-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Blacklisted News, Secret History . . . From Chicago, '68, to 1984
©1983 Youth International Party Information Service
Bleecker Publishing
POB 392
Canal St. Station
New York, NY 10012
ISBN 0-912873-00-0
-----
Notice the players, the plays and the results . . .
Om
K
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"Cocaine-why should Yippies be down on coke? What about Abbie Hoffman?" said
Jody Powell, clutching a copy of the issue reproduced on the facing page in
his hot little hand.
After confering[sic] with Y.T.[Yippie Times] staffers in a New Hampshire hotel
lobby, it was a thoughtful Jody Powell indeed who took word back to Georgia,
where the State Bureau of Revenue was finally prevailed upon to return the
$28,000 Yippie Warchest seized at secret service instigation in May of '75.
(The GBR had defied a series of court orders, refusing for almost a year to
give it back, depriving Yippies of precious lead-time needed to prepare for
the '76 convention protests.)
Then, shortly after Yippies with "Coke Freaks For Carter" signs greeted Carter
at the Madison airport, and a TAKEOVER reprint on the scandal gave it media
currency around the state, Mo Udall came from behind in Wisconsin to within a
hairsbreath of beating out Carter. The warchest was percipitously returned-the
first and only time the GBR had ever done that, according to courthouse
observers.
Not until 1981, under Reagan, did we locate and interview the dealer who'd
given not just an initial $50,000, but additional payments totaling $150,000
for Phil Walden to produce Concerts for Carter (naively believing it would
secure marijuana legalization).
Yet, as we told Jody Powell in that fateful confrontation in New Hampshire,
what pissed us off wasn't the cocaine
( altho we foresaw, based on what had happened to Abbie, how a coke scandal
would bleed the democrats to death for 4 years ... ) but the cover-up of the
contributions, obstruction of justice, and the whole pattern of throwing the
little people to the wolves: all so reminiscent of Nixon.
Yippies instinctively felt that we had not fought so long to end the war, only
to leave the basic regime intact. James Rector, Randy Anderson and all the
others had not been martyred to elect a cold war democrat who as Georgia
governor threatened to bring the Guard on campus after the Kent shootings,
which he applauded.
Nonetheless, the story made next to no headway in '76—and not just because all
the reporters were turning on to coke themselves. Typically, the Rolling
Stone, which had launched Carter's counter-cultural identification with Bob
Dylan and blue jeans in Hunter Thompson's piece on Carter's Law Day speach,
followed it up with a "definitive" feature on Patty Hearst. The choice seemed
stark: armed struggle and fiery suicide ... or Carter.
Having reached the point of supporting someone they didn't really like
"because he was a winner," the "liberal" half of the country (who'd backed
McGovern, while finding the organized Left hopelessly mired in rigidity) found
it easy to self-censor unpleasant stories from threatening people. So long as
Carter was a only potentially President, and couldn't yet disillusion anyone,
the currents converging on the political center were simply too strong for the
Coke Scandal to become a Big Story in 1976.
Extraordinary efforts are still made by liberals of a Cold War stripe to
discredit it, based on the publication, several months after initial pieces in
New Times and Y.T., of a similar story in the neo-Nazi organ Spotlight dredged
up from their own rightwing sources in the Georgia. So ... it's not our fault
it really happened. All three articles included in this volume are updated
versions prepared for distribution in New Hampshire in 1980.
The Jimmy Carter Coke Scandal
Pt. 1 -Waldengate
In the past 3 weeks, a spate of news items has peppered the papers with veiled
hints and outright charges of intimidation being brought to bear on witnesses
due to testify before the special prosecutor in the Ham Jordan cocaine
investigation-" pressures" which at least one potential witness, Barry M.
Landau, has characterized as "Nixonian." This is not the first time a Carter
Presidential campaign has been charged with a cover-up:
Early in February, 1976, while Candidate Carter trudged through the snow in
New Hampshire, word began to leak out that a federal grand jury was
investigating a cocaine ring stretching from Colombia to the top echelons of
Carter's fund-raising operations.
Suspicion of a Cocaine-Carter Connection first arose during a 1976 federal
grand jury investigation of an international coke ring allegedly thought to be
centered in Macon, Georgia. Federal, state, county and city narcs were
collaborating to trace what the Georgia Bureau of Investigation called the
"cocaine trail" from its source in the peaks of the Andes Mountains in South
America to a domestic distribution point in Macon. The grand jury sought the
"higher-ups" in this farflung narcotics network.
$50,000 of raw coke had already been seized by Macon and federal agents in
June, 1975 as a result of the probe. The investigation had led to a $40,000
coke bust in Gainesville, Florida [only 6 hours due south by car] and now the
grand jury hoped to nab the "big boss" of the operation.
Word of the investigation had been whispered about in the tightly-
interstitched coke and music scenes in both Macon and Atlanta, 90 miles north.
Coke-dealers in each city began to head for the Georgia hills when not only
rock-star Gregg Allman, but Phil Walden [President of Macon-based Capricorn
Records] was mentioned as possible targets for a subpoena to testify about
drug trafficking in Middle Georgia. The investigation of coke-dealing
surrounding the Capricorn scene originated with the GBI (Georgia Bureau of
Investigation), who concluded that at least $25,000 worth of uncut cocaine was
passing through Macon each week. According to one Atlanta dealer, "Capricorn's
studio had a lot of people coming in all day and night to cop coke. Some days
maybe a hundred people, and that was just the small-timers and hangers-on."
One former studio employee recalled: "There were coke deals going on night and
day at that place. I never saw any really big deals, but the quantity sales
must have added up to a lot of money." A closer confidant of Gregg's also
related that "Just sitting around the place, if someone asked if you want to
do a little toot and you said yes, they didn'tjust lay out a few lines. Some
one would hand you a gram or two from his pocket and stroll on into the next
room".
Walden steadfastly denied the growing rumors that he might be subpoenaed by
the grand jury. "I don't anticipate it, and I can't imagine why I would be,"
he told the Macon Telegraph on January 21, 1976. Later that same year, Walden
suggested to Rolling Stone that he had known of Gregg's drug habits. "I didn't
say I didn't know," Walden hinted, "I didn't say I'm that naive."
Such knowledge in itself would have been reason enough for the U.S. Prosecutor
to consider Walden's testimony valuable in the event that AlIman refused to
cooperate on the witness stand. Observers familiar with the scene at the
Capricorn studio surmised that, as tightly as Walden personally supervised the
operations, it seemed impossible for him to have remained ignorant of the
rampant coke-dealing going on under his very nose. Even to the untrained eye,
it soon became readily apparent that if Gregg refused to talk on the witness
stand, Walden would be the next in line.
Denials by Walden at the time and subsequent denials by Jody Powell that
Walden might be subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury sufficiently
cooled out any interests which the national media would have shown in such a
volatile story in those early post-Watergate times. But the testimony of Gregg
Allman not only further aroused the suspicion of knowledgeable observers, but
pointed to a sweeping cover-up of the coke ring and the existence of a
possible Cocaine-Carter Connection.
While Allman fidgeted nervously on the witness stand, Jimmy Carter was on the
campaign trail in New England, where the New Hampshire primary posed a vital
contest for the then—unknown candidate. None of the trusting voters who
faithfully shook Carter's hand ever realized that without admitted heroin and
cocaine abuser Gregg Allman's aid, Carter would be back in Georgia picking
peanuts again.
"There is no question that the Allman's benefit concert in Providence kept us
in that race and others," Carter would later tell People Magazine. For
Carter's campaign fund had tilted precariously on the brink of bankruptcy in
the fall of 1975. And it was a series of benefit concerts, all featuring
Capricorn recording artists like the Allmans, Charlie Daniels, the Marshall
Tucker Band and others, all arranged by Phil Walden, that saved Carter's
campaign financially in the nick of time.
"Jimmy called and said the money was really critical and they have to raise
$50,000 or the campaign would be in trouble," Walden recalled the fall night
in 1975, as reported by the Telegraph's Washington bureau in August, 1977.
According to Thomas F. McCoy, a Washington-based fund-raiser for liberal
Democratic candidates, Walden then "...reportedly raised $100,000 for the
Carter campaign from persons in the rock music industry..." to bankroll the
series of concerts that he masterminded. As the Telegraph reported in the 1977
story, the concerts' proceeds, plus federal matching funds, "gave the campaign
a $100,000 shot of life, enabling Carter to go on to victory in the pivotal
Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary in early 1976".
Did Carter know anything of Capricorn's impending legal problems while this
boodle was passing hands? He claims not. A few days before the March, 1976
Florida primary at a press conference at the Miami International Airport,
Carter was asked by Alternative Press Syndicate writer Michael Chance whether
there was any substance to the articles that had appeared in the alternative
press. He answered that he knew nothing of the grand jury investigation until
he read of it in the papers. Again, this position was reiterated by a Carter
loyalist interviewed in New Times later that summer.
But Phil Walden tells a different story. At the annual Capricorn Records
barbecue, held that summer in August at Phil Walden'; palatial country estate,
Chance and Craig Copetas, on assignment for High Times, encountered Carter and
sought to question him again on the alleged cover-up. But he was spirited away
by the Secret Service before any questions could be asked.
However, later that night Copetas asked Phil Walden when he had told Carter of
the grand jury investigation and he responded that he had informed Carter as
soon as he had learned, in mid-November of 1975, that Allman had been
approached by the grand jury and at first refused to testify. It was 2 months
later that Allman finally squealed, and several more weeks until the stories
hit the newspapers; Carter claims that's when he just found out.
It is this discrepancy that has never been reconciled, by Jody Powell or by
any other Presidential spokesperson. Nor does it help that key inner staffers
of Carter's '76 Campaign have since been named in coke scandals of their own.
In December of '75 or January of '76, there were 2 individuals uniquely suited
to have intervened in the Walden matter on Carter's behalf. One of them was
Ham Jordan, Mr. Fixit for Carter since 1972 and White House chief of staff
today. An even more likely candidate was Dr. Peter Bourne, described at the
time as "chief hatchetman for special campaign problems" who, as top drug
advisor to then-Governor Carter, had been responsible for liberalizing
Georgia's tough dope laws. He knew the laws, the judges, prosecutors and
politicos who made and enforced the drug laws. Little-known aides to a born-
again candidate-who would have suspected that each would be involved in his
own cocaine scandal before the first term was out?
In January of 1976, the grand jury convened in Macon. As local dealers and
musicians had feared, Allman was subpeonaed to testify. Allman took the 5th
Amendment on his first two appearances before the grand jury. On January 13,
he was granted immunity from prosecution on federal drug charges. His eventual
testimony diverted the grand jury's focus from the international cokesmuggling
ring to Allman's road manager, Scooter Herring. Herring was later indicted and
arrested on five counts of drug sales to Allman. The charges involved
relatively small quantities, nothing more serious than selling 1 gram of coke
at a time to Allman.
Thirty-three others were indicted the following day, but proved to be nothing
but "small fish in an ocean of coke." The "higher-ups" originally sought by
the grand jury had slipped through their fingers-and are probably weighing out
kilos of coke and counting stacks of $100 bills today!
So the theory of the Cocaine-Carter Connection has its roots in this at first
seemingly unrelated chain of events that reads something like this:
1. Summer of '75—Walden's name rumored to be on list of potential witnesses to
be subpoenaed by grand jury investigating coke-smuggling and domestic
distribution.
2. Late October of '75—Walden gets call from Carter for crucial funds.
3. November of '75—Walden arranges concerts which save Carter, while
discretely informing the campaign of potential embarrassment by the Grand
jury.
4. January of '76—Allman, after twice refusing to testify, reveals the names
of a few small fish. Walden is never subpoenaed, the grand jury dissolves
overnight, and not another word is ever heard of the cocaine ring originally
the subject of the investigation.
Could Carter's influence have been used in his native state to arrange some
sort of deal by means of which Allman would agree to turn in a few people like
Herring to satisfy the grand jury? This would make sense for Carter, whose
chances for the Presidency would have gone down the tubes. Certainly if
Walden, a key member of his finance committee, had been grilled by a grand
jury about coke-dealing at such an early stage in Carter's campaign, that
"born-again" Southern Baptist's image would have been shattered irreparably.
If Carter did intercede in such a manner, he would irrefutably be guilty of
obstruction of justice. Carter would be as guilty if he were even aware that
Walden may have devised a cover-up to divert the focus of the grand jury's
investigation and avoid the witness stand himself on his own.
The deal itself would have been a simple matter. Since the pressure was on
Allman to talk, he would implicate Herring and a number of others, none in a
postion to ever have suspected Walden of being involved in any coke-dealing.
Herring would plead the 5th Amendment and take the rap in return for a
guarantee that he would be taken care of by the "higher-ups" his testimony
would otherwise have implicated.
Allman told Rolling Stone in November, 1976 that he asked Herring what to do
if the grand jury asked about him. "Don't worry about it, I've got it all
covered," Allman says Herring confidently replied.
"The buck is going to have to stop being passed somewhere," Gregg says Herring
elaborated. "'Cause I'm going in there and plead the 5th Amendment; they ain't
going to get shit out of me." Herring obviously knew a lot. From the vantage
point he enjoyed running his own "Laidback Productions" from an office in the
Capricorn studio, he was perfectly situated to have been aware of any
involvement Walden may have had in the local coke-dealing scene.
Did Walden, with Carter's knowledge, enact a cover-up to avoid the witness
stand to save Carter the political embarrassment? Or was Walden actually the
"big boss" of the coke-ring which the grand jury had originally sought?
Herring's testimony could possibly have answered these questions.
The subsequent history of Herring's case suggests a continuing cover-up of the
Cocaine-Carter Connection. Originally convicted on five counts of drugs sales,
Herring found himself sentenced to 75 years. ABB member Chuck Leavel said the
judge was so severe because he was angry at Herring's "lack of cooperation."
Scooter was granted a new trial in May, 1978. Again, Allman was mentioned as a
prosecution witness, and the possibility that Walden could be subpoenaed as
well presented itself once more. The stage was set for Herring to tell
everything he knew about the coke-dealing scene at Capricorn Records. The last
thing Carter and Walden wanted to see was a new trial for Herring.
Herring had every reason to want a new trial at this time. Because of the
illness of a crucial witness in his original conviction, the U.S. Prosecutor's
office had told the Telegraph that Herring would probably go free if re-tried.
Then why would Herring, only 2 days before the trial was scheduled to begin,
decide to waive his right to a new trial and cop a guilty plea to 2 of the 5
charges and a less severe sentence? Why, except to further the cover-up, would
Herring agree to go to jail, where he is in Georgia right now, when even the
U.S. Prosecutor reckoned he would not be convicted at a new trial?
In spite of what appears to be a cleverly-manipulated cover-up, Walden's name
has become at least as directly associated with cocaine as the names of Dr.
Peter Bourne and Ham Jordan. Once the possibility that Walden was engaged in
coke-dealing at a major level is entertained, an even more controversial
avenue of suspicion becomes available. Could the $100,000 that Walden
reportedly raised from "persons in the music industry" to bankroll the crucial
Carter benefits actually come from the Macon-centered coke-dealing operation?
This possibility then becomes the operational question of the Cocaine-Carter
Connection: Did an international cocaine ring finance Jimmy Carter's campaign
at a critical stage, effectively putting Carter in office in 1976? Was a
cover-up enacted in 1976, and is it still in effect? Who other than Carter,
Walden, and Herring can answer these questions?
As in the case of Senator Kennedy's behavior that fateful night at
Chappaquiddick, many troubling questions in the actions and motives of Carter,
Walden, Allman and Herring remain unresolved. Until these questions are
answered, it is impossible to point an accusing finger directly at either
Walden or Carter. The curious web of circumstances in which each is so
irretrievably enmeshed though, is still best explained by this theory of a
Cocaine-Carter Connection.
Speculation on such a theory would soon be "bourne" out by subsequent events
on a much higher political plane than even pro-
ponents of the theory itself could have im-agined or foreseen in 1976.
copyright Shay Addams 1980 All Rights Reserved.
Pps. 100-103
=====
THE JIMMY CARTER COKE SCANDALS
Part 2 ... Bourne Under A Bad Sign
Peter Bourne was never one to mince words. From the beginning he pooh-pahed
outright grass legalization. What he did favor was cocaine liberalization. It
could best be controlled, he told one interviewer, by "making it so expensive
it would be restricted to very rich people." But cocaine makes crazy things
happen. In July, 1978, we had the last laugh on the journalistic fraternity
when it was a coke scandal—Bournegate—which brought about a virtual counter-
revolution on "social issues" at the White House.
If it is permissable, based on the outcome of it all, to speculate about the
ultimate authorship of the coup, it is worth noting that the immediate
bureaucratic effect was to abolish Bourne's position and turn drug policy over
to Nixon holdovers Peter Bensinger and Lee Dogoloff, who immediately initiated
a crash program, de-emphasizing enforcement against hard drugs in favor of
quick, cheap victories in the war against marijuana.
They brought with them a coterie operating under a new consensus, crystallized
at the Rheims Conference that year on the "new medical evidence against
marijuana" — sponsored by Gabriel Nahas and Lyndon LaRouche.
The Peter Bourne affair was the direct fruit of continued associations with
cocaine amongst closely knit Carter insiders who had successfully diverted the
1976 U.S. Grand Jury investigation of cocaine dealing at a recording company
headed by key Carter fund-raiser Phil Walden. Bourne's ouster not only blew
the lid off their two-year coverup, of drugs and the Carter White House, but
signaled Carter's capitulation to DEA hardliners, as evidenced by his defense
of the paraquat spraying campaign despite the health threat to U.S. pot-
smokers.
This second act of the Carter cocaine drama began casually enough, with a
doctored prescription for Quaaludes for a woman on Peter Bourne's staff.
Suddenly one of Jimmy Carter's key aides and top troubleshooters found himself
front-page news around the nation, the subject of another drug scandal.
Before the ink was dry on the Quaalude beef, follow-up stories had Bourne
sniffing cocaine at a chic Georgetown gathering. Worse, the Georgetown bash in
question—where according to Gary Cohen of Jack Anderson's office, Bourne
partook of a rock of coke "the size of a prune"—was sponsored by the National
Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) as part of their annual
conference. In attendance were numerous minor officials of the Carter White
House team as well as most of Washington's "hip" media people, one of whom
later characterized it as "the social event of the year."
But while the gossip columnists and social pontificators tsk-tsked at Bourne's
nasal habits, investigators at High Times who had first explored evidence that
a coverup had occurred during the original Macon Grand jury investigation took
another look at Bourne's past.
Bourne had been director of Georgia's drug abuse program under Carter. He not
only knew most professionals and prosecutors on the Atlanta/Macon axis, but
was one of earliest Carter Campaign Directors. During the time of the key
months, from November of '75 to January of '76, Bourne was identified as
Carter's chief hatchet man for special campaign problems.
Unlike Nixon's unwieldly corporate-style campaign in '72, only a handful of
"Georgia Mafia" (as Carter insiders were called by the old-line Democrats they
displaced) knew of the delicate negotiations going on, and perhaps only Ham
Jordan was as well suited to talk to the prosecutors and separate the wheat
from the chaff as to whether Allman, Herring, or Walden would face the
inquisitors.
For 4 years Bourne was Gov. Jimmy Carter's chief drug advisor, as he was to be
later at the White House. Instrumental in liberalizing Georgia drug laws and
enhancing Georgia's image as the semi-hip center of the "New South" in the
early '70's, Bourne was also the nation's foremost advocate of methadone
programs for junkies.
To add to his credentials as a middleman with the Grand Jury, Bourne had even,
at the peak of Nixon's War on Drugs, been adivisor to the White House Special
Action Office of Drug Abuse Prevention.
At the same time, Bourne was propelled by his wife Mary King, a liberal
feminist, into the "hip" new Southerner crowd of rock musicians, antiwar
activists, leftists and local Atlanta glitterati. He was no stranger to Phil
Walden, attending many of the famed parties the Capricorn Record boss threw
now and then, which featured silver trays heaped with coke.
Carter's election in November of '76 seemed to prove his born-again image was
impervious to rumors about drugs. At the annual December NORML conference,
Bourne gave the keynote address and even took a few discrete puffs without a
murmur from liberal reporters present, who were still hoping for drug law
reform from the new administration.
During Carter's first year a honeymoon atmosphere existed between the
administration and the pro-pot bloc that had delivered votes in return for
promises to decriminalize marijuana. Peter Bourne, Ham Jordan, Jody Powell and
others around Carter got to know some pot bloc leaders personally.
NORML head Keith Stroup spoke of his closeness to Chip Carter and presented
himself as a sensible, controlled lobbyist who could push a sensitive issue
like decriminalization without alienating too many of Carter's crucial
moderate supporters. Stroup in fact wrote Carter's message on drugs delivered
in the summer of 1977—a call for federal decrim.
But after a summer that saw 15,000 people engaged in civil disobediance on the
4th of July-defiantly puffing pot across from the White House-the December '77
National NORML Conference (the one with the party where Bourne snorted coke)
was marked by considerable infighting. Carter was intensifying use of the
deadly herbicide paraquat in Mexico. Radicals defeated a bid to gain NORML
endorsement, based on a decrim provision, of the repressive criminal code
revision once known as "S-1".
Keith Stroup feared a power play by some NORML staffers and the White House to
get rid of him. These staffers, in charge of the day-to-day administration at
NORML's D.C. offices, were primary organizers of the conference. Stroup, in a
ploy to change the flow of the convention, contracted with famous pie-man Aron
Kay to hit Joe Nellis, chief counsel of the House Select Committee on
Narcotics Abuse and Control, with a pie as he gave the keynote address.
"Keith paid me for the pie," Aron recalls. "I only had a quarter, and he gave
me $4 dollars. I got a lemon meringue pie."
Stroup tried to stop the pieing after Kay let word get around, and Kay agreed.
But the next afternoon, as Aron sat eating the pie, Nellis asserted that World
Government, in the form of the UN Single Convention Against Marijuana,
supersedes the Bill of Rights, and Kay saw red. He ran up to the speaker and
let fly with the lemon meringue. In the resulting uproar conference
coordinator Marc Kurzman took the microphone and denounced Stroup as chief
conspirator of the pie plot.
A few days later, a Bourne aide who'd been sitting next to Nellis fired off an
indignant letter. On White House stationary to stress the severity of the
issue, Bob Angarola, general counsel to the Office of Drug Abuse Policy, said
he was "upset ... at the unfortunate pie incident."
"I think they wanted Marc Kurzman to run NORML,- Stroup said later. According
to New Times, Stroup told "Bourne aides to pass on to their boss a threat as
dangerous to Bourne as Kurzman's had been to Stroup: He implied that he might
know too much about the recreational drug preferences of certain senior White
House aides. He also suggested that those preferences could end up in the
newspapers." The article concludes that "it hit home."
Not content, Stroup next took the offensive, launching the great Paraquat
Panic of '78, a publicity assault depicting a government resolved to poison
those it could no longer afford to imprison. The tide only turned with
Bourne's bust for falsifying the Quaalude prescription.
When the Washington Post broke the story July 19 that Dr. Peter Bourne was
under investigation in Prince William Co., Virginia, a number of mines were
set off. Bourne had been informed of the script investigation on July 11,
eight days earlier. On July 20, the morning after it hit the papers, he took a
leave of absence, with pay, from his White House duties. He was yet determined
to stay on, convinced, along with his White House mentors, that he could
weather the storm. He probably could have, considering the Quaaludes were not
for himself, nor for any monetary gain. It was embarrassing for the head of
the nation's drug abuse office, but it was unlike, say, Burt Lance's sticky-
fingered loan shifting.
Supportive stories appeared within 24 hours quoting doctors who said the
writing of pseudonymous scripts was a frequent practice, especially among the
rich and influential. The investigation itself had come to a close. It
appeared that afternoon that Bourne would survive.
But that night everything changed with the almost simultaneous publication by
Jack Anderson and the Washington Post of charges that Bourne had been seen by
a number of people at a NORML party the previous December, snorting coke and
toking pot. The stories that Stroup had planted months earlier with his
friends in the media now blossomed in the summer heat.
Bourne and the White House were besieged by questions from reporters: How much
dope was there in the White House? Did President Carter get dope from Bourne?
What about Greg Allman and Phil Walden? The New York Daily News, which had run
the Quaalude investigation on page 3, ran the new stories under a front-page,
3-inch head: 'Pot, Coke, Tied to Carter Aides."
The next morning, Bourne resigned—not because of his naive script mistake, but
because of the massive paranoia paralyzing Carter partisans, who assumed the
nation would be outraged that a presidential advisor was doing cocaine and
marijuana. This was drugs for pleasure by one who was supposed to be above
such things.
Worse still, Bourne, in the classic pattern of one who's been finked on, and
then "turns" himself, fingered other unnamed aides for pot and coke.
Stroup got his comeuppance a few weeks later when NORML chapters across the
country voted against his leadership because he had snitched on a fellow
doper, even if that fellow happened to be Bourne.
Peter Bensinger and the advocates of total crackdown on marijuana were
triumphant; the office of White House drug advisor itself was simply abolished
to make way for DEA control. The message was clear: elected officials and
their appointees are too corruptible to be trusted with drugs, their charge
must given to the keepers of the sacred flame of Law Enforcement.
As was universally recognized at the time, Carter's actual concession to
hardliners lay in sacking marijuana decriminalization. After all, official
concern with the fate of one funloving physician pales next to bureaucratic
interest in the 80% of the DEA's appropriation target for marijuana
prohibition this year.
The outcome of the Bourne affair had other, more serious implications,
however.
The question of how a Virginia Pharmaceutical inspector, later found to be
working closely with the DEA, happened to be at the small suburban drugstore
to intercept Bourne's forged Quaalude script has never been adequately
explored, for instance.
Still, Bourne and the White House at first stonewalled as they had with
revelations about Walden in '76, until the expose planted by Stroup with Jack
Anderson's office seemed to threaten a firestorm of further charges.
Now the point of the gambit involving busting the President's drug czar for
pushing Quaaludes became clear. For the original charges of cocaine, Walden,
and Carter's '76 Campaign, previously dismissed in the press as incompatible
with a born-again Presidency, instantly became credible, and were in fact
subsequently re-opened in a series of articles by Michael Novak in the New
York Post.
The threat of exposure, the original campaign finance scandal, conveniently
known only to a small cicle[sic] including the DEA, now became a real one
With the appointment, in December of 1978, of Phil Walden to the advisory
board of NORML, the organization completed its transformation from a marijuana
lobby to a campaign committee dedicated to marijuana liberalization through a
second Carter term.
Bourne, the British Doctor whose tenure had become identified with a crescendo
of demands for the abolition of marijuana prohibition, was replaced overnight
by DEA hardliner Peter Bensinger, noteworthy for proposing stiffer penalties
for pot than for "angel dust."
A backlash of recriminations about the ethics of continuing to probe personal
use of drugs which many reporters use themselves stanched the flow of leaks
before it spread from the toppling of one aide to calling into question the
fairness of Carter's '76 Victory.
Yet Bourne's regrettable involvement with nose candy did not turn out to be
the last time the Carter camp would be involved in a coke scandal. Even as the
first shock from the discovery of the falsified Quaalude script was about to
hit the White House, on the night of June 28, Ham Jordan was doing up lines at
Studio 54. He would become the next major player in the unfolding coke
scandal.
This section written by Mike Chance and D. Beal.
-YIPster Times, August '78
pps. 145-147
=====
Carter insiders had never forgiven YlPs for touting Walden's $50,000 campaign
contribution in' New Hampshire; but as predicted, any democrat running in '76
(other than Wallace or Jackson) had more of a commitment to drug reform than
the bornagain Baptist from Georgia.
>From the beginning the Administration had, in addition to the well-publicized
NORML Connection, also maintained ties with Sue Rouchie, a Georgia "liberal"
whose idea of good works was "parents' groups" to lobby to keep weed
classified with hard drugs.
Yet as story after story of the White House inner circle tooting coke and
leering at women titillating the papers right up to November 4, 1980, nothing
could stanch the Presidential bleeding with Carter's evangelical
constituencies.
Later we came to wonder about researcher Dennis King's hypothesis (first
released in Heights and Valley News a month or so after Y.T. broke the
original coke scandal story) that Bourne had something to do with the murder
(made to look like a heroin overdose) of a researcher at Lincoln Detox Center
who as perfectiung[sic] a revolutionary acupuncture cure for methadone
addiction.
What we realized was that Bourne, if he was intelligence community, was part
of the losing 'human rights' crew, and a far less likely culprit than the
cadres of LaRouche, who'd just finished a period of attacking CP members with
baseball bats and were embroiled in a bitter feud with Lincoln Detox, charging
that it was a BLA front. Outright conspiracy was not necessary to explain the
convergence, after Bourne, of Carter drug efforts with the LaRouche/DEA axis.
As in so many other areas, Carter, by blocking a definite solution to the
problem of Reaction in the U.S., paved the way for Reagan.
THE JIMMY CARTER COKE SCANDAL
LOOKED OVER JORDAN
Snortergate (noun] It began with Waldengate, surfaced as Bournegate,
reappeared as Jordangate. But in the end it was Cartergate...
Jordangate is the climactic act of a drama that began with a U.S. grand jury
in Georgia investigating cocaine dealings at a recording company headed by key
Carter fund-raiser Phil Walden. Walden was President of Capricorn Records, at
that time the fabulously-successful label of the Allman Brothers and other
Atlanta-based rock and roll acts—a company which has since gone bankrupt. This
investigation commenced in 1975, but in early 1976, the grand jury was
mysteriously diverted from probing too deeply into the "front money" for the
series of Capricorn-sponsored rock concerts that rescued Carter's campaign
from bankruptcy just pior[sic] to his first major victory in Iowa.
Spurred by major seizures of cocaine in 1975, the Grand jury probe led them to
examine the goings-on at the Capricorn studios in Macon, Ga. Eventually,
Allman himself was forced to testify in late January, 1976, under a grant of
immunity. But instead of fatally implicating Phil Walden, who was in the midst
of raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for the impoverished Carter
warchest, Allman fingered his road manager, Scooter Herring, as number one
rock scene connection for coke and pharmaceuticals.
Carter escaped the taint of a drug scandal for at least two years, until the
Bourne affair, and went on as "the cleanest man in the race" to win a bare 29%
plurality in New Hampshire. Herring, who protested from the witness stand that
he "could not" talk, got the unlikely sentence of 75 years, but evaded prison
for several years until it was reversed on appeal. Last summer he avoided the
disclosures of a new trial through a quiet deal with Federal prosecutors for
four months for a single gram of coke.
Charges of gross obstruction of justice, tantamount to a new Watergate-style
coverup, have plagued the Carter incumbancy ever since. The question of who
got Phil Walden out of trouble, just in time to handsomely finance Carter's
limping candidacy, has never been seriously addressed with the intensity of,
say, Chappaquiddick. A good deal more media play was given in mid-1978 to the
ouster of Dr. Peter Bourne from the White House staff-but here again, no real
press investigation has ever been conducted about the incident in which a
friend of Bourne's secretary was suprised[sic] in a Virginia pharmacy, trying
to fill a prescription for Quaaludes filled out by Bourne under an assumed
name. The question of how an investigator for the Virginia State Pharmacy
board just happened to be in the fatal drugstore at the fatal time, and "got
suspicious" of the transaction somehow never was followed up in the wake of
tantalizing accounts of Bourne snorting cocaine at a 1977 party held by the
National Organization for the Reform Of Marijuana Laws.
In uproar over the coke-snorting charges, Bourne resigned, and the whole
Quaalude caper was forgotten. In the Bourne affair, once again, more was
concealed than was revealed. But as was universally recognized at the time,
Carter's actual concession was to "dope hardliners" in the Drug Enforcement
Administration, who arm-twisted the President into sacking his campaign
promises to decriminalize marijuana.
Finally, less than a month after becoming White House Chief-of-Staff, Hamilton
Jordan came under investigation when a spate of revelations about his cocaine
use followed news stories in New York of the legal problems of one of the
journalists who first broke the Cocaine-Carter story in February of '76.
The Bourne affair had been a post-Watergate watershed for the Press, who would
never again discount rumors of rampant cocaine use by the "born-again" Carter
staff. Indeed, the hasty dissipation of the Bourne scandal left newsmen
waiting for the other shoe to drop; feeling that-in the words of Village Voice
columnist Alex Cockburn—"many's the time there's enough smoke around to
justify the lighting of a fire under it."
This set the stage for the third act.
As the Bourne controversy diminished, the powers-that-be were content to move
quietly to settle scores with troublemakers. Steve Rubell (who recently
received a stiff 3 year prison sentence) was not the first to discover that
talking about cocaine and the Carter scene could be a high-stakes game. In
June of '79, fresh on the heels of accounts of Chip Carter's toking up with
Secret Service protection came word, in the above-quoted Voice column, of the
indictment of the publisher of the original "Cocaine-Carter Connection" expose
in 1976.
Dana Beal, Yippie, underground publisher, and contributing editor of High
Times, who had long interested himself in the drug connections of the "Georgia
Mafia," was himself appended to an unwieldy drug-conspiracy indictment with 23
others, accused of trafficking marijuana in 17 states, 5 countries, and the
continent of Africa.
Yet Beal never suggested he was being silenced on White House instructions.
Instead, because the complete facts on the '76 campaign finance/drug scandal
are known only to the DEA and a few Carter insiders—and because the DEA
obviously had something in reserve, something substantial enough to get Carter
not just to fire Bourne, but to dump his marijuana constituency-friends and
associates in. the New York media circuit became convinced Beal's indictment
pointed to the resurrection of the Carter Coke scandal in time for the 1980
campaign.
As outlined by Alex Cockburn in that fateful Voice column, the DEA would seek
a conviction of Beal in order to force him to testify at other trials during
the height of the campaign (exactly as they are now doing with Rubell). The
object would be his knowledge of the original Walden story and the overlapping
High Times/NORML/White House Staff party scene. (Beal has been active in
national marijuana reform, and was present at the controversial NORML bash
where Bourne was allegedly seen "tooting up.") The goal would be to torpedo
Carter in favor of a Republican more agreeable to the intelligence
establishment, but only after Carter is firmly re-nominated by the Democrats.
As Cockburn reported, this put Beal and friends "in something of a moral
dilemna[sic]: unwilling-by going public with whatever information they may
conceivably have-to promote 'marijuana McCarthyism,' but ardent to expose what
they see as White House hypocrisy in backtracking on marijuana
decriminalization; seeing the common folk put away on drug busts while
privately the 'snorting and sniffing' goes on with abandon."
"Snortergate," as Cockburn's June 25 "Press Clips" piece was tided, contained
further media-titillating news. Beal would turn himself in at the annual White
House Smoke-In July 4. Beal was never actually able to do so, since the smoke-
in was brutally dispersed by mounted police on orders from Ham Jordan, day-to-
day operations chief while Carter was touring the Mid-East. Beal was content
to turn himself in quietly a week later in New York, and got his charges
dropped 4 months later. But no one at High Times was surprised when, less than
a month later, Steve Rubell decided a similar expose might be of use to him in
beating his income tax rap.
Hamilton Jordan, Carter's new Chief of Staff, had chosen to visit and snort
coke at Studio 54 with one of the owners, who was subsequently raided for
income tax violations. (in that raid, an ounce of cocaine was found on
Rubell.) Once again unchecked drug use amongst Carter's staff had created what
could be a time-bomb, for someone desperate enough to use it.
"Snortergate," then, had one additional effect. It was on the stands the day a
U.S. Grand jury returned indictments against Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell for
tax evasion, obstruction of justice and conspiracy-June 28th, 79. The Jimmy
Carter Coke Scandal had once again, with this small addition to the defense
portfolio, achieved critical mass.
On August 17th, Roy Cohn and Michael Rogovin, lawyers for Rubell and Schrager,
approached Justice Dept. officials in New York and told them that the
defendants had a ,'very significant" allegation to make involving a high
Government official. In a subsequent meeting the allegations against Jordan
were laid out-the allegations behind the charges pending against Jordan today.
On the night of June 27th, 1978, upon the arrival of Jordan and several other
Carter staffers, Jordan allegedly asked Barry M. Landau whether he could visit
the secluded "basement," where drugs are available. There he asked for coke,
and as "Johnny C." later testified on ABC's "20/20," did up quite a snootfull.
Rubell hung around, trying to ingratiate himself, according to Landau. But Ham
gave him the brush-off.
Even Carter campaign staffer and loyalist Tim Kraft, who was questioned by the
FBI in the initial investigation, had to admit that Jordan left other staffers
including Evan S. Dobelle, chairman of Carter's reelection committee, for at
least 10 to 15 minutes, going off by himself.
Within days the Attorney General was confering[sic] with President Carter.
Jody Powell issued statements branding Rubell and his witnesses as liars and
publicity hounds, claiming that the only ones making these charges were
criminal defendants who were obviously trying to get off charges themselves.
To emphasize his point, drug sales charges were announced against "Johnny C.,"
the dealer who'd had the nerve to treat and tell.
But in a matter of days, a Los Angeles businessman who had thrown a party for
top Democrats revealed that he had been shocked at the amount of snorting
going on amongst Jordan, Powell, and the "White House crowd."
Lou Rawl's ex-wife charged that Jordan once had her "score" 5 grams of coke,
but refused to repeat her story under oath unless guaranteed immunity from
prosecution.
Although the furor died down a bit as the national press underwent its own
guilt pangs about McCarthyite aspects to this inquiry into personal drug use,
Attorney General Civiletti finally concluded that although he felt Jordan was
innocent, there was no way to dispell[sic] the charges without appointment of
a special prosecutor.
The case against Jordan is still pending, most recently marked by charges by
Mr. Landau in the N.Y. Times that Christie, the Special Prosecutor, seems more
interested in getting witnesses to recant, rather than getting Jordan.
But as this 3-part review of all allegations concerning cocaine and the Carter
Administration has made clear, lurid charges of personal drug use by White
House staffers have if anything diverted attention from the miasma of
deception and intimidation left from the original '76 Campaign financing and
drug scandal involving Phil Walden and President Carter himself.
For the probability that successful obstruction of justice and a coverup of
Watergate proportions was successfully accomplished by a born-again. master of
the soft-sell is bolstered by the truly Nixonian treatment of those who have
exposed this story.
By the same token Scooter Herring, who allegedly took the fall for Walden, and
whose original 75 year sentence assured casual observers that no impropriety
could possibly be afoot, averted retrial last summer by copping to the sale of
one gram of cocaine. Not bad, for an investigation that began with the seizure
of 4 kilos of coke. He'll do about 4 months.
The coverup, continues. Rubell sits at this moment in custody in Manhattan,
waiting to testify. But the worst that can happen to Jordan is that he'll have
to resign. Campaign financing scandals, coverups—by such things are
administrations laid low.
The situation today-with police agencies sitting on the dirt in their files
instead of moving against guilty public officials-may not seem particularly
urgent now that the public is supposedly jettisoning the baggage of Watergate.
But for the first time since J. Edgar Hoover, the federal police have
succeeded in reversing a popular mandate-for drug law reform-because of the
dossiers they hold on elected officials.
The long-term costs for democracy are unfathomable.
-YIPInform, February '80
This section was a collaboration by Mike Chance, D.A. Latimer, and Ron
Rosenbaum.
pps. 176-178
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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