The Clintons' War on Women (16 page)

Dan Lasater was perhaps Bill Clinton’s closest and most important political contributor. Lasater was also heavily into the drug trade, and he and Bill used to party with girls as young as high-school age. One of the girls who Dan Lasater got hooked on cocaine was sixteen-year-old Patty-Anne Smith. Patty-Anne got very close to Lasaster and knew he was involved with both the drug trade and the Nicaraguan contra supply operation. She told Ambrose Evans-Pritchard that Clinton “was never acting like a governor when I saw him.” Patty-Anne saw Clinton use cocaine on two or three occasions including one night in Lasater’s residence: “He was doing a line. It was just there on the table.”
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Former Saline County criminal investigator John Brown looked into the governor’s “habit.” “I talked to the manager and the assistant manager of the apartment complex for Roger Clinton,” said Brown. “They’ve all said Bill Clinton did drugs, they saw him. I’ve talked to many other people, who have all, just like the people at the apartment complex, said ‘Hey John, get us to a congressional hearing. Yes, we’ll sign a sworn affidavit.’ These people want to be sure that when they come forward that something is done about it, because they fear for their lives, but they really want the truth to get out.”
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Sharline Wilson was a so-called party girl, close with Roger Clinton and other drug dealers in the 1980s. “I lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, okay?” Wilson said. “And I worked at a club called Le Bistro’s, and I met Roger Clinton there, Governor Bill Clinton, a couple
of his state troopers that went with him wherever he went. Roger Clinton had come up to me and he had asked me could I give him some coke, you know, and asked for my one-hitter, which a one-hitter is a very small silver device, okay, that you stick up into your nose and you just squeeze it and a snort of cocaine will go up in there. And I watched Roger hand what I had given him to Governor Clinton, and he just kind of turned around and walked off.”
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Ambrose Evans-Pritchard gives a great recounting of the Clinton-Arkansas drug scene and the dirty deeds and cover-ups that flowed from it. “On the afternoon of December 10, 1990, her [Jean Duffey’s] best informant, Sharline Wilson, walked into the U.S. District Court in Little Rock and blurted out in front of an astonished grand jury that she had provided cocaine to Bill Clinton at Le Bistro nightclub during his first term as governor.”

Wilson said that one time she saw the governor so high on cocaine that he literally leaned against a wall and slid down into a trash can. “I watched Bill Clinton lean up against a brick wall,” Wilson said. “He must have had an adenoid problem because he casually stuck my tooter up his nose…. He was so messed up that night, he slid down the wall into a garbage can and just sat there like a complete idiot…. I was, you know, the hostess with the mostest, the lady with the snow … I’d serve drinks and lines of cocaine on a glass mirror.”

Wilson, who was once sexually intimate with Roger Clinton, says she and her friends would go back to the Arkansas governor’s mansion and party until the early morning hours. “I thought it was the coolest thing in the world that we had a governor who got high,” Wilson stated.
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After Wilson testified before the grand jury, the Republican-appointed U.S Attorney Charles Banks shut down his investigation. Wilson contacted investigator Jean Duffey and told her that she was terrified and that her home had come under surveillance as a result. She was dangerous to the “powers that be.” She had been a girlfriend of the drug dealers, including Bill Clinton’s half-brother Roger,
and she had worked “for three or four months unloading bags of cocaine at the Mena Airport in the mountains” of western Arkansas.
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The Clinton brothers seemed, by many accounts, to be more than just casual users.

Roger was caught bragging on a police tape to an undercover informant, “I’ve got four or five guys in uniform who keep an eye on the guys who keep an eye on me.” Roger was dealing directly with Colombian Maurice Rodriguez, a man with ties to the Colombian drug cartels.
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CHAPTER 9

THE BOYS ON THE TRACKS

T
he small town of Mena, Arkansas, is about a four-hour drive from Dallas. The town of Alexander, thirty miles south of the Arkansas state capital, Little Rock, where Governor Clinton resided,
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was founded as a construction camp for the railroad. Both towns had shady reputations: they were thought to be hubs of prolific illegal drug activity.

Sharline Wilson, the “party girl” described in the last chapter, would pick up loads of cocaine at the Mena Airport and “make the run down to Texas. The drop-off was at the Cowboys Stadium,” she told Evans-Pritchard. “I was told that nobody would ever bother me, and I was never bothered. On Sunday morning, August 23, 1987, a Union Pacific train was making a routine run from Texarkana on that stretch of railway, when the workers manning the locomotive spotted something ahead on the tracks.

“When we were approximately one hundred feet away from this dark spot, engineer (Stephen) Shroyer yelled out, ‘Oh my God!’ recalled
the brakeman, Danny DeLamar. “We could tell there were two young men lying between the rails just north of the bridge, and we saw there was a gun beyond the boy who was lying to the north. There was something covering these boys from their waist to just below their knees, and I’m not sure what this object was. They were both in between the rails, heads up against the west rail, and their feet were over the east rail. Both were right beside each other and their arms and hands were to their sides, heads facing straight up. I never noticed any movement at all.”
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The horn was sounded and the brakes were locked, but despite the deafening sounds from the futile attempts to stop the train, the boys never moved as the locomotive rolled on and over them.

“What had caught my attention at first was a big brilliant flash,” said Stroyer.

“Apparently that was my headlight striking the barrel of the gun. The next thing I was totally aware of was the chest and head of that second boy, the one without the shirt. And from then on, I never took my thoughts off of him. What I focused on were his chest and his head—and how relaxed he looked. To me he looked as relaxed as a boy sunbathing on a beach.”
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As the train ground to a halt, the men hesitantly went back to look for pieces of the boys on the tracks. What they anticipated was a large amount of fresh blood, spilled from the impact with the train; what they found made the oddity of the boy’s stillness as the train bore down upon them even stranger.

There
was
blood, but not much. According to the train’s conductor, Jerry Tomlin, a lifelong hunter with knowledge of how the blood will flow from a freshly wounded animal, there was “hardly any blood spilled at all. And the color of it bothered me, too. It was night, and we couldn’t tell for sure, but the blood we saw was not red—not as red as you would think blood would be on a fresh kill like that. It was dark, more of a purplish color.”
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Compounded with his earlier suspicion, the blood tipped Tomlin off. “Out there that night,” Tomlin said, “I kind of smelled a rat.”

Deputy
Chuck Tallent and Lieutenant Ray Richmond of the Saline County Sheriff’s Office, the first responders to the scene, almost immediately deemed the deaths an accident or suicide, despite the protests of the train crew or the report of Arkansas State Trooper Wayne Lainhart, who hours earlier had investigated two shots fired in the immediate vicinity.

The two EMTs on scene, Billy Heath and Shirley Raper, also noticed something wrong with the color and quantity of blood. A note attached to their official report read, “Blood from the bodies and on the body parts we observed was a dark color in nature. Due to our training, this would indicate a lack of oxygen in the blood and could pose a question as to how long the victims had been dead.” Raper later told the state police, “The body parts had a pale color to them, like someone that had been dead for some time.”
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The boys were identified as seventeen-year-old Kevin Ives and sixteen-year-old Don Henry. Linda Ives, the mother of Kevin, made finding the truth behind her son’s death a lifelong mission. The evidence didn’t point toward accident or suicide, yet the authorities were cavalier in their insistence. Linda knew something was wrong.

Arkansas medical examiner Fahmy Malak ruled the deaths an accident. He said the boys had smoked twenty marijuana joints and fallen into a trance on the railway tracks, side by side. How he reached this astounding conclusion was a mystery. The state crime labs had not tested the concentration of marijuana in their blood. Many in the medical world were confused by the finding.

“I know of incidents where persons smoked twenty-one marijuana cigarettes, one right after the other,” said Dr. Arthur J. McBay, chief toxicologist for the North Carolina medical examiner’s office. “They become euphoric, but it doesn’t make them unconscious. I don’t know what kind of evidence you could possibly use to conclude this. I have never heard of anyone becoming unconscious from this under ordinary circumstances.” McBay added that he didn’t “know who would agree with it.”

In
his career, Malak left a trail of perplexing medical opinions. One stood out. A ruling by Malak had once aided Governor Clinton’s mother, Virginia Kelley, a nurse anesthetist. Malak gave the medical opinion that one of Kelley’s patients, Susie Deer, had died of “blunt trauma” to the head when the patient was in fact determined to have died of lack of oxygen and medical malpractice by an incompetent practitioner.

Highly controversial, Malak had staunch critics. “He repeatedly lied about his credentials, misconstrued his findings, and misrepresented autopsy procedures,” author Meredith Oakley claimed in her 1994 book,
On the Make: The Rise of Bill Clinton.
“In the lab, he misplaced bodies and destroyed evidence. On the witness stand, he was a prosecutor’s dream.”

In response to the claims of incompetence and corruption, Governor Clinton deferred the decision on Malak’s future to a retired sheriff he had recently appointed.

“It didn’t seem to matter what Malak did, Clinton protected him,” said Linda Ives. “[Clinton] made excuses such as ‘he’s overworked,’ ‘he’s just stressed out,’ ‘he’s underpaid.’ They gave him a $14 thousand raise, which was an insult to my family as well as many others in the state. I was outraged that protecting a political crony of Clinton was more important than the fact that two young boys had been murdered.”
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Saline County Sheriff Jim Steed, complicit in the finding of an accidental death or suicide, echoed Malak’s ruling and stood by the medical examiner. “Our local investigation was headed by our sheriff, Jim Steed,” said Linda Ives. “He later went on television bragging about what a thorough investigation he had conducted, and that he felt very sorry for us as parents, but that he had every confidence in Fahmy Malak’s ruling. Their investigation was so thorough that they left my son’s foot out there for two days in plain sight.”
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A political liability, Malak was eventually moved by the governor to a new job as head of the Arkansas state AIDS education program, which paid him three-fourths his old salary.

In
April 1988, Atlanta medical examiner Dr. Joseph Burton administered a second autopsy of Ives and Henry. Dr. Burton found that Don Ives had been stabbed on the left side of the chest with “something like a large cutting edge knife.”
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Ives had damage to his skull that indicated to Dr. Burton that he had been hit in the head with the butt of a rifle. It was also discovered that the level of marijuana in the blood of the two boys was consistent with having smoked little over two joints in the hours before their death, a far cry from Dr. Malak’s assertion of almost two dozen.
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Linda Ives, distraught with what she saw as an intentional mishandling of her sons deaths, was approached by Deputy Prosecutor Richard Garrett and, Defense Attorney Dan Harmon, who vowed to catch those responsible for her son’s murder.

Linda was particularly impressed by Harmon. To Linda, Harmon was a man of integrity who “helped us when no one else would.”
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Harmon was appointed special prosecutor to head the grand jury probe. While Harmon helped to change the ruling of the boy’s deaths from a suicide to a homicide, his investigation was deeply flawed.

“He helped lead them down a path that absolutely led nowhere on this case,” said former Saline County criminal investigator John Brown. “I got involved in the case and immediately Harmon tried to discredit me without even knowing me. I couldn’t figure it out.”
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Individuals who might have provided essential testimony were not called; some witnesses close to the murder, with vital information, met a far worse fate.

Keith McKaskle, bar owner of the Wagon Wheel in nearby Pulaski County, was one of those unfortunate witnesses. McKaskle had passed on a piece of information to Deputy Cathy Carty, the only Saline County deputy on the tracks the night the boys died who strongly disagreed that the deaths were an accident. “Keith told me I might want to watch Dan Harmon,” Carty said, “that he was one of Saline County’s largest suppliers.”
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McKaskle
knew something about Harmon that connected him with the murders of Ives and Henry. In the weeks before his death, McKaskle was treated to Clinton-style intimidation and threats. “He was always pointing out small cars, saying they were following him,” a friend of McKaskle said. “[He] kept saying the law was following him.”

The friend added that McKaskle repeated the belief that, “someone was going to kill him” in those last weeks.
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