Sergeant Smack, page 29
The judge obviously agreed with Nerney, for he sentenced Chai to sixty years in prison—15 years on each of the four counts of conspiracy to sell heroin and import it into the U.S.—two of the counts to run consecutively. Chai would have to serve at least thirty years in prison.
THE U.S. GOVERNMENT had a trophy in their War on Drugs, although its claim about Chai’s drug-trafficking rank in the pantheon of international drug dealers has to be questioned. Chai was mainly a middle-man supplyng heroin to Atkinson. He was not a dealer in his own right for much of his career and apparently had no distributors of his own. In fact, he really did not get involved with the drug trade in any significant way until after Herman “Jack” Jackson was busted in 1972 and Papa San, the uncle of Jack’s wife Nitaya, who was the original source of a large part of Ike’s heroin supply, died. Although Chai supplied heroin to the Japanese Connection, Chai’s dealings with Lionel Stewart appeared to be his first serious attempt to become a bigger player in the Thai-U.S. drug trade.
Still, it cannot be denied that at the time of his arrest Chai was the only reliable source of heroin for the band of brothers and that posed a serious criminal threat to American society. He had procured heroin twice for Carl Dunlap, numerous times for Ike Atkinson’s AWOL bag and APO (Army Post Office) shipments, the furniture shipment that Thornton picked up in California and the huge Myrick and Brown furniture shipments that were by far the largest shipments Ike had ever attempted. Chai had become a serious criminal threat to American society and needed to be taken off the streets. It would be easy enough for Atkinson to replace the Smedleys and Thorntons in his operation, but without a reliable source of heroin it would be much more difficult for him and his band of brothers to continue to operate.
IN APRIL 1979, the DEA responded to a legal move for modification of Chai’s sentence. Chai’s lawyers requested a ten-year limitation. Chai had spent nearly four years in prison, so if his sentence was reduced, he would have been eligible for immediate parole. In a letter to Judge George B. Harris of the Northern District of California, Peter Bensinger, the head of the DEA, noted that Chai was “one of the largest sources of heroin on record” and “the source of supply for the largest Southeast Asian heroin smuggling and distribution ring in U.S. history.” Further, read the letter, “DEA files show that this group is responsible for the importation of more than 1,000 pounds of heroin into the United States per year between 1967 and 1975.” The letter concluded: “In view of the above and the fact that Ruviwat continues to pose a serious, potential threat, DEA strongly opposes any reduction in sentence.”
The letter contained one error. As we have seen, Ike and Jack began their drug smuggling operation in 1968, not 1967. Nevertheless, Chai would stay in jail and remain there until 1994 when he was finally released and deported to Thailand.
THE TRIAL OF Jasper Myrick and Jimmy Smedley was scheduled to begin on March 26, 1976, in Bangkok Criminal Court, but the court granted the prosecution a stay until June 9, 1976, because one of their witnesses, who it declined to name, was overseas. The wait had taken its toll on the 57-year old Smedley. When he appeared in court, he looked wasted and exhausted. Smedley complained about the trial delays. “I’ve come here twice expecting the trial to begin and both times it’s been put back,” Smedley grumbled. “When is something going to happen?” When the much younger Myrick appeared in court, he looked as if he had experienced less wear and tear in the Thai jail.
IN MARCH, 1976, at about the time of the Smedley-Myrick trial delay, Peter Bensinger, the head of the DEA, announced in Washington, DC that, in a concerted operation, the DEA had arrested eleven people and that the arrests were related to the bust of Smedley and Myrick in Bangkok. Bensinger provided reporters with an indictment showing that over a 14-month period, from August 1974 to October 1975, these associates of Atkinson had smuggled more than 220 pounds of ultra-pure heroin into the U.S. from Thailand. Bensinger estimated the street value to be $100 million.
Bensinger said that 11 of the 14 people charged in the indictment were past or present U.S. servicemen who had served in Thailand. They smuggled the heroin in false bottoms of flight bags and later in furniture being shipped from Bangkok to the U.S. Although there was no indication that the U.S. government prosecutors would bring the so-called “cadaver-heroin connection” into evidence at the trial, the press could not help itself. Outlets like the Associated Press and The Washington Post reported that “an early method” of smuggling by this group had included the stuffing of drugs into dead bodies of U.S. servicemen sent back to the United States after being killed in Vietnam.
The indictment said the ring mastermind was 51-year old former Army Master Sergeant Leslie ‘Ike” Atkinson of Goldsboro, who, since June 1975 had been serving a 19-year prison sentence for heroin trafficking. The indicted included some familiar names—Rudolph Jennings, Charles Murphy Gillis, James McArthur and William K Brown.
IN JUNE 1976, the trial of Myrick and Smedley finally began in Bangkok. It was short, and the defendants were found guilty. The Thai court did not hesitate in throwing the book at them. The 57-year old Smedley was given a life sentence that might as well have been a death sentence. Myrick also got a life sentence, but it was reduced to thirty-three years because he fully confessed, and his testimony was helpful to the case. In its ruling, the court reasoned that Myrick would not accuse Smedley of being the furniture’s owner if it was not true because the two men never had any personal conflicts. The willingness of Valerie Myrick to travel from the U.S. to testify on Jasper’s behalf no doubt helped her husband, but it was little consolation to him. He would be eligible for membership in the American Association of Retired People (AARP), the U.S’s leading advocacy group for senior citizens, before he would be eligible to get out of prison.
For whatever reason, Myrick did not appeal his case, but Smedley did. And it got him acquitted. An appeals court overturned the lower court’s ruling because it found that the evidence upon which the authorities issued a warrant in the case was insufficient and that Myrick’s testimony was not sufficient to warrant Smedley’s conviction.
The Appeals Court ordered Smedley’s detention for another 30 days in case the prosecution filed an appeal to the Thai Supreme Court. But that didn’t happen and Smedley walked.
How in the world did that happen? Living in Bangkok for some time, Smedley knew the ropes of the Bangkok legal system and how to grease the right palms. Peter Finucane, a reporter with the Bangkok Post at the time of Smedley’s arrest, conviction, and subsequent exoneration, was a friend of Smedley and enjoyed a drink or two with him after he was released from jail. Smedley confided to Finucane about how he beat the wrap. “At the time, Jimmy had a limited amount of money, so there was no point for him in trying to bribe the criminal court, which gave him the life sentence,” Finucane recalled. “The lower court would have appealed, so he spent what money he had on trying to bribe one member of the Appeals Court. That member subsequently influenced his colleagues on the panel, and Smedley walked.”
Journalist John McBeth, who at the time was writing about the Atkinson drug ring for Asiaweek magazine, has a different take on what happened: “I was told at the time that Smedley paid $50,000 to win his acquittal in Thailand and that to get the money his brother had to mortgage his house in Los Angeles and a set of golf clubs. The money was apparently paid to the prosecutor. Smedley told me as much in front of two witnesses.”
After the trial Smedley returned to his high-profile lifestyle and was once again a familiar figure in Bangkok’s bar and nightlife scene. How Smedley ended up being extradited to the U.S. is still unclear. According to Finucane, one day Smedley told a group of his friends, including Finucane, that he planned to go to Hong Kong. Why he wanted to do that nobody knew, but friends tried to talk Smedley out of it. “He was advised to stay put,” Finucane recalled. “Thailand did not have an extradition treaty with the U.S. Hong Kong did. He was safe in Thailand, but Smedley did not listen. He went to Hong Kong, and, as soon as he got off the plane, he was arrested and extradited to the U.S.”
According to McBeth, though, Smedley was arrested at his rented home in Bangkok and taken from there by Thai immigration officers to Don Muang Airport,where he was handed over to the two DEA agents. The flight they boarded went through Hong Kong to the U.S.
Whatever the true story, it is ironic that Jimmy Smedley, who had talked Myrick into the attempted smuggling venture, ended up spending his days and nights in a relatively plush U.S. prison while Myrick languished in Thailand.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Behind Bars
BY MID-1976, IKE Atkinson’s drug empire was in shambles. His reversal of fortunes took root in 1972 when William Herman Jackson, his partner, was busted in Denver. Jack had already spent four years in Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary and would remain locked up for several more years. Luchai Ruviwat, Ike’s main heroin supplier, was in jail as well and scheduled to remain there for three decades. Jimmy Smedley was imprisoned in Bangkok but, in terms of Ike’s drug ring, he no longer mattered. Ike had long since given up on his likeable friend and his inebriated ways. Besides, Ike would lose touch with Jimmy Smedley after he bribed his way out of Thai prison. Ike had made Freddie Thornton his main man in Bangkok, but that move was looking more and more like a big mistake. Ike believed that Thornton had done a good job, but he had heard through his lawyers that Thornton had struck a deal with Uncle Sam in the wake of the DEA’s October 24, 1975, raid on William K. Brown’s residence in Augusta, Georgia.
Ike had been one of fourteen people indicted in March 1976 on a major Federal drug conspiracy charge. He and ten of the other co-indicted alleged conspirators had pleaded not guilty, while two, James Smedley and Jasper Myrick, were in prison in Bangkok awaiting trial on a drug trafficking charge and the possibility of being extradited to the U.S. for trial on Federal drug trafficking charges. Only one of the indicted, Freddie Thornton, had not been sent to jail.
On March 22, 1976, two days before the indictment was unsealed, Federal prosecutors issued a warrant for Thornton’s arrest. The warrant’s purpose—to get Thornton into protective custody before the indictment became public. In becoming an informant, Thornton negotiated with Uncle Sam what many observers considered to be a sweetheart deal, given his role in Ike’s organization and the fact that he trafficked in the more than 100 pounds of heroin stashed at the Brown residence while supposedly being in the U.S. government’s service. Thornton received a suspended five-year sentence, five years of probation, and a $10,000 fine. Thornton was released on a $100,000 personal recognizance bond.
Sometimes to ensure victory in court the prosecution must make a deal with the devil, law enforcement officials often rationalize. The physical evidence in the 1976 drug conspiracy case was impressive, but to tie all the pieces of the conspiracy together, the prosecution needed Freddie Thornton’s testimony. He knew who did what and with whom and when. “In a conspiracy case it is necessary to have someone, preferably someone on the inside, spell out the conspiracy, while we, as investigators, identify and document the overt acts and corroborate the witnesses,” explained Don Ashton, the DEA Special Agent who headed the DEA’s Wilmington, North Carolina office and spearheaded CENTAC 9, the DEA agency that conducted much of the Ike Atkinson drug ring investigation. “We do not always have a choice about who the witnesses are, but without a primary witness, the case is often lost and the organization continues. We spoke to a number of potential witnesses, and I told them that the first one on the bus gets a free ride; the rest go to jail. I guess, considering Thornton’s involvement, some might say he got a good deal. But he was the first one on the bus, and without him, we would not have had the impact we had on this (Ike’s} organization.”
The indictment led to the biggest drug trafficking trial in North Carolina history. The U.S. government maintained that all defendants in the case where members in good standing of the Atkinson organization over a protracted period of time. “I would say that this organization has to be classified as one of the largest heroin smuggling organizations in the world whose actions directly affected the United States,” Ashton told the press.
Mike Nerney had ceded the case to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Raleigh, and Joe Dean, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in North Carolina, prosecuted the case. Dean explained that the Atkinson organization had been under investigation for a number of years, and the case got a big investigative push in October 1975 when the DEA organized its tactical unit, CENTAC 9. The case was so big that it included investigators from Bangkok, New York City, Atlanta, Wilmington and Baltimore.
THE PROSPECT OF Ike manipulating a get-out-of-jail-early card from the American legal system was looking dimmer by the day. On October 24, 1975, Ike made his first attempt to have his 19-year “palm print” conviction reduced. Ike had pleaded no contest, and Judge John D. Larkins, Jr. had structured the palm print sentence so that Ike could be eligible for parole within a relatively short period of time, given Ike’s relatively clean record, family ties and what the court described as “good personal characteristics.” Now, Ike’s attorneys argued before Judge Larkins that their client should have his prison sentence reduced because of “family problems.” Ike’s wife, Atha, it seemed, had relapsed into alcoholism, and without a healthy mother, several of the children needed special care that only Ike could provide. Given these personal problems, the lawyers contended, Ike’s 19-year sentence (15 years on the first count and four years on the second to be served consecutively) should run concurrently. That would substantially reduce his prison time.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas McNamara strongly opposed a sentence reduction, telling the court, “Family problems should not interfere with justice.” Judge Larkins agreed. “All criminal defendants have family problems, which they caused themselves and not the court or prosecution,” the judge ruled. “In view of the fact that the defendant states that he has employed maids and nurses to help care for his family, it appears he is in a much better position than most criminal defendants.”
With the 19-year prison sentence remaining intact, Ike now had to go to trial again, this time for conspiracy to traffic and distribute heroin. Prosecutor Joe Dean told the jury: “We have put evidence before you of 126 kilos of heroin, some of it has been brought and laid before you on the clerk’s desk and in further testimony, you have seen pictures of 47 kilos of heroin in the Myrick shipment—103 bags of pure heroin shipped to this country... that’s what the case is about, about the international big business of importing dope into this country.”
Later, the U.S. government conceded that at trial it had only offered evidence of about some of the activities of the Atkinson drug ring—that for which they had evidence. The prosecution contended they could prove the defendants trafficked in about 354 pounds of pure heroin that could produce 54 million dosage units. According to Uncle Sam’s calculation, the individual dosage units normally sold for $10 on the street, meaning that the approximate retail value of the heroin the Atkinson ring smuggled into the U.S. stood at approximately half a billion dollars. This staggering figure, the prosecution argued, showed the mammoth scope of Ike’s drug ring activities, making the ring one of the largest heroin conspiracies in the United States over the past several years.
THE PROSECUTORS HAD a star witness and were confident they had a solid case, but they still expected a tough trial. “The case was no slam dunk,” explained Christie Whitcover Dean, a now retired Federal prosecutor who assisted in the case’s prosecution. “You never know what a jury is going to do. It was tough to get Ike because like any good CEO he was insulated. But we did have a lot of evidence that could be corroborated.”
Freddie Thornton was the first witness the prosecution called after jury selection, and his testimony comprised more than 800 pages of transcribed court testimony. Thornton testified about how he headed the Thai operation of Ike’s drug ring before it was broken up by the CENTAC 9 investigation. He revealed how he had used unsuspecting military personnel to help smuggle the heroin in military aircraft and how he helped buy and package the drugs. Under cross examination, Thornton admitted that he led the U.S. law enforcement to believe he could help them break a smuggling operation and that he lied to a grand jury in San Francisco after being arrested in Thailand and expelled from the country.
Ike watched Thornton’s testimony in court impressively roll on and could not understand how he could be so wrong about a man. Ike considered Thornton to be the biggest mistake he had ever made in his life.
The prosecution called other witnesses besides Thornton. Lionel Stewart testified about his undercover work negotiating with Luchai “Chai” Ruviwat and linked him to Atkinson. Herbert Houseton and Robert Ernest Patterson, who had participated in Ike’s postal connection, where able to tie several of the defendants to the conspiracy. Many of the defendants testified in their own defense.
DEA Special Agent Chuck Lutz flew from Bangkok to testify at the trial. Lutz was a Thai speaker and prosecutor Joe Dean used him to introduce into evidence the Thai newspapers that had been found in the false bottom of Brown’s furniture. When Lutz was handed the newspapers by Prosecutor Dean, Judge Dupree asked to see them. After examining the Thai Sanskrit writing, he quipped, “This looks like the voter registration forms we used to use here in North Carolina years ago.”
Finally, on May 19, 1976, the four-men and eight-women jury came back with its verdict. Nine of the 14 defendants were found guilty of participating in a drug conspiracy. Ike received a sentence of 25 years to be served consecutively with his 19-year palm print sentence, and a $50,000 fine. Without any successful appeals or court reductions in his sentence, Ike would not get out of prison until 2020. He would be about 95 years old.
Dressed in his military uniform and decked out with his ribbons, Sergeant William K. Brown stood at attention as Judge Franklin T. Dupree, Jr., sentenced the ten-and-one-half year veteran soldier to ten years in prison and fined him $5,000. Air Force Sergeant Charles Murphy Gillis was only months away from his 20-year retirement and was still assigned to Seymour Johnson Air Force Base. He asked the judge to give him time to determine whether the Air Force was going to discharge him and take away his retirement benefits. The judge told Gillis he would sentence him whenever that matter was settled. Eventually, Gillis lost his retirement and was given a ten-year sentence and a $5,000 fine. James McArthur, Ernest Patterson and Rudolph Jennings also received ten years and a $10,000 fine. Most of the convicted showed little emotion.
