Of all the famous feuds that have been fought in the mountain country of the United States, probably no other has equaled the famous Hatfield and McCoy feud in deadliness, in duration, and in desperateness of conflict.
—G. Elliott Hatfield
Rick’s devotion to his mother, Betty Gladden, who cared for him and his brother LeRoi after his father abandoned them, was the underlying motive for his entire life. It made him want to make himself into something that impressed her, a goal he certainly achieved. It also made him want to abandon the use of illegal drugs, a goal he only partly achieved, but not for lack of trying. Unfortunately, it also involved him, his mother, and two of his brothers in a partly criminal Upstate New York version of the Hatfield-McCoy feud.
In the early 1980s, single again, Gladden began seeing a Buffalo resident named Montey Harper. Gladden was in her late fifties and Harper was in his twenties when the relationship began. After a time, Gladden broke off the relationship, but Harper wanted to resume it. Gladden called his attempts to resume the relationship harassment and complained to Rick and his brother Carmen Sims, then thirty.
Rick and Sims confronted Harper in a Buffalo barroom in June 1984. A barroom fight, which included bottle throwing, resulted. Harper, claiming the two men had beaten him up, charged them with assault.
Harper then approached Gladden once again. He said he would stop bothering her and drop his complaint against Rick and Sims if she paid him $10,000. She agreed, but only paid him $6,400. When he threatened to reinstitute his complaint, Gladden consulted a lawyer, who told her that her payments to Harper could be considered bribery and urged her to see the Erie County district attorney about the matter. The DA granted Gladden immunity in exchange for her testimony in the subsequent prosecution of Harper.
Rick told an interviewer he was “totally freaked” when he learned his mother had paid Harper. “To me, it was not fair and not agreeable for my mother to be paying him for throwing bottles at me,” he said. In January 1988 Harper was convicted by a jury of one count of bribe-receiving as a witness, a felony punishable by up to seven years in prison. His conviction, however, was overturned by a higher state court in December 1988, and he served no jail time. The assault charges against Rick and Sims eventually were dropped, but now the Harper-Johnson feud had taken a darker turn.
In April 1985 another of Rick’s brothers, William “Head” Johnson, went out looking for Montey Harper but shot Montey’s brother Raymond by mistake. The confusion was understandable: it was 2:25 AM, and Raymond, who closely resembled his brother, was driving Montey’s car.
Raymond Harper survived, but William Johnson was convicted in April 1988 of attempted murder and sentenced to between six and twelve years in prison, a term he began serving in 1989 in Attica. His sentence was later reduced, and he was released in 1992.