-Caveat Lector- from: http://www.hightimes.com/News/2000_10/levreview.tpl http://www.hightimes.com/News/2000_10/levreview.tpl Click Here: <A HREF="http://www.hightimes.com/News/2000_10/levreview.tpl">THE BOYS ON THE TRACKS: A Book Review</A> ----- THE BOYS ON THE TRACKS: A Book Review FILED 10/03/00 By all accounts the engineer did a masterful job of bringing his train to a stop. It had taken a screaming, screeching half mile. By the time the engine shuddered to a standstill, conductor Jerry Tomlin was on the radio notifying an approaching train on a parallel track to stop because some boys had been run over. He also called the dispatcher. 'Have you got injuries?' the dispatcher asked. 'No,' Tomlin said. 'We've got death. I'm sure we've got death. They passed under us. It has to be death.'' With this graphic image, Mara Leveritt's brilliant THE BOYS ON THE TRACKS launches unstoppably into a moving and troubling expos� of one of the more bizarre criminal cases in recent US history. The victims here were two central Arkansas 17-year-olds, Don Henry and Kevin Ives. Immediately after that rushing train passed over their bodies in the pre-dawn hours of August 23, 1987, official discrepancies and coverups proliferated. Mara Leveritt The state Medical Examiner, after perfunctory postmortem blood tests, immediately attributed the "cause of death" entirely and solely to marijuana, speculating that the boys had somehow smoked "20 joints' worth" apiece, which supposedly rendered them too zombified to rouse up and get out of the way of a roaring, screeching, multi-ton train. Other evidence indicating alternative causes of death--such as the knife-stab rent in one boy's shirt, and the imbedded imprint in the other's face of a rifle butt--was ignored and unmentioned. So was the the way both boys' lungs were filled with blood, which could not have happened had they been struck by a speeding train and killed instantly, without time to wheeze and gasp down the blood caused by extensive internal hemorrhages from the beatings they'd sustained before they were laid down on those tracks. But all that the Arkansas state pathologist, Dr. Fahmy Malak, would tell the boys' parents about was traces of pot in the boys' bodies. Author Mara Leverett, who very skillfully uses Kevin Ives' mother Linda as a sort of Greek chorus throughout this book, describing her puzzlement, consternation, suspicion and progressive outrage as she confronts one lie after another from authorities, recounts the preposterous way Dr. Malak initially tried to flim-flam the freshly grief-stricken parents gathered in his Little Rock morgue. 'The Psychedelic Influence of THC (Marijuana) Intoxication'"What we have here," Dr. Fahmy authoritatively told them, "are two accidental deaths due to THC intoxication. At 4:25 AM on August 23, 1987, Larry Kevin Ives, 17, and Don George Henry, 16, were unconscious and in deep sleep on the railroad tracks, under the psychedelic influence of THC--marijuana--when a train passed over them causing their accidental death." Now, according to Leverett, none of these parents knew a heck of a lot about pot, but no one is stupid enough to believe that its "psychedelic influence" extends to passing out cold, like an oblivious alcohol coma. Dr. Malak certainly must have known better, but may have hoped these plain, ordinary Arkansas folks would be dumb enough to swallow his diagnosis. When instead they exploded into questions, he tried to shock them into silence by spreading photos of their sons' mutilated bodies in front of them, and then refused to give any answers to anything. Dead Before Arrival Disbelieving and contemptuous of Malak's preposterous marijuana ruling, Linda Ives and her husband Henry began digging for information wherever they could find it. Eyewitnesses of the death-scene cleanup told them that the train's engineers had spoken eerily of how the boys had been lying side-to-side, motionless, covered by a tarpaulin spread over the tracks. One engineer had led the cops, that morning, to the tarp, in fact--and then been told, later, that he'd been seeing things. And the cleanup was inefficient, to say the least, since some curious sightseers visiting the site later turned up one boy's severed foot, still encased in his shoe, lying out in the open. Fragments of the true story were not that hard to come by. In rural Saline County, well west of Little Rock's suburbs, everybody knows somebody who knows the real story about something "official." The Emergency Medical Technicians who collected the remains (or most of them) told folks they themselves were puzzled by Malak's post-mortem verdict, since those bodies had been dead long enough for the blood to lose all its oxygen and turn dark before that train ever hit them. When the private investigator hired by the Ives and Henry families heard about that, he told them to be careful, and get a court order for all of the medical-examiner records. When the hospital with the records initially tried denying the existence of any papers at all, an EMT tech came forward with a recollection of spending 15 hours doing his own paperwork. And though somehow his papers never did turn up, the parents did get a report mentioning how the boys' blood had had time to turn dark well before that train hit them. Habeas Corpus For The Dead As 1988 began, Linda and Henry Ives asked the Arkansas state crime lab for tissue samples from the boys' bodies for independent testing. Dr. Malak bluntly told them they'd need a court order for that, and then when they got one, simply refused to comply with it. Calling the Arkansas State Attorney General and explaining the situation to him, Linda Ives was surprised to find out he couldn't, or anyhow wouldn't, do anything to force Malak to comply, beyond trying to "encourage" him to do so. Finally on February 8, 1988, the Ives and Henry families held a press conference in Little Rock, publicizing Malek's idiotic "THC intoxication" theories, and outlining the stonewall treatment they were getting from his office. And the next morning, by inviting reporters to another session at Malek's office in the morgue, they eventually extorted a couple samples for testing by two independent toxicologists they'd enlisted. The chief toxicologist for the State of North Carolina, Dr. Arthur McBay, who also teaches pathology and pharmacology at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, was highly skeptical of Malak's ruling. "I don't believe it," he emphatically stated (as reported in HT Magazine's HighWitness News for April 1989). "Marijuana doesn't make you unconscious and go into a deep sleep. When I see this kind of result, it's usually from someone who doesn't know a damn thing about marijuana or testing." The other toxicologist, San Antonio blood-detection specialist Dr. James C. Garriot, excoriated Malak's conclusions, and even his technique. "For confirmation of cannabinoids in blood," sniffed Garriott, "the only completely reliable technique available is mass spectrometry. I am sure this was not done in this case." Upgraded From 'Stoned' to 'Murdered' All this was sufficient to prompt Saline County deputy prosecutor Richard Garrett to hold a three-day public meeting before an Arkansas judge to review the evidence in the boys' deaths, to determine if foul play may have been involved. Witnesses testified to the many odd bits of evidence at the scene of the deaths that had gone unreported and uninvestigated by police initially: like the overlooked boot left still in its shoe at the tracks, pieces of George Henry's .22 rifle lying about, and the cops' failure to notice an entirely un-smoked bag of marijuana in the pocket of one boy's jeans. All these things, as well as Malak's incredibly callous and confusing initial report for the boys' parents, combined to convince the prosecutor's office, and the judge, to reclassify the boys' deaths from "accidental," to "undetermined"--on August 28, 1988, a year and a half after they died. A special medical examiner, Dr. Joseph Burton, was flown in from Marietta, GA to perform the second autopsies on the exhumed bodies. Burton moreover looked at their clothing and items found at the scene, as well as traveling out to the tracks himself to see the area. Taking his evidence with him back to Marietta, he carried on his examinations there. Meanwhile, prosecutor Garrett moved to convene a grand jury under Arkansas Circuit Judge John Cole, who swore the panel in that April 28th---with Garrett's law partner, one Dan Harmon, as the special prosecutor. Dan Harmon was special, all right, being himself the subject of a federal drug investigation. But that information was highly secret, known only to a few people outside the federal US Attorney's office, some state-police investigators, and some narcs working for the sheriff's office in adjoining Pulaski County. Nevertheless, suspecting nothing about the prosecutor guiding them, the 10 men and six women on Harmon's grand-jury panel were empowered to "subpoena, question, and request indictments" on any individual this prosecutor wanted to target. Within a month, citing Dr. Burton's report, the grand jury resolved that the deaths were "probable homicides." How To Derail An Inquest Whereupon the case suddenly took another strange turn--a series of them, actually. Witnesses who'd previously testified before this Saline County grand jury under Dan Harmon's guidance suddenly began being busted by cops under the guidance of Harmon's law partner, Richard Garrett. In a matter of months, nine people who'd either testified or were being sought by subpoena to testify in the dead-boys case were murdered. (Only one murder was solved.) Then there were all those cops from outside Saline County getting dragged in to testify in the dead-boys case. Sgt. Jay Campbell of neighboring Pulaski County had his suspicions why he and fellow narc Kirk Lane were being hauled before Harmon's panel. In the previous summer, just before the boys were killed on the tracks, these Pulaski narcs had begun hearing from informants that Dan Harmon was "buying and selling drugs, and providing drug dealers with protection." They'd passed this news on to Assistant US Attorney Robert Gover, head of a federal-state investigation into area drug trafficking. And sure enough, when special prosecutor Harmon got Campbell and Ives behind closed doors, in front of his Saline County panel, he asked just two questions: did they know anything about the boys' deaths, and if they'd heard anything, would they say what it was? Sgt. Campbell concluded that Harmon was trying solely to discredit any future investigation that might be brought against him, to cast it in the light of retaliation by Campbell and Lane, for being called to testify, as though suspects somehow, before Harmon's grand jury. As Leverett painstakingly describes it, prosecutor Harmon was losing it as the federal-state noose tightened around him, even while he was running this Saline County inquest: this serial wife-beater-and-divorcer with finances in a mess, who physically attacked defense attorneys in court, was now calling in witnesses to give testimony on drugs, not the boys' deaths. Harmon was, in fact, systematically rounding up everyone who might know something about him and his sideline business of dealing drugs, putting heat on them with the grand jury to ferret out and do away with the competition. And it worked, for a good long time, too. After four months of this bewildering prosecutorial procedure, Judge Cole was fretting aloud that the original focus of the investigation--the deaths of these two boys--appeared to have blurred considerably. The next week, he was handed by the jury videotape from Dr. Burton, detailing a slice in the back of Don Henry's shirt which, examined by a scanning electron microscope, proved not be the work of a train, but of a knife. The injuries to Kevin Ives' face were not the least bit characteristic of a speeding train's impact, but entirely characteristic of a viciously wielded rifle-butt. And all that blood sucked into the lungs, Burton emphasized, was "inconsistent with the type of injuries one would expect from being run over by a train, when you have sudden death occurring." In March of 1990, Judge Cole finally allowed the boys' death certificates to be changed to read "homicide," and the jury demanded that they should continue the investigation. A Textbook For Corrupt Prosecutors Mara Leverett's fascinating recapitulation of all the ingenious ways prosecutor Harmon manipulated the Saline grand jury to obfuscate the original objective of the inquest, and to misdirect it as a vehicle for obstructing real investigations into his own crimes (and the crimes of many others) irresistibly recalls THE TURKEY SHOOT, written in 1985 by Malcolm Bell--a New York State investigator of official misconduct in the 1970 shooting of 43 unarmed inmates and their hostages at Attica State Prison in New York State. The 20-year series of grand-jury investigations into the Attica massacre were consistently manipulated by state government prosecutors to exculpate murderous prison guards and the Albany officials who covered up for them, and sought to fasten the guilt for the killings on the victims themselves, by using many of the same techniques Harmon later on used in Arkansas: calling the wrong witnesses, intimidating and incriminating others, delaying paperwork until statutory deadlines lapsed, misinforming the press and public about their investigations and the laws they were supposedly enforcing, and so on. In fact, Harmon may have used Bell's TURKEY SHOOT as a blueprint for conducting his impossibly fouled-up inquest, and for what came later, too. Was Clinton Governor? Then It Wasn't A Crime. Because instead of the case picking up, and the police going after the killers, that was the end of the inquest into who killed the boys on the tracks. There were a variety of subsequent investigations into Harmon's bizarre behavior over the next few years, and the allegations of informants that he was dealing drugs, but each time the cases were dismissed, or charges never filed. Dan Harmon seemed to have protection from a variety of unlikely sources in high places, and in Little Rock especially, where investigators seemed blessed with the uncanny ability to somehow brush off the outrageous incidents of his violent and criminal behavior. That is, until 1997, when Harmon was finally convicted on one count of racketeering, three of extortion, and one count of possession of marijuana with intent to sell. But this supposedly had nothing to do with the two dead boys on the tracks in 1987, because Harmon was only prosecuted for offenses committed after 1991. It was almost as though there had been a concentrated ef fort not to uncover any unsavory information about this highly-placed Arkansas law-enforcement official prior to the installation of ex-Governor William Jefferson Clinton in the White House in Washington, DC in 1992. Oh Gawd, Not BARRY SEAL TOO??? Mara Leverett is too skilful an investigative reporter to get obsessive about any particular Arkansas horror show among the many, many American Gothic horror shows encountered by the Ives and Henry families as they searched for the real story about their sons' deaths. (To find out how they probably actually died, you are really going to have to buy this book.) Out of over 300 pages aggregate, she spends less than 30 on the Barry Seal angle, even though it's entirely pertinent and macabre as anything else in the book. Since this is HIGH TIMES, where the spirit of Barry Seal is as pesky and permanent as the Amityville Horror, we may as well treat it at some length. One theory of the boys' deaths is that they happened upon (or maybe sought out) a clandestine cocaine air-drop at or near the tracks where they were eventually run over. For years beforehand, there had been reports from residents of Saline County and the surrounding area of low-flying planes circling slowly overhead at night, and tales of bundles plopping out of the skies from time to time, full of coke or pot. In fact, this air-dropping technique was pretty much standard operating procedure for the minions of Adler Barriman Seal, importer of the Medellin Cartel's finest commercial intoxicants since the 1970s. As amply detailed elsewhere in HIGH TIMES and many other places, Seal was the CIA's favorite dope-smuggling pilot, employed on contract to "investigate" dope gangs like the Medellin mob--and to keep all the money he made moving dope for them. And in the mid-1980s, when the CIA's puppet "anticommunist" armies in Nicaragua and El Salvador needed a sure hand to pilot tons of Colombian dope for them through Central America, to raise secret money for guns, the CIA set up Seal with a clandestine base strip in a place no one would ever have thought to look for one--in little Mena, Arkansas, about a hundred miles west of where those two boys were killed on the tracks in 1987. Although Seal himself was assassinated in New Orleans in 1986, over a year before Ives and Henry were killed, Leveritt speculates thusly: "My thoughts are that if Seal's operation was as large as it has been described by the FBI itself, then something like that just does not stop. Even if the CEO is taken out, they are going to have a staff. This operation has been described to me by Louisiana investigators, who told me that if this had been a Fortune 500 Company, it would have been one of the top ones. We know operations on that scale have a life of their own. So his death did not suggest to me necessarily that the two events were not related." This is not idle speculation from a conspiracy dingbat. The University of Arkansas named Leveritt, a Little Rock crime journalist and columnist for almost 30 years, as the state's Journalist of the Year in 1994. And THE BOYS ON THE TRACKS is a story of such bizarrely intestine complication, tracing the slender thread of forensic truth through all the Byzantine mazes of Arkansas organized crime and politics, that really only a good nose-to-the-grindstone local journalist would ever really want to TRY to doing it justice. It required plowing through an Augean stable of rancid local politics, and then discovering a whole new level of rancid federal corruption and coverup. The Evil That Men Do Is Last Season's Story Prodded by HT to amplify on the Barry Seal angle in the boys' deaths, Leverett recalls, "There was one reporter, Gary Bowers, who was working in Fort Smith, the second-largest city in Arkansas--near Mena, near the Arkansas-Oklahoma border. He was doing some reporting on Seal. There was a TV reporter in that town who was doing some reporting on Seal, and so was I. But by and large most of the media saw this as an old story, a very hard-to-get story, and so confusing that it was better, or simply easier, for them to ignore it. The problem really, and I'm sympathetic to this, is because Seal was dead by the time anyone outside of a very few people in law enforcement had heard of him. He was already dead. Everything he did was cloaked in so much mystery, partly because it was illegal on his end, and now we know partly because federal officials were trying to KEEP it cloaked in mystery." Among the federal officials who worked brilliantly to keep a cloak of mystery over Seal's dope-import concession at Mena, as Leverett recounts almost in passing midway through THE BOYS ON THE TRACKS , was the Western Arkansas US Attorney at the time Seal's operations moved up there from Louisiana and Texas: one Asa Hutchinson, who later on went to the US House of Representatives and became William Jefferson Clinton's most pitiless prosecutor among the House Impeachment Managers. Dope corruption makes strange bedfellows indeed. But the impeachment circus itself was a long time ago, by the US media's attention span, and so the heyday of Barry Seal at Mena is absolutely paleolithic history, as Leverett acknowledges. "Seal is dead," concludes Leverett, "everybody is scattered around, and much of this happened out of Washington. It is just scattered, fragmented pieces, and as I said, there is always this attitude among the press of, Well this is history, and it is hard to get at anyway. So after the immediacy of the 1992 Clinton Presidential campaign, nobody was interested in picking it up. But I like this state, and I have been appalled in my career because I've covered a lot of criminal-justice issues. I have been appalled at the growth of prisons just in this state, and I know that is replicated throughout the nation. So here we've got this huge War on Drugs, which has characterized my career, which I've seen the effect of on individuals as well on the economy of our state, and the toll it has taken on government resources here." "Meanwhile here is this very big mystery of this huge drug dealer, who by the US government's own estimates was one of the very biggest drug kingpins to ever operate in the United States, and there is virtually no reporting whatsoever on this episode." A horrifying expos� of official coverups, lies and drug running. THE BOYS ON THE TRACKS covers one of the darker chapters of very-recent US history, an under-reported, secret chapter that influenced everyone alive then by the amount of drugs flowing through Seal's operation, and the microcosm of this whole picture represented in the deaths of these two teenagers, and the lack of official interest in finding out exactly what happened to them. A poignant, pertinent, and sorrowful tale, there are no real conclusions to the story. The Ives and Henry murders themselves are still officially "unsolved," but Leveritt has gathered together many disparate sources to create a cohesive picture of a shadowy, hidden operation and scandal, and a seemingly bi-partisan, multi-level cover-up of what happened to the boys, and of Seal's massive cocaine smuggling. This book is well worth the read. by -Preston Peet, Special to HighWitness News ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. 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