Coming in this cool, overcast morning from walking/running around the dirt track at six a.m., then at the loudspeaker’s command passing under the gun tower and razor wire and military fence and locked gates and through metal detectors and guards in anti-stab vests, I was listening on headphones to a piano rendition of Tchaikovsky’s “Sugar Plum Fairies.” Reminded me of my father playing the Tin Soldier to Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker. I could only smile and offer a little prayer of thanks for a moment of grace at the start of the day.
I wonder what almost twenty years now in a maximum-security environment does to a man. After a day in the chiller (wearing mittens and knit cap due to the coldness), compressed among the tattooed faces and eyeballs, we were let onto the track for an hour. Few go, for most remain mesmerized for decades by TV. But wandering alone was an elderly friend, a native Sioux from South Dakota.
He has a fine old dark brown and deeply craggy face that Edward Curtis would have photographed. Gray hair to shoulders, easy, slow walk, the rhythm of his language—that which older Native Americans often speak.
He told me of riding his horses who still wait for him: bareback with just a blanket and no halter (for they sense his wishes and the way), along the ravines and isolated magic pools and streams of remote places, then watering his horses and building a fire and just sitting and feeling the peace and beauty. He’s going home soon to his sons and horses. Best conversation I’ve had in a long time.
1. A privately-owned computer company operating since 2009 that allows inmates to communicate with the outside world.
Postscript
UNTIL THE 24TH OF JULY 2020, the final pages of Operation White Rabbit ended in the imprisoned voice of William Leonard Pickard, Inmate # 82687-011, speaking with weary but unbowed resignation from inside Tucson’s maximum-security federal Penitentiary.
He held out hope. He worked tirelessly for his own freedom, as well as that of dozens of others, instructing all comers on how to navigate the impenetrable federal appeals system. But the system hadn’t worked for Pickard. Even with his minor legal triumphs, such as forcing prosecutors to release more of the voluminous yet dubious evidence they used against him than they ever revealed at trial, he could not reverse Judge Rogers’s draconian sentence. In writ after writ, appellate justices conceded mistakes may have been made, but none absolved Pickard of his crimes.
Then, late on a Friday night in July, five words rocketed across the internet, shifting tragedy to triumph.
Leonard Pickard had been released.
Everything changed in a tweet. The headline: William Leonard Pickard’s latest appeal for compassionate release had been granted. The verdict stood. He was still guilty of manufacturing and distributing 90 percent of the country’s LSD supply, and would have to submit to five years’ probation. But his age (seventy-four) and health (stage three chronic kidney disease, hypertension, iron deficiency anemia, hypothyroidism, cataracts, pre-diabetes, prostatic hyperplasia, posterior vitreous detachment and Vitamin D deficiency) prompted the closest thing that the government offers as mercy.
Leonard would immediately leave prison after nearly twenty years. The normally glacial justice system moved with such speed that there was no time to close out his email. All texts bounced back with an alarming note that this inmate no longer existed. Most of those who’d championed his cause for two decades had no idea how to even contact him, let alone where he would wind up when he walked out the gates for the final time. He later confessed to friends that he felt like a virgin in this brave new technological world—one that he’d left behind when Bill Clinton was still in the White House.
“As you can imagine, matters are overwhelming but a continuing delight,” he told me a few days later.
Without fanfare or much in the way of a helping hand, guards handed him a pair of jeans and a one-way bus ticket that left around midnight, then sent him on his way. He barely had time to call Trais Kliphuis to let her know he’d be arriving the following day. She and Duncan met him at the Albuquerque bus depot the next afternoon. After hugs and tears and a gathering up of Leonard’s meager belongings, they drove home to Santa Fe, where Leonard reacquainted himself with the luxury of an actual mattress with pillows, sheets, and box spring. When he switched off the lights – another small privilege he’d never again take for granted – he could actually hear the sound of his own breathing, and nothing more.
His family and friends set him up with a MacPro laptop and cell phone—twin toys that simply did not exist when he went inside at the turn of the century. His millennial son Duncan taught him the rudiments, while Trais hooked him up with WiFi.
Leonard boggled.
“Have sorted out some of the new world of electronica and am somewhat functional,” he reported after a few days of practice. “Remain amazed at the rapidity of communication, and fullness thereof. Evolutionary.”
When I had finished writing Operation White Rabbit some months earlier, Leonard pulled one of his many strings and had a friend on the outside deliver a magnum of Moët & Chandon to my front door. A master of the grand gesture, he never let prison limit his good will. The day after Mike Bauer’s apparent suicide in 2018, he saw to it flowers were delivered to Bauer’s widow. While a self-trained expert at manipulating words, Leonard knows full well that actions always speak louder.
I reciprocated the day following his release with roses. A dozen appeared on his doorstep with a note attached, apologizing that they hadn’t come from Paracelsus. As with all the gifts and simple pleasures now at his disposal, flowers were as
