The First FBI Agent I Met

The first FBI agent I met; I saved his life. This was in Hawaii in the late 1980s.  I was in the Hawaii State Sheriff’s Department, but this was not a state operation.  My work as a Deputy Sheriff did not involve drugs or even guns.  I had joined after finishing my service in the US Marines while I waited to hear back from the US Air Force, where I had applied to Officer’s Training School, and was waiting on a slot.  At that time, this could take over a year, and tracking down people wanted by the court seemed like an interesting way to stay productive.  I had, however, gotten a federal firearms license when I was in the Marines, to supplement my income and because I knew quite a bit about guns.  Hawaii, with its unique blend of cultures and lack of a cowboy ethic, is extremely strict about gun ownership. In most states, federal paperwork is the only thing required, and this was before phone-in or digital background checks, of course, so Hawaii had a manual system.  

The prospective purchaser had to fill out paperwork that the seller would take down to the police station and register the transaction so the police could check backgrounds prior to approval.  In the course of my business operations, I would be contacted from time to time by people who did not want to fill out the paperwork.  I would tell them that I did not operate that way.  If they persisted or made threats, I would notify the ATF so they would be aware if something happened to me and run the number to know how credible the threat was.  Usually, nothing came of this.  Even when a guy said he wanted an assault rifle to kill Imelda Marcos when she came to town.  Or I should say usually, I did not know what actions were taken on the information I provided… But one guy called, and all that changed.

The person who called said that he needed a lot of guns, Tech 9s and Uzis as I recall.  This immediately identified him as someone unfamiliar with the quality of different weapons manufacturers.  It would be equivalent to someone shopping for a car saying, “I’d be happy with a Toyota or a Yugo.” One choice, the Uzi, is made in Israel and is a very dependable weapon for its purpose.  A compact submachine gun.  As a semi-automatic pistol, it is stupid and too heavy, but it does look cool. The Tech-9 also looks cool, but it was a piece of junk.  Made from poorly stamped metal of inferior quality, I wouldn’t trust one in combat.  But this guy was not a Marine or a soldier… He was a “lieutenant” in one of the largest organized crime groups on the islands, and his boss was a real killer.  

Giving these guys military designations makes me almost ill.  They are nothing like the men and women I served with in the Corps or my brothers and sisters in the rest of the armed forces.  A true soldier does not shoot an unarmed, defenseless person… Ever.  I don’t care what you saw in “Fury” or a thousand other films.  This is not honorable, and it is a violation of everything we as a nation should stand for.  Let me continue as I carefully climb down from my soapbox.  There was one time when I was showing firearms to someone, and they walked off with them, having arrived with a large, read Samoan friend, and showing a gun under his shirt.  I notified the ATF and read later where those men had been arrested.  I did not get compensated for the guns, but that was on me.  I should have been more careful. 

There were several other times that the ATF took action against people after asking me to go through with a sale, but my direct participation had not been required until this time.  The man’s name was Watanabe as I recall.  And after I told him I wouldn’t sell firearms without paperwork, he became belligerent, almost threatening.  I called my acquaintance in the ATF and instead of telling me nothing, he asked me to help set up a sting operation.  This would involve me, working completely outside my duties as a deputy, more on that later, and it would put me in danger.  The Marines had not taught me to quail when there was an opportunity to do right, and I agreed.  The man Watanabe worked for, Charlie Stevens, was unknown to me but well known to federal law enforcement. It would be fair to say that he was famous.

When federal authorities are at their best, is when they protect us from corrupt local and state law enforcement officials.  There was a lot of drug money running through Hawaii, much related to its largest cash crop, marijuana, but once local officials are paid to look the other way, they lose the right to pick and choose what to ignore, and crystal methamphetamine was running rampant on the islands.  Charlie Stevens, known by many monikers and famous for cruising the island of Oahu in his black Lincoln Continental with his henchmen.  Charlie had earned his reputation as a heartless killer back in 1978, when he killed two people.  One of them was a woman that he first shot in the stomach to make her suffer, and as she pleaded “No, Charlie, no,” he shot her again in the head. 

Her name was Patricia Stevens, 32, (no relation, not that it would have mattered to Charlie), and killed with her was a man named Conrad Maesaka, 27.  Many newspaper reports from that time dismissively refer to them as “drug dealers” ignoring the fact that being addicted to drugs necessitates purchasing them, and Charlie often forced users to deliver drugs or collect money for him, seeing them as more expendable than his men.  To get rid of the bodies, Charlie had ordered them taken to the Waianae Valley, about as rural as Oahu gets, and conscripted three local men to help cut them up with cane knives and put them into separate trash bags.  Burying the bags in a shallow grave covered with leaves and branches.  Charlie had supervised the entire operation at gunpoint. 

Charlie had been involved with other deaths.  Like when Mervin “Charlie” Chan died while mainlining meth Stevens had sold him.  Stevens was called to the site and helped dispose of the body with some of his henchmen. When I say henchmen, I mean that.  One of these was Ronnie Ching.  Ching was a hitman, having killed his first victim at age 16 by his own admission. Ching helped run drug and prostitution rings in Hawaii, killing at least twenty people in total.  Two of those would come back to haunt him.  Not because he had a conscience, there is no evidence of that, and it was well known he enjoyed killing, but because he killed Arthur Baker, who turned out to be a government informant, and Charles Marsland the third.  Many serial killers admit that the target prostitutes and drug addicts because no one cares. But someone cared about Charles.

That someone was his father, Charles Marsland Jr., who happened to be a local prosecutor.  Charles was of Norwegian descent whose family had come to Hawaii before his birth. If your family has lived in Hawaii for a while but are not Polynesian, the locals may give you the honorific, Kama’aina which means literally “child of the land.”  The rest of us, as I discovered when I went there, are Haoles.  A word meaning “foreigner” but with an emphasis that makes it more than a little pejorative, often applied to “white” people.  Though my dark green brethren in the Corps were also often referred to also as haole.  Mr. Marsland was clearly kama’aina, with a father that was a deep-sea diver and a mother who was a schoolteacher.  Marsland the junior attended Punahou school and went on to graduate from Tufts University in Massachusetts.  He also joined the Navy Reserves.

Marsland fought in World War II in the Pacific Theatre, after which, he attended Northeastern University’s school of law in Boston. He became an assistant attorney general in Massachusetts and served from 1953 to 1958, then went into private practice, and returned to Hawaii in 1967.  Back in Hawaii he became deputy corporation counsel for the city of Honolulu, developing good contacts with local law enforcement.  During this time Marsland had married and divorced and had one child, Charles “Chuckers” Marsland III, who went back to Hawaii with him, running a nightclub his father helped him set up.  Chuckers was 19 years old when he was killed by Ching with what is described as a “police revolver”, which could mean it was a .38, often carried by police, or that it had been registered to the police and acquired somehow by organized crime.  

Mr. Marsland was haunted by the death of his son, thinking that Chuckers may have overheard something in his nightclub. By 1984 he had an organized-crime strike force that had corralled Ronnie Ching and another underworld denizen named Henry Huihui. Ching pleaded guilty to federal firearms and narcotics crimes, providing Marsland some information to get a better deal, but of course, kept quiet about murdering Chuckers. He went to prison in 1981 and was serving that sentence when someone informed the government that Ching was the one who murdered the informant, Baker, back in 1978. Baker had also been involved in drug trafficking and prostitution in Hawaii’s Chinatown but, as an informant,  had police protection. 

When confronted Ching confessed almost everything, admitting to four of the twenty murders he was suspected of committing, including being a lookout during the 1970 murder of state senator Larry Kuriyama, who was gunned down at his home.  The killing of the informant in 1978, where Baker was handcuffed and dragged from a cocktail lounge on Kalakaua Avenue and buried alive in the sand at Maili. The execution of Bobby Fukumoto came next, also an informant.  Ching shot him with an automatic rifle outside a bar in 1980.  And finally, he confessed to the 1975 murder of Charles Marsland the third, catching him when he left the Infinity disco in Waikiki at 4:30 a.m.  His body was later found at Waimanalo. For these crimes Ching received four life sentences.

Huihui, Ching’s associate, also gave information to the police.  He had ran an organization called “The Company” that had been formed by crime boss Wilford “Nappy” Pulawa. In 1984 he confessed to racketeering, extortion, and gambling, and to the murders of a gambler named David Riveira and a labor leader named Joseph Lii.  Riveira because he had turned police informant, Lii because of a power struggle between union factions.  The both turned on former Honolulu police officer Larry Mehau, who lived on the Big Island and was believed to be the “godfather” of organized crime since the 70s.  This failed and Mehau was never convicted.  That brings us back to Charlie Stevens.  As you can see, the underworld in Hawaii at that time was violent, murderous, and merciless.  

With many key players gone, Stevens stepped in to control the Waianae Coast for twenty years. And that brings us back to the first FBI agent I ever met. I knew nothing of all this at the time, and truth be told, it has always been hard for me to imagine that someone truly enjoys hurting someone else, but I think burying someone alive in the sand would have convinced me.  Back to Stevens.  Stevens had killed at least two people personally in 1978, as related before, cutting up the bodies and melting down the gun. But someone, perhaps Ching or Huihui, had informed on him and In 1981 he had gone on trial for those murders, with the three young men, conscripted from Waianae to help, testifying against him. Stevens argued that those three young men had committed the murders and he had been framed. 

The jury didn’t buy it, and Stevens was convicted of the murders on 6 October 1981, but in a stunning reversal, Judge Harold Shintaku reversed the verdict, claiming there was insufficient evidence to convict.  This was a very surprising event, as judges routinely leave innocent people languishing in prison because a motion was filed a day late; why would the judge do this?  The answer came later, but by 28 September 1981, Stevens was a free man.  So, now, one of Stevens lieutenants is out to buy guns from a naïve former Marine.  I said no but later got a late-night call saying that my wife and I would be killed and buried in the sand.  I informed the local police and called the ATF. They checked the number, identified the lieutenant, and asked me to help them set up a sting.  We would make a deal and take him down with FBI support. I agreed, and here is how it went down.

I called Steven’s lackey back and told him I might be able to help him.  He had said he wanted “full auto” weapons.  A lot of gangsters prefer these because, without any firearms training or a range to practice on, they were terrible shots.  Not caring about collateral damage made a full auto or “machine gun” very popular with them.  I told him that you couldn’t easily make a Tech 9 full auto, and it would jam.  I also explained that Uzi’s were from Israel and converting a semi-auto one to full auto required a complicated conversion, but a Mac10, a US-designed submachine gun originally chambered for .45 caliber, was still in old U.S. military inventory.  He was excited and ready to make the deal, offering drugs and money for payment.  I told him that he would need to talk to my military connection, as I had been instructed to do since he wanted a lot of these weapons.

We agreed to meet at the parking deck of a local mall, where he would bring the drugs and money to show good faith, and we would bring one Mac 10 to show the quality of the firearm.  Date and time were set, and we got ready.  The ATF agent chosen to play the young military contact was indeed young and red-haired, obviously a haole to avert suspicion.  He was wired and picked me up in a red Mustang.  Military members don’t make much, and seeing one in a nice car can indicate an alternate source of funds.  I sat in the back behind the front passenger’s seat.  We pulled up at the mall and waited until the lackey walked over with a duffle bag.  The ATF agent showed him an unloaded gun, and he opened the bag to show the crystal meth, stacks of bills, and a Tech 9, which we had not expected. Everything was going according to plan until an FBI agent walked into view in a suit.

Now, it is important to understand how laid-back Hawaii is.  It is very common for people to wear extremely colorful tropical prints with five or six primary colors and sandals.  Hawaiians might go to a funeral in shorts with only two colors, still wearing sandals.  This is not a sign of disrespect but just a characteristic of their culture.  Seeing a man in a suit on a warm day in Hawaii definitely stood out.  Just as we all noticed the man in the suit, he reached up to his ear and pressed, talking without anyone next to him.  That is a common sight today, but back then, it meant one thing.  The lackey yelled “Five-Oh” and pulled the Tech 9, swinging it around toward the agent.  I immediately wrapped my arms around the seat, trapping and lowering his arms, applying as much force as I could.  This brought the gun down toward the floorboard.  

The ATF agent grabbed onto the gun and started wrestling it out of Watanabe’s hands as the FBI agent ran over and grabbed his hair, trying to pull him through the window it looked like.  The gun was wrested from the criminal, the FBI agent didn’t get shot, and that was the first time I met an FBI agent.  I had idolized these agents and still did, despite questioning this one’s common sense regarding surveillance dress.  Eventually, the lackey became an informant, and Stevens went down.  It turned out that he had his brother bribe the judge back in 1981.  This had long been suspected, and things had not gone well for Judge Shintaku since that time.  The same night he had acquitted Stevens, 6 October 1981, he had been stopped by the local police and charged with drunk driving.  

The next morning, his family found him in a beach cottage his family owned in Mokuleia with multiple skull fractures and a broken clavicle. Police said that he had hurt himself in a suicide attempt, not explaining why they had released him in the first place.  I think they beat him so badly they thought he would die, and put him in the empty cottage so he wouldn’t die at the jail. Judge Shintaku had resigned in 1983, after the state supreme court started investigating him, and was arrested in 1987 in a police raid of an Alewa Heights teahouse, along with Earl Kim, who controlled illegal gambling in that era.  It turned out that the judge had a gambling problem, and Shintaku needed the money from Stevens to pay off gambling debts.  A financially compromised or greedy judiciary is the first step on the road to chaos, and Shintaku was not a stranger to that road.  He had ruled that the unrepentant murderer of Sandra Yamishiro in 1979 was legally insane because he stabbed her to death after shooting her with a pellet gun.

Ignoring the fact that the murderer, Randall Saito, was determined to be a psychopathic killer with sexual sadism by psychiatric evaluation.  Most psychopaths, a 1% variant of usual cognition, live productively among us, serving as soldiers, police officers, surgeons, and prosecutors.  But when one goes bad, their innate lack of empathy for others makes them extremely dangerous.  Saito was the worst type of psychopath to encounter, with superficial charm and an almost total lack of fear, making them hard to detect, passing polygraphs, and fooling police officers.  Saito would have enjoyed torturing his victim with the pellet gun before stabbing her to death.  He spent decades in a psychiatric facility on Oahu before escaping, catching a cab, and flying first to Maui and then to LA.  Later during an investigation, a medical staffer at the facility said that Saito was a master at getting what he wanted. It turns out that he had formed sexual relationships with at least three staff members.  He was recaptured in 2017.

 Psychopathic sexual sadism is like an addiction to those who suffer from it, and while some can turn their lives around.  That was not the case with Shintaku. Like crystal meth addiction, gambling addiction can be almost impossible to control. Shintaku had been paid $21,000 to circumvent justice in the case of Charlie Stevens.  I don’t know what possessed him in Saito’s case.  But over time, Shintaku’s demons caught up with him.  He slashed his wrists and jumped from a high hotel casino window in 1989 after running up $21,000 in gambling debt. The Demons also caught up to Stevens when his men, including the one I helped catch,  turned and were willing to testify against him. Copping pleas as they say. Stevens came under federal indictment in 1991 on firearms and drug charges, which were updated in 1992 to include kidnapping. Minutes before the trial started, Stevens confessed to the 1978 murders of Patricia and Conrad, all those years ago.

By this time, I was serving as an ICBM Deputy Commander in Montana and had been contacted by my friend in the ATF about needing to testify and how that could be arranged with my military duties.  After the guilty plea, he called back and said it wouldn’t be necessary, and I went on with my life.  The next time I spoke to my friend was just as I finished medical school, having been accepted at the Mayo Clinic and given an Air Force scholarship.  While there, the internet had become a new thing, and my family had received a message shotgunned to hundreds of email addresses saying that a man had a child that he wanted to photograph while being abused.  I called my old friend in the ATF and asked who had jurisdiction over the new internet.  He said the FBI and I called the local office, speaking to Agent David Price.  Price said to try to get a location as back then, as they couldn’t track things online the way they can now.

Indeed, there had been a famous murder of a young newscaster, with the killer sending taunting emails to the authorities, never being captured. I was perfectly willing to help as I was in Hawaii, and set about earning the trust of those online who were dealing in this subject, many of them sending images with their messages, eventually finding and making contact with the originator of that first contact.  It turned out that he was from somewhere near Saint Cloud, a suburb of Minneapolis, and when I called the Rochester office, they passed me off to an Agent, Jim Tucker, in Minneapolis.  Over the next several months, we were able to set up a sting at a hotel in Saint Cloud, and the FBI contacted the Saint Cloud Police Department to help in the weekend operation.  I was not needed there, as I had given my description as that of an agent who would take my place in the undercover operation.  

That was fine with me, as I had a very busy schedule in my last year of medical school, planning a trip to South America to serve in Quito, Ecuador, and the Amazon.  I had also, during my Ob-Gyn rotation, delivered my own daughter, as my wife went into labor while I was on shift.  So, needless to say, I was busy.  One of the law enforcement personnel on the operation, someone I later learned was from the Saint Louis Park PD, contacted me to say the sting had failed, and he asked me to try to regain contact and set up another meeting.  I agreed and did my best over the next several months, but I was graduating and had gained acceptance into an emergency medicine program, and time was limited.  Still, I did my best.  After graduation, I called and asked the Minnesota FBI about the messages and images still on my computer.  He said that rather than having them drive all the way down to take it out of my hands, I should just call the local FBI where I was going.  This is exactly what I did,

On arrival in Little Rock, I set up my computer and found that it had crashed.  I ran recovery software and got busy with my ER training.  When the computer had been recovered, reloading what could be salvaged from on-disk records and ISP servers, I guess, I called the local FBI.  I spoke to a Glenn Brandon, special agent I thought, but he turned out to be an administrative assistant.  I related everything that had happened, and he told me to print everything out on hardcopy and bring it down to them during their working hours, 0830 to 1630.  I was routinely working twenty-hour shifts and had not gotten around to it before two men in dark suits came to the hospital.  I was called by the residency director and told that I had past due charts.  I knew this was not true as I had been meticulous not to fall behind.  It’s a devil to remember old patients when you have so many new ones.  But I came down to clear things up and was immediately taken by the arm and shoved into a room.

“You need to talk to these men.” My director hissed.  I immediately thought they were DEA and that perhaps a vial of morphine had gone missing somewhere, but when they started asking questions, I knew this was not the case.  They asked if I had a computer, if I had ever been online, what emails I had used, etc.  I relaxed and said, “Oh, I’ve been working with the FBI on this.” And related to them essentially everything I have written her about Minnesota, except the names of the agents. Names have always been hard for me, while numbers come easy.  I’m also a visual learner, and never having met those agents in person, I did not remember their names. The agents said that was alright, one of them would step out and call the FBI.  He did so and said it was all good.  The FBI had verified my statements. I just needed to take them down and give them access to my computer, and they would take it off my hands.  

I agreed, telling them I might need to stop and buy more disks for the data, but remembering that I had just bought some the week before as I led them in a separate car to my home.  These guys turned out to be from US Customs, and once there, an agent named Sanders operated the computer, copying whatever he wanted, while the other agent kept stepping out to make calls.  When Sanders was done, he moved the files to the trash icon.  Now, I had done medical research, and my trash had a shredder linked to it to make sure that when something is deleted, it stays deleted and I didn’t compromise patients’ privacy.  I don’t know if Sanders knew this or not, but the icon came up when he moved the files to delete.  Then the other agent, who turned out to be named Mensinger, came back in an jerked the power cord out of the wall, screaming, “The FBI has never heard of you!”  They ran out to their car carrying the computer and actually squealed away like a bank heist. 

I was beside myself, trying to figure out what had gone wrong.  I went down to the local FBI office and asked them to find the person I had spoken to when I had called.  I called the FBI in Minneapolis and asked them to find the agent I had worked with.  I also called the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as I had mailed them some information on those I had contacted before leaving Minnesota.  Finally, I located and went down to the local US Customs office, demanding to know what was going on.  We almost came to blows, with them accusing me of heinous acts and my pleading that they were jumping to conclusions.  They threw me out.  I contacted a local attorney who said she would pray for me, which, while a nice sentiment, was not what I was paying her for.  I was later indicted, and the papers screamed my name, tainting any hope of an impartial jury.  I filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the FBI in Minneapolis and Little Rock, but both came back with no records.

Due to pretrial publicity, the only attorney I could find was an immigration lawyer, who agreed to take a settlement I was due from a car wreck as payment.  I filed thirteen motions to get access to FBI records, but all were denied when the government responded that they had searched and there was not a “scintilla” of evidence supporting my claim.  I went to trial with no records turned over, with Mensinger saying it was “absurd” that I had ever contacted and helped the FBI.  The federal prosecutor told the jury that they looked for any record of contact between me and the FBI but reported that there was no, “a scintilla” of evidence to be found. I was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison.  I appealed, as did the government, and I was given another two years based on the content of the images in the messages.  Then I got a lucky break.  While preparing for my appeal, a federal defense investigator had gone up to Minneapolis and spoke to the FBI.  

They refused to give him access to any records or help him in any way, but on his way out, someone mentioned Saint Louis Park. The investigator went there and spoke to the police.  They immediately located a fax from FBI agent Jim Tucker, listing me as the complainant, and laying out the entire operation.  This was presented to the court in a writ of habeas corpus, but the trial judge refused to overturn the conviction, ruling that I had not tried “hard enough” to find the records before trial and it was, therefore, a lack of due diligence.  I spent four years in federal prison before coming home.  Once home and armed with the new records, I went in front of the medical board, having been licensed during my residency.  They reviewed the evidence and voted unanimously to return my license unrestricted.  This was an amazing moment in my life, as being a doctor had been my dream since childhood, and I had feared in prison that it would be impossible. 

I rebuilt my life, starting out in a walk-in clinic, working on my days off with a pain specialist so that I would know how to deal with this complicated condition.  Over the next six years, I worked with this specialist weekly, then moved to another area of the state where I eventually became the director of emergency medicine and trauma at two hospitals, helping one reach a higher level of designation, and eventually started several clinics of my own.  These were general practice clinics where I worked with a fantastic elder surgeon and ER doctor, with him handling general medicine and urgent care, while I did general medicine and pain, eventually taking responsibility for evaluating patients on controlled medication therapy, and traveling to take Harvard-sponsored classes in pain medicine for the primary care provider. When the CDC’s guidelines came out in 2016, we read and complied with them, exempting patients who came to us already on opiate therapy and those who had sickle cell, cancer, or AIDS.

I also hired an attorney who specialized in FOIA litigation.  Over the years, I was able to slowly get more and more records from the government. Soon, I found out that the assistant US attorney who had prosecuted me did not have a law license during my trial.  She, in fact, did not have a valid law license in any state when the government hired her.  I have the records from the Office of Professional Responsibility asking essentially, “How the hell did this happen?  It happened because she had been disbarred in Kentucky but still had a paper copy of her license.  She took that to the Arkansas bar and asked for reciprocity, getting a temporary law license.  The state of Arkansas did its due diligence and quickly revoked this temporary license, but again, she still had the paper copy.  She took this to the US Attorney’s office, was hired, and spent twelve years practicing in federal courts and taking away the liberty of Americans.  When this came out, they gave her a raise and let her retire.  

The Arkansas Supreme Court found out and banned her from ever practicing law in Arkansas again.  She went back to Kentucky and was readmitted to the bar there. We raised this point with the court to get my conviction overturned, but the same judge ruled that there is no intrinsic right to be prosecuted by an honest person, and I was left convicted.  Over the next decade and a half, my FOIA attorney kept fighting, eventually getting further records proving that the FBI had indeed told this illegal prosecutor that I had worked with them in the past.  She claimed just before the trial that she had “lost” those records, and they hand-delivered another copy of them to her before the trial.  So when she was saying no “scintilla” of evidence, she knew the truth and didn’t care.  Neither Sanders nor Mensinger nor anyone else was involved.  I wondered why my FOIA had failed, but that was answered in early 2019, when my attorney pried from the government’s iron grip a message regarding my FOIA.  “Deny All Records”.

I was in talks with an attorney to file a writ of coram nobis to try to clear my name.  At the same time, I had become interested in the treatment of addiction, wanting to offer this service to any patients of mine who developed that complication on controlled medication therapy. I took the addiction medicine boards review course three years in a row and was able to work with a psychiatrist whose specialty was addiction. I helped establish the first medication-assisted treatment center in my area.  It was there that I had my next encounter with an FBI agent, as he was putting cuffs on me in that clinic.  I had been indicted on testimony to a grand jury from a few disgruntled patients who had been dismissed from controlled medication therapy for misbehavior.  These complaints had gone up to the state medical board and, after a brief suspension to investigate, had returned me to practice.  The records proving that the testimony to the grand jury was false were in the government’s possession when they testified,

These records had been sufficient for the medical board but not for the federal authorities.  One of my patients had died in police custody after being denied medical care for eight hours, and someone had to pay.  They decided that someone had to be me.  I’ll probably never know if I was targeted because I now had proof that the government had withheld evidence in my first trial, the lack of which the trial judge had based his decision to deny my motion to overturn.  The records are available at drlonnieparker.com. Or did I just get caught up in the current opioid panic that is still raging through this country, where doctors treating pain and addiction are prosecuted for the amount of medication they prescribe, sifting through thousands of patients to find a few with a bad outcome and the convincing a jury that the doctor knew, should have known, or was willfully blind to the “risk” of addiction, overdose or diversion? My thoughts on these matters have been published in KevinMD and the Daily Remedy.

 I may never know why I was really prosecuted. Maybe I was just low-hanging fruit, as my good friend and former police chief suggested. Or maybe it was because I was about to sue them for millions of dollars. But a lot of time has passed, and although I feel young for my age, I may not have too many decades left to wait for the records.