Sergeant Smack, page 30
IN OCTOBER 1976, the DEA terminated CENTAC 9, one of the most successful of all CENTAC investigations. After a year of operation, it cost just $55,475.77 to fund the takedown of one of the biggest American drug trafficking rings ever to operate from Southeast Asia. Most of the money was spent on travel and per diem expenses. In Don Ashton’s official report to DEA headquarters, he wrote about the impact of the operation on North Carolina: “CENTAC 9 had a very significant impact on the heroin availability in North Carolina. Prior to the operation, white heroin was both prevalent and immediately available throughout the State. After the completion of CENTAC 9, and to the present time, white heroin is rare and the overall availability of heroin in North Carolina has been significantly reduced.” The impact was much broader, of course, considering Ike’s heroin was supplying drug dealers primarily in New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, DC, and elsewhere
THE TRIAL WAS over and the authorities transferred Ike from the Wake County jail in Raleigh to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta. But he left behind a trail of rumors and innuendos of corruption. The press reported that while Ike was in the county jail in Raleigh, before and during his 1976 Federal trial, he had bribed his jailers to allow him to have parties in his cell with liquor, women and gambling. At the time, Stephen Nimocks, one of Ike’s lawyers, said: “If any of that happened, I was certainly not aware of it. The only time I saw him was when they brought him from the jail cell to the consulting room.”
That was hardly a ringing endorsement of innocence. But, fortunately for Ike’s reputation, North Carolina Governor Jim Hunt appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the allegations. Joe Cheshire, a young 30-year-old lawyer who had graduated from Wake Forest University law school in 1973, conducted a thorough year-long investigation in which he interviewed the county sheriff’s deputies, jail employees and prisoners in the Wake County jail. Cheshire also went to Atlanta to interview Ike. “In my entire professional legal career—and I have been involved with defendants in hundreds of drug cases—I have never met a more pleasant person who was convicted of a serious crime,” Cheshire recalled.
Cheshire presented his findings to Governor Hunt. “I reported that there was widespread corruption in the Wake County jail, but it was not because of Ike Atkinson or the other prisoners,” Cheshire explained. “The jailers were responsible for it. My investigation led to a number of firings and convictions, and the state moved to clean up the jail system.”
FOR IKE, EXONERATION in the Wake County jail scandal was a small victory that did not change the sobering reality. He could spend the next 44 years in a 6" by 9" jail cell. He could continue to spend thousands of dollars in appeals to try to dig himself out of his hole, but, in all likelihood, he would likely never see the “light at the end of the tunnel.”
“I always believed that as long as I did things right I would never get caught,” Ike recalled. “So I never thought about the consequences. But I could not foresee how things would work out. Eventually, I depended upon too many people and a lot of things spun out of my control. Still, I wasn’t afraid of prison because I knew I could do the time.”
Ike had some good friends in the Atlanta pen who helped him learn the ropes of prison life. Thomas “Sonny” Southerland, who had accompanied Ike and two cadavers on that fateful night in December 1972, was still in prison and at the Atlanta facility. Ike had always treated Sonny as a younger brother, and he took Sonny under his wing.
In a remarkable development, Herman “Jack” Jackson was also transferred to Atlanta. Why would two partners in one of the 1970s biggest drug rings end up in the same prison? Could not such an arrangement help to create the conditions under which a criminal conspiracy could continue to function? Law enforcement officials say that the federal prison system is a huge complex, so it is difficult to keep track of who is in which prison, with whom.
When Jack showed up at Atlanta, Ike was already inclined to believe that his transfer was not a bureaucratic screw-up, but a move to bring Jack to the prison to snitch on him. After all, how often does a comet hit the earth? Unknown to Ike at the time, Jack had been singing to the authorities at the Leavenworth Federal Penitentiary and with U.S. Attorney’s Office in Denver, where he had been tried and convicted of smuggling 21 pounds of heroin that had somehow disappeared from the hangar at Lowry Air Force Base.
Jack told Paul Cooper, Assistant U.S. Attorney in Denver, that he had information about drug trafficking in Philadelphia, and he was willing to share it if he could get a reduction in sentence. Cooper called Arlen Specter, the District Attorney in Philadelphia at that time, who would later become famous as a U.S. Senator, and Jackson’s information led to the arrest and conviction of at least three-dozen people in Philadelphia. As he had promised Jack, Cooper went back to court to get his sentence reduced. Cooper and Jack, however, were in for a big surprise. Cooper recalled: “I told the judge how Jackson’s information had helped the authorities and why he should get his sentence reduced. The judge said to Jack: ‘You did all this while behind bars for several years? I can’t let you out. You will still be a menace to society on the street. Request denied’”
But Ike was not going to let the threat of Jack being a snitch cramp his lifestyle. He was happy to see Jack—after all, he was still his best friend. Ike used his money and charisma to make life comfortable for Jack, Sonny and anyone else who became part of his circle. Ike bribed the guards for favors, such as getting them to buy him good pizza and cigars or a nice radio that he could use to keep up with world news. “Ike could get anything he wanted in the Atlanta pen, and he was treated quite well,” said Talbot Smith, one of Ike’s lawyers who visited Ike often. “Ike didn’t want drugs or women, just mainly food. He literally controlled the prison and the guards and prisoners, and they treated him with respect.”
Ike made friends easily, especially when other prisoners began learning about his place in the roll call of big-time drug dealers. One day the word came ricocheting down the prison corridor. “Goldfinger is here!” Another celebrity gangster had arrived at the Atlanta pen. Jimmy “Goldfinger” Terrell was one of the big-time Harlem drug dealers of the 1970s. Ike knew of Harry Terrell, Goldfinger’s brother, but he had never met Goldfinger.” “He turned out to be one of the nicest guys,” Ike recalled. “We got along fine.”
Ike met Joe Stassi at the laundry. “Well, if it isn’t Mr. Atkinson,” Stassi said in his clipped, tough talking manner straight out of the “Godfather”. Ike knew who Joe Stassi was—a well-connected mobster in La Cosa Nostra with powerful criminal friends in high places. Ike and Stassi hit it off and they became good friends. Ike thought Stassi was some kind of “godfather” but came to learn that he was really a soldier in La Cosa Nostra. Still, Stassi had powerful connections in La Cosa Nostra. Stassi knew all the legendary gangsters—Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky and Bugsie Siegel, for example—and had killed many people for the Mob, and did it often.
During his testimony in 1962 before a Senate Subcommittee, Mafia turncoat Joseph Valachi named Joe Stassi a member of La Cosa Nostra. By this time, the FBI was already investigating him. A grand jury in Corpus Christi, Texas, indicted Stassi on a heroin importation charge, but he went on the run for three years before being captured in one of the FBI’s biggest manhunts at the time. Stassi spent the next thirty years in prison claiming he was framed.
“We would walk the yard together every day,” Ike recalled. “They called the regular route that Joe took the ‘Stassi Trail.’ We would talk about life, our families, Joe’s wife who was a former Miss California (beauty contest winner), his son, who was a professor at a university, and the mob scene in New York City.” Ike told Joe about the Italian mobsters who had come to the Atlanta pen to collect the $80,000 that Frank Lucas owed the Mob. Stassi had never heard of Lucas, but he had a good laugh anyway.
Walking the Stassi Trail became part of Ike’s daily routine. He also worked as a clerk typist and barbershop orderly in Prison Industries where, according to prison reports, he received “meritorious pay and meritorious time.” But while adjusting to prison life, Ike was also trying to keep an eye on the considerable assets he had left behind. He was receiving reports he did not like. Ike had a stash of heroin hidden in the countryside near Goldsboro. The location of the heroin stash was supposed to be a secret, but he heard that some members of his own family were stealing from it. “I don’t know how much dope I had out in the country, but it could have been worth as much as $50 million,” Ike explained. “The frustrating part of it—I was locked up and I really couldn’t do anything about it. I guess my situation made it too tempting for some of those close to me.”
Disloyal family members were not the only people who concerned Ike. He was also becoming suspicious of some of the people who were supposed to be handling his affairs while he remained behind bars. Ike hired Talbot Smith, a prominent criminal defense lawyer, to investigate. “I came to see Ike several times,” Smith recalled. “He said some things didn’t seem right to him. He had concerns and wanted me to investigate the people who were working for him. I checked out one private investigator and found out he was ripping Ike off, so we fired him. I remember checking out Richard Mazur, a lawyer from San Francisco who was doing a lot of appeal work for Ike. Mazur checked out fine. He was doing an excellent job.”
One time, Ike wanted Smith to deliver a message to Frank Lucas about a twenty-kilogram deal. At the time Lucas was incarcerated at the Metropolitan Correction Center (MCC) in New York City. “I said I wasn’t going to do it,” Smith said. “So he had a young lawyer named Wilbur Fuller go instead. Fuller got arrested because Lucas was an informant. Fuller was sentenced to four years in jail.”
LEON COHEN, AN Atlanta businessman, and Fred Sans, his accountant, were two of the individuals Talbot Smith investigated. Cohen owed more than $600,000 to the IRS due to several tax liens against him. Desperate for money, Cohen devised various schemes between late 1976 and mid-1977 to defraud Ike. It began in November 1976, when Cohen sent his attorney Stanley Galkin and an associate, John Tipton, to see Ike at the Atlanta pen. Cohen offered Ike a deal he did not refuse. Ike bought six kilos of quality heroin for $300,000. Ike and Cohen agreed to a time and place for the exchange, but Cohen arranged for fake cops to make a fake bust, and in a panic, Ike’s people fled the scene without the money or drugs.
Sans and Tipton took the money to Cohen’s house and counted it over a two-day period. Cohen then sent couriers to several Atlanta banks, ordering them to exchange no more than $5,000 at any one bank so as not to attract attention. In other words, Cohen was trying to launder his dirty money and avoid paying federal taxes. Over the next three months, Cohen also laundered money at the Palm State Bank in Palm Harbor, Florida, where he had corrupted bank officials.
In March and April 1977, Galkin returned to the Atlanta pen and conned more money out of Ike. Under Cohen’s direction, Galkin convinced Ike that he had a high government official from the U.S. Attorney General’s Office, who, for a $ 1 million fee, could arrange Ike’s release from prison. After receiving a $100,000 “down payment” from one of Ike’s associates, Cohen, himself, went to see Ike in prison impersonating Michael Eagan, then Associate U.S. Attorney General in the Jimmy Carter administration.
“I knew Griffin Bell (the U.S. Attorney General) was from Atlanta, so I thought I was making the contacts who would give me a hook into high places,” Ike said. “Nothing was happening through the courts. I had the money, so I thought putting some money in the right high place gave me a good chance to reduce my sentence.”
Cohen conned Ike out of nearly another $300,000. Not satisfied, Cohen also forged Ike’s signature on a note he sent to one of Ike’s brothers authorizing payment of $260,000 to Cohen. Then Cohen sent Sans to the Cayman Islands where he arranged a wire transfer of $260,000 from one of Ike’s accounts there, using a Canadian bank to send the money to a checking account in Sans’s name at the Palm State Bank. Cohen now had close to $1 million dollars of Ike’s money.
Uncle Sam, however, was hot on Cohen’s trail and he and Sans were arrested and charged with four counts of fraud, money laundering and falsifying facts in a matter under the IRS’s jurisdiction. Leon Cohen’s case was separated from the other defendants because he was ill. A jury found Sans guilty of the conspiracy charge only.
ON APRIL 16, 1978, Ike was suddenly transferred to the federal penitentiary at Marion in southern Illinois. Built in 1963 on a wildlife refuge, Marion was a replacement for the less practical prison facility at Alcatraz. By the time of Atkinson’s transfer, Marion was being touted as the country’s most secure facility and the home of its most dangerous prisoners. Despite its reputation, the guard towers and the coiled razor wire cascading from the fences, the prison’s look was unimposing. Still, Marion was a state-of-the-art prison for that time. It had new electronic detection systems, armed mobile patrols, remote-controlled gates and closed-circuit television. Each prisoner had his own cell, which included concrete fixtures and a stainless steel toilet.
Prison officials told Ike he was being transferred to Marion because the Atlanta penitentiary was overcrowded. But his transfer was actually part of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons’s move to put all the prisoners it considered extraordinarily violent into one secure prison. Some U.S. cities were beginning to have a gang problem, and many of the transferees were gang members who had killed other inmates or assaulted prison officials while incarcerated. “One day at Atlanta, I was simply told to get my stuff together; I was being moved,” Ike recalled. “I was put on a bus, and we left Atlanta. Just like that.”
On the way to Marion, the bus stopped at the Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary, located in central Pennsylvania about 120 miles west of Philadelphia. Built in 1932, Lewisburg has housed many famous prisoners in its history, including Alger Hiss, John Gotti, Jimmy Hoffa and Whitey Bolger. The prison became known for its “Mafia Row,” or G-block, a maximum-security wing that houses many Mafiosi.
“We were to stop at Lewisburg and stay overnight,” Ike recalled. “While we were on the bus, some of the prisoners planned an escape. They didn’t try to recruit me, but I could see what they were doing. The escapees were caught and the guards beat some of them up badly. The prisoners brought a lawsuit and I testified. I didn’t know too much about Marion, but after what happened at Lewisburg, I was kind of happy to get there.”
Soon after his arrival at Marion, Ike was brought before the warden and his administrative team. “The first question they asked me was: ‘What are you doing here?’ I said: ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’ They reviewed my record and could see that I may have been a big-time drug dealer, but that I wasn’t the violent type and I didn’t belong in Marion. The team adjourned and then came back a little later. They said my file indicated I had been involved in a drug conspiracy, a serious crime, but that I had a good prison record at Atlanta. If I kept my nose clean, they would review my file at a later date, and I could get transferred. At the time, the guards at Marion weren’t brutal, and there was no twenty-three hour lockdown. The prison wasn’t actually that bad.”
Ike settled into his prison routine. He was assigned to the food service department where he worked in the dish tank as the lead man. On September 16, 1978, Ike’s food service supervisor wrote the following evaluation of Ike: “Atkinson is an excellent worker who causes no problems whatsoever. He is courteous and polite to officers and inmates alike. This man works with a minimum of supervision, and he is cooperative in every respect. This man does not involve himself in any activities that are questionable. Atkinson is basically a loner, and he has done his own time. He is not a sniveler and accepts his present circumstances as a man who has made a mistake, but would never involve himself in any further criminal activities. Atkinson is friendly to all, but he has made no close ties within the institution.”
Actually, Ike did have some good friends at Marion. Joe Stassi was transferred from Atlanta as well, and once again, every day, the two pals took to a new Stassi Trail. Ike made one of his best friends at Marion in Veronza Bowers, Jr., a dread-locked, charismatic inmate who was in prison for life without parole. Bowers was a former member of the Black Panther Party who, in 1973, was convicted for the murders of a U.S. park ranger on the word of two government informants, both of whom received reduced sentences for other crimes. Since his incarceration, he has become the subject of a concerted campaign to get him released from jail. For Ike, Bowers was a Renaissance Man with many interests, including meditation and the healing arts, especially acupuncture and massage therapy. “We became good friends and still are,” Ike recalled. “Veronza is a health nut and into exercise. Veronza stayed after me to lead a healthier lifestyle. He was an inspiration. I tried to follow his advice.”
HARLEM GANGSTER LEROY “Nicky” Barnes was at Marion when Ike arrived. Dubbed “Mr. Untouchable” for his uncanny ability to avoid arrest, Barnes was considered so dangerous that, when he went on trial for his crimes in 1978, the court made the jury anonymous, the first time that had happened in American history. The popular song Bad, Bad Leroy Brown was supposedly written with Barnes in mind.
“Mr. Untouchable” Barnes was arrested in March 1977, but while on bond, he gave an interview to The New York Times Magazine. The article portrayed Barnes as a clever operator who enjoyed his popularity in Harlem, engaged in a lavish lifestyle and seemed to have made a career out of avoiding arrest and embarrassing law enforcement groups. On the front page of the magazine was the article’s bold title: “Mr. Untouchable,” with the subtext: “The police say that Nicky Barnes may be Harlem’s biggest drug dealer. Now the government will try to prove it.”
