It’s a strong argument, seeing that we are close to the termination date of this foolishness. Also, given that I am willing to take them to court if need be, and they know that, and given that I think they know I have solid grounds for relief, those in authority seem obliged to release me. But Rocky Raccoon is still not convinced that I am reformed, and, as my designated parole officer, he is required to review my case and sign off on any decision having to do with my status unless I choose to, and am successful at, going above his level of authority.
Rocky confronts me one afternoon as I sit in his cramped office for my scheduled report. Earlier, while sitting in the outer waiting room with all the other unhappy ex-offenders summoned to be grilled by their parole officers, I had the inspiration for a TV drama to be set in the world of parole. Here we have this room, a room that is filled with male and female ex-offenders, ex-convicts, allegedly former criminals, and now parolees. By and large, they are interesting characters, many with colorful histories, and they are prohibited from associating with one another under the terms of their release on parole. Yet here they all are, gathered together in this room on their given report days as though at a reform school reunion where and when they will surely meet one another, possibly revive old friendships, old rivalries, and even possibly hatch new criminal conspiracies. I observe them as they behave like a classroom full of elementary school children—chattering, greeting one another, laughing, goofing around, and making plans to get together later and play—all while the teacher is out of the classroom. And then, as soon as the door opens and one of the parole officers sticks his or her head in to call the next parolee, like kids in a classroom they immediately shut up, sit up straight, eyes straight ahead and attention focused on behaving themselves and certainly not associating with one another.
It’s ludicrous. And when you put it all together with the degree of invasive authority the parole officers have over their parolees’ lives, it’s almost familial; they become like unwanted relatives who show up on the doorstep and beg intrusion; you must let them in; that, given the challenges parolees face trying to readjust to living in so-called free society while in fact under close scrutiny after however many years of confinement; and the parole officers’ powerful, complex relationship with his or her parolees; how they in fact might be influenced by their charges: it makes for an inherently complicated and fascinating dynamic rife with potential drama.
For example, Rocky and I adjourn to his office and he instructs me to fill out the standard report form. Have I moved? No. Have I changed jobs? No. Have I met with any agents or police officers? No. Have I been in contact with anyone who was or still is engaged in criminal activity? No—a lie, clearly, but one I have managed to get way with so far. Again, I remind him that I am due to be terminated.
While reviewing the form, when Rocky gets to the question concerning contact with other criminals, he stops. He looks up at me with an expression that seems to say: Aha! Caught you! No contact, huh, Stratton? Well, what about this? And he produces a letter written by me to none other than one Frances Mullin, a.k.a. Frin, also known as the Smack Goddess, a fugitive wanted by the FBI, living under an alias in London, and ratted out by her disgruntled, rejected boyfriend. She was recently arrested by British police and is now being held in England on a warrant pending extradition to the United States, where she is wanted for having escaped from federal prison. This letter from me was discovered in her property.
“You wrote this letter, did you not?” Rocky demands.
“Yeah, so?”
“So? So it’s a violation of the terms of your supervised release! That’s so. I can have you violated.”
“Okay,” I tell him, “go ahead and try. But I beg to differ. The letter, as you will see when you read it, advises Ms. Mullin to seek an arrangement, a deal with the authorities where she does not fight extradition back to the US under prearranged terms that assure her she will not be prosecuted for the escape but merely be required to complete her sentence in the United States. This, in my capacity as a forensic specialist working for Ivan S. Fisher, is no violation of the terms of my release, since I was not in contact with Ms. Mullin for the purpose of engaging in criminal activity but rather to advise her on how best to come to equitable terms upon her surrender to US authorities.”
Rocky may be loath to admit it, but he’s all done—finished, at least with this ex-offender. Over his objection, I am cut loose. A few weeks later I receive written notice that I have satisfactorily fulfilled the terms of my supervised release. I have discharged my obligation to the United States attorney’s designated representative, the Bureau of Prisons, and the US Parole Commission. Therefore, my two-year-plus supervision that never should have been required in the first place is finally officially terminated.
Hallelujah! Praise God and pass the doobie. I am one step farther from the prison gate, one degree of liberation beyond government infringement upon my freedom, past all official demands for asshole scrutiny or urine analysis. So much for Rocky’s prognostication that this ex-offender would soon be back in the marijuana trade and that when he was, old Rocky Raccoon would be there to bust the ingrate and send him back behind prison walls where he belongs.
Adios, muchachos! I’m outta here. . . .
PART TWO
HOLLYWOOD:
ADVENTURES IN THE SKIN TRADE
Chapter Ten
BLOWBACK, PROJECT MK-ULTRA, AND BEYOND
A FEW DAYS after our meeting following the Oliver Stone town hall event, Marc Levin calls to invite me over to his studio. He asks if I still smoke pot. Yes, of course, light it up. What am I working on? I show him early issues of Prison Life magazine I edited. Marc asks if he can keep them. Sure, I brought them for him. He tells me that he is currently working with his father, Al Levin, on a documentary for HBO called Mob Stories about various wiseguys, most of whom are still locked up or only recently released from prison. I offer to put him in touch with some of the organized crime characters I know who might make good subjects for the film.
This night, and my meeting with Marc Levin, turns out to be the beginning of a rich creative collaboration that has lasted years and changed both Marc’s and my life and the lives of several others, as well as resulting in some award-winning film and TV productions. Marc shows the issues of Prison Life to Sheila Nevins, his executive producer at HBO. Sheila says she wants to meet me. Marc and I go to Sheila’s office at HBO’s corporate headquarters. Sheila is the doyenne of documentary film executives, and HBO has begun to distinguish itself as the premier television exhibitor of quality documentaries. Soon the cable network will dominate the entertainment industry with some of the best movies and scripted TV series ever produced.
As I take a seat in Sheila’s office, she pulls out a pair of antique leg shackles and tells me that she is going to chain me to the chair until we make a deal. What do we want to do? Sheila says she would like us to make prison-based films as part of HBO’s America Undercover documentary series on subjects that will also be covered in issues of the magazine and published in tandem when they air on HBO. Okay, that’s a great idea. We love it. Sheila asks what subject we want to explore as the first HBO and Prison Life Presents production.
Marc and I suggest that the most important prison-related subject at present is the war on drugs. The government’s drug war is responsible for America’s alarming incarceration rate—the highest in the world. The drug war is the engine driving the criminal justice system, overwhelming our criminal courts, over-populating our prisons and jails, and fueling the expansion of the prison industrial complex with new prisons being built at an unprecedented rate, and yet still not fast enough to house all the new prisoners locked up for using or dealing illegal drugs.
And, I say, the irony in all this is that illegal drugs are even more available in prison than they are on the street. What? Yes, it’s true, and why not? What would you expect is going to happen when you lock up a bunch of experienced, creative, and well-connected drug
traffickers and ingenious smugglers and put them in close quarters with a captive market of confirmed drug users? Business is booming both on the streets and behind the walls. And there is not even a pretense of rehabilitation, no real drug treatment for addicts in the system. Families are being ripped apart. Inner-city neighborhoods have become war zones. The so-called war on drugs has become a war on American citizens; it is being waged at home and in third-world drug-producing nations around the world but has only made the situation worse by increasing the profit incentive to smuggle and distribute illegal drugs and by enriching and empowering gang bangers and ruthless drug lords. It’s all become a big business supporting armies of agents and cops, judges, lawyers, and prosecutors, propping up politicians’ careers, and creating hotspots around the globe teeming with heavily armed insurgents who buy American-made weapons with profits from drug trafficking. There is way too much money being made in the illegal drug business and financing the criminal justice system and the prison-industrial complex for anyone in authority to get serious about stopping this fraudulent but highly profitable and insidiously destructive war. Marc and I are both passionate about the subject.
Great. Done. The series is to be produced by Marc’s company, Blowback Productions, and we’ll begin with HBO and Prison Life magazine presents Prisoners of the War on Drugs. Sheila says she is ready to get started as soon as the contracts can be drawn up. As we get up to leave, Sheila says, “Don’t forget your leg irons,” and she hands me the antique shackles.
“That went well,” Marc says as we leave HBO.
PRISON LIFE MAGAZINE, like many other print publications, is struggling to stay afloat. Kim and I buy out the original publishers and move the magazine from its Manhattan offices to the basement of our home in the Hudson River Valley to cut down on overhead. It’s a gamble, of course, and hardly a sure bet. The HBO deal looks like it could provide the financial shot in the arm we need to keep the magazine alive, and possibly help boost circulation, but it’s definitely a day-to-day struggle.
My history in the magazine business dates back to the founding of High Times in the early 1970s. High Times was a phenomenon, profitable after its first few issues for the very good reason that it offered a unique opportunity for manufacturers and distributors in the burgeoning drug paraphernalia industry to advertise their wares in the only magazine devoted to the illegal marijuana trade. Rolling papers, various pot grinders and joint rolling machines, bongs, roach clips, hemp products, and on and on: High Times drew advertisers in droves. Not so Prison Life. It is 1995 and yes, the US prison population is exploding; we have a captive—actually a captured—market. But for the most part our readers have very little disposable income, and often do not have ready access. They can’t get to the newsstands to buy our magazine, and prison authorities around the country have already mounted a campaign to keep Prison Life out of prison.
So the purchase of the magazine is quickly perceived by its new publishers—Kim and me—as a failure in good business planning. Add to that the fact that the magazine industry as a whole is about to go into a nosedive as the internet comes online and eventually decimates print media, threatening the survival of even the most profitable and established publications. For me, it was never about the money. It never is. Even my criminal enterprise was always about more, about the cultural struggle. It is always about the issues, the subject matter, the human stories, and the larger social and political story of the drug war and the massive build-up of the criminal justice system juggernaut and its impact on American society. My goal for the magazine is to have it act as what we call the Voice of the Convict, to give voice to the voiceless. The stories, poems, and essays are all written by prisoners or ex-convicts. The artwork also is created by prison artists; we run an annual Art Behind Bars contest that draws dozens of submissions and provides us with exceptional prisoner art to illustrate stories in the magazine and to exhibit in galleries.
Prison Life soon becomes a succès d’estime, if not a financial success. We win awards, including a prestigious Utne Reader independent magazine award. We are written up in Time and Newsweek magazines and in the New York Times. Simultaneously, the magazine is seen as a security threat and banned in different prisons around the country and in the entire California prison system, which only adds to its credibility and allure. I am invited to appear on TV and radio shows to talk about the magazine as well as topical issues in the criminal justice system. I am invited to give talks at colleges, including Harvard Law School, where I discuss how the emerging World Wide Web is changing the way people receive and consume information. I become known in criminal justice circles as an expert on prison culture and prison violence. Soon I am hired to appear as an expert witness for the defense in federal and state courts in prison homicide cases and at sentencing hearings. But we are rapidly going broke trying to keep the magazine afloat—and it’s Kim’s money that is supporting my magazine habit.
PRISON LIFE MAGAZINE Presents Prisoners of the War on Drugs airs on HBO in January 1996. Marc meanwhile has teamed up with an aspiring producer, a former club promoter named Henri Kessler, also known as Henry from Brooklyn. Marc and Henri hire me to do research and then to write a screenplay based on the long-rumored but little-known story of the CIA’s secret testing of LSD on unwitting human guinea pigs in a covert Cold War program code-named Project MK-ULTRA. Henri has an angel investor, David Piepers, who puts up the money for me to write the script.
While researching Project MK-ULTRA, I take a trip to Washington, DC, to visit the National Archives. There, I am directed to a room in which I’m told what remains of the CIA’s records on MK-ULTRA are stored, along with files related to other secret Cold War drug experiments. Most MK-ULTRA records were destroyed on orders from CIA director Richard Helms when the project was first exposed, but what endures resides in this room.
“Those boxes there,” the clerk in charge of the archives tells me, “you are free to examine.” He then points to several cartons stored on a higher shelf. “But those are not for public viewing.”
As soon as he leaves the room, I take down the prohibited cartons and begin rifling through the enclosed documents.
FOR ANYONE STILL naive enough to doubt or dispute that elements within our government have conspired to carry out anything as nefarious as political assassination, I challenge them to look into the history of Project MK-ULTRA and its several secret mutations, Midnight Climax, Project MK-NAOMI, and ZRRIFLE to name a few. It began in the early 1950s as the brainchild of CIA director Allen Dulles and under the direction of Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the head of CIA’s chemical division for the Technical Services Staff (TSS), as the CIA set about to purchase and control the entire world supply of a new drug, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD-25). Discovered during the war by Dr. Albert Hofmann, a scientist at the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland, LSD was hailed by CIA officials as the most powerful mind-altering drug known to man. Infinitesimal amounts of the odorless, colorless, and tasteless chemical could alter a person’s consciousness for hours, possibly forever. Dulles had received a memo from an agent in Europe reporting that the Soviet agents had purchased ten kilos of LSD. The CIA director was alarmed. Ten kilos of pure acid would be enough to dump into the water supply and dose the inhabitants of an entire city the size of New York or Washington, DC.
This was at the height of the Cold War. Dulles and other CIA officials believed that the Soviets and Communist North Koreans had already developed insidious mind-control techniques using psychedelic drugs and brainwashing procedures. Dulles was determined that the United States would not be left behind in the race to control men’s minds. He dispatched CIA agents to Switzerland with a briefcase full of cash and orders to purchase the entire current and future output of Sandoz LSD.
In reality, the KGB had purchased ten grams of LSD, not ten kilos. Sandoz had in fact only produced a total of forty grams of acid since its discovery. It turns out the agent who reported to Dulles did not kno
w the difference between kilos and grams. Ironically, the entire CIA/LSD escapade that was to have a totally unexpected and lasting effect on Western civilization was based on dumb intelligence.
Once in possession of Sandoz’s entire supply of acid, and with a deal to purchase all future LSD output (and later an arrangement with Eli Lilly and Company in the United States to acquire LSD in “tonnage” quantities), the CIA strategists needed to figure out what to do with it, how it could be used, whether as a truth serum or chemical weapon. To test its properties, they determined to use a cutout, someone who was not actually in the intelligence agency so as to circumvent the prohibition against domestic activities by CIA. The cutout had to be an experienced and discrete operative who could be trusted to keep his mouth shut and protect the agency if things got out of hand, which, given the nature of the project, was of real concern. They turned to a hard-drinking, rough-and-tumble undercover FBN agent named George Hunter White.
George was already a legendary figure in the world of covert drug testing. During the war, while with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), George had been an organizer and even a willing test subject for a number of different drugs in an attempt to develop a truth serum that the army could use while interrogating enemy prisoners. To his credit, George would not test any drug on others without first testing it on himself. Once LSD was discovered, agency officials believed it might just be the panacea they had been looking for, a drug that could be slipped to enemy agents as well as used in interrogations. They brought George into the agency fold under Sidney Gottlieb and George’s wartime friend and OSS controller, now CIA’s counterintelligence chief, spymaster James Jesus Angleton. They had no idea what they were about to unleash on America and the rest of the world by supplying George White with an unlimited quantity of pure Sandoz and Lilly acid and sending him out to test it on unwitting human guinea pigs.
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