In the World
ALSO BY RICHARD STRATTON:
Smack Goddess
Slam (editor, with Kim Wozencraft)
Altered States of America: Outlaws and Icons,
Hitmakers and Hitmen
Cannabis Americana: Remembrance of the War on Plants Trilogy
Smuggler’s Blues: A True Story of the Hippie Mafia
Kingpin: Prisoner of the War on Drugs
Copyright © 2020 by Richard Stratton
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.
First Edition
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Stratton, Richard (Richard H.), author.
Title: In the world: from the big house to Hollywood / Richard Stratton.
Description: First edition. | New York: Arcade Publishing, [2020]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019035674 (print) | LCCN 2019035675 (ebook) | ISBN 9781628727272 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781628727296 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Stratton, Richard (Richard H.) | Ex-convicts—United States—Biography. | Screenwriters—United States—Biography.
Classification: LCC HV9468.S77 A3 2020 (print) | LCC HV9468.S77 (ebook) | DDC 812/.54 [B—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019035674
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019035675
Cover design by Erin Seaward-Hiatt
Cover photograph courtesy of Ray Vanacore
Printed in the United States of America
I returned, and saw under the sun
that the race is not to the swift,
nor the battle to the strong,
neither yet bread to the wise,
nor riches to men of understanding,
nor yet favor to men of skill,
but time and chance happens
to them all.
Ecclesiastes 9:11
Ain’t life grand . . . ?
Bank robber Clyde Barrow,
from the movie Bonnie and Clyde
CONTENTS
Author’s Note: Détente in the War on Plants
Prologue: Time and Chance
PART ONE
PAROLE: DOING TIME ON THE STREET
Chapter One: Lawless
Chapter Two: Get My Monkey Laid
Chapter Three: A Violation for Real
Chapter Four: A Man Has Got to Get His Teeth Fixed
Chapter Five: Amor a la Colombiana
Chapter Six: Your Whole Tribe Eats Donuts
Chapter Seven: Mailer Pal Writes Druggie Novel
Chapter Eight: I Was Hungry, and It Was Your World
Chapter Nine: Heavyweights
PART TWO
HOLLYWOOD: ADVENTURES IN THE SKIN TRADE
Chapter Ten: Blowback, Project MK-ULTRA, and Beyond
Chapter Eleven: White Boyz
Chapter Twelve: Street Time
Chapter Thirteen: Original Gangster: Joe Stassi Redux
Chapter Fourteen: The Informer: Whitey Bulger and the FBI
Chapter Fifteen: The Brand
Chapter Sixteen: Dog Eat Dog, Crude, and More False Starts
PART THREE
FATHERHOOD: THE BEGINNING OF A GREAT ADVENTURE
Chapter Seventeen: Godfather and Son
Chapter Eighteen: Fathers and Sons
Afterword: A Place You Never Want to Be
Author’s Note
DÉTENTE IN THE WAR ON PLANTS
FOR THIS, VOLUME three of my Cannabis Americana: Remembrance of the War on Plants trilogy, I pick up the story on that unforgettable day, Monday, June 25, 1990, when they opened the front gate at the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) in Ashland, Kentucky, and I was allowed to walk out. After eight straight years in custody of the US Bureau of Prisons, I was suddenly free.
The outside world felt like a different reality—a heightened new dimension of existence where anything is possible. The simple act of walking without high stone walls and chain-link fences strung with coils of gleaming razor wire penning me in; the horizon no longer assaulted with manned gun towers; no shackles and chains around my ankles to restrict my stride; no handcuffs linked to a belly chain around my waist to hinder my reach; no sullen, beefy guards loitering, watching, poised to order me to drop my drawers, bend over, and spread ’em so they could peer up my asshole—yes, I was a man again, a human being, no longer an inmate identification number, no longer a prisoner. After a struggle worthy of Kafka with faceless authorities in an unfathomable criminal justice system, I was free at last.
MY FIFTEEN-YEAR CAREER as an international marijuana and hashish smuggler prior to my arrest in 1982 is recounted in volume one, Smuggler’s Blues: A True Story of the Hippie Mafia. That book ends with my capture by DEA agents, deputy US marshals with the Fugitive Task Force, and LAPD cops in the lobby of the Sheraton Senator Hotel at the airport in Los Angeles. I went to trial twice—once in the District of Maine and a second time in the Southern District of New York. In the Maine case I was convicted of conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute marijuana and sentenced to the maximum: fifteen years. On my way to the penitentiary to serve that sentence, I was waylaid in New York and told that unless I was ready to cooperate with the government and become a rat, I would be charged again, this time under the so-called kingpin statute, Title 21, United States Code, Section 848, with being the manager and organizer of a continuing criminal enterprise. I faced anywhere from a minimum of ten years up to life in prison with no possibility of parole. I chose not to cooperate and went to trial again. After a second conviction, I was sentenced to a total of twenty-five years and six months in prison.
While in prison, I became a jailhouse lawyer. I studied the law and discovered an illegality in my sentence. I appealed the sentence and won in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. The appellate court vacated my twenty-five-year sentence and remanded me for resentencing before a different judge. After more legal wrangling, I was resentenced to ten years. I maxed out that sentence, but I then had to litigate with the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and ultimately have the judge order the bureau to release me. Both federal cases and the years of legal warfare, my eight-year sojourn in the vast, brutal American penal system in custody of the BOP, and my eventual courtroom victory that resulted in my being released are detailed in volume two: Kingpin: Prisoner of the War on Drugs.
RELEASE WAS A heady time. My novel, Smack Goddess, about a lady kingpin drug dealer, written while in prison, was about to be published. I had an advance from my publisher of $20,000 waiting for me—the most legal money I had ever earned. Anything seemed possible. Freedom beckoned, and challenged: Get your life back. Or, better still: Make a new life for yourself. And a reminder: Obey the law, asshole. Stay the fuck out of prison.
Several of the friends I made while in prison who had been released were unable to make it out here in the world. They were busted for violating conditions of their parole, or they picked up a new case and were soon back behind bars. Doing serious time—anything over five, ten, or more years in a ma
ximum-security penitentiary—will change you no matter how strong you are—it’s inevitable. I had a lot going for me, far more than most ex-cons coming out of prison. But I was still wrestling with internal demons, doppelgangers, and the self-sabotaging tricksters of my character that had not been fully exorcised even after eight years of punishment, and were just lying in wait to resurface and play havoc with my peace of mind. As I was about to learn, getting out of prison, and staying out, and really getting free from the prison in one’s head is in many ways more of a challenge than surviving long-term imprisonment.
SOME NAMES HAVE been changed to protect the privacy of dear friends and lovers, as well as those who have never been captured, and who may still be active in the marijuana underground and cannabis black market even as the mysterious outlaw spiky green-leafed plant becomes semilegal. The status of cannabis has changed dramatically since my arrest and imprisonment. It has gone from the “weed with roots in hell” to legal medicine and recreational refreshment available over the counter in some thirty American states, and in foreign countries, including our enlightened neighbor to the north, Canada.
One could argue that we were right, that we were ahead of our time, those of us in the so-called hippie mafia, the outlaws and freak entrepreneurs who risked their freedom and their lives and continued to defy laws that were not only wrong but ridiculous, unenforceable, and downright un-American. Over a tumultuous three decades we were able to change the culture in the United States by continuing to smuggle, cultivate, and distribute this remarkable, and yet still controversial, plant. We questioned and resisted the so-called authorities, the federal government; we fought them not only in the war on pot, but in the ongoing civil rights struggle, the anti–Vietnam War movement, and in opposition to the police state and ever-expanding prison-industrial complex that still represses us today.
As far back as the Nixon presidency in the 1970s, the war on drugs has been used by the government as a means of social control over blacks and the counterculture through arresting the leaders and disrupting their communities. Yet all these years later America’s longest and costliest war—the war on plants—rages on. Thousands of men and women are locked up, serving long sentences, even life sentences, with no possibility of parole for trafficking in an herb that has proven to be a remarkable medicine and a disobedient friend of mankind. As I write, the old-guard reactionary right has once more assumed power in America. Already the forces of repression have begun to mount a new propaganda campaign against cannabis. It is long past time for our politicians to wake up and understand that this plant and the people who use it will not be controlled. It is too late to try to put the genie back in the bottle. It is time to get smart and to end this destructive government fiasco.
Free the prisoners of the war on plants.
Prologue
TIME AND CHANCE
June 25, 1990
FREE AT LAST! Although . . . not so fast.
Monday morning at 9:00 a.m., as I am ready to leave the prison through the front gate at the FCI in Ashland, Kentucky, my case manager—a guy I call Axelrod, not a bad guy as far as these Bureau of Prisons types go—pulls me into his office and hands me some papers. He informs that I have forty-eight hours to report to my parole officer in the Eastern District of New York, Brooklyn office. If I fail to show up, if I do not report on time, Axelrod says, I will be deemed an escaped prisoner and pursued as a fugitive.
“What did you say? Parole? No. Wait a minute. That’s wrong. My sentence is nonparoleable. Remember? Look.”
I show him my commitment papers and sentence computation sheet where it specifies that I am serving a nonparoleable sentence and therefore not subject to parole.
“Yes, that’s true,” Axelrod tells me. “You won’t be on parole. You’ll be on supervised release.”
“Supervised release? What the fuck is that?”
“Well,” he says, “the good-time you earned while you were locked up—a little over two years—that good-time is forfeited as you walk out the door.”
He smiles a smug captor’s smirk.
“You still owe the government that time on the street.”
Oh, okay. I get it now. Supervised release is simply another term—government doublespeak—for parole. It’s another way of saying that I am still under the scrutiny and ostensible control of federal authorities. This is fucked up—typical Uncle Sam double-dealing. You can’t trust these federal fuckers. They dole it out with one hand, snatch it away with the other.
“You can refuse to sign the release papers if you choose,” Axelrod says, still with a knowing smile. “You could go back to your cell . . . and do the remaining two-plus years here with us.”
No. I’m tempted out of sheer defiance, but no, never mind that. I have had more than enough of the prison existence, this half-life of the convict—of the world but not in it. I want out now, today, not after two-plus-more years, not after two more days. Anything could happen in that time. I could pick up a new case by strangling some motherfucker who disrespects me. I could get caught smoking or dealing pot. I’m ready to leave now, today, with or without supervised release. Fuck that noise. I am ready to live again in the free world. And to hell with these lying federales and their supervised release. I never gave credence to these people or obeyed their rules in the first place. I never kissed ass and adhered to their ridiculous regulations. Why start now? Any bureaucracy that is run by supposedly intelligent human beings who outlaw and wage war on a plant cannot be trusted. Aren’t these the same so-called authorities that told us we could free the people of Vietnam by bombing the shit out of them, murdering hundreds of thousands of women and children? I didn’t believe them then, and I don’t believe them now.
I live by the maxim “Question authority.” I don’t trust anything these government stiffs tell me. After eight years of being subjected to total Bureau of Prisons control down to regular asshole inspections, I will leave prison, yes, I will walk out of here today with new respect for the frightening power of my government and its minions, but also with new disdain for their legitimacy, their veracity. They lie, they cheat—they don’t even abide by their own rules. They fuck us over all in the name of justice. They have usurped the American dream of personal liberty. But they do it with such authority, with such willful power, and such guile, such arrogance and zeal that you must pay attention and remain mindful of what it means to be an American in the first place, or you will find yourself cowering in the face of fierce governmental repression.
To Axelrod I say, “No way. Gimme the fucking papers and show me where to sign.”
In my own personal war with the government over time, I got lucky—twice. First, I was sentenced in October 1984, nota bene. Had I been sentenced fourteen months later, in 1986, when the feds enacted new mandatory sentences under the kingpin statute, my judge would have been required by law to impose a mandatory life sentence with no possibility of parole. I would have been sentenced to life in prison for smuggling cannabis. Instead of walking out the gate, my release plan would have called for a wooden box and a grave in the pauper’s cemetery outside the prison.
I would still be locked up serving a life sentence instead of out here in the world writing this book and bringing attention to the government’s criminal war on drugs. Under mandatory federal sentencing guidelines judges have no discretion; they must impose the sentence called for by the guidelines—unless one “cooperates” and becomes a rat for the government. This federal law is still on the books.
I got lucky a second time in the New York prosecution when my sentencing judge, United States District Court Judge Constance Baker Motley, made it clear that she was enhancing my sentence, giving me more time, because I “refused to cooperate with the government,” that is, I refused to rat on my friends and enemies. Her language on the record tended to make my sentence coercive rather than punitive. And for a judge to do that, to try to force a defendant to cooperate and become a rat by giving them more time rather than simpl
y punishing them for their illegal behavior, higher courts have ruled to be illegal. You can give a defendant less time for snitching, but you cannot give them more time for refusing to become a snitch. Judges do that all the time, of course, but they don’t usually make the mistake of stating on the record in plain unequivocal English that that is what they are doing. Judge Motley, however, made it clear she had determined to give me a total of twenty-five years and six months “for the reason,” as she put it, “that it might convince you that cooperation with the government is in your best interest.”
Well, dear Judge Motley—may you rest in peace, gone off to that great courthouse in the sky where we will all be judged one day—perhaps not. You see, things are not always as they seem. Sometimes it is better to keep your mouth shut—hold your mud, as they say. Admit nothing. Deny everything. Make them prove it. Rat on no one. Go to trial. Tell them they are wrong. Tell them to go fuck themselves. Their laws are asinine. Take a stand—but not the witness stand. Insist this war on drugs is bullshit—it’s a lie; it’s a war on the American people.
As Americans we have a constitutional right to keep our mouths shut, to not incriminate others or ourselves even after we have been arrested and convicted. When I was locked up in the early eighties, the feds were hot on a drug-fueled celebrity witch hunt not unlike the McCarthy-era pursuit of presumed communists. They were determined to indict my close friend and mentor, the world-renowned novelist, frequent TV talk show guest, author of Pulitzer Prize–winning books, husband of several wives, and perennial government critic and alleged enemy, Norman Mailer. They hoped to disgrace Mailer by branding him a drug dealer, convicting him as a co-conspirator in my far-flung pot-smuggling enterprise, and locking him up in prison. Mailer had held a position on the government’s enemies list since the Nixon regime primarily due to his opposition to the war in Vietnam. Government prosecutors in New York figured that if they put enough pressure on me, I would flip, roll over, and implicate Mailer and testify against him as well as my friend the writer Hunter Thompson, my attorney and friend Richard N. Goodwin, and his wife, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and anyone else I knew whom they hoped to indict, convict, and imprison, destroying lives in order to enhance their careers.