Sergeant Smack, page 32
Jimmy hired Ike’s lawyer, Stephen Nimocks, to represent him and he went before Judge John D. Larkins, Jr. “I knew Nimocks was Judge Larkins’s good friend and that he had once been his manager in some political campaign,” Jimmy said. “I knew that relationship would help me.” It certainly did not hurt him. On January 2, 1974, Jimmy was released on appeal bond. The following month he took his family to Disney World to celebrate.
In 1974 and 1975, the heroin trade in North Carolina boomed; Jimmy was an active street dealer; and the money rolled in. He would arrange the sale of a kilo of heroin for $50,000 and sell it for $80,000. According to Jimmy’s calculation, he did it “fifteen or twenty times.”
By the summer of 1976, however, the heroin trade was in flux. Ike was in jail; the Asian heroin connection fragmented; and Mexican brown tar heroin was the smack of choice on the street, even though it was of poor quality compared to the Golden Triangle’s ultra-pure China White.
Jimmy thought it was a good time to get out of drug dealing. He had made a lot of money, but he had to spend a lot as well and not necessarily on a good time. By his own estimate, over a three-year period, Jimmy spent $150,000 on lawyers to keep him out of jail. But eventually his lawyers finally told Jimmy he had to turn himself in; he had exhausted all of his appeals. He was sent to the prison near Asheville, North Carolina, to complete his sentence, but got out in August 1977. Jimmy went to Denver where one of his brothers was living. He was now out of the drug trade.
One day in March 1978, Jimmy’s lawyer called him and said the SBI was coming to get him. He was being hauled in as part of the North Carolina’s investigation of Ike’s drug ring. “I thought it was bullshit,” Jimmy stated. “I didn’t know any of the others who were indicted.”
BY THE MID-1970S the drug ring Ike and Jack started in 1968 was having a much more negative impact on North Carolina than the moonshine whiskey. When Ike launched his drug ring in the late 1960s, Goldsboro became the hub of his narcotics empire. The heroin may have gone through other parts of the U.S. after being transported from Thailand via couriers, the postal system, crew chiefs and finally teak furniture, but it always ended up in Goldsboro for distribution. “In those days, any time I went to an intelligence meeting, all I heard was how a lot of dope was coming into Goldsboro,” revealed Steve Surratt, a retired SBI agent who worked the Atkinson investigation in the 1970s. “I spent hours on surveillance. Informants would tell us that so-and-so from New York City or DC was in Goldsboro. Every work day, I would tour Goldsboro to see what cars were in town, and we’d run the plates to see to whom those cars belonged.”
By then, both heroin trafficking and addiction were big North Carolina problems, and Rufus Edmisten, the North Carolina State Attorney General, decided to establish a drug squad. “I met with about six of my top SBI agents and they told me something illegal drug-wise was going on in North Carolina,” Edmisten explained. “I decided we needed to go after the big-time drug dealers and gave the SBI and the state prosecutor all the resources they needed. In North Carolina no one was bigger than Ike Atkinson. I told the state prosecutor that he could have anything he wanted. I literally gave him a blank check.”
Ike’s drug ring had the purest heroin in North Carolina, Surratt recalled. “I never saw any of Ike’s heroin that was less than 80 to 90 percent pure. We learned that Ike’s goal was to have a $2,000,000 stash of heroin in North Carolina, but I don’t think he made it.”
The North Carolina prosecutors publicized the 1978 indictment at a press conference in the Justice Building in Raleigh. North Carolina State Attorney General Rufus Edmisten said that the state’s indictment was “only the beginning” and explained how the investigation showed that “Ike was running a continuing criminal enterprise.” Edmisten boasted: “no other state had brought a case that we know of in the history of the country involving the charges we have presented and will prove in court.”
The case had national significance, Edmisten told the press, because “it is fair to say that that there have been literally millions of dollars made over the years and that it (the investigation) is an attempt on the part of all the people assembled here (officials at the press conference) to get the people in high levels who are in the business of distributing heroin. We can arrest hundreds of street people a day, and we do. That is not what we are really after. I think the case speaks for itself in that we are going to bring to justice a number of people who have been engaged in the business of distributing large amounts of heroin involving hundreds of millions of dollars.”
A week later, the defense lawyers jumped on the prosecutor for holding a press conference. Ethics rules for lawyers strictly limit the comments they can make about a case outside of court. Defense attorneys Robert Levin and Thomas Loflin charged that the press conference was a carefully orchestrated public circus. Levin called Edmisten the “orchestra leader.” Judge Forest A. Ferrell took the defense motion to dismiss under advisement and said he would rule at a later date. Judge Ferrell eventually ruled against the defense motion.
Meanwhile, Don Jacobs, the North Carolina District Attorney who was prosecuting the case, added some melodrama by asking Judge Ferrell to provide protection for witnesses, since the judge had ordered that the prosecution share details of the prosecution’s case with defense lawyers. SBI agent Bill Slaughter escorted Ike from the Marion prison to Raleigh for the state trial. He recalled telling Ike about the rumors that were floating around in North Carolina, claiming he might try to kill some witnesses in the case. Ike was sitting in the back seat. He leaned toward Slaughter, who sat in the front and said: “Mr. Slaughter. I’m not going to try to kill somebody when it’s much easier to bribe them.”
WHILE IKE’S DEFENSE lawyers prepared for arraignment, they were also fighting an attempt by the State of Ohio to extradite their client to Akron where his old pal, Dan Burch, who taught Ike how to prepare AWOL bags for smuggling heroin and who had the bitter relationship with William Herman “Jack” Jackson, was on trial, fighting a drug-conspiracy charge. Ohio prosecutors were trying to prove that Burch ran a widespread heroin network with North Carolina connections and that he, his brother, David, and three co-conspirators had brought 1,000 pounds of heroin annually into the U.S. from Thailand between 1968 and 1978, most it through Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro. The authorities also claimed that Burch used his business, Rare Elements Boutique, as a front to launder drug money. All of the defendants were found guilty and Dan Burch was sentenced to ten years in prison.
Burch was largely convicted on the basis of Ellis Sutton’s testimony: “Sutton testified that he hid in the closet of the Atkinson home in Goldsboro and saw me enter and get drugs from Ike,” Burch explained. “Sutton lied. A lot of things were wrong with his story, including the timeline. I had lousy lawyers. Any decent defense lawyer could have picked Sutton’s testimony apart. I didn’t know that until I went to prison and began studying the law.”
Ike had no idea Sutton was testifying in Ohio. ”I didn’t know he was a star witness in Dan’s trial,” Ike recalled. “Otherwise, I would not have fought extradition. I would have testified and showed that Sutton was a liar, just as he was in ’72 when he lied about me selling him drugs.”
ON SEPTEMBER 12, 1978, Ike Atkinson was brought from a two-man cell in Block D in the central prison to the Wayne County Courthouse for arraignment. Ike was handcuffed and his ankles shackled as he climbed from a vehicle escorted by two policemen to the conference room in the Justice Building where one of his defense lawyers, Talbot Smith, joined him. Ike waved and smiled to some of his family members who were at the courthouse. Smith asked for a ten-day delay to prepare his case. Judge Ferrell granted the request.
WHEN THEY INDICTED Ike and the other thirteen defendants, prosecutors revealed that some of the information leading to the indictments came from the conviction in New York City of Frank “Superfly” Lucas, whom they described as a major heroin trafficker in the Bronx, Queens and Manhattan boroughs of New York City and in New Jersey. On September 19, 1978, five days after the defendants were arraigned in Raleigh, Frank Lucas and his brother Vernon “Shorty” Lucas signed a “memorandum of agreement” with the State of North Carolina. In return for Lucas’s truthful testimony in the trial of the 14, the State of North Carolina promised not to prosecute the Lucas brothers of any crime that they may reveal in testimony before any grand jury or at any trial.
By that time it was no secret that Lucas was singing to the authorities. In January 1975, a team of 12 U.S. DEA agents and 12 NYPD officers, acting on a tip from two East Harlem members of La Cosa Nostra, surrounded Lucas’s house at 1933 Sheffield Road in the well-to-do neighborhood of Teaneck, New Jersey, and arrested him. The strike force confiscated $585,000 from the Lucas residence. Two days after the raid, the authorities indicted Lucas and 18 other people on drug conspiracy charges. A year later, a New York federal district court convicted Lucas, and he received a 40-year prison sentence and a fine of $200,000. In November 1976, a New Jersey state court sentenced Lucas to an additional 30 years in a New Jersey state prison for drug trafficking. The state sentence, however, would not begin until Lucas had finished his 40-year term in federal prison.
The prospect of spending the next 70 years behind bars did not deter Lucas from his life of crime. In September 1977, Lucas confessed to authorities that while incarcerated he had been running a multi-million-dollar drug ring with brother Larry and Ezell. The drug lord directed the operation through coded messages he passed to visitors who visited him in the Essex County jail in Newark, New Jersey.
It looked as if Superfly would be imprisoned forever, but he still had a card to play. He began contacting federal officials about working out a deal to reduce his sentence. In March 1979, one law enforcement source told the Newark Star Ledger newspaper: “Lucas had been telling us everything from ‘day one’ to now. A lot of the stuff was known to law enforcement, but a lot of it was new. We couldn’t prove some of it, but he (Lucas) had agreed to testify everywhere he has to.” The source said most of the information Lucas was giving the authorities was about drug operations in New York and North Carolina.
Later, when the American Gangster movie appeared, which starred Denzel Washington in the role of Lucas, Lucas vehemently denied being a snitch. As part of the movie producers’s efforts to soften Lucas’s image, the movie portrayed him as only snitching on corrupt cops. That was not true; in fact, Lucas did not turn in a single law enforcement official. Lucas also claimed that he never took the stand as a witness. But that is also not true. Lew Rice, a retired DEA agent debriefed Lucas during his investigation of Leroy Butler, a big-time Harlem drug dealer who was convicted and sentenced to 15 years in prison largely because of Lucas’s testimony. Rice confirmed that Lucas took the witness stand as a government informant.
In a memorandum dated March 13, 1977, Lucas made a statement to two DEA officials, claiming he had dealt with Ike Atkinson on only two occasions. According to Lucas, in 1969 he purchased two kilos of heroin from Ike at his Goldsboro home. Lucas claimed the heroin was of such poor quality that a second delivery of two kilos was made in order to make up for the first package. He had no further dealings with Ike, Lucas said, although he did not deny reports that his brothers were involved with the Atkinson drug ring. Later, however, Lucas repudiated this statement, saying he had bought heroin from Ike on several other occasions.
While Lucas was incarcerated at Riker’s Island, the authorities there allowed him to make more telephone calls than normal from prison and to have as many visitors as he wanted. Lucas used the arrangement to help keep his drug organization afloat. In early March 1977, Gino Gallina, a well-known criminal defense lawyer who represented several of the most powerful La Costa Nostra mobsters in New York City, as well as Lucas, Frank Matthews, and some other prominent Black gangsters, visited Lucas in the counsel room at Riker’s. Gallina was suspicious and attempted to search Lucas for a recording device. Lucas hit Gallina and demanded money that the lawyer allegedly owed him. On March 5, 1977, Gallina was planning to dine with a lady friend at a restaurant in the vicinity of Carmine and Varick streets in Greenwich Village. As the lawyer stepped from his car, a lone gunman walked up and shot him eight times. An ambulance rushed to the scene, but it was too late. Gallina lay sprawled on the street, dead.
Not all of the people who visited Lucas in prison and pissed him off ended up dead like Gallina. Stanley Galkin came one day after the Gallina visit. Galkin was the Atlanta lawyer who represented Leon Cohen in Cohen’s successful effort to scam Ike out of nearly $1 million while Ike was incarcerated at the Atlanta pen. As part of the scam, Cohen had visited Ike while posing as real-life Michael J. Egan, an associate U.S. attorney general in the Jimmy Carter Administration. Galkin had fallen out with Cohen, but Galkin decided to try the scam on Frank Lucas. He brought with him a real estate agent named Robert Charnock to pose as Micheal Egan, but the scam did not work and Galkin and Charnock were arrested. They pleaded guilty and were sent to prison.
Meanwhile, Galkin also pleaded guilty to a felony charge of criminal solicitation for conspiring to murder Leon Cohen and his accountant Fred Sans. “Galkin was the worst lawyer I ever met,” Ike revealed. ”He was a real nightmare.” Sources say that Galkin was later murdered in a home invasion.
Joe Cheshire, a Raleigh lawyer who represented Ike’s brother Edward Atkinson at the massive state trial following the March 1978 indictment and who conducted the special investigation of prison conditions in the Wake County jail, got a sense of the Lucas-Galkin relationship listening to an audio cassette tape. Cheshire, along with the other defense lawyers in the North Carolina State case, received about 300 tape-recorded conversations from the prosecutor.
“There were no transcripts and no indexes to go with the tapes,” Cheshire recalled. “I wasn’t going to listen to every tape, but I put one of them in a tape recorder to see what they contained. The tape happened to be a recorded conversation between Lucas and Stanley Galkin. Lucas was telling Galkin: ‘Stanley, you owe me money and I want it now.’ Stanley sounded nervous. He said: ‘I can’t get it, I traveled all over the country. I’ve maxed out my American Express card.’ You could hear Galkin’s children in the background. Stanley said: ‘I got to go and take my kids to the park.’ All of a sudden, Lucas’s voice changed; it had a real chilling tone. Lucas said: ‘ Stanley, you remember the story in the paper about how they found a lawyer floating in the river. Motherfucker, if you don’t get my money, you and your family will be floating in the river, too!’ I remember thinking. ‘I’m glad I’m representing the Atkinsons and not the Lucas family.’ The two families were so different. The Atkinsons were family people, pleasant and respectful. I never felt fear or danger.”
IKE SENT FULLER to Riker’s Island to negotiate the deal with Frank Lucas that led to the sale of 13.3 pounds of heroin to an undercover SBI agent at a Holiday Inn in Selma, North Carolina. Frank Lucas would have been a star witness at the state trial, but the defendants, including Ike, pleaded guilty and received a sentence of 12 to 20 years to be served concurrently with his sentence in his 1976 federal conviction.
Lucas had provided enough information to make the North Carolina case against Ike and many of his relatives, but Ike was not going to let Superfly get away with it. And neither was Jack. The two decided they would get even with Lucas. During his period of incarceration, Lucas had adamantly denied any involvement in murder, even though during his efforts to fight a drug conspiracy case in 1974 he left behind a suspicious trail of dead bodies.
Lucas was one of 13 people named in an indictment that New York prosecutors unsealed on June 23, 1974. Lucas and his co-defendants were accused of involvement in a conspiracy that had sold up to 20 pounds of heroin during the previous five years. Lucas faced the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison for supervising the alleged conspiracy.
The prosecution looked as if it had a solid case against Frank Lucas. It presented a parade of witnesses, most of whom were informants and undercover detectives, and they provided impressive testimony about heroin deliveries and cash payments. Charles Morris, the prosecution’s key witness, stayed on the stand for nine straight days, as the defense hammered away, trying to trip him up and blow holes in his testimony.
Still, the prosecution had a big problem. Important witnesses kept dying violently during the trial. The situation became so dire that Thomas M. Fortuin, the chief prosecutor in the case, complained to Judge Irvin Cooper that there is “an extensive amount of blood in the case. We constantly have had more protection problems that any case I am aware of, really, in the history of the court.”
The series of murders were indeed disturbing and made witnesses look like casualties of war. The first victim cited by the prosecution was Marjorie Morris, who was murdered in 1973, two weeks after she had been interviewed by defense investigators. Next to die was Albert Pratt, who was shot to death in front of a Harlem bar shortly after he began cooperating in the case. On February 22, 1973, Stanley Peek became the next witness to fall. He was an informant who tape-recorded conversations with Zack Robinson, one of the defendants in the trial. Robinson subsequently disappeared, and police did not know if he had fled or was killed.
Another victim was George Ford who had also been indicted in the case but had agreed to testify against Lucas before a grand jury. Police suspected Ford of trafficking as much as $12,000 worth of heroin a day from his candy shop in Harlem. On July 24, 1974, the “Candy Man” was shot dead at a block party in Harlem. Police had no suspects.
In September 1978, Ike and Jack told New York City detectives that Martin Trowery, who, at that time was cooperating against Ike and Jack in Pittsburgh, was the shooter in the George Ford murder and that Lucas was the buyer of Trowery’s services. This new Lucas-Trowery-Ford lead convinced the New York special prosecutor to reopen the dormant Ford murder investigation.
