The Bluegrass Conspiracy
Page 37
J. DAN CHANDLER
After losing his job at Caesars, he is rumored to leave Nevada to work in casinos in the Caribbean and elsewhere. By the 1990s he is back in Las Vegas, where he becomes a “host” at the Las Vegas Hilton. In 1993 his son Joseph Daniel “Chan” Chandler, Jr. dies in his father’s Las Vegas home in what the coroner will rule as a suicide from a .357 magnum handgun. The younger Chandler is also found to have a 0.46 blood alcohol level and a toxic volume of crack cocaine in his system. Years later, beyond the statute of limitations for contesting the forensic finding, the elder Chandler vainly challenges the ruling in an effort to collect the son’s insurance as well as to “clear his name,” claiming Chan died “accidentally.” The resulting controversy with Nevada authorities prompts a remarkable outpouring of sympathetic publicity for Chandler from the Las Vegas Sun, whose editor extols Chandler in May 1999 as a man who “has proved his mettle from Versailles to Frankfort to Churchill Downs and back.”
MELANIE FLYNN
In 1993 her mother breaks a sixteen-year silence about the disappearance, calling a radio talk show to accuse the Lexington police of ignoring significant information she provided them in 1977. Mrs.
Flynn is especially critical of then-Captain John Bizzack for his role in the case. “I have given Bizzack and many of your police officers,” she tells Lexington Police Chief Larry Walsh on the air, “names, dates, addresses, and events, that nobody seemed to care about.” The mother also tells a WKYT TV reporter that she believes the Lexington police themselves were “involved” in her daughter’s disappearance and murder. Mrs. Flynn speaks out after her daughter’s name is repeatedly mentioned during the drug trafficking trial of Bill Canan. According to several witnesses at the trial, Canan, the Lexington police officer who had been the last person to see the missing woman alive, had implied that he had been involved in her death. Yet at the time he was never interviewed by Lexington detectives. In the summer of 2001 the case of Melanie Flynn remains unsolved.
PHYLLIS GEORGE
Rebounding from her acrimonious divorce from John Y., she is reported by Newsday in the fall of 1998 to be living in Manhattan in a “sumptuous 5th Avenue apartment.” She has written a book called Living With Quilts, and boasts of having 100 quilts and other Kentucky folk art in a spare room in her Manhattan home. She has also had a brief stint with CBS, where she suffers numerous gaffes, is excoriated by critics, and would be fired after only eight months when she perkily suggests on air that a falsely accused rapist and his purported victim give each other a hug—albeit with the network reportedly paying the balance of the $1 million in George’s three-year contract. Like her ex-husband, she maintains close ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton in the White House, giving the latter an expensive pin in one of the gifts Mrs. Clinton fails to report as required by law. Meanwhile, New York society columns portray the 1971 Miss America as prominent both socially and politically, dating Charles Gargano, a leading Republican and chairman of the Empire State Development Corp., as well as hosting a lavish Washington party for dignitaries of both the outgoing Clinton regime and the incoming administration of George W. Bush, Jr. By the summer of 2001, George is reportedly courted both by national Democratic leaders to run for the U.S. Senate from Kentucky, and by Kentuckians to run for Governor in her own right.
OSCAR GOODMAN
He becomes one of the nation’s most prominent and successful lawyers in defense of organized crime figures, to whom he is social friend and spokesman as well as legal advocate. In the spring of 1999 the fifty-nine-year-old Goodman runs for mayor of his hometown Las Vegas, wins in a landslide, and is said to have higher political ambitions both in Nevada and nationally.
BERTRAM GORDON
In the early 1990s he is brought from his prison cell in the Netherlands to testify for the prosecution in the Canadian trial of Montreal crime boss Allan Ross for the murder of another drug dealer. Gordon has met Ross in 1987 and with a Canadian passport in the name of George Light promptly become the Canadian mobster’s “main pilot.” Their narcotics traffic into Montreal and Ottawa yields hundreds of millions of dollars, and, in a familiar pattern, reportedly implicates a prominent Montreal lawyer later murdered and a deputy director of intelligence of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who commits suicide as investigators close in on him. Fleeing to the Netherlands after a botched deal in 1987, and eventually arrested by the Dutch two years later, Gordon is sentenced there to eight-andone-half years for smuggling. In 1991 he is deported to the U.S., where he agrees to testify against Ross in return for reduced American charges. Recounting in the trial the bulging loads and “suitcases of cash” in major drug deals in Colombia, the Bahamas and Europe as well as in Canada and the U.S., Gordon is described by the Canadian press as having been “tied in to the biggest smugglers of the 1970s and 1980s…keyed in with the best and the brightest in the heyday of cocaine smuggling.” In the end Ross is convicted and the sixty-fiveyear-old Gordon returns to U.S. custody. By the end of the decade his whereabouts—whether dead, under witness protection, quietly retired, or even back at his old trade—would be unknown.
REX DENVER HALL
The former Lexington narcotics officer is convicted in 1998 on federal cocaine charges of cocaine smuggling and is serving a life sentence.
EDWARD “BIFF” HALLORAN
Once a rising star in New York’s business world as the owner of a Lexington Avenue hotel and Manhattan’s only two concrete plants, he sees his empire collapse after being accused of working with organized crime to fix concrete prices on multimillion-dollar projects in the city. In 1986 he is sentenced to six months in prison for a check-kiting scheme, and the next year to thirteen years on federal charges of racketeering, bid-rigging and extortion—“a full associate of the Genovese family,” a prosecutor says of his Mafia relationships. After only four years in prison he is released in 1991 in a plea bargain during an appeal for a new trial, and moves to Florida, where he will be implicated in a scheme to buy out lucrative management contracts for the Seminole Tribe’s casinos. During the late summer of 1998 Halloran vanishes while on a visit to New York, and in November becomes a criminal fugitive when a grand jury indicts him, his wife, and others in charges of defrauding investors, many of them court officers of New York, in connection with a Broward County recycling corporation secretly owned by Halloran. As the new century began, the sixty-year-old inveterate con man, onetime patron of Bradley
Bryant, close friend of Dan Chandler, and regular at the Kentucky Derby, remains at large.
CHARLES V. HARRELSON
Caught trying to escape in 1995 from the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, he is sent to serve his two life sentences for the 1979 murder of U.S. Judge John Wood in an isolation cell at the federal Supermax prison in Colorado known as “the Alcatraz of the Rockies.” There he is imprisoned alongside soon to be executed Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef, and Syndicate boss John Gotti, and more than 300 others in a prison population the Houston Chronicle described as “the nation’s boldest convicts.” Even in this notorious company, Harrelson is something of a celebrity, with a number of books on the assassination of John F. Kennedy identifying him as one the gunmen around the mysterious “grassy knoll.” In 1998, Harrelson’s actor son Woody, well known for his role in the television series “Cheers” as well as in films such Natural Born Killers and The People Versus Larry Flynt, hires attorneys to seek a new trial for his father, claiming, according to the Rocky Mountain News, that “the federal government colluded to frame him.” “In my own mind,” the younger Harrelson tells the press in June 2000, “a rogue element of the DEA killed Judge Wood, if not directly then by hiring someone.” By the summer of 2001, U.S. Judge Orlando Garcia in San Antonio has yet to rule on Harrelson’s request for a new trial.
PAUL HORNUNG
Elected to various halls of fame in the latter 1980s,
he becomes president of his own Paul Hornung Sports Showcase and Paul Hornung Enterprises, Inc., and vice president of an entity called Real Estate and Investment Company. In May 2001 he attends his 50th Kentucky
Derby at Churchill Downs where he had seen his first race as a 16year-old usher.
JAMES HUGGINS
He retires from the FBI after thirty years, having narrowly escaped being gunned down by a shotgun-wielding fugitive in an incident just before his farewell party. While his son James, Jr. rises in his own FBI career as one of the agents catching the Unabomber, the elder Huggins, in his late fifties, soon leaves retirement to join a new public integrity division of the Kentucky Attorney General’s office, where he is charged to investigate political and law enforcement corruption throughout state government. In 2001 his boss as attorney general is Ben Chandler—Dan Chandler’s nephew and ex-Governor “Happy” Chandler’s grandson.
BONNIE KELLY
She is serving a life sentence at Broward Correctional Institution in Florida, and will be eligible for parole October 15, 2005, at age fifty-two. Meanwhile she and her husband Wallace McClure “Mike” Kelly have divorced, and Mike went on to marry Bonnie’s sister Betty Gee, with whom he has a child. Mike dies in June 2000 of complications from cancer.
JAMES PURDY “JIMMY” LAMBERT
Released from prison, he becomes a partner of Phillip Block in the Kentucky chain of Castle pawn and jewelry shops. Seemingly intent on a low profile, he largely disappears from the political and social pages of Lexington and other local newspapers.
In 1996, a published biography of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Partners in Power, reveals that Lambert had also been the conduit for some $300,000 in cash given to then-Governor John Y. Brown by Clinton and Brown intimate Dan Lasater, a fast-food and bond brokerage millionaire suspected of ties to organized crime and who would later be convicted himself on drug charges. According to FBI records, Brown through Lambert had asked for a million dollars at the time, but Lasater had decided to give “only” $300,000, conveyed in a brown paper bag aboard Lasater’s Lear Jet as he flew the Clintons to the 1983 Derby, where the two governors and their wives would socialize as usual. “I just took care of John Y’s money problems,” an associate would remember Lasater telling him after that trip to Kentucky with the future President and First Lady.
ANITA MADDEN
In 1991 she ceases her legendary Derby parties, but remains conspicuous in Lexington society and, as always, a patron of the state’s politicians as well as its thoroughbreds. Her social standing apparently undiminished by her part in the turbulence of the Brown years, she continues to attract extensive favorable publicity in the local press. In the summer of 2001 an extravagantly showy but temperamental hybrid daylily—six inches in diameter, pale yellow with peach blush and ruffled edge—is named for her. “Sparkles like sunlight in champagne,” says the wife of the hybridizer.
DANNY ALAN MURPHY
In 1990 he is convicted on federal drug charges with the use of weapons and sentenced to 30 years. Months later, while in jail, he pleads guilty to manslaughter in the 1985 suffocation death of his then 33-year-old wife Barbara and is sentenced to 11 years to run concurrent with this other sentence.
STEVE OLIVER
In the autumn of 1994, Denver’s Rocky Mountain News reports in a feature article, entitled “To Some People, The Sky’s The Limit,” that Oliver and his wife Suzanne, whom he met at a Kentucky Derby, “for the past dozen years or so… have been criss-crossing the continent (to say nothing of Canada and Mexico) as skywriting pilots.” Featured as well in People and Us magazines and on television shows ranging from Inside Edition to Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood, the couple are quoted as saying they are “the only people who make a living doing skywriting.” Sponsored by the Pepsi-Cola Company, they reportedly spend much of their time spelling “Pepsi” across an 8-mile stretch of sky over some 150 cities each year. As with others in or around the Kentucky scandal of the 1970s and 80s, there is no mention in this later publicity of Oliver’s involvement in that history.
RALPH ROSS
He goes on to become a nationally renowned private investigator based in Central Kentucky. By the latter 1990s he retires to the comfortable house he built with his own hands in Lawrenceburg, spending his time doting on his grandchildren and playing golf. He also remains an avid and knowing observer of the Kentucky and national scenes, where events from the Statehouse to the White House corroborate his work and vindicate the accomplishment and integrity of his 26-year law enforcement career as he never could have imagined as that young boy growing up in Dry Branch.
HENRY VANCE
In the spring of 1997—at fifty-four, said to be suffering from impaired sight, and after serving eight years and nine months of his fifteen-year sentence for conspiracy to murder—he is released early with time off for good behavior. Trudy Berry, the widow of prosecutor Eugene Berry for whose 1987 murder Vance provided the .38-calibre handgun, says of his early release, “I hate to see it, because if anyone should be in jail, it’s Henry Vance. He should be there forever.” In 1997, Kentucky State Insurance Commissioner George Nichols III learns that Vance had been granted a renewal of a state insurance license the day before the former official was sentenced, and Nichols begins proceedings to revoke the license on grounds of Vance’s manifest “moral turpitude.” In the ensuing legal battle, Vance is represented by former Kentucky Governor Julian Carroll, for whom Vance was once a ranking aide. There was “nothing improper” in the convicted felon being given the license, Carroll tells the press at one point. By the summer of 2000 the issue seems to become moot with a new state law abolishing such licenses. In 2001, the nearly blind Vance reportedly still attends reunions and social occasions with the political figures and patrons with whom he was so powerful two decades before.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book could never have been written were it not for the overwhelming support and involvement of Harry and Pat Miller. Without Harry’s keen legal eye, subsequent endorsement of the veracity of the material, and personal guarantee to WKYT executives that the stories were thoroughly substantiated and documented, my original reporting would have stopped dead in its tracks years ago. As if that were not enough, Harry and his wife, Pat, offered me safe harbor in an increasingly tempestuous sea. They opened their home to me and incorporated me into their lives at a time when being a friend of Sally Denton’s was highly unpopular.
Likewise, special thanks are due John Schaaf and Mary Jane Gallaher, who loved Kentucky enough to want to improve it, and who believed in the First Amendment enough to withstand the resulting heat.
Most of the supporting documentation for this book is found in government documents. Still, my sources are the cornerstone of my endeavors. Many of my sources in the FBI, Customs, DEA, IRS, Kentucky State Police, and the Lexington Police Department do not wish to be publicly acknowledged. They know who they are, and they know how appreciative I am.
My thanks to the following current and former law enforcement officers: DEA—Bob Brightwell, John Bums, Dennis Dayle, Ralph Frias, Kieran Kobell, Lowell Miller, Al Overbow, Lou Perry, Cindy Schultz, Don Ware; FBI-Jim Blasingame, John Crisp, John Denton, Bill Henshaw, Jim Huggins, Neil Welch; U.S. Customs—Houston Allman, Art Donelan, Bill Paul, Marvin Walker; ATF—Dennis Dutch, Frank Eddy, Bob Pritchett, Sam Simpson; Captain James Black, Jefferson County Police; Pete Caram, New York Port Authority; Bud Fanner, Jefferson County Police; Billy Gallinaro and Nick Navarro, Broward County Sheriff ’s Department; Colonel Don Powers, Kentucky State Police; Ron Rohlfs, Georgia Bureau of Investigation; John Sampson, Dade County Metro Police; Arthur Bohanan, Knoxville Police Department; Danny Dominguez and John Buhrmaster, Miami Police Department; Corky Dwight, Louisiana State Police; Bill Wolf, Florida Department of Law Enforcement; and to Steve and Harry.
My thanks also to the following reporters, writers, editors, and researchers who contrib
uted their time and support to me throughout the years: Joanne Bario; Dan Baum, Tom Burton, Tom Chester, Ken Cummins, Jan Fisher, Jeff Frank, Jim Grady, Patricia Griffith, John Hill, Jim and Carolyn Hougan, Robert Blair Kaiser, George Knapp, Ken Kurtz, Jonathan Marshall, Greg McDonald, Jay Peterzell, Wendell Rawls, Bill Rempel, Kevin Sacks, Jim Savage, Albert Scardino, Tom Scheffey, Quin Shea, Curt Suplee, Nicholas Von Hoffman, and to the memory of Ned Day and Bob Brown.
I am grateful to the following friends and acquaintances who offered assistance in this project: Tom Baynard, Dennis Blewitt, Karen Brannon, Maxine Champion, Paul Cody, John Davis, Gregory Bruce English, Larry Forgy, Ed Garland, Dottie Goffstein, Bonnie Goldstein, Pat Hallinan, Chris Jurgenson, Steve Koch, Dr. and Mrs. Thomas Hobbs, Guy Mendez, Dr. and Mrs. John Moore, John Paustian, George Ratterman, Howard and Ruth Samuel, Robert Samuel, Larry Weinberg, Dr. Doug Wilson, and Betty Zaring.
The following current and former state and federal prosecutors provided valuable insight: Louis De Falaise, U.S. Attorney, Lexington,
Kentucky; John Gill, U.S. Attorney, Knoxville, Tennessee; Mark Johnson, Florida Statewide Prosecutor; Robert Trevey, Assistant U.S. Attorney, Lexington, Kentucky; Steve Wehner, Assistant U.S. Attorney, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
I appreciate the time taken by sundry librarians, archivists, and FOIA officers who assisted in my research.
Thanks to Mabel Mitchell, who taught me how to write, and to Bob Trapp, who taught me how to report.
Thanks to my agents, Arnold and Elise Goodman, for their commitment to this project; and to my editor, Patrick Filley, for grasping its significance.
A hard-working, sensible, idealistic cop named Ralph Ross explored the mystery that unfolds in The Bluegrass Conspiracy. He received little assistance in his endeavors, and was faced with a multitude of personal and professional obstacles more unfair and difficult than most of us ever face in a lifetime. Words cannot express the depth of my gratitude to him.