In the World

by Richard Stratton

  I quickly become absorbed in the whole process of making the documentary. My job involves running around from pay phone to pay phone (cell phones are still a few years away), setting up the interviews, finding and arranging locations, arranging to have a crew on set, often conducting the interviews, and then getting the footage developed and delivered to the editors, sitting with the editors and with Barbara to review the footage and make selects and to take phone calls from Barbara at all hours. The process of making the documentary reminds me of nothing so much as my previous business as a drug smuggler, although with one important distinction: it’s not illegal. They can’t lock me up for this even if no one likes the film.

  I’m hooked. This is my new calling. Maybe it’s not as lucrative, but it’s much more satisfying than smuggling pot.

  Through Leon Gast, the editor on the Tyson film, I secure a second documentary film gig producing Norman Mailer’s interview for the Academy Award–winning feature documentary When We Were Kings, about the 1974 Heavyweight Championship fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire.

  I move from the apartment in Brooklyn. Kim and I move into a larger apartment in her building on East Thirty-First Street. We spend a glorious week on St. John in the US Virgin Islands scuba diving, hiking, making love, and drinking. One evening at dinner, I ask Kim to marry me and she agrees, but again on the condition that I continue to abstain from all illegal activity. She says she does not want to bring up our child having to visit a father who is in prison. When I inform Ms. Lawless that I have moved to Manhattan and that I plan to marry, she appears relieved to have me off her caseload. My case is transferred to the Southern District of New York office.

  THE SOUTHERN DISTRICT parole offices are located in a top floor of the stately old Thurgood Marshall courthouse in Foley Square. My new parole officer, whom I call Rocky Raccoon because he reminds me of Rocky Graziano, the Middleweight World Champion, and because he has dark circles around his eyes, informs me during our first meeting that he knows all about me and my kind of criminal. He says I may have got one over on Gloria Lawless and the Brooklyn Eastern District office, but I’m in Manhattan now, the Southern District, and here they know how to deal with big shot offenders like me.

  “Sophisticated criminal activity,” Rocky says and looks up from my file, “continuing criminal enterprise. Lots of media coverage . . . Guys like you, you don’t quit. You’re a career criminal. I give you a month, or two, six at the most under my supervision, and you’ll be right back at it, doing whatever it is you do.” He looks down at the file again. “Importing drugs. Bringing in that poison and selling it to our kids—you’re probably back at it already. But this time . . . this time is gonna be different. You know why? Because this time I’ll be right there to catch you and send you back to prison.”

  Thanks, Rocky, for the vote of confidence. Sure helps to know you’re on my case.

  EVERY TIME I leave the five boroughs to do an interview for the Tyson film I am supposed to get prior approval from Rocky. Fuck that.

  “What about the job with Ivan Fisher?” Rocky wants to know. Is this movie business supposed to be my new employment? Because if it is, Rocky says, he’s probably not going to approve it since it’s only a temporary gig until the film is completed. Next he tries to block my planned marriage to Kim. He says we will not be approved to marry on the grounds that she is also a former convicted felon who served prison time, and therefore I am not allowed to associate with her, let alone marry her, so long as I am still on supervised release.

  “Well,” I tell Rocky, “then we’re going to have a real problem. Because she’s pregnant with my child, and we are going to get married. So do whatever it is you’ve got to do, and I’ll see you in court.”

  These federales just don’t quit.

  I AM STILL working for Ivan but on a part-time, case-by-case basis. I’ve also taken a job at the Fortune Society editing Fortune News, a magazine that is distributed to prisoners throughout the country and written largely by prisoners or ex-offenders—the preferred term for ex-convicts in the criminal justice system reform movement. And I have entered into talks to take over as the editor and publisher of a struggling new publication called Prison Life magazine.

  KIM AND I marry at the Religious Society of Friends Meeting House near Gramercy Park. The ceremony is presided over by the justice of the supreme court of New York, Shirley Fingerhood. Norman Mailer is my best man. Kim’s close friend and now editor at Houghton Mifflin, Betsy Lerner, is Kim’s maid of honor. We have a festive reception at the nearby New York Arts Club. Our tiered wedding cake is topped by a miniature bride and groom joined wearing handcuffs. The reception might be the largest group parole violation in history.

  On our honeymoon in the mountains of New Mexico, Kim is spooked. The landscape, the people . . . perhaps it is all too reminiscent of her time in Texas. I receive word that my short story, “A Skyline Turkey,” is to be published in Story magazine. Story is also where Mailer published his first story. This strikes me as auspicious. Kim comments, “When you’re hot, you’re hot.”

  Back in New York, Kim takes it upon herself to catch me up on all the independent films I missed during my imprisonment. Most nights we stay in and watch crime movies. One film in particular, the Coen brothers’ Raising Arizona, starring Nicholas Cage and Holly Hunter, about an ex-con and a former cop, strikes a resonant chord, particularly when one morning we get a visit from a jailhouse pal who shows up at the apartment with two suitcases full of ivory. He says he needs a place to leave the suitcases just for a couple of hours while he determines if the buyer he is to meet is on the level or merely trying to rip him off. He seems frazzled and may also be high on coke. Before I can refuse to take possession of the suitcases, he excuses himself to use the bathroom, and then splits, leaving the suitcases behind.

  No sooner is he gone than we get a call from the doorman to say that there is a Mr. Rocky Raccoon here to visit.

  Holy shit! It’s my parole officer, he’s making his first home visit, and we are sitting on two suitcases of what is most likely stolen ivory. Quick, stash the suitcases. Kim and I both look at each other and wonder aloud if this is a set up. How could it be? Kim is eight months pregnant. This is all we need, to get busted with a stash of—whatever it is, I assume it must be stolen ivory—and my parole violated, a new case, and back to prison with the baby due, and proving Rocky’s prediction.

  Kim stashes the suitcases under the bed. Rocky shows up. Kim welcomes him, offers him coffee, which we know he’ll refuse. He does a cursory inspection of our living arrangement, takes a heart-stopping peek in the bedroom, and then he sits down to visit and to let us know that he’s troubled by the relationship. One ex-con in a marriage is already one too many, according to Rocky. We may both be published authors, but that in and of itself is no guarantee that we have foresworn our lives of crime. Rocky does appear enchanted by Kim. It’s the fraternal law enforcement bond that prevails no matter that she was accused of having crossed the line. Once a cop, always a cop, Rocky seems to say, and he hopes that she will be able to keep me on the straight and narrow, but in all honesty, he doubts it. Once an outlaw, always an outlaw.

  Guys like me, Rocky tells Kim, do not respect the law, and therein lies the fundamental issue—the difference between a confirmed criminal and someone who makes a mistake, and then is able to reform. The confirmed criminal blames law enforcement for having caught him rather than admitting that he was wrong in the first place. Yes, yes, we know all that, Rocky; we are both steeped in the psychology of the criminal miscreant. But the offender in question is about to become that most exalted member of the male component of the human family—a father, goddamnit—and that, it is believed, at least by your parolee, that will finally, or has already, convinced him to embrace a life of upright citizenship and adherence to the laws and mores of civilized society. Now, please, get the fuck out of here, Rocky Graziano before that coked-up whacko comes back looking for his suitcases full
of stolen ivory. One look at that guy and Rocky will know something is up.

  And what, I’m wondering, what is it with me and ivory? I abhor and want nothing to do with the brutal, horrendous practice of hunting and stripping elephants, these magnificent beasts, of their elegant and formidable tusks, and yet I seem fated to be connected however tangentially to the crime. While living in Lebanon preparing to smuggle the fifteen-thousand-pound load of hashish out of the country, I was billeted in a West Beirut penthouse apartment that had one room decorated with wall panels engraved with ivory, and a menagerie of ivory statuettes cluttering a huge display case. I was appalled and demanded to be moved. Now the ghosts of slaughtered elephants and extinct mastodons are once again impinging on my peace of mind and possibly my freedom.

  Rocky seems satisfied, even a bit impressed that I have managed to find and marry a woman as remarkable as former narcotics officer and bestselling author Kim Wozencraft, and at last he departs.

  Days go by and we hear nothing from the ostensible owner of the ivory. He’s probably back in the slammer, or on a coke binge and forgot all about the suitcases. I am so distressed by even having the cache in our apartment that I make some calls looking for someone to take it off our hands.

  THE HARRY CHAPIN biopic project founders and then dies in a sad, slow demise. Kim works with me on the screenplay, but it soon becomes apparent that Suarez can’t raise the money. He never optioned the rights to the Chapin biography, and that’s a fundamental problem. He tries to stiff me on the balance of the ten grand once I deliver my draft of the script. He tells me he won’t pay me until Sandy Chapin agrees to sign over the rights to Harry’s music. This, I remind him, was never part of our deal. It takes a call from Sandy to tell Suarez that until he pays me, there will be no further negotiations on the music rights. Suarez does eventually make good on the contract and he pays me the remainder of my fee. But from there the project goes nowhere.

  LISTEN TO AMERICA: The Harry Chapin Story, based on my script, is to be the first of several films I write over the next several years that will never get made. Other film projects, however, are about to come together in such an apparently serendipitous and yet somehow finely plotted manner that even I must sometimes step back and wonder if I am making all this up.

  While out for a walk one afternoon, Kim and I spot a poster advertising a film called Blowback about the CIA and drugs that somehow managed to get made. We go see the film in a theater with three other ticket holders. The movie is suitably bizarre, given the subject matter. As we leave the theater, I say to Kim, regarding the director and writer of Blowback, “I’ve got to meet that guy.”

  A week later we go to see Oliver Stone’s JFK. I’m enthralled. This is the most intense cinematic experience I have ever had. However long the film is, I’m so mesmerized, so caught up in the story playing out on the screen that it seems to happen in a time warp. As a child of the sixties, I came of age under the guilty, miasmal dread of the Kennedy killings and the murder of Martin Luther King. I was never able to recover my faith in our government, so convinced was I that these murders, as well as the killing of Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, were not isolated events as the government would have us believe, not the work of lone deranged assassins, which struck me as too convenient, too contrived. Rather, these murders were the result of something much more sinister, much more conspiratorial. The brazen, seemingly staged killing of Oswald by Jack Ruby had to be a prearranged hit. Even as an eighteen-year-old, sitting in the den of my girlfriend’s home glued to the TV in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination, when I saw Ruby in the basement of police headquarters in Dallas, Texas, walk up to the man who had allegedly just killed the president of the United States, pull out a gun, and shoot the suspected assassin right there in the police station while surrounded by cops, it seemed all wrong, impossible, clearly a setup intended to forever silence a man who was already claiming to be “a patsy.”

  Like so many of my generation, I came of age believing that we live in a nation that is inherently no better than other empires past and present. America is, or has been, simply better at covering up the truth, more sophisticated in disguising its leaders’ malfeasance and criminality, more adept at creating propaganda to pass off American democracy as pure and above reproach, when in fact this country’s history is as dirty and manipulated by bad actors as any other’s. We are simply better at creating a false narrative, better at public relations. I love this country, and I believe in the concept of American democracy. But I want to see America become what it was created by its founders to be: a land of liberty and justice for all. The hits on both Jack and Bobby Kennedy, as well the murder of Martin Luther King, and to this list I would add the killing of John Lennon, to my mind these assassinations were the work of a cabal of intelligence agents, high- and low-level organized crime figures, professional hitmen, and an even more sinister mutation: Manchurian candidates programmed to kill. Call me a paranoid conspiracy theorist, but there is ample evidence that a conspiracy exists. And why not, why should America be any different from other empires riddled and ultimately undermined by conspiracy, when human nature and the lust for power have not changed?

  I lived a good part of my life in the criminal underground where conspiracies abound. As a result, I have come to trust that very little happens that is random in the milieu where organized crime and government meet; very little is the result of freak events carried out by losers and fall guys. High-profile murders of men like the Kennedy brothers, King, and Lennon, men who represented a threat to the entrenched power elite that secretly rules America, all reek of conspiracy.

  I was made to be moved by Stone’s JFK. And when Kim and I hear that Oliver Stone is going to be present at a town hall meeting to ­discuss his film and the Kennedy assassination and defend his use of documentary footage in a feature film, we decide to go. Stone is impressive. He marshals his facts, has made notes, and is articulate in his defense. It’s my belief that, like most assassination investigators, Stone is naive when it comes to the role of organized crime in the Kennedy hits. He dismisses the mob as a bunch of old-time Italian mobsters and fails to appreciate the long and complex relationship between the master killers of organized crime and certain elements within the ranks and the upper echelons of federal law enforcement—Hoover’s FBI, Allen Dulles’s CIA, and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), now renamed DEA.

  After the town hall meeting, Kim and I go across the street for dinner. As we are leaving the restaurant, a guy seated at the bar stops us. “Aren’t you Richard Stratton?” he inquires. Yes, I admit that I am. It’s Danny Schechter, also known as “the News Dissector,” formally of Boston, a radio personality, human rights activist, and television producer whom I’d met through Barbara Kopple while working on the Tyson film.

  Danny is sitting with another man who, he says, shares similar interests and, yes, we have all just been to the town hall meeting to hear Stone discuss his film. I mention that Kim and I recently saw a wild underground film called Blowback, which I thought had some thematic similarities with Stone’s film.

  “What?” the man with Danny asks, “You saw Blowback? You must be the other two of the four people in New York who actually bought tickets and went to see that movie.”

  Danny introduces us to Marc Levin, the auteur who wrote, produced, and directed Blowback.

  YOU SEE, IT’S true, at least for me, and here is proof: this is all predestined; nothing in life is random. You cannot cheat life, you pay for every last thing you get out of life, and you are rewarded for every good thing you bring to life because there are repercussions that are not subject to the space-time continuum but that happen in another dimension beyond the world we know and will manifest where and when we may never know. There is no such thing as coincidence or luck, not if you believe otherwise. It wasn’t just chance that brought Kim and me together in Fielding Dawson’s living room any more than luck brought me and Marc Levin to meet in a bar after going to hear Oliver Sto
ne speak about his masterpiece, JFK. No, no such thing as chance encounters like running into Joe Stassi on the subway for those who live according to the belief in a master plan. It is as inconceivable as to believe that the planets are ruled by chaos. There is method, and even meaning to all this seemingly haphazard experience. It is all worked out, all part of a grand, vast cosmic creative conspiracy, a master plan that is the very mind and divided consciousness of the Creator. We are only allowed to glimpse nanoseconds in the scheme of the master plan, for to fathom the mind of God we must become gods ourselves. If we believe, then we can achieve our given divine destiny. Faith is the essential element. Belief makes it all come true. If you don’t believe, then it’s not true for you.

  I PETITION THE parole commission to cut me loose from this nonparole supervised release bullshit on the grounds that it has been over two years since my release from prison, and I am fucking sick of it; it’s cramping my style as a documentary filmmaker. I want to burn some herb without the threat of a piss test. I want to travel when and where I choose. I want to hang out with criminals and ex-criminals and write about grand criminal enterprises, arrests and trials, imprisonment. Of course I couch all this in different terms in my petition, and it is incorporated as part of a larger argument to the effect that I cannot engage effectively in my new occupation—that of documentary film producer—while under the yoke of governmental supervision that, at best, is questionable in its legitimacy and, at worst is a violation of my rights as one who has fulfilled his obligations to the government under the requirements of my nonparoleable motherfucking sentence for doing something that should never have been illegal in the first place.