importation to the U.S. When Chai stood trial in late December 1975, the prosecution team portrayed him as one of the top five suppliers of heroin to the U.S. Chai’s defense team, on the other hand, asserted that Carl Dunlap (true identity withheld) and Lionel Stewart had entrapped him.
Testifying on his own behalf, Chai admitted to being a partner in a Bangkok bar catering to Black American servicemen. His American business associates, Chai revealed, were Ike Atkinson, Herman Jackson and James Smedley. Chai said he first met Carl Dunlap in 1968, and that in the following year, Dunlap approached him with an offer to buy 600 to 700 grams of heroin. At first, Chai claimed, he refused, but he was eventually persuaded to do so by Dunlap because Dunlap needed the money. Chai maintained he made nothing on the deal.
In 1971 Dunlap again allegedly persuaded Chai to procure two kilos of heroin for him because, as Chai put it, Dunlap “wanted to get rich” This heroin was for a Japanese friend of Dunlap’s, and Chai admitted to making $300 to $400 profit on the sale.
Chai also described at his trial what he claimed were his heroin dealings with Ike Atkinson. According to Chai, Ike had offered him a $5,000 “gift” if he could supply Ike with some heroin. Chai admitted to making four to five sales to Atkinson, totaling fifteen to twenty kilograms. Chai, however, claimed that in November 1974 he told Atkinson and Smedley that he would arrange no more sales to them because “heroin was bad business, and it hurt people.”
Chai told the court that he did not see Dunlap again until March 1975, at which time Dunlap asked the defendant to get him some heroin for an American friend. Chai testified that he refused several times, but was persuaded at last, telling Dunlap it would be his last time. Later that month, Dunlap introduced Chai to Lionel “Johnny” Stewart, the undercover DEA agent. Chai admitted to selling Johnny slightly less than a kilo of heroin to “help” Dunlap and claimed that Dunlap’s influence was what persuaded him to charge “Johnny” only $4,700 per kilo.
Chai testified that he saw Dunlap and Stewart three to four times in March 1975. At the end of March, he received a telephone call from Dunlap and Stewart in the U.S., pleading for more heroin.
The defendant also testified that he did not see Dunlap again until June 1975 at Smedley’s house. According to Chai, Dunlap again requested that he secure heroin, but Chai refused because he was afraid. Finally, Johnny promised Chai some “big money” if he allowed the agent to sell some of his heroin in the United States for him on consignment. Chai admitted he agreed to this deal.
Chai testified that it was Stewart’s idea for him to come to the U.S. in August 1975, so the defendant could get his $80,000 because Stewart did not want to send that much money to Thailand. At that time, according to Chai, it was Stewart who suggested Chai bring a courier with two or three kilos of additional heroin. The courier was to get $5,000 for the trip. Chai further testified that Stewart promised that he would show him around San Francisco and Las Vegas and get him some blond women.
Chai also gave his version on the meeting with the “Mr. Big” in Stewart’s organization, played by Peter Fong, Stewart’s supervisor. According to Chai, Stewart pressured him to deal with Fong. After the negotiations, Fong was supposed to take Chai to Las Vegas and get him the best hotel and a blonde girl. Chai also claimed that the DEA agents tried to get him drunk during this meeting.
The defendant further admitted on the stand that he had told the agent several lies in order to save face—a common Thai personality trait—that he had his own smuggling system and that he had a friend in the Thai police department. During the trial, Chai had continually asserted a defense of entrapment, but he could not recall any threats or promises made by Carl Dunlap. Moreover, he admitted paying for his own ticket to fly to San Francisco.
THE DEFENSE STRATEGY did not work, and Chai was found guilty as charged. Robert Marder, Chai’s lawyer, literally and figuratively threw his client on the mercy of the court, reading to U.S. District Judge Oliver J. Carter a famous refrain from The Merchant of Venice, a play the bard, William Shakespeare, wrote.
The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.
Upon the place beneath; it is twice blest.
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
The mightiest in the mightiest.
It becomes the throned monarch better than his crown.
Marder told Judge Carter that Chai’s wife was dying of leukemia in Thailand and Chai wanted the chance to see her again. The lawyer poured it on, adding that Chai had a young son in Thailand who would not have a father if his client went to jail for a long time.
The judge then heard the government’s side. Federal prosecutor Mike Nerney told the judge that the DEA believed Chai was one of the most notorious drug traffickers in the world and had sold 3,200 pounds of pure heroin that had been smuggled to the U.S. market from Thailand. “You have been on the bench for twenty-five years, your honor,” Nerney said, “and I’m sure you have never seen as big a drug dealer as this man before and it is not likely you will again.”
