Stolen Life (13 page)

“I know Earl always wanted to be a U.S. Marine. He would have made a damn good one. He was no suicidal kid, he was twenty. Sure he was disappointed about something, but no one saw him depressed. You read it: they all say he appeared ‘normal, or even in good spirits,’ and then half an hour after talking to a Marine who tells him, ‘Maybe you can join Friday’—two days later! when he’ll have finished his jail sentence!—half an hour and he’s hanging by a hose in a blind corner of the jail?”

In the next room I can hear wood crack, burning in the woodstove beside Clarence’s bed to fill the entire house with thick, heavy heat. Clarence strikes another match, holds it to his cigar, and abruptly continues.

“I say them three cops blind-sided him.”

“What do you mean?”

“Earl was only in law trouble once before. Not with Butte cops, with the
FBI.”

For transporting stolen cigarettes between states, which is a federal offence. In 1969, Earl and two friends stole some cigarettes in Butte and ran to Sheridan, Wyoming, before Earl’s good sense caught up with him and he phoned home. Clarence told him to return to Butte, which he did. He turned himself in, confessed, and was given a suspended sentence for providing the facts of the burglary in court. But that testimony also convicted his best buddy, who thereupon avoided jail only by agreeing to join the Marines. That buddy had had “a very rough” time in Vietnam; in late April 1971, he returned to Butte, vowing, according to rumours floating around the bars, to get even with Earl.

Clarence hints at a further complication, another of the many strands that are, as always, so tangled throughout living stories: “The girl Earl was with, they were living in our house while we were gone, Susan, Cecilia got her on the phone when she called, she was his buddy’s girl first. They had a fight over her back then, and now this guy comes home from Vietnam and here Earl’s having it on with her. So maybe Earl wanted to calm his old buddy down, ‘Look, you had a rough time, but I’ll go to Vietnam too, I’ll go.’ I’m not saying Earl wasn’t mixed up, confused, so he goes to the cops, he figures he’s better off in jail so no one can get at him till the family gets back—”

It does make some sense.

“—but the cops don’t like Earl Johnson, never did, he never takes any bullshit and keeps his nose clean. But Leon! Leon Johnson’s always doing something stupid, in court, in jail, he’s in Miles City for juvenile auto theft when this thing happened, so what I think is when this cop Mickey Sullivan questioned Earl for over an hour, 8:30 in the morning before his court appearance, Earl maybe said a wrong word. If he mentioned seeing one cop where he shouldn’t be, if he got careless
and slipped one word about a cop ring doing deals on drugs or sex around the high school—every kid in Butte knew it was going on, at the time it was even in the newspapers. I think they used older kids to get the younger ones involved—shit, one word and he’s finished. Because Mickey Sullivan was the crookedest, worst drug dealer in Butte.”

He may very well have been. The newspapers Clarence digs out from under his more-or-less buried coffee table detail careers of continuing crime that directly involve three of the four policemen who were the primary witnesses at the inquiry into Earl’s death.

In May 1980, Michael John “Mickey” Sullivan, who in 1971 questioned Earl about the drugs he had allegedly sold, was himself caught when in broad daylight he robbed a drugstore at gunpoint. He was a Butte City Police shift commander, though off duty at the time, with his face hidden under a ski mask. Witnesses said he scooped drugs off the shelves into a denim bag, tried to open the cash register, failed, and fled the store. He was noticed by passers-by, who contacted police on citizens’ band radio.

“Sullivan got cornered by people on the street.” Clarence chuckles grimly. “They pulled his mask off. By the time the cops showed up they couldn’t cover for him! It come out they used school kids, too, to rob for them, and then the cops’d clean up all the evidence.”

At the time of Sullivan’s arrest it was feared he had police accomplices who would try to break him out of jail. He was held without bail, and Sheriff Larry Connors stated in
The Montana Standard
, “We do have a well-trained, honest and professional law enforcement agency in Butte-Silver Bow.” Nevertheless, he ordered an “independent” investigation of his department by the
FBI
.

Mickey Sullivan, age forty, was tried and convicted in 1980, but I discover he never served time; the
Standard
of Friday, 11 August 1989, states that in 1980 he died “of an accidental gunshot wound while awaiting sentencing for robbery.” Later, a lifelong resident of Butte tells me it was also rumoured to have been suicide—though the gun was found twenty feet from his body.

The same issue of the
Standard
is dominated by three full front-page stories compiled by Staff Writer Rich Simpson of how a continuing
FBI
investigation finally “solved a string of Butte crimes, some led by a police crime ring, stretching over 20 years.”

The central characters facing a federal court in Helena, Montana, in 1989 are “Louie” Markovich and former Butte policeman Clarence “Moon” LaBreche. Among other things, they had pleaded guilty to complicity

A mere listing of all their crimes, in tiny print, fills over one and a half full-length double columns of the newspaper’s front page. At one point Markovich is quoted as saying offhandedly that “putting together a group of criminals to rob and rip off a marijauna growing operation was of no concern.…” The newspaper summarizes their history of crimes as follows:

“John T. and Mickey Sullivan weren’t arrested with LaBreche because in 1989 they were both dead,” Clarence Johnson says, glaring at me. “Those were the crooks who said at the inquest my Earl was a pusher, he was coming off a drug binge. Jesus H. Christ. You think I’d ever believe that?”

“So how did the cops do it? Dishman says he sees nothing, the three guys in the last cell testify they heard ‘gagging and vomiting,’ but they just think someone’s being sick …?”

“Those three drunks were never actually questioned. It’s just what LaBreche says they said.”

“Okay, okay … and it’s all around the corner out of sight. But all those people … Dishman knew Earl real well … how could …?”

I’m flipping through the inquest report, and stop suddenly. On page 22 is the huge asterisk I marked the night before in the margin beside the trusty’s answers to questions from the Chief Deputy Attorney of Silver Bow County. Dishman states that he spoke to Earl immediately after he returned to his open cell from speaking to the Marine recruiter, and then he continues:

“Uh-huh, that has to be it,” Clarence says, reading past my pointing finger. “Those fucken ‘inspectors from Washington.’ ”

“ ‘Inspector from Washington,’ ‘they went back and inspected the jail.’ Shit! There were three of them.” With his black cigar dead in his hand, Clarence Johnson continues slowly, living through every detail once again. “I tracked Dishman down a year later and he was working near Dillon, on the county sheriff’s ranch there—go figure. He told me there were three of them.

“Those ‘inspectors’ walked past. Earl was standing in the open door of his cell, watching them go farther back into the jail. He and Dishman had just hosed down the corridor, cleaned it up. Then Dishman went into his cell to read and he said a guy he knows, Smokey, came to bring him some tobacco and he read some more and everything seemed real quiet. So he went out, he wasn’t locked up, and looked into Earl’s cell next to his. It was still open too, and the other drunk was there, sleeping it off. But Earl wasn’t there.

“So he goes farther back into the jail, looking for him. There’s three guys in the last cell, locked up, and past that the corridor narrrows right down because opposite the last cell there’s a old stone dungeon cell they don’t use any more, and if you go past it into that narrow part there’s a corner, and around that corner, right, is the dead-end space where they used to have showers rigged up. There’s no windows anywhere back there, it’s all underground, under the sidewalk, no doors, nothing.

“And he sees Earl hanging there. On the hose they just used, wrapped once around the pipes and twice around his neck. The cops
said a table was beside him, but all Dishman remembered was a little three-legged stool tipped over.”

I ask, “What’s that for?”

“I think they put the table in later, for the pictures. He was too high off the ground for the stool. They needed to show something higher.” “They keep talking about pictures——”

“I asked them and asked them, I could never find out a thing about a Washington inspection. There was no report, no one asked about it in the inquiry, nothing—there were no fucken ‘inspectors’!”

“But surely——”

“They stonewalled me, no word, nothing!”

“Did you see the inquiry pictures? Was he actually hanged?”

“Oh hell yes, they had the pictures on him. Cecilia took them and a whole bunch of stuff, and other reports. It all ended up in Washington.”

“Yvonne said something—Cecilia went to Washington, D.C., about this?’

“With the
AIM
March in 1972, the Indian ‘Trail of Broken Treaties’ caravan from Wounded Knee. It was so crazy,” he continues in a rush, his memories focused only on Earl’s death. “We were already driving home from Canada. We were on the highway that day, the fifth, we always drove it in one real long day. Cecilia had phoned home the night before to tell Earl we were coming, she wanted to go to his graduation, but no one answered, so we left Red Pheasant and just drove for home. We were just past Great Falls, past Ulm, when my car motor blew. We were sitting on the side of the highway with the four girls.