From: Martha &/or James <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Monday, January 04, 1999 11:13 PM
Subject: [exploration] It's only fiction. Right.
http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3640a55a6b89.htm
Topic: White Water
Written in Blood (An Interview with Michael Sullivan)
JANUARY Magazine (literary)
October, 1998 Linda Richards
January Magazine
Written In Blood
Interview with Michael Sullivan, by Linda Richards
He doesn't look like a lunatic. Crisply dressed and coifed, his blue eyes
smile quickly -- though not for our cameras -- and
his graying-blond hair
stays neatly placed. He is, he tells me, a son of the south and this is verified
by his voice: as close
to clipped as a southern accent gets. An educated
voice, certainly. But one that is, nonetheless, punctuated by the region
that spawned him. He does not wear a white suit, but if he did it wouldn't
look strange. In short, he doesn't look or sound at
all like someone
hatching a plot or grinding an ax, though looks can be deceiving.
If half of the things Michael Sullivan is saying are true, the
Clinton-Lewinsky scandal starts to look like a children's
sandbox creation.
Interesting for a while, but more crumble than substance. If it's not true, it
still seems likely that Sullivan
is going to sell a lot of books.
"I want to go on record as saying I am not planning on committing
suicide," Sullivan says earnestly. "I plan to live a long,
long
time."
My interview with Sullivan did not go at all as planned. I arrived expecting
to speak with the author of an interesting new
suspense novel. I planned to
talk to him about his writing process and perhaps his life, interests and
favorite pets. The last
thing I'd anticipated was being led down a dark path
of conspiracy featuring some of the largest characters in international
politics: especially some of those who (ahem) have been getting a lot of
press in recent months.
I had, of course, noticed some more than fleeting similarities between one of
Blood Trail's major characters and a certain
former governor from Arkansas.
This I put down to the richness of fiction and the fact that Sullivan is a
native of that state.
However, it would seem that Sullivan's interest runs less to literature than
it does to high level machinations: at least in
this instance. With some
passion Sullivan spoke at length about what led him to write Blood Trail.
The fictional work focuses on two men from Arkansas. Robert Davis Prescott
has been groomed almost from birth to take a
place in American history.
David Farr is the Vietnam Vet whose son is stricken with AIDS from a blood
transfusion given to
him in Canada. Farr wants to find out who is
responsible, and is somewhat surprised when the trail -- the Blood Trail, if
you will -- leads back to his home state and eventually to the White House
and Prescott.
Sullivan -- though it's not the writer's real name, and he's not talking --
is a doctor who says he was a medical practitioner
for the Arkansas prison
system between 1982 and, "off and on, to the present time." He says
that he knew that blood was
being drawn from sick and infected Arkansas
prisoners but he didn't know where the blood was being sold and distributed.
In 1995, says Sullivan, he learned about infections and death in Canada,
where the Arkansas blood had ended up.
Sullivan says he became determined to
find out more. The result of that research, says Sullivan, is in the novel Blood
Trail. A story that while it's almost unbelievable, Sullivan says only
begins to scratch the surface of the truth.
Linda Richards: So is Bob Prescott's resemblance to Bill Clinton unintentional?
Michael Sullivan: I had certain information when I started the book.
Actually, not very much. I worked in the
system. I knew they were taking
blood from very sick people. I knew the group was basically corrupt. And it
wasn't until years later that I realized that they didn't have a way to
clean up. It was not until 1995 and the initial
Krever investigation was
kicked off that one article appeared in the Associated Press that said that
tainted blood
in Canada had been taken from Arkansas prisoners. And I said,
'God Almighty!' because I'd forgotten about it. I
was in it. I knew certain
things. You know, it was like this huge guilt rush hit me because I hadn't
investigated it.
That's not my specialty. I just assumed mistakenly that
they had a way to manufacture some kind of clean
product.
Suddenly I remembered how Clinton had stood in and protected the HMA [Health
Management Associates]
through everything. Because they'd come under fire
not because of plasma but because they hired drug addicts
and they hired
guys that had lost their medical licenses and several other things, especially
dealing with
narcotics. They'd come under fire from the media. Clinton had
protected and in fact ensured that they received a
renewed contract when
faced with all this. And I thought, 'There's some kind of scheme here,' you
know? And so
I was afraid, to be honest with you, to go and do an
investigation at that time because I'm too public and I knew
I'd be exposed
and I knew I'd never get a book written.
Where were you ?
I was still in Arkansas. I had a private medical practice outside of the
prison. I was only doing the prison work as
a subcontractor.
I naively thought, I'll write this book and then some real smart reporter
will grab it and go, 'Oh, my god! Some of
this must be true. I need to
investigate this.' And then he would do all the work. And I could just sit back
and be
Mike Sullivan. So, that didn't happen. And we were forced into either
dropping the story or coming out and
pushing and gathering our own
information. I have one investigator working with me. He's one brave guy. He's
gone in the face of the Arkansas power people and slowly but surely gotten
this information. One of the
documents was one in an investigation done by
an independent firm in Berkeley, California in 1986 about the
prison medical
system. We knew that they had done it, and we knew kind of what the summary was,
but we
couldn't get our hands on the document because the group's building
burnt down in 1990 and all the microfiche
and everything was ruined. The
only people that had documents were Bill Clinton and his group of prison
appointees and his board of directors. Finally we found what was probably
the only existing copy in one of the
state legislator's garages. We asked
him to look through all of his old papers and he found it. And man, it is
powerful.
I gotta tell you, this is not the conversation I expected to be having with
you. It's interesting because we're talking about a
novel. But we're kind of
not...
It's hard to understand the chronology of it. Chronologically it was
absolutely a novel. In the book I kill people
right and left and I take
political-type characters and I manifest all sorts of things on them. Using a
lot of fantasy.
The thing that's incredible to me is that afterwards the
things we'd learned fit in almost perfectly with the story
and -- even more
fantastic -- I swear, we never anticipated that.
Maggie Gallagher, the woman who's a writer for the New York Post -- she
hadn't even read the book. She read a
story about the book in the Ottawa
Citizen and all of a sudden she remembers an incident that happened two
days
after Vincent Foster was killed that ties perfectly to the book. And all of a
sudden she's off on this tangent.
Well, I made all that up. We were just
trying to be inventive. I thought, 'Well, this will be great. I'll tie this
character
in and kind of relate to this Foster story.' And now she says it's
true. That indeed an informant called up to the
White House offices and said
that Foster was killed because he knew too much about tainted blood. I was the
one most surprised of anyone. I mean, who would have ever dreamed? My only
relationship with Foster, I met
him one time. I saw him all the time. He and
I had one very intense conversation about the prison and the blood
procedure
there, years ago. So I guess that was on my mind and I wove that into the story.
Now a national level
reporter has said, 'How did this guy know about this?'
Well, I didn't know about it.
Are you afraid? Are you afraid for your life?
Well, we weren't especially. I talked with my family. They knew all the
evidence. They all voted to go ahead. And
just like the main character in
the story -- David -- who dropped everything to go seek out who had infected his
son, they want me to do the same thing. So our strategy is, if we get enough
publicity we'll be safe. Hopefully
that'll happen. It seems like it's going
to. Just in the last few days we've had national level TV news programs
that
have called and are interested in the story.
But yes, I'm terrified, to tell you the truth. Put yourself in my position.
The power groups I'm going up against.
The only advantage is that now the
general population of Canada and the United States knows a little bit about
the character of the administration. Even though they really don't condemn
him so far, they know his capability
of lie and deceit and deny. I'll stand
on that. I'll stand on my character, he can stand on his and we'll see who's
standing at the end.
You said you're collecting more evidence. Why is that?
Well, look at it this way. There were a lot of people who fit into that
system back then who are still alive, who
know portions of the story much
better than I do. They know intricate parts of it. As soon as this story breaks,
our
hope is they still have a conscience and if they know, hell: Americans
don't know of the contaminated blood
source. They just don't know. So, as
it's exposed hopefully they'll -- like they already have -- start calling in and
telling us their portion of the story.
For instance, the inmates that were the donors? I had no idea when I wrote
this that they were as much victims
as the end users because the HMA was
using dirty needles over and over to collect the blood. So they
cross-contaminated all those inmates. And these guys -- because of our
investigation I've just found out in the
last month -- that many of them
have already had liver transplants. A bunch of them have already died. Several
of them are in intensive care units right now. And a whole group of them --
I've just found out -- they're
contaminated with HIV and Hepatitis C. So
they're preparing to file a class action suit against the administration
of
the state of Arkansas, the department of corrections, and all of the people
involved in this thing. That's a
bigger story than we could have created on
our own. They're doing it. And there's no statute of limitations for
murder.
And there's no statute of limitations when you've just discovered that you're
hurt from a certain cause.
This happened in the mid-1980s? Early 80s?
Yeah. They started the blood contract in 1978 when Clinton became governor.
They continued right up until he
went to the White House. The really
important part to Canadians is this: the Krever Commission tells us in 1982
there was one incident that some contaminated blood was identified from
Arkansas and everybody went, 'Oh,
my God. We didn't know we were taking it
from prisons. Oh, my God, we didn't know it was coming from the
States.
We'll never do it again.'
Krever says they never were supposed to have it in the first place. And he
says they were not supposed to
destroy all these documents for the Red
Cross, so this coverup is obvious. And certainly from 1982 forward you
would
suppose that no more blood was received from prisons, right? I mean you assume
that. It was against the
law, and they'd exposed it and no one was going to
do it again. We have the head of HMA, the president of HMA
telling us in
1984 and again in 1986 that he can not find any place else in the world to sell
it, except Canada.
Who's lying? Krever's Inquiry? Or this president who
would have no reason to tell anyone he was selling it to
Canada. But see, no
one back in '86 thought that this would be looked at 12 years later from this
angle.
Well, it's a really good story. The book is really well written and you're
probably hearing comparisons to a lot of the best in
the genre.
We've gotten good reviews, and I'm pretty proud of that because this is my
first attempt. And all I thought that
would carry it was the story. It's
such a fantastic story. And Canadians must be sitting there going, 'God
Almighty: this guy's really gone out on a limb to tie Clinton and all we've
heard about Clinton to all we've heard
about the blood plasma story.'
I know! Because it's like, Arkansas and... I mean, there's not even a thin attempt at veiling it.
But, wait a minute: why am I the only one that's made the connection? The
Canadians knew from the very
beginning it was Arkansas prison blood and they
knew it was during his term of government. I expected
everyone -- when I
read that article -- but there was not a single editorial. Not a single article
that appeared after
that making the obvious connections.
Blood Trail is published on a fairly small imprint, yet it's doing quite well.
Well, there's a story there, too. I had extremely good connections to several
of the big publishers: I won't name
names, but the biggest. When I finished
the manuscript I took it to them. As a group, they all said, 'Wow! Well
written. Nice story. Wow. We don't know what the hell we're going to do with
it.' I didn't understand what they
were talking about, and yet now that
we've done what we had to do with a very brave little publisher out of
Ottawa, Illinois there was probably no other way to do it, except that.
Because they would have never been able
to put all of this together that we
have. It would have been too risky for them.
Is this Jameson's biggest ever book? This seems like a big commercial push for a small publisher.
We don't know yet. They had a big book back in the '80s called On A Clear Day
You Can See General Motors. It
was a slam on General Motor's upper echelon
centered around DeLorean. John DeLorean.
So Jameson likes to take a few risks?
Yeah. That's why I went there.
Forgive a naive question but, if everybody knew about the tainted blood, why would they allow it to go on?
You mean the people doing it?
And the people receiving it.
These fractionators were running out of blood. They'd been closed down in
east Africa and Haiti because of
AIDS. And so they had a very quiet and very
strongly controlled audience of politicians that kept it open. When
you step
back and see it from that standpoint, you understand how it could all happen.
You know, for instance -- I'll bet you don't -- the blood companies, the big
money people went to every state in
the United States that had no blood
shield laws prior to this. And in 46 of 50 states they had blood shield laws
passed.
So prior to this, that would be...?
Late 70s, mainly. Now that protected them from any product liability
associated with a plasma product so that no
one could sue them. And to this
day that has inoculated them from liability suits from the states. So why would
you do that? Why would spend the vast amount of money to do that when you're
totally innocent?
This is a corrupt medical operation. They'd already been shut down in 1982 by
the FDA for all kinds of reasons.
Mainly, the FDA says you're taking hot
blood and you're shipping it. That's pretty obvious, right? You're draining
your donors to a near-death situation. Like Dracula. You have inmates doing
all the procedures. You have
inmates falsifying records so that other
inmates can give who should never be allowed to donate. I'm telling you
verbatim what's in the report. There were six issues altogether. So they
shut them down. The board of prison
with its director are all appointed by
Bill Clinton, personally. They go before the board they say, 'We've been shut
down.' Guess what the discussion was about? Not whether we clean this up or
figure a new way to do business
or ensure the safety of our product. It was:
"Let's open up under a new name, under a new charter to the FDA as
soon
as possible." We've got the minutes from that meeting. They did this not
once, but three times. Now, are
they interested in anyone's well-being?
They're only interested in the millions of dollars brought in. It's
incredible.
Why didn't you do it as a non-fiction book? Why did you decide to do it as fiction?
At the time, in 1995 when I read this article, I decided I was going to do
something. I didn't know all of this. I didn't
have all of it. I didn't know
how much I could find. But I knew enough that I could assume certain things. And
I
said: okay. And I tried a couple of times. If I start going into these
state offices and asking all these questions, I'm
going to get exposed, the
book will never get finished and the story will be covered up.
So my wife said, 'What would you do if one of our sons had been infected and
you knew what you know?' That's
what I would have done.
So you're David?
Kinda. I got a whole bunch of kids.
Is there any threat of law suits? Do you think? Or any possibility of law suits?
Well, I hope not. But, yeah. The interesting thing is we really, truly wrote
it as a work of fiction. It does have some
obvious things to certain people
in the media nowadays. But people are going to have to stand on their own
credibility sooner or later.
As a piece of fiction it provides you with some protection from law suits, doesn't it?
I hope so. Yeah.
There are some real strong similarities, though.
Yes.
And you haven't made a whole lot of bones about keeping it close to the time.
You know what, I didn't even attempt to. It is kind of chronological to a lot
of things, but it's not exact. Arkansas is
just a big small town. We all run
into each other all the time. As I said in the book, there are just a few people
who
control all the positions and money, and if you travel in those circles
sooner or later you meet these people all
the time.
I didn't think anyone could condemn me for writing what I know about. Which is what I did.
The other good thing is I'm a lifelong resident of the state and I'm also the
son of a state policeman. Does that
sound like something from the book? I
know a lot of these people, and a lot of these people who were connected
with the Clinton power structure are now very pissed off because he has
absolutely ruined the state's credibility.
And so he doesn't have the
structure he used to have.
So you're collecting more resource material. Are you doing another book? Or, what is that for?
We're turning everything over to the RCMP and the FBI. That's for them,
because I want to be done with it. Other
than promoting this book. But after
you've gathered evidence if you have evidence about the commission of a
felony you're required by law to make it available to the legal authorities.
Have you done any pictures yet? Have you been on TV or anything?
Yes, several times.
Maybe you want to stop that.
When lots of people who are involved in this read the story, they'll know who
wrote it. I put enough of myself in
there. I never intended to completely
hide it.
I'll tell you a bizarre thing that happened among all the other bizarre
things. We finished the manuscript and it
was ready to go to the printer.
And we had to change the name of Prescott's daughter. You know what the
original name was that we had for her? The name in the book is Nicole,
right? That was changed at the last
minute to Nicole. The original name in
January was Monica. As God is my witness. And of course everyone
associated
with my tight group of friends goes, 'You're clairvoyant!' But it just seemed
like a good name. So we
could not leave that, that would be too funny.
Are you working on any other books?
I'm writing two other books right now. They have nothing to do with this. And
yet already we've had three or four
groups come and ask me to write the
story about the story. A non-fiction account of how I wrote the novel and
then all of this. I don't know if it's in me to do that. I'm burned out on
it. I've been doing this for almost two years
now. My family is wrung out
over it.
Go interview these victims. It'll change your life. I dare you. Go interview
someone who has hemophilia -- a
really bad disease in itself -- and through
no fault of their own they're born with genetic aberration. And they're
required to inject themselves with this Factor VIII [blood clotting agent
made from the contaminated prison
plasma]. Their life is already difficult
enough, and because of greedy people they get infected with HIV. They
develop AIDS and now they're taking 40 pills a day, they're on constant IV
antibiotics, they're taking oral
medication to kill the fungus that grows in
their mouth. Their life is absolutely decimated. And then they find out
they've got Hepatitis-C, so they have to go on Interferon which makes them
sick all of the time. And their liver
gets so big that they can't lie down
and sleep anymore because it pushes up against their heart and lungs and
they can't breathe. So they're reduced to spending the rest of their lives
sleeping sitting up.
These people are as destroyed as anyone I've seen on the battlefield, in
third world countries or anywhere else.
If they had any means to start out
with, they go through that money immediately. So they don't have funds for
liver transplants. They're completely at the mercy of whatever public
assistance there is. You go see these
people, and then you will stick your
neck out. It really changed my life. And when I tell my wife, she just falls
apart. She just can't believe that people that we grew up with, people that
I worked for, people that I've known all
my life were capable of this. That
all the evidence points to the fact that they were.
A lot of people have thought to associate us with some vast right wing
conspiracy. And this Republican agenda.
In fact I was accused by a reporter
of being part of that group. And I said, 'Well, exactly what do you base that
on?' And he said, 'Well, obviously, you're flying all over Canada last
minute. That costs a lot of money, right?'
And I said, 'Well it sure does.
Because I can't plan anything more than a day ahead of time.' And he went on and
on about, 'Well you're doing this, staying in hotels and that costs a lot of
money.' And he said, 'I'd imagine
someone behind your publisher is putting
up a lot of money.' And I said, 'Oh really. Do you want some evidence
on
that?' And he said, 'Well, I suppose.' And I said, 'Well, let me tell you, I'll
make this available to you. You go to
my CPA and you can look at every
expense I've had in the last five years. What you'll find is in the last 20
years
I've traveled about four times a year as a medical missionary. I've
financed it myself. I don't tell anybody about it,
it's just the thing that
I do. For me. I do it for me. And this year, this has taken the place of that.
And I funded
every single penny when I travel. These expenses. Is part of
what I normally spend for my mission trip. I'm
spending it for this because
I think it's important and I'm not part of any political party. No one has
contacted me.
This is as close to a personal vendetta on my part as you'll ever get.
Because I have a daughter that I adopted
when I was a missionary in Korea,
who is now 16 and who in 1991 contracted a disease very similar to Leukemia.
She had to undergo vast amounts of transfusions and went into remission
because we did a spleenectomy on
her. Now five years later, six years later
she's come up with a new disease -- an auto immune disease -- and now
we
realize it may be the result of the blood products she received. And all of this
has come back on me in a way I
can't ignore.
It's kinda like God's going, 'Listen to me now! You gotta tell this story.'
So all of that's behind what I'm doing. Not
any political agenda.
Tell me about the timing of the release of this book. In some ways, it seems pretty calculated.
To be honest with you, we couldn't have chosen any worse time in American history to break our story.
Why? I would think it would be a really good time.
You know when we sent out the stuff [PR materials] to the American press, not
one response. And when our
people in New York called up to follow up, 'Did
you get it? Did you read it?' And they got, 'Well, we got it but we
haven't
read it because,' it all had to do with Clinton and Lewinsky. That's all anyone
wanted to hear about.
This story would be a lot more palatable to the American audience if we said
-- I tried this on a reporter once,
before I told him anything about the
story I said, 'If I could prove or convince you that the sitting governor of
Arkansas who later became the President had direct control over a scheme
that ultimately caused the direct
death of one person, how big a story would
that be?'
He said, 'God almighty! That would be the biggest story in the American
presidency. There's never been
anything like that. All we've had are rumors
about sexual liaisons and rumors about special deals that were cut,
but not
the direct death of one person.' And I said, 'Okay: multiply that by about
400,000.' When you do that it
goes shoomp. They can't get a handle on it.
They think it's just too fantastic. We're talking about genocide. Think
about that idea.
So you're working on two new novels?
One is based on kind of a popular and ingenious young actor and brat packer
who got himself in a lot of trouble.
But I don't want to say any names.
That could be a bunch.
Good. I'm glad you said that. But I'm having a blast with it. It's got a lot better plot than this one has.
But the reviews have been good for Blood Trail?
Yup. So far. But I'm new to all this. And the publishing business the craziest business I've ever been in in my life.
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