MORE INFO ON SHARLENE WILSON (and Jean Duffey)
THE SECRET LIFE OF BILL CLINTON
3-31-98 (publ. 1997) Ambrose Evans Pritchard
(Sorry for misspellings. I am off to a meeting and don't have enough time to check it thoroughly.)
The federal probe into Saline County corruption was still running, so Duffey was able to continue her crusade vicariously by offering her witnesses to the U.S. Attorney's Office. On the afternoon of December 10, 1990, her best informant, Sharlene Wilson, walked into the U.S. District Court in Little Rock and blurted our in front of an astonished grand jury that she had provided cocaine to Bill Clinton at Le Bistro nightclub during his first term as governor.
It had no criminal implications for Clinton because the statute of limitations had passed long before. But matters were clearly getting out of hand. Within days the federal investigation was closed down. U.S. Attorney Charles Banks went into full cover-up mode. He was a Republican appointee but that meant nothing in Arkansas. What mattered were the interlocking relationships of power. Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert Govar was pulled off the case.
A month later Sharlene Wilson contacted Duffey in a desperate panic and arranged a surreptitious meeting at Lake Catherine on January 7, 1991. It was then that she revealed what she had blurted out in a moment of misguided candor at the grand jury.
"She was terrified. She said her house was being watched and she'd made a big mistake," said Duffey. "That was she told me she'd testified about seeing Bill Clinton get so high on cocaine he fell into the garbage can....I have no doubt she was telling the truth." Duffey had provided me with her contemporaneous diaries recording the conversation.
For both Sharlene Wilson and Jean Duffey matters took a drastic turn for the worse when Dan harmon became prosecuting attorney for the Seventh Judicial District in January 1991. He immediately summoned a county grand jury and issued a subpoena for all the records of the task force, which included the incriminating files on his own activities. If Duffey had complied it would have e xposed 30 witnesses and her confidential informants to violent retribution. She refused.
Harmon issued a felony warrant for "avoiding service." Harmon's ally, Circuit Court Judge John Cole announced publicly that once arrested she would be held without bail. "That is when I got really worried," said Duffey. "I got a message from one of the dispatchers that I would never get out of jail alive, and I didn't doubt it. Some of the cops had already been warning my family there was a $50,000 price on my head."
She went into hiding on a ranch in northern Arkansas. During the early months of 1991 she was on the move, emerging from time to time for a clandestine meeting with her husband and three children, but always one step ahead of Dan Harmon's men. THE ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT called her a "felony fugitive" in blaring headlines. Finally she fled to Texas. The family followed.
"I was dragged through the mud, totally discredited and professionally destroyed, but I have no regrets," said Duffey. "We tried to do what was right; we did everything that we possibly could; all that was left was to get on with our lives....I became a school teacher, and you know what? I just love it."
It took longer to deal with Sharlene. In the mid-1980s she had been one of Harmon's lovers, on and off, and an accessory in his illicit operations. That, of course, is why she had been so invaluable to Jean Duffey, guiding her through the underworld of organized drug trafficking in Arkansas. Sharlene, in essence, had served as paramour to the cartel.
She had helped with most of the criminal fraternity, including Roger Clinton, in a decade-long career of vertiginous debauchery. She had even done a stint for three or four months unloading bags of coaine at the Mena Airport in the mountains of Eastern Arkansas. If there was anybody who knew the business inside out---where the aircraft made their drops at night, who picked up the deliveries, who laundered the moneyh, who ordered the hits---it was Sharlene Wilson. She was a dangerous woman. What's more, she had gone spiritual. She was trying to rectify her life, hoping to regain custody of her lost son. She posed a threat to the whole organization.
But Harmon had to be careful, bide his time. Sharlene had become an undercover informant fo the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, and the DEA did not like it when their sources had fatal accidents. So with a nice sense of irony he used the Seventh Judicial District task force, now completely under control, to set her up on drug charges.
His opportunity came when a close friend of Sharlene's, Joann Potts, was arrested and agreed to "roll over" to avoid prosecution. Potts was sent on repeated visits to Sharlene's house to arrange a drug deal. Sharlend succumbed. She gave Potts a joint of marijuana, then made the fatal mistake of fetching her some methamphetamine. the woman was crying, saying her husband was cheating on her, that her car wouldn't start, that life was hell, and she "needed to get high really bad."
"I'm not denying that I did it," Sharlen later told the court. I'm saying that I've been pushed and pushed into this whole situation. The girl would not leave me alone, and I cared about her genuinely."
Sharlene was arrested by Dan Harmon in person. "He yelled, 'Bitch, I told you that if you ever breathed a word about me I'd take you down. You're going to prison, bitch,"' she said.
Harmon then prosecuted the case, neglecting to tell the jury that they had been lovers. He offered her a plea agreement of 116 years. A bit stiff, she felt, opting instead for a trial. She was convicted and sentenced to 31 years in prison for delivery of methamphetamine and marijuana. Still a bit stiff, for a first drug conviction.
"They couldn't silence her so they locked her up and threw away the key," said Duffey. "That's Arkansas for you."
But this jtime the powers that be in Arkansas did not have the last say. Represented by a talented, maverick lawyer, John Wesley Hall, Sharlene took her appeal all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a unanimous opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas on May 22, 1995, the Court found that Harmon's men had violated the "knock-and-announce principle" before entering the home.
Citing English common law, Justice Thomas noted that a man's house is "his castle of defense and asylum" and that the King may not send his sheriff into a person's house, either to arrest or to do other execution of the King's process, without signifying the cause and requesting that the doors be opened, Harmon had forgotten to study his Blackstone COMMENTARIES. So had the Arkansas courts.
"The judgment of the Arkansas Supreme Court is reversed and the case is remanded for further proceedings," concluded Thomas. It did not get her off the hook entirely. Other convictions still held. But it bolstered her claim that she had been a victim of legal foul play, and it occured at a time when Harmon's vicious sway over the Seventh Judicial District was fast coming to an end.
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