Richard Stratton had been on many buses before — some as a child, some as a drug smuggler and fugitive in Mexico — but none like this. It was the first time he saw a man’s mouth duct-taped shut for demanding to be fed.
The blue federal Bureau of Prisons bus Stratton would call home for weeks and months at time, where he was “shipped like cattle” across the country from federal lockups to county jails, was also his introduction to “diesel therapy,” a practice where problematic inmates are shackled on buses and continuously transported as an unspoken form of punishment. As one jailhouse lawyer told Stratton on the bus in the fall of 1982, the feds “want to soften you up, marinate you with diesel fumes so that by the time you get where you’re going, you’re ready to get down on your knees and plead guilty just to get it over with.”
That jailhouse attorney had some other invaluable advice for Stratton, who had been arrested months earlier in June after jumping bail on a federal indictment in Maine. “Language is the key,” the convicted bank robber said. “It all comes down to words.”
Stratton’s latest book — available Tuesday — follows his 2016 memoir, “Smuggler’s Blues: A True Story of the Hippie Mafia,” and details his treacherous trip through the federal prison system with an unfiltered voice and a knack for finding humor in the most desolate of spaces. After refusing to falsely implicate his mentor, Norman Mailer, in the enterprise, Stratton was sentenced to 25 years in prison under the Continuing Criminal Enterprise Statute, also known as the Kingpin Statute. He then began learning the language of law, just as Marcus the jailhouse lawyer proposed, and ultimately had his sentence reduced on an appeal he wrote after eight years behind bars.
“Kingpin” begins where Stratton’s last book left off, with him in custody in Los Angeles’ infamous Glass House, “possibly the worst jail in America.” His winding road through the system would take him across the country, with stretches at prisons in California to Virginia to Manhattan, where he snorts cocaine in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center — “the Criminal Hilton” — and debates whether he can roll over on Mailer in an “era of government star-f——g” in drug cases.
Page Six recently caught up with Stratton, 71, to discuss his newest book and how he parlayed his life in crime to a flourishing and award-winning post-conviction Hollywood career, including as the creator of Showtime’s “Street Time,” a writer and consultant for HBO’s “Oz,” and former editor and publisher of High Times.
How do the dramatized versions of prison and the real thing compare? Is reality even crazier than what we see on TV?
In many ways, it is. It’s hard to capture that insanity. I often said prison is the loneliest place in the world. You’re alone, and constantly feeling the rift between you and the people you love. You’re surrounded by people you might otherwise not want to be around. I often likened it to living in the men’s room at Pennsylvania Station. It smells bad, it feels bad, it’s noisy, it’s not a pleasant place. But it’s not — my experience at least — the overwhelmingly violent world that it’s often depicted, as far as prisoner-on-prisoner violence is concerned. Most of the violence was guard staff-on-prisoner.
The eight years you spent in prison allowed you time to learn the law and eventually serve as your own attorney. Did your time behind bars work in your favor?
Well, in a lot of ways it did. I was suffering from what I have to call hubris. It comes with making a lot of money, in an illegal way. It just goes to your head, you begin to think you’re special, and you’re defiant. You’re living in an outlaw-fantasy world that I was subjected to. I think I watched too much TV as a kid, and related to guys like Al Capone and got fascinated by the whole idea of the criminal outlaw anti-hero. When you’re making that much money, and smoking that much weed as I was in those days, it goes to your head. You begin to think you’re invincible and above it all. So prison really humbled me and made me come to terms with what happened to me while I was on that trajectory of the criminal outlaw folk hero that I thought I was living out, and who I was as a person, and what I was doing with my life.
Going back to my original goals in life, from the time I was 17, 18, which was to be a writer. It brought me into that world in a curious way. So prison really helped me in a way, it stripped me. That’s the great thing about it, it’s a great equalizer. You’re all wearing the same garb, you don’t have access to the money you might have had on the street, you don’t have the entourage to build up your ego. It all comes down to who you are.
How did you manage to so deftly navigate the prison system?
I do think it has to do with your personality, and how you deal with the authorities, with your captors. If you treat them with a modicum of respect, they’re going to in time, give you that back. With these guards in prison, and the staff, if you treated them with a modicum of respect, they’re doing their job, you’re doing yours, then ultimately, they come to give you a little slack here and there. They come to respect you.
As a writer, how do you feel about using the power of words as an attorney to reduce your sentence?
I’m happy about it. I was fortunate to run into a jailhouse lawyer early on. I was being transported by a diesel therapy guy, and he told me, “You gotta study the law, the indictment, you gotta read it. You gotta become your own lawyer.” I realized how little actual work most of these lawyers actually do. Their whole job is signing up more cases and getting more retainers, but then a lot of times, they just give it to some sub-lawyer, and you don’t get the great defense that you’re going to get if you become a participant in your own defense. I ended up defending myself, which was a bit of madness, but it ultimately worked out for me.
Are you still on parole?
No, I’m off parole. I was only on it for two years. And I was working on this documentary with Barbara Copple about Mike Tyson and they tried to stop me from that. They said, “You can’t leave the district, you can’t be traveling. You can’t be around people like that.” It was ridiculous. I went to work for Ivan Fisher, the criminal defense lawyer, and they said, “You can’t work for him because you’ll be coming in contact with other people in criminal activity.” So whenever they would tell me stuff like that, I would just say, “Take me to court. Let’s take it to a judge.” They would back down. It was unbelievable. And that became the inspiration for the show. I would sit in this room at the courthouse and it would be like 25, 30 guys waiting to see their parole officer, all of whom are not allowed to associate with each other. Strict rules, but they’re all talking and then the parole officer would come in and they’d all sit there like this [folds hands], like kids in a classroom when the teacher comes back. So I said, you know, this is a TV show.
Do you still smoke pot?
From time to time. The thing with smoking is, it’s not good for you. When you’re taking hot smoke and burning embers into your lungs, it’s not good for you. But I’ll do the vape occasionally, and one of the things about marijuana is it’s the most forgiving of all of these substances. In many ways, I do believe it’s medicinal. Not only for the many medicinal needs but also psychologically. I think I cured myself. I smoked enough pot that I finally came to the conclusion that I’m already there in a way.
The whole idea that you start smoking pot and then the next thing you know you’re shooting junk is ridiculous.
Do you expect the Trump administration to go after recreational pot?
I think if they do that, they’re going to create even more of a movement against this regime and it’s going to become even more powerful. There’s something about marijuana that refuses to be controlled. There’s something about freeing the consciousness that comes with marijuana that makes it difficult for people to control. The anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, there was pot in both of those movements. If they try to put this genie back in the bottle, so to speak, it’s going to create even more anti-Trump, anti-government sentiment than there already is, which may be a good thing. There’s too many people out there who smoke pot and now it’s legal in so many places. How do you stop that? How do you roll that back? I don’t think they can. And if they try to do it, I think it would be their downfall.
What do you think about the feds targeting pot instead of opioids, which are killing people in large numbers across the country?
The anti-pot fundamentalists have always believed it’s a gateway drug, which I don’t accept at all. I don’t think a lot of people who use pot on a regular basis would disagree with that. The whole idea that you start smoking pot and then the next thing you know you’re shooting junk is ridiculous. It doesn’t hold water. But people like [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions and those guys are going to revert to this fundamentalist mindset, that marijuana is a gateway drug. What you’re seeing now is the biggest drug crisis in this country and it’s fundamentally built around legal drug: painkillers and Oxycontin that these doctors are prescribing to people and they get wired to that. They’re unbelievably strong. It fucks them up in ways marijuana wouldn’t even come close. They get hooked on them, and then they go out and buy heroin. And there’s so much heroin in this country. It’s absurd to think you’re going to roll back the laws in this country, and somehow stop the opioid crisis. You’re only gonna make it worse.
Being a drug trafficker has taken you to HBO, Showtime and High Times. For you, has crime paid off?
Yes, and that’s the ironic thing about it. Not only has crime paid, but I think the best thing I ever did was choosing not to cooperate with the government and to take the heat and do the time. By doing that, not only did I satisfy a fundamental question about myself, but I also am now accepted not only by law enforcement — they have more respect for someone who does the time than they do for their own snitches and rats. For me to have decided to cooperate with the government and rat out Mailer and all these people they wanted me to – testify against Hunter Thompson, too — I would never have been able to live with myself if I did that. So, yeah, crime has paid for me in that now I’ve began to mine it as material. But then again, even way back in the day, I saw it that way. Look, I’ve been writing even while I was involved in and working for Rolling Stone, and hanging out with Mailer and Hunter Thompson, people like that. Writing was always there. I used to say: Dealing pot or smuggling pot was how I supported my writing habit.
Was there ever a time you considered cooperating against Mailer?
I can’t say that. You entertain these scenarios. So I’m think to myself, “Shit, I’m facing life without parole. And all I have to do is basically say, yeah, I’ll give you Mailer, Richard Goodwin, Hunter Thompson, whomever you want. All the really bad guys.” But in looking at that and thinking about that and considering it, the better part of my character would continuously say, “That’s not the person you are, that’s not the person you want to be. So, forget about it.” I actually write about it in the book: There’s a surreal chapter, where I’m snorting cocaine, high, in jail, looking in the mirror, wondering who the f–k I am and how I got to be there, but fundamentally coming to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to end up ratting on people. That’s not who I am.
What was your relationship with Mailer like?
He was definitely a mentor. He taught me a tremendous amount about writing and character. I would say that he was a very close, dear friend of mine. We bonded from an early time, when we first met, in Provincetown. We had similar likes and dislikes. I was living across the street from him and started hanging out with him, boxing with him and talking about writing. He really was a mentor; he taught me a lot about writing, and what it means to have the courage of your convictions.
Do you still intend on making this a trilogy?
There’s a third book. It’s going to be fun. The most satisfying activity to me is writing, working on these books. Even though I don’t make enough money to live on, there’s something so, kind of it’s your own world and obviously, at some point it goes to an editor, but it’s your thing. The real creative process, it’s just you and the page. I have a couple of other projects I’m working on. I wrote an article a few years ago called “The Altered States of America” about the secret testing of LSD by the CIA back in the ’50s. We found this really interesting character who died a few years ago and I’ve been developing this idea to write a book about it and a series about the early years of the CIA from the Cold War to the Summer of Love. That era was so bizarre, resulting in the downfall of President Nixon with Watergate. I’m fascinated by those whole early years, with Allen Dulles at the CIA and the power that they had.
Do you see any parallels between Nixon and Trump?
A: Yeah, I think Trump is a goner — I don’t think he’s going to last. I think they have the goods on him and if they don’t, I think his Achilles’ heel will be Roger Stone. He calls himself a dirty trickster and I think if the s–t hits the fan, he’ll be the first to roll over … If they can show there was real meddling on behalf of the Russians, it’s gonna be curtains for [Trump].
Any advice for young writers?
You have to appreciate the craft, and you really have to focus on the fundamentals of it. You have to study it and you have to read and read and read. Find writers that you really love. Absorb their work. Study what they do. Then, it becomes a matter of discipline, of saying to yourself, “There’s a certain amount of time every day that I’m going to devote to this activity.”
And Mailer, again, he wrote a book called “The Spooky Art,” which is his advice on writing. He was a great believer in the power of the subconscious mind, particularly of dreams and the connections you make with the subconscious mind you make when you’re asleep. He said if you go to bed at night and think about what you’re going to do the next day, and you make that promise to yourself, that while you’re asleep, your subconscious mind will work on that. If you get up the next day, and you don’t do that, your subconscious mind begins to think, “This guy isn’t really serious.” And that’s where, he claimed, you’d get writer’s block. You have to be true to your subconscious mind and true to what you’re doing. That advice was profound. It’s discipline — that’s what it comes down to and honoring the commitment you make to yourself.
What do you think has driven your varied success?
It’s God, I’m a deep believer. I pray all the time. God just opens doors, he does. If you align yourself with that force, and really get into it, and keep your promises, amazing things happen. You get out of prison. People say to me all the time, “Man, how the hell did you get out of that?” God, man, it was all God. I give God all the credit.