Long posting about my father in law's conviction on drug charges

[wgrr]

My father in law, known as Jim from now on. was an attorney with a very distinguished career. He was a Commander in the Navy Air Corp during WWII, He finished Law school after the war and started his career in Little Rock. Eventually he became the little Rock City attorney. Then he was appointed to be the first Western Arkansas assistant US attorney. He eventually went on to represent Eisenhower during the Little Rock Central High integration were troops from the 101st Airborne led nine black students into the school in 1957. Then he was asked to move to Fayetteville to practice law and act as the associate dean of the U of A law school. During that time he hired a couple of folks to teach at the law school named Bill and Hillary Clinton. After he left the law school (that is another good story) He went into private practice and was very successful.

He owned a large farm in Goshen, AR that he was leasing to one of his clients. His clients were Americans that did business in Columbia mainly buying and selling large luxury yachts. In 1974 the farm was raided by Federal DEA officers. They found four tons of Columbian weed in bales in a barn on the farm. They arrested twenty one people which included Jim who was not out there and had no direct knowledge of the drug smuggling operation.

The trucks used to transport the pot traveled through Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas. Texas and Arkansas refused to press charges, but Oklahoma was having drug trafficking problems at the time so the Charged Jim and convicted him in a trial that was a little tainted shall we say. He appealed immediately and was granted a new trial in Federal court in Arkansas, in 1977, where he was acquitted of all charges by a jury that deliberated less than ten minutes.

What came out in that trial was Strange to say the least. During the build up to the appeals trial a lot of weird stuff happened to me and Janet, Jim's daughter. Janet and I lived together in an old house, broken up into apartments, just off the UofA campus. We started noticing things out of place in our apartment when we returned from classes. We both felt like we were being watched. This happened several times. The shocker was a phone call from my aunt in DC in which she only said two words, "watch out". Normally this would just be weird, except my aunt worked for the CIA. So I took the warning very seriously. I have no clue to this day what she did at the CIA. Nothing ever came of it but it was a very tense time.

In Jim's appeals trial in Arkansas some things came out that was very damaging to the DEA. First they accused Jim of money laundering because he had gone into a bank a changed $100,000 in small denomination bills to large denomination bills. Anybody with half a brain would see that this is not money laundering. He did it to make the money easier to carry down to Columbia were he assisted his clients in buying a yacht.

The DEA knew of the shipment and was following it the entire time. They could have ended the ordeal at anytime.

The biggest thing that came out was at that time DEA agents were paid according to the stature of the person arrested, tried, and convicted. The bigger the fish, the bigger the money. That practiced ended after Playboy magazine published an article outlining and detailing Jim's entire ordeal.

What happened to the other twenty defendants. In a nutshell, nothing. They all went free. No charges were ever filed.

The government claimed they could keep the farm and all the personal property on it since it was were the pot was discovered. They did not know who they were dealing with. Jim had everything back in about six months.

Sadly, Jim died in 1982 from a ruptured vein in his leg at the age of 57.