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...by James Mason
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While still in the sky with this pair, my thoughts were of a situation in transformation. It was now serious. While chuckling to myself over the very thought of a spectacle such as this one, I knew from experience that one plant can be no more than an informant while two or more can be, and usually are, a set-up. I knew and finally acknowledged to myself that I was to going to have to do what I had been toying with ever since the first contact by the younger agent. I would have to check them out.
Having no concrete reason to believe they wouldn't attempt to proceed with their plan involving me, I telephoned an attorney whose acquaintance I had made while helping with the defense of an entrapment case in 1979. The men concerned had been infiltrated, set up and entrapped first (and significantly enough for a period of three years) by one agent and then, at the critical stage, by several and had been convicted in federal court and served four years in a federal penitentiary for having done NOTHING. This particular attorney– the sharpest and best I've witnessed, "Perry Mason" included– I knew had been deeply chagrined at having lost the case to the prosecution despite overwhelming evidence that the whole thing had been conceived, engineered and instrumented by POLICE agents, and despite a BRILLIANT defense. Furthermore, it had all happened just before "Abscam" and certainly before DeLorean. Had it happened afterward, as I told him when I re-contacted him, he'd most surely have won. Aside from all this, the man had impressed me with the speed and thoroughness with which he had dug out the background on the prime agent involved in this entrapment case. From absolute zero to a complete sketch in about twenty minutes from the time we first met and I supplied him with the agent's cover name and a photograph of him. It seems this attorney had been an FBI man before taking up law and, since our last meeting, had served as a municipal judge. And he agreed to help me now without hesitation and without fee.
The mysterious curious entrapment agent Gene Laws, in his "private plane".
What he found out was that the first agent was a licensed private investigator in the State of Ohio, including the name of the agency for which he worked. Plus the fact that he had turned state's witness with information he'd been paid by the defense to collect in a rape case the year before. And so my suspicions were confirmed. The attorney also felt the situation serious enough to warrant hiring a private investigator of our own in order to learn why I was being watched and exactly who was footing the bill as this was a private business. The attorney's services were free but to retain an investigator would cost five-hundred dollars going in. At that point, with this man knowing my story, I felt my ass was sufficiently covered even if the agents made a reappearance. Naturally, I wanted to know what was behind all this. If I were to scrimp and save, I might have been able to come up with the five-hundred but I had two afterthoughts: first, to tell the agents to go to hell and forget the whole thing now that the joke was over; second, since this affair did involve the Movement and I was only in a cockpit position, I'd go to the Movement and request help in turning one around on the System for a change.
This final afterthought I decided was the best course by far. Right away I ruled out a general appeal because I have seen from experience just how dismally those turn out and this was far too important to trifle around with. So I settled upon a handful of Movement leaders upon whom to appeal, significantly the same group I had been watching over the years and placing increasingly high hopes in as well as the same ones that the agent had expressed the greatest interest in my helping him get close to. The System and I seemed to be noticing the same things and, certainly, by all this, these men had a very real and vested interest in cooperating with me in order to not only protect all of us but score a strong victory for the Movement as well in a great show of working unity. Split amongst this group, the dollar amount called for was practically insignificant.
Remember, these were considered by both the System and myself as THE BEST, those most effective, most dangerous to the System and, therefore, most worth watching. And the response to the urgent appeal that went out via certified mail, with copies of the attorney's letter attached? ZERO. After a time, I received ONE polite response from one of these men, and that was all. The rest chose to IGNORE it completely. And while this was in progress, they were all lamenting the fatal damage done to The Order by these very same types of infiltrators. Agents who were in operation at the same time as Thomas Martinez [the man who informed on and later testified in court against members of The Order], etc., who were working their way into different Movement circles, the same types as had sent who-knows-how-many others to prison or to death, and who were STILL AROUND and active after the climax with The Order, doing their level best to try to move in and wreck what was left of the Movement, lest it might produce still other organized revolutionaries.
In essence, I had asked the Movement the same identical kind of question as that senior agent had asked of me at that final luncheon date. The answer was given and in no unmistakable terms.
I was disgusted but not surprised. I had known all along that when you are in any kind of trouble, as far as the "Movement" is concerned, you are just plain SKEE-ROOED! In twenty years of all kinds of trouble, I had known better than to call upon the Movement for help. This time it could have been the worst jam I was ever in– it had all of the potentialities. But, instead of falling into a System trap, I worked things to where it could have been a MOVEMENT TRAP for the System! Instead of crying for help out of a mess, I was inviting AID in prosecuting an offensive type operation. And you can be sure, by the result, that I have been thanking what gods there may be ever since that it had not been a case of my ass in the sling!
Just be sure it never happens to you.
[Vol. XV, #4 – Apr., 1986]
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