PARDONS FOR SALE
Media and non-media reports are circulating that supporters for Sean “Diddy” Combs and Ghislaine Maxwell are lobbying the Trump administration for pardons or commutations of sentences. And having granted executive clemency in nearly 1600 criminal cases, President Trump has at a minimum created the impression that pardons are for sale, and given the U.S. Supreme Court’s grant of near total immunity to the presidency, the president could sell executive clemency without any meaningful concerns about criminal liability.
Put simply, the president accepting a $50 million quid pro quo arrangement with the Diddy enterprise for a pardon would not be prosecutable criminal offense.
Now, for the record, I know a thing or two about pardons selling. First, and foremost, it can be both dangerous and personally damaging to expose the corruption historically associated with this kind of political corruption.
In 1986, my wife and I exposed the largest “pardons for sale” (as it was dubbed by the media) criminal scheme in Louisiana history. The federal and state investigations that ensued sent the pardon board chairman to a federal prison, got one of the state’s most powerful legislators indicted (later acquitted), forced three prison officials into bribery guilty pleas, led to the resignation of a prison warden and a number of lesser prison officials, and, as you can imagined, pissed off a whole lot of people inside and outside of the Louisiana prison system—including then Gov. Edwin Edwards who never saw a bribe he did not like.
The little Cajun governor told Jack Martzell (a very prominent criminal defense attorney representing my clemency efforts at the time), “your guy sure fucked up, Jack.”
One month later, on the very day I appeared before a federal grand jury to testify about the pardons selling corruption, Edwards denied a 60-year commutation of my life sentence that had been recommended by the previous Republican-appointed pardon board whose members were replaced when Edwards became Louisiana’s governor for a third time in 1984.
By that time, I was housed on the same tier in the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison with the three Colombian assassins who had just months earlier gunned down DEA informant Barry Seal at the behest of drug lord Pablo Escobar.
That’s the way the corrupt Louisiana prison system worked (and still works): put a high profile informant on the same tier with three informant killers.
But instead of being killed off by the Colombians, we sort of became fast buddies in the scheme of things. The leader of the trio, Miguel “the Chin” Velez, gave me all the fried chicken and pizza (brought to them by bribed jail guards) I could eat, along with a portable radio (also smuggled into the jail) and writing material in exchange for all the information I would provide him with about the physical layout and inner workings of the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.
At that point I had no qualms telling Chin about the brutal nature of the Tunica Hills surrounding three sides of Angola in exchange for Popeye’s fried chicken breast and a drumstick with a side order of Popeye’s red beans and rice.
If Edwards and his political cronies thought that my placement with the Colombian assassins would somehow shorten my life span, they underestimated my ability to communicate through barriers of broken English to trade information for Popeye’s chicken.
While I was trying to remain healthy and alive with my new-found Colombian cohorts, my reputation as an award-winning prison journalist had been transformed into my being “snitch” inside the prison system and an “FBI informant” in the free world.
While Edwards and his political machine, led by his executive counsel, were preparing my clemency denial, the Louisiana corrections secretary and my fellow award-winning co-editor of The Angolite, a prison publication of which I was also co-editor, were spinning the bullshit narrative to The New York Times and the Columbian Journalism Review that I had betrayed the “integrity” of prison newsmagazine and violated some unwritten code of journalism ethics by cooperating with law enforcement.
Through my co-editor’s insider influence with the editorial board of The New York Times, I became the only inmate in history to ever be rebuked in an editorial by this massive media conglomerate for exposing corruption over protecting the “integrity” of a prison publication.
To put the Times editorial in context, the nation’s largest newspaper did not editorialize against Jack Henry Abbott, a convicted killer and a celebrated author of “In The Belly of the Beast” (which was praised as “brilliant” by the Times following the memoir’s 1981 release) who, after he got out of prison, killed an innocent restaurant waiter for no reason at all. That second murder sent the “brilliant” writer back to prison where he died by suicide in 2002.
To context with absolute clarity the Times editorial, the prestigious print media outlet did not editorialize against the graphic artist assigned to The Angolite after the ensuing state pardons selling investigation discovered the artist had bought a pardon while assigned to the publication. The prison official who brokered the corrupt pardons deal pled guilty to bribery charge and was given a probated sentence. The artist was allowed to keep his unlawfully purchased pardon and went home unscathed.
What the editorial amounted to was this: The New York Times apparently believed that my reporting the pardons selling corruption violated the “integrity” of The Angolite while its graphic artist’s buying a corrupt pardon enhanced the prison publication’s stature in the inmate criminal community.
Anyway, back to pardons for sale.
You would think that Gov. Edwards would have been a little more circumspect about executive clemency in his fourth term in office than he had been in his third term that saw his pardon board chairman hauled off to a federal prison.
Given this experience in prison affairs and corrupt pardons selling, I will go out on a limb and make this prediction: the warden of the club-med penal facility where Ghislaine Maxwell now resides will within a year create an “innovative” inmate rehabilitation program called something like “Massage Therapy for Underprivileged Teens,” of which Maxwell will be chosen as its “inmate coordinator.”
The program, which will be hailed for its ability to take vulnerable young girls out of the dire straits of homelessness and place them in private clubs for old men, will be used to justify a complete and absolute pardon for all of Maxwell’s prior criminal transgressions.
Beneath the pardon’s forgiveness deal will lay the quid pro quo understanding that “silence is golden.”
Given that the more than two dozen inmates who brought pardons in the Louisiana pardons-selling scandal were allowed to keep the pardons and go home, I spent another 20 years in prison managing somehow to stay alive through it all, spending more than $75,000 in attorney fees during the process for legal protection.
And, hell, all the Edwards pardons selling machine asked Jodie and I for in exchange for a corrupt pardon was $15,000.
That’s why Diddy and Maxwell will pay the money for the deal.