Stolen Life Read online

  They’d sometimes load up with all kinds of things before they left, with or without anyone knowing, least of all Dad. Mom didn’t mind; for her it was always elders and grown-ups first, and at times I went hungry while watching my aunts and uncles stuff their faces. Then we were told to be quiet and respect our elders and guests—the Creator would reward us.

  Mom just loved to show off her big house to her brothers and sisters. But I guess Dad thought they were freeloaders.

  “Do you think it’s true?” I ask Clarence. “Earl went to the police for protection because he thought someone in Butte wanted to kill him? Why would he think that?”

  But Clarence answers his own question, not mine; his voice stiff with hate: “It was those three cops, John Sullivan, Mickey Sullivan, Moon LaBreche—they’re the ones.”

  Checking the inquest transcript, I realize those three provided all the information about what happened to Earl while he was held in jail.

  Lieutenant John T. Sullivan “just happened to walk in the [police station] door” when Earl first came in, and after his arrest Sullivan began the questioning about drugs; Detective Mickey Sullivan further questioned Earl about drugs for over an hour next morning before he was sent up to the judge for sentencing at 10 a.m.; Officer Clarence D. “Moon” LaBreche was half a block from the jail and answered the alarm raised about 12:30 p.m. by the trusty Harold Dishman. LaBreche ran down the stairs, along the corridor, and, as he testified under oath later, he “observed [Mr. Johnson] hanging from the hose around the corner of the jail there. He was approximately two and a half feet off the ground.… I took out my pocketknife and we cut the hose and he fell to the ground.”

  “Those three cops,” Clarence continues, “were the biggest crooks in Butte. John T. and Mickey set Earl up, questioning him about drugs, then Moon makes sure he gets there first to the body. All three of them were involved with drugs themselves, I think they had a whole ring going. That’s why they started this talk about mescaline, about Earl being doped out of his mind. Three weeks before, he was at home, we were there, he never took off to Spokane or anywhere, he was cramming, he was trying to pass his Grade Twelve exams! Where would he have time to run all the way to Washington and get drugs? I know it, Earl stayed away from drugs.”

  “But studying or not,” I push him, “it seems after midnight on the Wednesday Earl was drunk. Everybody smelled it. They put him in a cell.”

  “The autopsy says nothing about drugs or booze in his system.”

  “That’s noon the next day. That could’ve cleared up by then, eh?”

  “The night before it’s the cops’ word—nothing else, just cops!”

  “What about the guy in the cells, Dishman. Didn’t he see him drunk?”

  “I knew Harold Dishman, he had worked for me logging in summer. In jail a trusty damn well says what the cops tell him or he’s toast. Anyways, he told me he never talked to Earl till next morning, just saw him get locked up at night.”

  “What about the Marine recruiter, Burgess?”

  “Burgess only saw Earl the once, after the city judge sentenced him for drunkenness, after eleven o’clock.”

  “Well”—I’m scanning the report as we talk—“Graham says that, at one in the morning, when he locked him up, Earl offered to watch the guy he was locked in with, who was getting sick—so Earl couldn’t have been drunk that bad, eh?”

  Clarence sits bent, his chair moulded around him, staring somewhere into that past. “Mostly I don’t think he was drunk at all. He was set up.”

  Nevertheless the events remain confusing, if not contradictory. Clearly Clarence’s aging memory has a lot of self-justification to protect, so I push him, as mildly as I can,

  “But that Marine, Burgess, wouldn’t be in on any cop set-up, and he says Earl insisted he wanted to join the Marines right away, walk out of jail, join up and leave, today. Burgess says Earl was very disappointed when he told him he had to get his conviction for drunkenness cleared up first, okay, maybe waived by Friday—only two days—but definitely cleared up before he can go. So maybe Earl was scared. Maybe not drugs—but what? He’ll graduate tomorrow, May 6, sure, but that’s just a ceremony and he can’t attend anyway if he’s in jail, refusing to pay a small fine. And he won’t finish his high-school final exams before the end of May—so why does he need protection in his home town? Why all of a sudden does Vietnam look better than Butte?”

  When I first came into his house two days before, Clarence guffawed loud and long as he offered me one of his patented throwaways: “I wish I was as smart as I’m good-looking, then I’d have figured all this family stuff out by now!” But it seems to me that, self-justifying or not, in the twenty-four years since Earl’s death he must have thought of almost every possible angle, again and again. He answers me now.

  “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

  in a number of burglaries, arsons, bombings, insurance fraud, a shooting, payoffs from whorehouses, shakedowns of whorehouses, threatened murders, robberies and snatch-and-grab thefts and a conspiracy to commit [other] crimes led and orchestrated out of the Butte police department.…

  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:

  The two became involved in crime together in the late 1960s, when LaBreche and Lt. Mickey Sullivan, both Butte police officers, learned Markovich could crack safes.

  Markovich became involved in burglaries at the direction of and with the protection of police officers Mickey Sullivan, LaBreche and Lt. John T. Sullivan.

  In the early days the group participated in “smash and grab” thefts in which John T. and Mickey would set up scores, LaBreche would line out the jobs and Markovich would break out a store window.… Responding police officers would help themselves to the merchandise in the store.…

  They planned much larger heists in the early 1970s.… By Nov. 25, 1972 … cigarettes worth $65,000 were taken from Christie’s Warehouse.… The three burglars were assisted by officer John T. Sullivan, who disabled the alarm system at the police station.…

  Markovich participated in the armed robbery of the Wells Fargo guards at the Metals Bank Building in Butte on Nov. 25, 1973. Participants included Mickey Sullivan, who set up the job, LaBreche and Markovich with John T. Sullivan as lookout outside the building. The take was $140,000.… Butte detectives called the robbery unusally well-planned.

  “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:

  They had an inspector here from Washington. The inspector came through and inspected the jail […]. Johnson was standing in the [cell] doorway there and they went back and inspected the jail.

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

  Yvonne: Late in August 1989, I was living in Wetaskiwin, Alberta. It was over eighteen years since Earl died. Dad sent me that whole Montana Standard with the cop pictures on the front page and the lists of their crimes. I recognized every one of them from when I was a little kid in school without looking at their names. I read the whole newspaper and I could hardly breathe. I didn’t know why.

  Suddenly I was so confused. My nightmares were suddenly even more dreadful. I got into all kinds of hassles and fights with people. Then out of the blue, I hadn’t heard anything about her in months, she was supposed to be happy and married in Ontario, my cousin, Auntie Josephine’s daughter Shirley Anne Salmon, came knocking on my door. Tuesday, September 12, 1989. She added to my problems, and then my whole world went absolutely to hell for ever.

  “ ‘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 th
e 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.

  “I couldn’t do nothing with the car and all of a sudden this Montana Highway Patrol comes past, then squeals to a stop and backs up. I think they want to help, and the patrolman gets out and I say, ‘Good to see you!’ and he’s just stone-faced. ‘Your name Clarence Johnson? You got a son Keith Johnson?’—fucken hell, they always had his name wrong! Nobody called him nothing but Earl—they had it all over their radios. To find us.”

  Clarence sits rigid, breathing so hard the air in the room seems to shudder. He gets up, goes back past his stove and through his bedroom into the kitchen, and after a time reappears with a pot of coffee. He offers me a cup, black, and then seats himself; drinks slowly, smokes.