Thompson was adamant Monday about the importance of refusing the District Attorney’s offer—even one allowing him to plead guilty to one misdemeanor and have a felony conviction purged from his record if he completes two years of probation.
“First, I’m innocent,” Thompson said. “And, second, if I plead guilty, that means their search was right, that they got away with it.”
He said defendants across the country who are innocent are forced to accept plea bargains in drug cases because they can’t afford to fight the system. He said he won’t do that.
“This is getting worse because people are caving into this. Somebody has to say, ’enough,’” Thompson said.
Echoing that position were the Mitchell Brothers, owners of the O’Farrell Theatre in San Francisco and longtime friends of Thompson. They said they came to Aspen to support Thompson, who wrote about the government’s unsuccessful 11-year battle to shut down their establishment, which features nude dancing. “Somebody has to stand up to this,” Art Mitchell said.
“Yeah,” said Roxy, a dancer who works for the Mitchells who only wanted to give her first name. “The search of Hunter Thompson’s is like being raped by the police.”
“I sure wouldn’t appreciate a search like that,” added Gigi, another Mitchell Brothers employee who arrived in Aspen wearing a scanty shirt and a mini-skirt.
“But, Gigi, you would answer the door differently than Hunter,” interjected a smiling Alex Benton, a member of the convoy.
Benton said the only problem during the road trip was on Interstate 80 near Truckee when a California state patrolman stopped the convertible that was later given to Thompson. In the backseat was a 3-foot-tall stuffed buffalo head that was also given to Thompson on Monday in memory of the movie and book “Where the Buffalo Roam.”
“He wanted to see the papers on the buffalo,” said Benton. The patrolman let the convoy continue without seeing the papers, but said he doubted the group would make it through Utah, according to Benton.
The patrolman also gave them a speeding ticket.
The buffalo head and convertible are to be displayed in a rally that’s supposed to take place this morning before Thompson’s preliminary hearing begins at 10 A.M. at the Pitkin County Courthouse.
“We just hope the judge has a sense of humor,” said Thompson.
The Alleged Crime
Thompson is charged with four drug felonies, a fifth for possession of explosives, and three misdemeanors including sexual assault. If Thompson, who is free on bond, is bound over on the charges today, his trial is set to begin Sept. 4.
The charges stem from a complaint from former porn filmmaker Gail Palmer-Slater, 35, of St. Clair, Mich. She claims that while visiting Thompson’s home on Feb. 21, she was punched and her breast was twisted by the famed gonzo journalist, who she said had been using cocaine.
Six investigators searched Thompson’s house for 11 hours for evidence of the alleged assault; they found LSD, four Valium pills and trace amounts of cocaine.
Deputy District Attorney Chip McCrory offered to drop charges—and avoid a trial—if Thompson were to plead guilty to one misdemeanor charge and accept a deferred judgment and sentence on a felony count of LSD possession.
The offer expires at 10 o’clock this morning, when the hearing begins.
If Thompson were to complete two years of probation—that is, pass two years of random drug tests—he could have the felony conviction removed from his record. If he were to flunk any drug tests, or were arrested for any other reason during the two-year period, he would automatically be convicted of the LSD charge and face a maximum four-year prison sentence.
Thompson, author of a half-dozen bestsellers, has written frequently about his use of drugs.
A Counter Offer
In rejecting the offer, Thompson’s attorney made a counter offer: drop all of the charges and Thompson will plead no contest to a charge of improper storage of explosives.
Thompson said the blasting caps found in the search were left on his property by an employee of the Salvation Ditch Co, who had been using them for construction.
Thompson’s attorney, Hal Haddon of Denver, said he isn’t expecting any sort of victory at today’s preliminary hearing. At a preliminary hearing, a judge is supposed to look at the evidence “in the light most favorable” to the prosecution, according to state statutes.
“Even the deity can’t win at a preliminary hearing,” Haddon quipped.
But the hearing will give Haddon the opportunity to question government witnesses and determine how to attack the District Attorney’s case.
THE SINISTER SEX AND DRUGS CASE OF
HUNTER S. THOMPSON
BY RICHARD STRATTON
Some theorize that the Thompson persona is theater. No one, they argue, could be this crazy and live to write about it. But what Dr. Thompson is really up to is Life as Art.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” Thompson quotes Bobby Kennedy in Songs of the Doomed. He lives and writes with the sensibilities of an outlaw, a man who refuses to kowtow to unenlightened authority. He is as rigorous in the demands he places on his integrity as he is about his art. Songs of the Doomed: More Notes on the Death of the American Dream; Gonzo Papers, Vol. 3, published soon after the Colorado sex-and-drugs case, contains some of his most vivid and visionary writing since Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
It took 99 days, but Dr. Thompson got his share of Justice. The government lost faith in their case.
“Comes now Milton K. Blakey, District Attorney in and for the Ninth Judicial District of the State of Colorado, and moves this Honorable Court to dismiss this case and as grounds therefore states that:
“The People would be unable to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
“Dated this 30th day of May 1990,” read the D.A.’s Motion to Dismiss. Judge Charles Buss granted the motion and dismissed the charges with prejudice, meaning that they cannot be brought again at a later date.
“Why couldn’t you have made this decision before you filed?” the judge asked Chief Deputy Attorney Chip McCrory. The D.A. responded that he was having witness problems and that the new findings made it clear just how difficult it would have been for the state to get a conviction.
Dr. Thompson was vindicated, but hardly pacified. “We’ve grown accustomed to letting anyone with a badge walk over us,” he said at the time. “Fuck that!” he wrote in a press release issued from Owl Farm the next day. He denounced the Dismissal as “pure cowardice” and said he would “appeal at once” to the Colorado Supreme Court.
Thompson described the District Attorney’s “whole goddamn staff” as “thugs, liars, crooks, and lazy human scum. . . . These stupid brutes tried to destroy my life,” he said, “and now they tell me to just forget it.
“They are guilty! They should all be hung by their heels from iron telephone poles on the road to Woody Creek!”
Instead of hunkering down to lick his wounds, Dr. Thompson has rallied a new offensive. He has established a Fourth Amendment Foundation “to promote public awareness of the erosion of the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution and the consequent threat to the privacy, peace, and security of citizens in their own homes, and to provide legal assistance to citizens whose right to privacy has been infringed.”
For, as he fully understands, the truly sinister aspect of the Doctor’s case is that government forces, all in the name of some shadowy War on Drugs, are in fact turning this nation into a police state.
In August of 1990, Dr. Thompson was back in court. This time he was there to file a Notice of Intent to sue the District Attorney’s office, collectively and individually, with a $22 million civil lawsuit for Malicious Prosecution, Gross Negligence and Criminal Malfeasance with Harmful Intent.
“The worm has turned,” writes Dr. Thompson. “They are doomed. They will soon be in prison. Those bastards have no more respect for the law than any screwhead thief in
Washington. They will meet the same fate as Charles Manson and Neil Bush.”
Lunch has been served. It is now four o’clock in the morning. Earlier in the day—actually, the previous day—as I purchased a disposable camera, the man in the shop asked me whose picture I intended to take.
“Ah, some old freak over in Woody Creek,” I told him.
“Which one?” he wanted to know. “There are a lot of them over there.”
“The main one,” I told him. “The last outlaw. I’m doing a story on his case for High Times.”
“Listen, do me a favor,” the man said. “Ask him the one question that is on everyone’s mind: How does he do it? How does he continue to live the way we did back then and survive?”
It is the most perplexing aspect of this baffling character. How does he do it? We’ve been drinking heavily all night. He’s got a head full of THC. Every so often, like an anteater, he buries his nose and comes up gasping. The Dunhills are consumed incessantly. He keeps the hours of a vampire who’s been sucking blood from speed freaks. And yet . . . yet, he makes sense. To me he makes more sense than anyone else who is writing today, because he UNDERSTANDS WHAT IS HAPPENING.
I spent the ’80s in prison. When I got out it seemed to me the country had changed drastically for the worse. I worried that only those hundreds of thousands of us locked up during this despicable decade had a decent perspective on just how bad things have become. Then I read Songs of the Doomed.
So I asked the Doctor, “How do you do it?” We are out in his backyard, a combination one-hole golf course and target-shooting range. Dr. Thompson is demonstrating an infrared nightscope he has attached to a high-powered rifle. He even looks well. In his fringed Indian apron, and wearing some kind of wooly dive-bomber’s cap, traces of chocolate cake from lunch on his lips, he looks remarkably healthy for a man who, by his own admission, has never just said no.
“I made my choice a long time ago,” the Doctor says as he peers through the scope. “Some say I’m a lizard with no pulse. The truth is—Jesus, who knows? I never thought I’d make it past 27. Every day I’m just as astounded as everyone else to realize I’m still alive.”
Possibly he doesn’t understand, but I doubt this. I realize through the fog in my own brain that Dr. Thompson is in a kind of psychophysiological state of grace, because he has for all these years remained true to himself.
High Times, August 1991
. . .
Well well well . . . it is twelve years later now, and the Police Problem in this country is even worse today than it was then. The American Century is over, we are still beating up on pygmy nations on the other side of the world, and our once-proud quality of life in the good old U.S.A. has gone up in smoke for all but I percent of the population.
And our President is still named Bush—just like it was in 1990, when that gang of doomed pigs attacked my house and tried to put me in prison. They were stupid, and they got what they deserved. They were disgraced, humiliated, and beaten like three-legged mules on the filthy road to Hell. Res Ipsa Loquitur.
I was never especially proud of that squalid episode in my life, but I really had no choice. It was Root hog or die, in the vernacular of the Chinese hog farm, and apparently it was not in my nature to simply roll over and die.
Marlon Brando explained this to me about 40 years ago when we were both bogged down in some kind of Indian Fishing Rights protest on a riverbank near Olympia, Washington. “Okay,” he said to me at a violent press conference for the Indian cause, when the Native American gentlemen were expressing their hatred of being lumped together with “all those niggers” under the collective rubric of Civil Rights. I was disgusted by those rude alcoholic fascists, but Marlon was trying to stay neutral. It was touching.
“Okay,” he said. “Why don’t we have another look at this situation. So you’re a nasty counter-puncher, eh? We’re all impressed, but so what?” Marlon could get a little edgy on you, with no warning at all in those days. He had a scary way of leaning on people who got in his way. I admired him for it, even when I was the leanee.
But he was wrong about me. I was a working journalist, just trying to understand what was happening, so I could write a true story about it, and I am not much different today. I liked Marlon, but at that moment in time he was getting in my way, so I popped him. That is my nature.
Maybe that is why I could understand the Hell’s Angels so naturally. They were essentially desperate men who had banded together in what they told one another was self-defense. They were the proud and crazy elite of social outlaws, and they insisted on being left alone to do their thing in peace, or else.
Ho ho. And a central ethic of Total Retaliation whenever they were crossed, which scared the shit out of normal people who had no appetite for being chain-whipped in public or gang-raped in their own homes.
“Are you talkin’ to me, pervert? I hate it when perverts get rude with me, you rotten little bastard.”
. . .
Which gets us back, I guess, to my sleazy little morality tale about 99 days of being in the grip of the provably corrupt American Law Enforcement system at its worst with provably evil intentions.
They were bullies and cowards who had somehow been given a license to carry loaded weapons and put anybody who argued with them in prison. That half-bright punk of a District Attorney had campaigned un-opposed for re-election for 16 straight years, doing anything and everything he wanted to do, in the name of public security and aggressive law enforcement by pistol-packing cowboys who got paid about a dollar an hour, plus perks, to whip the villagers into line.
Yes sir. And those perks were Huge, Bubba, huge. They ranged, and still do, from 50 cents a mile whenever they stepped into their taxpayer-funded fast new police cruisers to being the only one in the neighborhood with a license to kill.
. . .
Okay folks. The time has come to wrap this story up. I can’t be spending all this space rambling on and on about the time I went to trial 12 years ago for Sex, Drugs, Dynamite, and Violence in a little cowboy town on the western slope of the Colorado Rockies because of stupid, vengeful police work. It was no big deal, as major criminal cases go—just another goofy example of dumb cops abusing their power in public and not getting away with it, for a change.
We busted them like shit-eating dogs. They were Punished, Mocked, and Humiliated with the whole world watching, just like they had schemed from the start—except in my case, their plans went horribly wrong, and when the deal finally went down, they were the ones on Trial.
It was wonderful, a stunning happy ending to what began as just another tragic rock & roll story, as if Bob Dylan had been arrested in Miami for jacking off in a seedy little XXX theater while stroking the spine of a fat young boy.
Jesus! That is so horrible that I hate to see myself actually writing it. What is wrong with me? Why would I even think of a scene like that?
. . .
Well, shucks, folks. I guess I’m just lucky. It’s just amazing, isn’t it?
Right. And Ted Williams was lucky, too.
Whoops. And so much for hubris, eh? I was never able to swing a baseball bat like Ted Williams, and I will never be able to write a song like “Mr. Tambourine Man.” But what the hell? Neither one of those Yo-yos could write Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, either. . . . At the top of the mountain, we are all Snow Leopards. Anybody who can do one thing better than anyone else in the world is a natural friend of mine.
Even Criminal Lawyers will qualify for that thin-air club on some days, and my wildly publicized trial in the winter of 1990 was one of those. What had begun as just another routine case of a booze-maddened autograph seeker run amok very quickly mushroomed into a profoundly serious Life or Death situation for me in the middle of another goddamn Urgent book deadline, and I suddenly realized that I was going to need major-league criminal trial attorneys if I wanted to avoid the dismal fate of a wild beast caught in a net and headed for the Bronx Zoo forever.
There
is not much difference between the death penalty and going to jail for the rest of your life to a snow leopard or any other wild beast. Even a fish will fight to the death, rather than be hooked and tortured by strangers who may or may not eat him alive. It’s like they used to say in New Hampshire—LIVE FREE OR DIE.
That was before the state brazenly peddled its soul to the cruel and greasy BUSH family from Texas. Along with its bogus reputation for independence and freedom. Going to New Hampshire today is like going to a leafy greenish high-end boutique in Utah where they sell the skulls of famous bigamists who died in prison for fifteen dollars or a bottle of brown whiskey. . . .
Ah, but never mind Utah for now, eh? Only a freak would jabber like that about the two most god-fearing states in the union. And where did that come from, anyway? I must be going crazy. Why go out and pick fights in an election year? We are not what we seem to be.
In any case, that was when I hired Hal Haddon and began my long quixotic journey to becoming the Poet Laureate of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF CRIMINAL DEFENSE LAWYERS, who rode in droves to my defense in my time of great and imminent peril. They slithered in like champions when the great Whistle blew—along with Ralph Steadman, the heroic Mitchell Brothers gang from San Francisco, Bob Dylan, the wild Sabonic sisters from Russia, and Jack, etc. . . . and we kicked the shit out of those Nazis who were trying to kill us. . . . Hallelujah! Fuck those people. OK, time to quit, I see. But not for long. We will RUMBLE, young man, RUMBLE!
Yes. Thank you. Don’t mention it. . . . And now we will get back to normal. Why not?
I was talking about this with Bob Dylan last night, and there was not a hint of Violence as we got down to our discussions. “We may never be able to defeat these swine,” he told me, “but we don’t have to join them.”
Yes sir, I thought. The too much fun club is back in business. Let us rumble.
Summit Conference with Bob Dylan, Aspen, Labor Day, 2002
(Anita Bejmuk)
. . .
DRAT! I wish I had more time and space for this story right now—but the publisher’s armed narks from N.Y. are on my back like leeches, and I can barely hear myself think. Somewhere in the chaos I hear myself yelling, “Please don’t slit yourself, JoJo. Just get back in the truck. I’ll give you whatever you want.”
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