From GLAMOUR magazine, June
1999. p. 224
You be the
Jury:
Does
This Woman Deserve To Be Locked Up for 24
Years?
AMY POFAHL'S DRUG-KINGPIN HUSBAND
CUT A DEAL THAT DUMPED HER IN PRISON FOR A QUARTER
CENTURY---AND FREED HIM AFTER FOUR YEARS. GLAMOUR
INVESTIGATES HOW SHE AND THOUSANDS OF OTHER WOMEN GUILTY
OF RELATIVELY MINOR CRIMES END UP DOING MORE TIME THAN
MEN DUE TO A CONTROVERSIAL FEDERAL LAW.
A harsh law punishes
women unjustly and lets drug lords off easy.
BY DAVID FRANCE
THERE IS AN INTENSE CALIFORNIA SUN on the
morning I pass the two rows of gleaming razor wire, the
metal-detector arch, the armed guards and two vault-like
doors before arriving at a brick patio inside FCI Dublin,
a low-security women's federal correctional institution
outside of Oakland. Amy Pofahl
stands on the other side of the terrace, her feet next to
a patch of pansies with a sign stuck in it that reads,
"No Inmates Allowed Beyond This Point." She was once an
exceptional beauty and a very wealthy woman, and even in
her regulation beige work shirt and slacks, she is still
striking---graceful and leggy, with silken hair that
drapes her shoulders in countless shades of gold. With
her top two buttons undone, revealing a glimpse of her
simple white T-shirt, she looks like she is ready to
leave on a safari, which couldn't be further from the
truth. Amy last saw freedom eight years ago, when she was
a 30-year-old nightclub promoter in Los Angeles. Now, the
toll of her long incarceration shows on her face,
particularly on her lazy eyelids, which are as creased as
crackled pottery.
As the warden's assistant and I approach Amy, he
points to her neckline and commands, "Button your shirt."
She complies with a slow hand. Later, she whispers to me,
"Being in here is very much like that. Everything starts
to focus on these little things like how to wear your
shirt. And whenever you're trying to focus on something
that's maybe going to get you free ...." Then her eyes
leave mine, and she flutters the long fingers of her
right hand in the air, pawing for emotional control.
Amy Pofahl broke the law, but she is not a hardened
criminal. Like thousands of women in prison today, she is
a once-productive member of society who made a series of
bad decisions, all for a man she loved. Unbeknownst to
Amy, for most of the time she was married to him, Charles
"Sandy" Pofahl---a Stanford University Law School
graduate and wealthy Dallas businessman with whom she
exchanged rings when she was 25 and he was 44---was the
mastermind of a secret and illegal international
syndicate that made and distributed the drug MDMA, or
Ecstasy. Sandy revealed his involvement to Amy after his
arrest on February 16, 1989, three years into their
marriage. But then he begged her to handle some financial
matters that she felt might be shady while he awaited
trial. Out of love, she agreed. "I have the kind of
personality that was just right for him to rely on," she
explains. "It's a flaw in my character. I'll jump off end
do things and ask questions later."
It's bad enough that Amy became criminally embroiled
in an operation her husband ran and had kept her in the
dark about. What's worse is that Sandy Pofahl, an Ecstasy
kingpin who directed nearly two dozen accomplices to
smuggle millions of pills into America, served just four
years in prison. Amy Pofahl, his blindly loyal wife who
did nothing even remotely like that, got 24 years with no
chance of parole.
Women Bear the Burden
It is a peculiar facet of the federal sentencing
guidelines that women, many of them young, who are
convicted in drug rings often draw much longer sentences
than men. Almost always, their connection to the drug
ring is as a gofer, delivery person or patsy for the men
they love. As a result, there are more women in prison
today than at any time in the nation's history. The
latest data, from July 1998, shows that 146,507 women are
serving time in federal, state and local facilities, up
from 63,015 a decade earlier. Nearly half of that
increase is drug related, according to the Bureau of
Justice Statistics, part of the US Department of Justice.
This is certainly the most unanticipated and least
logical consequence of the war on drugs.
At the height of crack cocaine's terrible march
through American cities in the mid-eighties, entire
neighborhoods succumbed to crime of such violence and
scope that it seemed as if the fabric of American
civilization was in danger of unraveling. Congress
responded by passing The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986,
which removed sentencing discretion from federal judges
and established a schedule of mandatory-minimum prison
sentences in drug cases, based solely on the type and
quantity of drug involved. The only way defendants can
earn a "downward departure," or reduced sentence, is to
give "substantial assistance" in the prosecution of other
drug dealers.
The Anti-Drug Abuse Act has drawn sharp criticism,
largely because it penalizes low-level participants and
drug users as harshly or---as in Amy Pofahl's case---more
harshly than people guilty of running major drug
operations. The mandatory-minimum sentences established
by the Act have been slammed by the American Bar
Association, the US
Sentencing Commission, Supreme Court Chief Justice
William H. Rehnquist and an astonishing 86 percent of
federal judges. Barry R. McCaffrey, the four-star general
who heads the Office of National Drug Control Policy, has
called mandatory minimums "bad drug policy and bad law,"
and decried the fact that they dominate the drug-war
budget: Some $35 billion a year are spent on
incarcerating drug convicts, many of whom McCaffrey
considers mere foot soldiers for big-time dealers.
Even the congressional staffer who wrote the law, Eric
Sterling (now president of The
Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, a Washington, DC,
think tank), works tirelessly today to undo his legacy.
"The statute has been profoundly misused," he says. "The
price has been a tremendous injustice and a tremendous
tragedy for the [less culpable] individuals,
their children, their parents, their siblings and their
spouses."
The Price of Loyalty
The primary reason women have been hit hard by the
Anti-Drug Abuse Act is that the original statute was
amended in 1988 to add "conspiracy" to the list of
offenses covered. Technically, a conspirator knows about
criminal activity and has agreed to participate. But
federal prosecutors have been able to convict people they
believe simply should have known about the ongoing
crimes, says Marc Mauer, an authority on crime trends at
The
Sentencing Project, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit
group. Frequently, that means the wife or girlfriend of a
dealer ends up behind bars, says Monica Pratt, of the
national organization Families
Against Mandatory Minimums. "Almost half of the women
in prison today under mandatory-minimum sentences have
been convicted of conspiracy. Taking messages for a drug
dealer, driving him to a bank to deposit his money---that
can make you just as liable as the dealer," she says.
In part because of the crackdown on "conspirators,"
the female prison population is growing faster on average
than the male population---7 percent versus just 4.5
percent a year since 1990. Also, of the 8,207 women
currently serving time in federal prison, 60 per cent
have been convicted of drug charges.
Casualties of the drug war include women such as Kemba
Smith, 27, a former Virginia debutante (see below). She
ended up facing the same stiff penalties as some of the
principal dealers in her college boyfriend's drug ring,
even though evidence at her sentencing showed that he
beat her, and that out of fear, she sometimes
participated in illegal activities for him. She was
convicted not of specific crimes related to those few
incidents, but for many offenses the drug ring had
collectively committed. At the age of 24, she was
sentenced to 24-and-a-half years without parole. By
comparison, the average maximum sentences that state
courts handed down for rape and robbery in 1996 were
11-and-a-half and eight-and-a-half years, respectively,
while the average minimum state sentence actually served
for rape was only six years, and for robbery, five.
Why are women like Pofahl and Smith receiving such
long sentences? Because when wives and girlfriends are
caught in the net, especially if they genuinely know
little about the drug operation, they seldom have the
kind of information to trade for a "downward departure."
So the law that was meant to crush drug-world master
minds actually rewards them with shortened sentences,
while their less culpable sweethearts are vigorously
punished.
Even if women have information to trade for reduced
sentences, however, they often decline to cooperate out
of loyalty. In 1989, Serena Nunn, now
29, refused to inform against her boyfriend, Ralph Nunn
(no relation), a member of a Minneapolis drug ring (see
below). "I would not hurt someone else to save myself,"
Serena said. "I'm just not made like that." For her
minimal role, she got a 16-year sentence. Had she
informed on her boyfriend, she might have received as few
as eight months. Instead, Marvin McCaleb, a senior
partner in the drug ring, informed on Ralph Nunn, who
received a 25-year sentence. McCaleb, who had previously
been convicted and served time for manslaughter, major
drug dealing and rape, got seven years---less than half
Serena's sentence.
In response to such cases, Rep.
Maxine Waters (D Calif.), a long time advocate of
Kemba Smith, introduced a bill in Congress last month to
eliminate mandatory minimums. "If you had to define
injustice at the turn of the century," says Eric
Sterling, "these cases are Exhibit A: the girlfriends of
king pins who get sentences that are two and three and
four times longer than the guys who head it all up."
Sandy and Amy Pofahl in 1988: "I thought he was
the best thing in the world."
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The End Of Innocence
Amy Pofahl was once a shy girl from little Charleston,
Arkansas, where her mother was the news paper editor and
her father served a term as mayor. She preferred her 4-H
Club activities to dating, and only begrudgingly attended
her junior and senior proms. That changed when. after a
year of college, she moved to Dallas, a 19-year-old with
dreams of becoming a model. At a party in March 1985, she
struck up a conversation with another guest, Sandy
Pofahl. He was 19 years older, a balding businessman who
reminded her of Gene Hackman. But he had tremendous
magnetism. "I was feeling emotions I never felt before. I
thought he was the greatest thing in the whole world,"
Amy says.
A few days later, they met for dinner at Cafe Pacific,
one of Dallas' finest restaurants, and he handed her an
Ecstasy tablet Although it was sold legally as a diet aid
at the time, Ecstasy is a psychedelic drug, like LSD,
that fosters feelings of intimacy and love. Popularized
in the eighties by San Francisco marriage therapists, it
was sold in night clubs and herb shops until it was
outlawed in October 1986. Using the drug tightened the
bond between Amy and Sandy. They were engaged within
eight days and married before the year was out. "She
called and said, 'You're just going to love him. He's my
soul mate!' "recalls Amy's mother, Nancy Ralston. "When
we met him and realized he was not a big, handsome man, I
thought, It must be love!"
He bought Amy a blue Mercedes and made her sales vice
president of one of his businesses, Commonwealth Bancorp,
specializing in home improvement loans. She earned $4,000
a month plus commission.
Sandy Pofahl was one of the frenetic entrepreneurial
high-fliers who distinguished Texas in the eighties. He
had graduated from Stanford before storming the business
community in Dallas. By the time he met Amy, he owned or
co-owned businesses including a mortgage lending company,
an oil and gas business, a computer software company, a
computer hardware company, a real estate brokerage and a
half-dozen other concerns. He and Amy lived in a
sprawling home in Highland Park, Dallas' most exclusive
suburb, and traveled the world. "These were people who in
Texas we call highfalutin," says an attorney familiar
with the case. And though Amy says they never tried any
harder drugs, the Pofahls continued taking Ecstasy at a
time when it was exceedingly popular and entirely
legal.
Sandy entered the Ecstasy business in early 1985,
several months before he and Amy were married. Together
with Morris Key, Ph.D., a Dallas chemist, Sandy
established Ecstasy International Export and Import
Organization (EIEIO) and sank nearly a million dollars
into start-up costs. Their main plant was in Guatemala,
and they employed a network of above-board distributors.
In October of 1986, however, Ecstasy was added to the
Drug Enforcement Agency's (DEA)
list of illegal drugs. Despite this, Amy says neither she
nor Sandy stopped taking it occasionally. Still, Amy has
consistently said she was unaware that Sandy and Key
continued with their business, and her protestations seem
credible: "Sandy went from one business meeting to
another, all day long. It was impossible to keep up with
his affairs," she says. "It was like being Jane Fonda
married to Ted Turner." EIEIO eventually established
production contacts in Germany, where it was easier to
get the necessary materials, smuggling millions of pills
into America over the next two years, according to
federal authorities. "I knew he had access to Ecstasy,
and he had said he could get as much as he wanted, but I
didn't think he was manufacturing it," Amy says.
Meanwhile, their marriage was crumbling. Friends say
Sandy had a drinking problem, which fueled grossly
inappropriate behavior "I couldn't stand him," remembers
Kathy Johnston, a friend from North Dallas. "It seemed
like anytime you'd even get close to him, he'd try to
touch you. I found him obnoxious. But Amy was in love
with the creep."
In love or not, by January 1988 Amy had had enough of
Sandy's drunken flirtations. She moved to Los Angeles,
leaving Sandy behind. She thrived there, and was soon
throwing such glamorous parties in her home that the
owners of Tramp, the exclusive Hollywood supper dub that
Jackie Collins opened, hired her as their promoter. She
earned $80,000 a year and hosted celebrities from
Jean-Claude Van Damme to Eddie Murphy. "She knew
absolutely everybody," says a soap opera star who
befriended her then and still keeps in touch. "I liked
her independence; I loved that she was out there doing
this on her own."
But Sandy's spell was not easily broken. He wrote
letters with lovelorn salutations like "Dear Better Than
Bestest" and visited her often. He even signed the lease
on a $42,000 a-year house in the Hollywood Hills to be
close. His campaign worked. "If Sandy could get within a
20-foot radius of me, he could just completely melt my
heart," she says.
Amy agreed to move into the rented home with him, but
before she did, Sandy left on a mysterious business trip
to Germany. A week later, on February 16, 1989, he was
taken into custody by German federal agents. Two days
later, his partner, the chemist Key, was arrested in New
York City and extradited to Germany for trial. When word
of the charges reached Amy, she was blown away---not by
her husband's criminal activity, but about the danger the
man she adored was now facing. "I was going to do
whatever I needed to do to help him. I didn't care what
he'd done," she says.
Amy (right) and a friend in 1987, four years
before Amy's arrest.
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"How would you
like to be told to plead guilty to something you didn't
do?"
Kept in the Dark
Other members of the EIEIO drug ring were rounded up
by the DEA, but many didn't even know Amy Pofahl's name.
When agents from the U.S. attorney's office interviewed
her husband and Key in their German prison, both said
that Amy---like all wives and girlfriends---was told
nothing about the Ecstasy operation. Daniel Bernard, one
of Sandy's main U.S. distributors, would later write in
an affidavit: "I never believed Amy to be knowledgeable
as to the particulars. Quite the contrary. I personally
observed numerous attempts made by Mr. Pofahl to shield
Amy from his MDMA enterprise, and I aided his endeavor to
hinder Amy from knowing about the operation."
But after Sandy's arrest, Amy, who had moved into the
rented house alone, became very involved. Sandy
anticipated (wrongly, as it turned out) that he would be
offered a chance to post bail. So he sent his wife a
series of coded faxes imploring her to help recover his
hidden drug profits and cryptically telling her where to
find them. Amy wanted him out on bail badly enough to
take the risk. "What kept going through my mind is that
incarceration is worse than losing someone to death," she
says, fighting back tears. "You know that they're
unhappy, and you know there's nothing you can really do."
Besides, she convinced herself that as his wife trying to
help him ferret out cash, she would not be breaking any
laws. The crime, she reasoned in her distress, remained
his responsibility.
In any case, by the end of the summer of 1989, she had
collected more than $780,000 from the various places
Sandy had stashed it, and had hidden the cash in attics
and shoe boxes in Dallas and Los Angeles. But then she
found out that Sandy would not be offered bail, and she
was stuck with the dirty cash. "The money," she says,
"became this enormous albatross."
Having secretly monitored Amy's actions, federal
authorities descended on her one afternoon in September
1989. She arrived home to find agents rifling through her
things. The list of seized items included six Ecstasy
tablets found in one of Sandy's coats and $7,000 in cash
earmarked for rent on the house, which, of course, was
leased in Sandy's name. She recalls an agent saying,
"You're in deep, sister."
One who questioned her was Charlie Strauss, an
assistant U.S. attorney from Waco, Texas. "She was told
we were just interested in what knowledge she had, and we
wouldn't use it against her husband," Strauss remembers.
"Had she come to the table at that time -- cooperated,
been truthful, honest and candid -- I would say there's a
probability she wouldn't have been prosecuted." Amy says
she didn't believe them. She says they wanted her to
visit Sandy to collect incriminating information.
(Strauss could not confirm this.) Out of love and respect
for her marriage, she says, she refused.
Sandy, it turned out, had fewer compunctions. In
exchange for a promise of leniency, he soon told German
and American authorities everything he knew about the
operation, from the street dealers to the smugglers. He
also offered information about his wife's handling of his
money. Rewarding him for the assistance, German
authorities handed him a six-year sentence.
Sold Out and Set Up
In a vague note he sent to Amy, Sandy told her he'd
come dean about everything, and encouraged her to
cooperate, too. She was livid that she'd covered for him
for no reason, but she did nothing. She did not know how
much trouble she was in. "Once they had him and he had
told them everything, I was sure they didn't want me
anymore." On the contrary, they were building a major
case against her based upon her husband's sworn
statements. Federal authorities seized her car and
plundered her bank accounts, asserting that the money was
ill-gotten. They even confiscated her wedding ring.
Agents asked Tramp regulars if they'd ever seen her
dealing drugs. Nobody had, but she lost her job
anyway.
For about 19 months, federal agents kept on the
pressure, and Amy nearly broke down. Her bank account
empty and her credit cards canceled by the bank, she
started spending the money she had collected at Sandy's
behest.
Early in 1990, she says, she asked her attorney to
tell the authorities that she would direct them to the
remaining cash if they in return would stop investigating
her. Strauss says the message never got to him. "Either
she's lying, or she misunderstood, or somebody's given
her some misinformation," he says. "But those overtures
never came to us."
Fearing that her arrest was imminent but still
convinced of her own innocence, Amy fled. She recognizes
in retrospect that this was a mistake, but at the time,
she says, sitting around and waiting to be indicted was
just too stressful. "Every time I tried to do something
to make it better, I got in deeper. I never made a right
decision in this whole thing." On the lam for about three
months, she found her way to Florida. But the isolation
from friends and family soon caused her to despair, so
she headed back to Marina Del Rey resolved to fight.
Agents from the DEA arrested her there on March 27, 1991,
and charged her with conspiracy to import and distribute
MDMA and money laundering. She was shipped to Waco,
Texas, to await trial.
Her court-appointed attorney, John Hurley, urged her
to plead guilty in hopes of a reduced sentence. She
refused. "How would you like to be told you need to plead
guilty to something you feel you're absolutely positive
you didn't do?" she asks rhetorically.
At trial, there was no evidence that she ever had
direct contacts with Ecstasy manufacturers or importers
or personally sold the drug after it became illegal. But
her efforts to retrieve her husband's money were well
documented. Sandy, still in his German jail cell, was not
called to testify by prosecutors. He wrote to Hurley,
pleading with the lawyer to be called as a witness on
Amy's behalf. For some reason, Hurley did not take him up
on the offer (Hurley refused to comment for this
article.) A jury of eight women and four men found Amy
guilty on all counts. According to the mandatory-minimum
sentencing laws, her involvement in the "conspiracy" made
her just as culpable as if she had built the organization
herself.
Unable to weigh her relative conduct, a federal judge
was forced to hand Amy a 24 year sentence. If she had
been found guilty of money laundering alone -- the only
charge alleging her direct involvement -- she would
probably have received a sentence of just five years.
Today, even the prosecutor, Charlie Strauss, seems
chagrined that Amy received such a harsh punishment. "I
don't think Amy was the linchpin here," he says. "If she
were not married to Sandy, she would not have done this.
She got involved through her association with him."
Life Behind Bars
At FCI Dublin, Amy Pofahl shares a closet size room
with another prisoner, their beds just a foot apart
opposite a sink and an open toilet. Amy has been an
exemplary prisoner with only two minor reprimands, the
more serious for feeding sardines to the cats that dart
between the squat prison buildings.
Amy has had plenty of time to reconsider her actions.
She now concedes that the government's money-laundering
case against her, charging that she removed and spent
money from Sandy's vaults, is valid. "From my soul, I
knew that the money was illicit, and I did spend it, and
if that constitutes money laundering, absolutely.
Absolutely, I regret it," says Amy.
"I've thought about the whole thing a million times,"
she continues. "It's going to sound phony, but it's
really true -- I just feel now that my loyalties were
displaced."
Sandy Pofahl, meanwhile, served only four years and
three months in a German prison, and although the
authorities there expected him to serve another 17-and-a
half years behind bars in America, the Justice Department
elected not to require more time because he had
cooperated with U.S. authorities. He left prison in 1993
and spent two years in the Netherlands, while his
attorneys confirmed that he would not be prosecuted in
America. He returned in 1995 and has since rebuilt his
legitimate business empire in Dallas. The first time Amy
heard anything from him after her conviction was two
years ago, when she was served with divorce papers. After
12 years of marriage, Sandy cited irreconcilable
differences.
In a guarded, hour-long phone interview with
Glamour, Sandy Pofahl rejected any
responsibility for Amy's incarceration. He put the onus
on her, despite his well-documented pleas for Amy to
retrieve his ill-gotten cash. (Sandy's faxes asking for
Amy's help were used as evidence against both of them.)
"She had a need to help," he says, explaining Amy's
attempts to free him from a German prison. "I went over
to Germany, and I truly don't know what happened when I
was over there." Asked why he chose a divorce filing as
his first contact with her after his release, he said: "I
was considering getting married ... so I needed to
divorce her. It was important for both of us to get our
lives going."
Sandy finally visited Amy a year and a half ago when
he was in the San Francisco Bay area for a school reunion
at Stanford. She agreed to see him because she had
questions: Why had he told authorities about her role
gathering up his funds? Why had he implicated her instead
of protecting her, as she had protected him? They sat
beneath a craggy pine tree on a terrace behind the FCI
Dublin visitors center. He was nervous. She was
suspicious. When he tried to kiss her on the side of the
head, she pulled away. "It was heartless," Amy recalls.
"I said, 'Sandy you could clarify a few things for me!'
He was dead set against it and wanted to talk about
surface stuff. I said, 'In case you haven't noticed,
there's razor wire around this little place where I live.
Stop acting like we're sitting at a sidewalk cafe in Los
Angeles, because I would really like to talk to you about
some of the things that happened."'
Sandy showed no sign of guilt or remorse, Amy says.
Regardless, she harbors no anger---at her ex-husband, the
prosecutor or anybody else. But it is harder for her
mother, Nancy Ralston, to let go: "I pray that I will not
be bitter. But it's difficult, it's very difficult."
Endless Sentence
Only one other target of the EIEIO prosecution besides
Amy is still behind bars. Amy herself has filed two
appeals citing incompetent legal counsel and plans to
seek other remedies, but in truth, her chances of early
release are slim. If she serves the full term of her
sentence as expected, she'll be 55 years old when she
gets out in 2015. Even if she were set free tomorrow, Amy
would have already spent twice as many years behind bars
as her husband, a fact she knows will never be
changed.
"I have regrets, of course I have regrets," Amy tells
me on the last day of our prison visit, her voice heavy
with emotion. "I'm getting to the period in my life where
I just feel like I'm losing my youth and the opportunity
to have children and to set up some kind of a future. I
lost the prime years of my life. Nothing's worth losing
that, nothing."
The November Coalition
is a national support group for Drug War POWs, their friends
and families.
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