Life is What Happens While Your Making Plans or Dumped in the Fjords

Turning States Witness against the father and son, I was sequestered in a very nice hotel downtown for two weeks while the trial was going on. Two Secret Service agents were assigned to me and had rooms on both sides of mine and I was told “there is nothing to worry about” as they were heavily armed. One night I went down to the hotel swimming pool by myself after a long day sitting outside the courtroom waiting to be called to testify, and I was swimming laps. I started floating on my back, gazing up at the clear night sky full of stars that shone so brightly and I was thinking “ God was in his heaven and all was right with the world” when suddenly, out of nowhere the man I was to testify against was standing pool side, staring down at me. He had an expression I can only describe as Al Capone like. I walked across water and ran to the lobby where I knew would be plenty of people and protection and was met by the Secret Service agents assigned to protect me and I told them what had happened. Suddenly, dozens of Secret Service agents appeared and “sealed” the hotel. I had told them I was going to the pool and by God I wanted to know why I was there alone and put in that position. I wasn’t allowed to leave the hotel but I insisted that my father be picked up and brought to stay with me because he was an ex-cop and I knew he could protect me. After arranging vacation day’s, with suitcase and German Luger, in swept my Daddy, my protector.

I had been shooting firearms, riffles, bows and arrows all my life so I knew how to use the Luger and I wasn’t afraid to aim and pull the trigger. Merlin found out that the man I was to testify against was staying in the same hotel but he didn’t tell me this until the hearing was over and I was long gone. I testified the next day that the man sitting at the table was the man who gave me the twenty-dollar counterfeit bill and I had to explain that I was well trained in identifying counterfeit money.   I told the jury that his son was only standing next to his father while he was chatting, being charming and trying to distract me and that the son didn’t appear to have any knowledge of what his father was doing. My own father was in that courtroom, at my insistence while I testified and until I was released. The jury came back with a “Not Guilty” for the father and the son who was only seventeen, was stuck with all the charges. It was the father’s shop in New York that had been busted and a quarter of a million dollars in counterfeit bills were confiscated from, yet the father got off scott free and the poor kid was sentenced to twenty-five years with no parole. I was so shocked by the juries findings that everything went black and I was escorted out of the court room after screaming at the jury for being so fucking stupid and telling the father that karma would get his ass. I didn’t know I had reacted that way until Dad got me home and we had five whiskeys together. I turned down my first and all offers to work with any attorney after that fiasco because I had no faith in the “system” and I had principals and beliefs that would not survive this venue and the stink of what Tricky Dickey had pulled was still in the air I became politically DEFIANT for years after that.

While still under the Secret Service protection for a couple of day’s after the trial, my father took me down to the Keys for a well-deserved retreat. It took me a long time to get over the injustices done to that poor kid by the jurors and his father. I developed a hard shield around me. It was down in the Keys, fishing with my father that he finally told me about his experiences during the Bay of Pigs Invasion while he was Crew Chief and in Morocco with the Joint Chief’s of Staff. . He reminded me of when I was only six years old in 1964 that President Kennedy had come to Castle Air Force Base and that I had shaken The Presidents hand. President Kennedy was at that Base to debrief the S.A.C. Commanders after the crises was over and to personally thank all the men on the B-52 Bomber Squadron for a “Job well done.” It was only at the end of our first day in the Keys that I realized that I was being “debriefed” by the master, my DAD what a man!

I know of no other father daughter relationship that shared such intrigue with such trust, I was a very lucky girl to have a father like I had, but I had known that for a very long time. This was 1979 and Donn had been in Alaska for about a year and was coming down to the Keys to surprise me because I was an emotional mess. I didn’t trust “the system” any more and was scarred to death that the counterfeiter was going to hunt me down and kill me.