things weren’t getting any better for Abbie as the new year rolled around. Nineteen seventy-three was going to be a watershed year of a different kind. It would be the year when he ran out of breath, ran out of time waiting for the political reality to improve—the year when disparate elements of his life seemed to tear him apart. As I sit here more than twenty years later trying to make sense of what happened to him that year, I find myself thinking of him as a kind of stray.
Abbie’s sense of place had once been so large a part of his survival instinct that he always seemed to know who he was by where he had come from. Now, feeling estranged from us, his Worcester cheering section, and estranged from the Movement as well, he seemed to lose that strong sense of himself. The choices he made about how to spend his time and where to put his energies started to have a weird tilt to them.
Stray dogs don’t usually live long. Without homes, their survival instincts begin to unravel and they are prone to all sorts of accidents and catastrophes. You see them sometimes on the road, running easily from one side to the other, ignoring the rush of cars. And that is how I picture Abbie that year—with the sweet, sad, dereliction of a stray dog, pitifully vulnerable, weaving in and out of traffic. And yet he still had that boundless energy that enabled him to press forward, hoping for the idea or the break that would bring him out of his slump.
In January 1973, I got a call from Abbie:
“What do you know about soap?” he said.
“You wash your hands with it,” I answered.
“Right,” he said. “But listen to this.”
Abbie’s idea was to imprint bars of soap with the image of the American flag and market them with images of hippies finally practicing good hygiene. He even had the slogan worked out: “Cleanliness Is Next to Godliness.” He wanted me to help him. I set to work, and within a couple of weeks I found a manufacturer in West Warwick, Rhode Island, a company owned by a Harvard graduate who’d inherited the business from his father. When I explained Abbie’s idea to him, he loved it. For weeks he attempted to design a soap bar that had the American flag all the way through, so the image would last through to the last wash—Abbie insisted on this. But the soap manufacturer couldn’t solve the technical problem, and since Abbie refused to go ahead with an American flag that would wash away, we ended up dropping the idea.
Abbie felt that his decision to back the Democratic Party presidential candidate in the last election had backfired. The realpolitik that had gotten us into Vietnam and overseen the troop buildup there had been nurtured within the Democratic Party. So as a Democratic Party supporter, how could one present oneself as an alternative to the system?
The only political activity that did capture Abbie’s imagination during this period was the case of Tommy Trantino, a two-time convicted cop killer who had already spent twenty years in prison, the last ten on death row at New Jersey’s Rahway Penitentiary. Abbie visited Trantino a number of times, making the trip to the bleak, fenced, and walled citylike facility in a barren part of New Jersey south of Newark Airport. He hardly seemed to notice the hellish landscape of the place.
He got involved helping to set up a defense committee for Trantino, and in his autobiography he pledges that “if New Jersey wants, they could parole him today in my custody.”1 Abbie felt at home with Trantino, in exactly the same way and to the same degree that he now felt at odds with his old colleagues in the Movement. If there was a distinction to be made between “us” and “them,” he seemed to be saying, then he and Trantino would be on the same side of that line, lumping all the would-be do-gooders, the liberals, the New Leftists, and the bleeding hearts on the other side.
It seems almost too obvious to say that Abbie identified with Trantino, and perhaps saw himself as an outlaw of the same tribe. And to Abbie it was important to be an outlaw—more important than it was to be nice, more important than it was to be good. The corrupt system wasn’t going to have much trouble co-opting most of the nice good people who came to demonstrations on weekends, Abbie knew. Maybe the outlaws stood the only chance of keeping the good fight going.
Quaaludes, a powerful sleeping pill, had recently come on the market, and the government was scrutinizing their distribution quite closely. Abbie liked Quaaludes at first and asked me to send him a dozen bottles from Worcester Medical. I did so without even thinking about it, filling out the necessary papers in such a way that the shipment wouldn’t be easily traceable. A few weeks later, Abbie asked for the same quantity again. In the next few months he did so two or three times. I guess I might have gotten worried, but I just didn’t think about it at the time. He said he was sharing them with friends.
Abbie liked to say, “There isn’t a drug I haven’t tried.” They allowed him to replicate somewhat the natural high he experienced during his manic periods. And he never saw them as being in any way harmful. Bizarrely, drugs had also been Dad’s business our whole lives growing up. Now they were the one area of common ground, the one concrete link, between Abbie’s world and Dad’s, between where Abbie came from and where he had landed.
With Abbie feeling hemmed in and harassed, even the success of Steal This Book rankled. No other Movement book had sold nearly as well. But instead of that success adding to his reputation, his credibility had mysteriously declined in an inverse ratio to the book’s popularity. Even the distribution deal with Grove had soured and ended over a disagreement concerning the terms. He was still working hard on the distribution of Steal This Book. But with many of his colleagues in the Movement unsympathetic to what was perceived as an entrepreneurial thing, as opposed to a Movement thing, he wasn’t able to call in the troops the way he might have in the past.
In the end, heartsick from all the troubles that had grown out of the book, he decided he no longer wanted to bear the responsibility of distributing it. He asked me if I would take on the task. The book had been hugely successful. Abbie used to say it had sold over two million copies. He exaggerated. But real sales had reached over a half million copies. By this time, sales had slowed, but they were still substantial. So between selling hospital beds and bedpans for Worcester Medical, I began calling on some local bookstores in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, sending Abbie half the money. And Abbie was probably entreating a half dozen friends all over the country to do the same.
The aftermath of the Chicago trial was still dragging on, but without the energy that had characterized the trial itself in 1969 and 1970. The life he lived in the public eye was in a tailspin. And as for his personal life with Anita, as he would confide to me in later years, there were problems there as well. He loved Anita, but with her increasing participation in the women’s movement he felt she was distancing herself from him. She had his full support, and he loved being able to take a more active role with their son, america—something he had never done with his first two children. And he was wonderfully caring of “the kid,” as he called him. But he missed the old closeness he and Anita used to have. And in his own mind, Abbie would date his earliest depressions to this period.
That winter, Abbie, Anita, and america were living in the resort town of East Hampton on Long Island about a two-hour drive from New York City, where Anita’s mother, Leah, owned a house.
In East Hampton that spring, he had his first serious encounter with cocaine, doing it regularly with people he’d met out there, looking for a way to bring himself out of his low moods. Meanwhile, Abbie would sometimes travel back to New York City, where he was researching what he hoped would be a sequel to Steal This Book, to be called Book-of-the-Month Club Selection and featuring the ways and means of the professional underworld. For the new book, he was interviewing hard-core outsiders of every stripe, from thieves and counterfeiters to dope dealers.
Meanwhile, and partly, once again, to combat his down moods, Abbie continued to push the boundaries of his life. He was preparing to have a vasectomy and arranged to have the artist Larry Rivers film the operation, planning on calling it Vas. He conceived of the vasectomy as “a statement of conscience: It says you’re not going to let your sperm scatter through the world. . . .”2 At the same time, he was spending more and more time looking after america while Anita pursued her work, which at this time included counseling women who had fallen outside society’s survival net. And Abbie was involved in what he termed intense “sexual exploration,” both with and without drugs, with Anita and with others, culminating in the experiencing of what he described as a female orgasm.3 He may have been referring to orgasms growing out of a new kind of responsiveness he was feeling, since around the same time he would write in a letter to Anita, “Active-passive is probably the big Yin-Yang. . . . If you’re active constantly in sex, you miss half the sensations, and never learn what the other knows.”4
So here was Abbie, his trial finally over, the Vietnam War finally ending, his credibility within the Movement shattered, and the all-consuming project that had been Steal This Book grinding to a halt. It was something to behold, like the miracle of stop-action photography, like a ball hovering in mid-air: Abbie in repose. What I see now, and couldn’t have known at the time, was how troubled a time this was for him emotionally.
On May 17, the televised Senate hearings into Watergate began, chaired by Senator Sam Irvin of North Carolina. I can remember sitting with Dad in the office of Worcester Medical watching on the small black-and-white set we kept there. Dad spent every free moment during the day watching. The President he had voted for twice was turning out to be a crook. Dad was learning that he had been wrong to place his faith in the authority of the U.S. government. The things he had believed in—our government leaders, and the American Way of Life—weren’t worthy of his trust. Abbie had been right all along.
More important to Dad, who was always most concerned with what other people thought, friends he respected were beginning to say to him, “Maybe your son was right after all.” They would tell Dad this, perhaps thinking he’d be pleased to hear nice things about his son for once. And, of course, a part of him was glad to hear things that could stir up a father’s pride. But more powerfully, his faith in his country, and the values on which he’d built his life, were now shaken by Watergate with particular intensity since he’d fought for them against his own son.
In the previous two years, Abbie had had little contact with his family, and almost none with our parents. They had seen their grandchild america only once or twice since his birth. For Jewish grandparents to hardly see their grandchild during his first two years of life is something that could only happen in times of war—not an unfair description of the mood in America during that period. But now Abbie was winding down his side of the war. The joys of fatherhood were now, perhaps, his main solace. And he began to return in his thoughts to our family. Pretty soon there were calls from Abbie inviting everybody to East Hampton for a family reunion.
In the end, there would be two outings, since there were too many of us now to all fit in the house at once. And so at the end of July, Ma, Dad, Phyllis, her two-year-old-son Hilario, twelve-year-old Andrew, and nine-year-old Ilya crowded into Dad’s brown Lincoln Continental in Worcester and made the pilgrimage to visit Abbie and Anita on Long Island, and to meet their two-year-old son america. That weekend, the lost time was pushed to the side and everyone tried to act as if things had never changed, as if the family had withstood all the craziness. They went clamming. They ate fresh duck, which Abbie said he’d shot himself, which, of course, nobody believed. Abbie and Dad went deep-sea fishing, just the two of them, as we once had done as children. Abbie had wanted to make peace with Dad. But you don’t make peace in a day.
The following weekend, Joan and I gathered our children, Jaime and Justin, and went to join Abbie, Anita, and america for a long weekend. There was swimming, basketball in the backyard, and Abbie’s fabulous fish barbecue. Our children played together. Even Anita, before disappearing as she always did when we visited, was friendly at first.
Abbie seemed content, and happy to see us. As Joan noticed right away, he lavished attention on america and seemed to love playing the role of father. That came as something of a shock to us: In the past Abbie had always insisted on being the center of attention, yet here he seemed to have no difficulty shining the spotlight on his son instead of himself. I wondered what could have changed to make things so different now.
He seemed to be really there, present, and available, as I’d rarely seen him before, and the weekend was one of the best times we’d spent together. But at the same time there were signs that might have worried me if I’d thought more about them, signs that he might be going through some kind of identity crisis.
He was subdued and seemed completely free, too free, of his usual egotism. He was growing a mustache, and it just didn’t look right on him. He had recently had the vasectomy he’d been talking about, and had made good on his promise to have the operation filmed by Larry Rivers. “There”—he said shortly after we arrived, pointing to a glass jar with what looked like some tissue in it on the mantel—“my manhood.” Proof positive that he was no sexist pig at heart, and a reminder to himself that he wanted no more children. Birth control from the dick end. Very equality-minded to have had the operation, but a little twisted to want so suddenly to separate himself so completely from a part of himself he had once considered important, and to have had it filmed and made into a work of art, I thought. He had undergone the vasectomy with the same enthusiasm that he did everything else. It was not exactly out of character, but as if his character itself were undergoing some kind of painful assault from within.
When Dad returned from his weekend with Abbie, I had asked him how it had gone, and he had said it had gone well but hadn’t seemed interested in talking about it. Now Abbie told me how difficult the fishing trip with Dad had been. Abbie had wanted to talk a little about the last ten years, had hoped Dad would meet him halfway at least. But Dad had been too reluctant. He was still too stubborn to admit he’d ever been wrong. I told Abbie that if he’d been the one proven wrong, he’d probably be the last one to admit it, too.
A few days after we got home, Abbie called me at the office and asked me to send him some procaine.
“Sure,” I told him, “How much do you want?”
“Five or six pounds,” he said.
“For what?” I asked, surprised at the large quantity. He said people were starting to get high on procaine, that he had a buyer, that he’d be getting a few thousand for it, that I’d make a thousand for helping. Procaine wasn’t a restricted drug, not one of the prescription drugs the regulatory agencies asked questions about. The six pounds cost me less than six dollars a pound wholesale. I didn’t know that at that time procaine was the preferred substance used to dilute cocaine. So I ordered the procaine, and when it came in I scraped the labels off and sent the six amber glass one-pound jars down to Abbie by UPS.
About three weeks later, on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 28, Abbie called me at work from art collector and Chicago crony Joe LoGiudice’s loft in Soho. He was manic, and he sounded high. The reason he was calling wasn’t clear at first. Not for advice, or for anything else in particular, but because, for better or worse, he usually called me when something important was about to happen. He called for the record. Maybe he knew somewhere inside himself that twenty years later I would be here now trying to understand him.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I yelled into the phone, sensing catastrophe approaching. All he would say was that my thousand had increased to five thousand. In the background, at his end of the line, I could hear our friend Joe LoGiudice telling Abbie he was crazy.
Around 11:15 p.m. that night I got a call from my friend Richie Lenett, then living in New York.
“Did you see the news?” he asked. I’d gone to bed early, so I hadn’t. “Your brother’s been arrested with three pounds of cocaine,” he said.
“Get out of here,” I said, trying to sound relaxed, but I’d stopped breathing. Abbie was confined in the precinct jail awaiting arraignment the next morning by a special narcotics grand jury, after which he was to be confined in the Tombs, the Manhattan prison.
Ma and Dad simply didn’t believe Abbie could have done it, and as I spoke to them over the phone on Wednesday, I told them, “Of course not,” but inside I doubted my words even as I was saying them. I thought that he might have done it, and that if so he had purposefully made sure I would know. He had asked me to supply the procaine, and then called me just before leaving for the Diplomat Hotel, not to keep me in the dark but to make sure that afterward I would see the light.
The questions that nagged at me during those first hours after I learned of the bust didn’t have to do with the arrest itself. My questions had to do with the surrounding circumstances. Who was his source? How had he been able to get that much coke? Had he been set up? Just as when a child shoots somebody, what we want to know isn’t whether he did it or not, but “Where did he get hold of a gun?”
At the head of the sting that netted Abbie were two Queens narcotics detectives, Robert Sasso and Arthur Nascarella, who posed as buyers dressed in silk shirts, patent-leather high heels, gold rings, and gold chains—going for the Mulberry Street look of Gambino family mobsters. By Monday afternoon, with New York City in the throes of a terrific August heat wave, Abbie had the cocaine, and had cut it with the procaine I had sent him. A meeting with Sasso and Nascarella was set up at the apartment of Abbie’s assistant Carole Ramer, arranged by Ramer’s boyfriend, a man named John Rinaldi, who owned a beauty salon in Far Rockaway, Queens, and drove a Mercedes.
Abbie swept into the meeting in T-shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots, calling himself Frankie, and carrying a bag he said contained the dope. “I got the best stoohff in New Yoohhkk,” he said in his fakest New York accent. Under his worse-than-fake real mustache, Abbie appeared very high and totally manic. His friend Diane Peterson was with him, introducing herself to the group as Martha Mitchell. Abbie sold the undercover cops a “taste,” and soon after they left to bring the cocaine sample to the police lab. Their impression of Abbie was that he wasn’t much of a coke dealer.5
Tuesday morning, August 28, the lab results showed the cocaine to be around 17 percent pure—so diluted that a professional buyer, anybody but a cop—might have killed Abbie and his friends for having delivered three pounds of such low-grade product. But since they weren’t really buyers, of course, the cops didn’t care that they were being sold low-quality coke.
Plans were made to do the main deal late Tuesday afternoon at the Diplomat Hotel. As usually happens in the middle of a heat wave in New York, the elevators were out of order at the Diplomat. The room Abbie had rented for the deal was on the tenth floor. This time, Abbie arrived in the lobby carrying two large brown paper shopping bags, one under each arm, with three brown jugs visible in one and a large tri-beam scale sticking out of the other (Sasso had asked him for the scale to weigh the coke on the spot so that he could get Abbie’s fingerprints on it).
During one of several climbs up the ten flights of stairs, the ridiculous became the sublime, as Abbie noticed a gun handle protruding from under the shirt of one of the cops and, still not suspecting anything, suggested to the detective that he had no need of that here. Finally the coke and the cash were exchanged in the hotel room, and Detective Sasso told him he was under arrest. At first Abbie tried to talk his way out of it: “All it is is a little powder. If you guys want it, you can have it and we can all go home.” Sasso took aim at Abbie’s legs and then Abbie carefully lowered the suitcase, raised up his hands, and backup police entered the room on the run. Had they waited, hoping that Abbie would resist arrest and get himself killed? Maybe. In any case, the party was over. Within hours, it would be followed by a full-scale media circus.
Both cops would later insist that they had first heard of a possible drug deal involving Abbie Hoffman only the day before the bust. But on December 6, 1974, a year and a half after the bust, and nearly a year after Abbie had become a fugitive, at a hearing on a motion to have the drug charges dropped, two individuals gave sworn testimony that months before the coke bust the two arresting officers were on Abbie’s tail. Carole Ramer’s building superintendent, a Jehovah’s Witness named Best Concepcion, testified that one Sunday during the spring of 1973 a man claiming to be a telephone repairman asked to be let into the basement to work on the phone box. Ms. Concepcion remembered thinking that it was strange a phone man would come on a Sunday, and at the hearing she identified the man as Queens narcotics agent Arthur Nascarella. Nascarella would deny that he had tampered with any phones or been in the building on Twentieth Street until August 27, the day before arresting Abbie.6
Around the same time that Best Concepcion saw Nascarella, the building superintendent at 80 Park Avenue, a man named Janos Deszey, would testify under oath to having seen Nascarella’s partner Sasso in his building—where Anita’s mother had her apartment, the apartment from which Abbie had placed most of his calls while researching his new book, the apartment that had served as his Manhattan office for all of 1973 until the bust. And like Nascarella, Sasso would deny under oath that he had ever been there.7
Abbie had been under nearly constant surveillance for ten years, often by at least a half dozen different government agencies simultaneously, and he was certainly under surveillance in 1973. Even as recently as August 14, just two weeks before the bust, as part of its surveillance of Abbie the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) requested information on him from the FBI.8 In fact, so skeptical would the New York District Attorney’s office prosecuting Abbie’s case be that Abbie wasn’t under surveillance at the time of the bust, that in March 1974, as the case proceeded toward trial and before Abbie went underground, Assistant District Attorney Dave Cunningham would inform both the FBI and the Justice Department that he “cannot proceed with prosecutive action until [he] receives information . . . regarding any wire taps . . . which could ‘taint’ [Hoffman’s] case.”9
On an afternoon in the spring of 1992 while researching this book, we sat down in a Manhattan diner under the Queensborough Bridge with former Queens narcotics agent Arthur Nascarella, who had agreed to tell us “the truth” about the cocaine bust that had ruined my brother’s life. He began by saying how sorry he was about what had happened and how much he’d liked and respected Abbie.
Nascarella was probably in his early fifties—Abbie’s age—but tall, lean, and powerful-looking. He seemed to have no fat on his body whatsoever. He breathed rapidly, noisily, almost hyperventilating as he spoke, and it occurred to me he might be using speed. He said he’d read all Abbie’s books—this from a guy who still carried his .38 Chief five-shot stuffed into his sock with a rubber band, a guy who had loved being a cop. You couldn’t imagine someone more different from Abbie, and yet he had related to Abbie, identified with him, or so he said. For a second I couldn’t help comparing them: little Abbie with the square jaw, the big talk, the mischief in his eyes; and this tall, muscular, angular, handsome detective with that hunger in his eyes.
“I guess Abbie got laid more than I did,” Nascarella said to me, “but hey, he got fucked more than I did too.” From Nascarella’s standpoint, that was a fair characterization of the unofficial NYPD position on my brother: Abbie had had a good time and messed with a lot of people, especially cops, over the years, so when they saw him ready to take a fall, they were going to make sure he fell hard. Nascarella then offered his condolences: “I was sorry to see your brother die the way he did.” In my brain I kept hearing the echo of the singsong refrain Nascarella used frequently to pepper his conversation: “Be-bop-bop, budda-bing, budda-bum.” As if to say, “People come and go; some die; too bad.”
I asked Nascarella if he’d mind if we taped the conversation. Taking up the challenge, he answered, “No, no, not at all.” He said that he’d known Abbie at the Columbia demonstrations in 1968—his first assignment right out of the police academy—and that he had first heard Abbie’s name in connection with the coke deal only the day before the bust. This confirmed the statement of his former partner Sasso, who had told us that Nascarella’s first mention of the operation had been on that Monday, when he had walked into Sasso’s office to tell him, “We’re making a buy from Abbie Hoffman tonight,” although it directly contradicted the testimony under oath of the two building superintendents.
He gave us his theory that Abbie’s problem was that he felt that “he couldn’t be touched.” At one point in the conversation, after describing how poor the quality of the cocaine was, Nascarella smiled and said, “It’s possible that us busting your brother saved his life that day.” At another point, Nascarella looked us squarely in the eyes and described having watched Abbie leave the Columbia demonstrations in a chauffeured limousine, an utter falsehood. The strange admixture of sincerity and mythology in Nascarella’s story left me feeling physically ill during the interview. I realized that after it was over I still wouldn’t know the truth about the coke bust.
I had waited in Framingham until Thursday morning, two days after the bust, when I received the go-ahead from Abbie’s lawyer and friend Jerry Lefcourt, and took an early flight to New York. Abbie’s bail had been set at $200,000. Things looked horribly bleak. Once in Manhattan, I went first, at Jerry’s request, to meet Anita so that she could give me a bag of essential articles for Abbie—some fresh underwear, deodorant, toothpaste, toothbrush, and soap—no frills. The meeting with Anita was a depressing prelude to seeing Abbie; we had never gotten to know each other, and Abbie’s trouble didn’t make us feel any closer. I couldn’t help remarking to myself that at this moment when Abbie was going to need all the help he could get, I felt like an outsider, waiting for instructions from Jerry Lefcourt before I could even get on a plane, and then having to pick up Abbie’s underwear from Anita. My impulse was to close ranks. I wanted this to be strictly a private family matter. I knew Abbie would lean on me in a way he wouldn’t lean on anyone else. Yet I was being used as a go-between by people who, I had to admit, knew Abbie better right now than I did.
From Anita I went directly to the Tombs, where I waited outside in a line that stretched for half a block, all of us waiting for visiting hours to start. I was one of the only white persons on that line. Bizarrely, Geraldo Rivera and several other reporters were there, picked me out of the crowd, and started to grill me. But for once in my life I wasn’t interested in talking about Abbie. I was too scared.
Abbie had involved me unknowingly in the drug deal by having me supply him with the procaine; for all I knew I could be indicted, too. And here I was standing in a line of outcasts, and I was one of them, along with Abbie and the rest of our family. I felt this overwhelming sense of our powerlessness; we had gone too far, past the point of no return. There is no more terrible, hopeless feeling, and it doesn’t go away. This arrest could not have been more different from the usual arrest after a civil disobedience, where you were on the side of right, where you were pointing a finger at injustice. Now the finger was going to be pointed at Abbie and at us. I waited in line for around forty-five minutes, listening to the sharp and tender melody of conversations around me in Spanish, feeling like I was in a foreign country.
Once inside the jail, still holding the paper bag of necessities for Abbie, I deposited money in his prison account. Then I waited for another hour or two in airless heat in a room downstairs, along with other visitors, sitting on hard wooden chairs. In the heat of that hundred-degree August day, the stench of perspiration and urine seemed to be everywhere. Finally, after being searched, I was led up a metal stairway with three or four other visitors to another waiting room, from where we could hear shouts and other noises from prisoners in the cell block. Seated under the greenish, graffiti-covered walls, I faced a glass partition several layers thick. Abbie was brought in and seated in a chair on the other side.
Sitting across from me, he put his hand to the glass. I began talking to him right away, while he kept pointing to the phone on the table. I didn’t understand at first. Then I picked up the phone and heard his voice.
“How’re you doing, Big Jack?” He was letting me feel that he was still there, still my big brother, having seen on my face how frightened I felt. Hearing that voice at first gave me a boost. But looking at him, unshaven, wearing the same clothes he’d worn for three days, his hair matted, dark circles under his eyes, and still with the comical mustache, I was filled with confusion. He looked out of place, horribly out of place. Then, all of a sudden, my apprehension of the whole experience increased, and he actually seemed to me not to be so out of place. For a second, I felt he belonged here. I turned my head aside, and then recovered enough to look at him again. Seeing my tears, he softened and turned to comfort me, saying that things would straighten themselves out.
“I’m doing okay, Abbs,” I answered, embarrassed to be the one receiving kind words when he was the one in jail. “Everything’s going to be okay,” I added, a little feebly.
Then I mouthed silently, “What happened to the brown bottles?” Abbie gave me the thumbs-up sign in response and mouthed back that it was all okay and not to worry.
That morning, an article in the New York Times described Abbie’s friends as being “either incredulous or downright suspicious”—a sign of faith in Abbie.10 But the article also quoted the same friends describing Abbie’s recent disillusionment. He was portrayed as “a man who had withdrawn into himself because of ‘badmouthing’ from other radicals, and money problems aggravated by legal fees, support payments to his former wife and two children, and financial problems with publishing companies.” Bill Kunstler described how Abbie “had withdrawn a great deal,” and had been “hurt, chastened, and upset” after the 1971 “people’s tribunal” that ended the Tom Forcade debacle. The article also quoted Anita describing Abbie editing his movie of his vasectomy. It wasn’t that Anita, or any of Abbie’s friends, had said anything wrong or untrue about Abbie. Rather, the circumstances under which the article appeared made you read it with his assumed guilt in mind. You searched it for an answer to the question of why he might have done it, and not for any other reason. Abbie seemed vulnerable as never before because of the recent bust. I felt a powerful urge to protect him. It was almost like a sharp pain. And here he seemed suddenly so completely out of the reach of any help I or anyone could give him.
Immediately after the bust Jerry Lefcourt had requested letters of support on Abbie’s behalf from a number of notable friends. Allen Ginsberg wrote six pages in praise of Abbie, including this interesting paragraph:
In time of communal Apathy synchronous with Abbie Hoffman’s recent disillusioned withdrawal to private life (after crises of his public efforts to confound Government police bureaucracy and war led him to be attacked left and right), Mr. Hoffman is now to be congratulated on an arrest which by its very surprise, its simultaneous whimsicality and seriousness, re-unites many of his fellow workers once again to resist the steamroller of police state Power crushing another live citizen’s body.11
Other letters arrived from, among others: Kurt Vonnegut, Dwight McDonald, and Murray Kempton, whose letter began:
I have almost never heard from Abbie exept when he was asking me to help someone else in trouble. Now he is the one who needs us; and I notice that he hasn’t thought to bother us by asking. But then I should have known he wouldn’t.12
On the following Monday, Labor Day, Abbie sat down and wrote me a letter that filled several pages of his trademark lined yellow sheets in his usual ragged hand. He described how agonizing it had been for him to have to see me through the barrier of the visiting area’s glass wall. He also implied that there were things that might vindicate him. And, after thanking me for visiting him, he told me not to cry for him. Most of the letter contained descriptions of life inside the jail—of how his view was of never-ending bars, and how, with the lights always on, he had no sense of time and little to fill it. He wrote about cop killers and other hardened criminals in the jail with him—and how killings inflicted by inmates on other inmates were routinely listed as suicides. He didn’t think he could stand being incarcerated for any significant period of time. He asked me to reassure Dad and Ma that he still had time to accomplish something to make them proud. He ended with an outpouring of affection and encouragement toward me.
Here he was in the middle of his life and at the height of his powers, suddenly placed in a living hell, examining himself and his surroundings objectively, soberly, almost clinically, filled with love, finding in his own misfortune a kind of peaceful quietude almost as if he’d died a natural death. The letter moved me and, somehow, gave me hope: Abbie was going to roll with the punch, and that told me he’d live to fight another day.
Abbie’s lawyers were able to get his bail reduced, first from $200,000 to $50,000, and eventually to $10,000. Anita had set to work with friends in the Movement raising money for Abbie’s bail. Contributors would include Dr. Benjamin Spock and Daniel Ellsberg, as well as film artists Paul Newman, Jack Nicholson, and Woody Allen.13 The $10,000 was soon raised, and Abbie’s release date was set for September 14. Jerry Lefcourt began planning a defense based on entrapment.
I visited Abbie again on my birthday, September 13, and that night, the eve of his release after eighteen days in the Tombs, he wrote to me again. His letter intermingled his relief at his imminent release with more of the remarkable humility and calm that had characterized his previous letter. He apologized for not having remembered my birthday the day before. Then, to my amazement, he wrote, “I feel awful bringing shame & scandal on the family.” I think writing that sentence was a milestone for Abbie. If he could write that in a letter to me, I figured it was to show me that he had the strength to face things squarely.
A decade later Abbie would say that it was during those days in the Tombs that he made the decision to go underground. “I’d been prepared for fugitive life ever since 1970,” he would write, and “I was sick of trials and jails. . . .”14 But it was also true, as he said over and over in private, that he simply wasn’t sure he would survive a long stretch inside.
Over the years I waited for my brother to describe again the shame he had felt after the coke bust as he had in that one letter written to me from the Tombs soon after the bust. But he never again expressed those painful emotions, at least not to me. Ironically for someone whose credo was all openness, Abbie was so often closemouthed when it came to the things that affected him personally most deeply. He thought he had acted stupidly. He felt responsible for what had happened. The details of the bust seemed to matter a lot less to him than those two incontrovertible facts.
Abbie always said he’d been set up, but he never figured out exactly how it was done. He had all the same facts as I did, but he never put it all together. I think there were a few reasons for this. One was pride. Abbie would rather be thought of as an armed and dangerous archcriminal than a schmuck. And when you think about it, the truth might have made him innocent of the charges, but nothing could make Abbie’s role in the drug deal look good. He felt tremendous guilt for having lost his way, and for having been willing to be persuaded to participate in a large dope deal; the fact that he may have been set up didn’t change one bit the shame and disappointment he felt he’d brought on himself. It is also possible, as Johanna Lawrenson has suggested, that Abbie took the fall for others and kept his silence to protect them.
Another reason is a little less concrete, but equally important. Abbie, like most other leaders on the Left, never wanted to acknowledge the extent to which the Left had been infiltrated, for the simple reason that to do so would only make his life that much more difficult. The burden of constantly questioning who might be spying on you—the mailman, your kids’ teachers at school, your neighbors?—and which conversations were being bugged—the phones, the house, the car?—was intolerable. So Abbie did what most of his colleagues did: He trusted rather than mistrusted the people around him, and hoped against hope that the enemy was on the other side of the barricades. He instinctively put out of his mind whatever clues he had that by 1973 the barricades had effectively been overrun.
Abbie may have been bored. And of course the main appeal to Abbie of the coke deal would have been the action, the excitement. His motivation would have been as simple as wanting to try something new. I don’t think he would have been naive about the money. He would have liked the prospect of making that much money that fast. But more than the money, the attraction would have been the danger, the excitement. For someone who was beginning to experience bouts of profound depression, the need to keep himself up was not something he had the option to ignore. He liked the action, but in a way he also may have needed it.
In later years, Abbie didn’t like to talk about the bust. He hoped that someday, somehow, either in a court case, or by a New York State Governor’s commutation, he would be pardoned. But he did say repeatedly that there was at least one undercover cop among his codefendants or their accomplices.15 Just weeks prior to the bust, Abbie had been the only individual named publicly in a lawsuit against BOSS, the New York City Police Department’s “red squad,” that resulted in the destruction of intelligence files on thousands upon thousands of people.16 That would have been only the most recent among a thousand reasons members of law enforcement had for wanting to put Abbie Hoffman away.
It may be that Abbie was entrapped. There is convincing circumstantial evidence to that effect. But so little of the record has been made public. Abbie’s entire FBI file contains some fifteen thousand pages, many of which have been released to us with large areas blacked out by heavy black Magic Marker. Untold numbers of documents from the FBI and other government agencies have simply been destroyed. To date, the New York Police Department’s Bureau of Special Services has released to me some eight hundred pages of files on Abbie. But since Abbie’s FBI file describes communications between BOSS and the FBI that are not indicated in the BOSS files, we know that other BOSS files were either destroyed or are still being withheld.
The early ’70s was a period when the FBI could destroy lives and, in some cases, whole movements with complete deniability. This was the period of their war against the American Indian Movement (AIM), the Puerto Rican Independence Movement, and the American Communist Party. As exhaustively documented by Peter Matthiessen in his book on the Leonard Peltier case, one of the more typical modus operandi of the FBI was to feed individual law enforcement officers exaggerated estimations of the dangerousness and maliciousness of activist leaders, thus tempting local police officers to exceed the letter of the law on account of the heinousness of their perceived enemy.17
The extent of the COINTELPRO activity against Abbie and other public figures on the Left is still open to question. The truth may well be that what is known represents only the smallest part of FBI dirty work.
If Abbie had really been dealing drugs, or was even suspected of dealing, wouldn’t there have been some mention to that effect somewhere in the 15,000 pages of FBI files we reviewed? There is no mention of it anywhere in the FBI files. It is clear that Abbie’s drug bust was an uncommon event filled with procedural irregularities and that today we still don’t know the whole truth about it.