LEAVENWORTH, Kan. (AP) - There is a lot about Nov. 22, 2002, that Lavelle Henderson cannot recall.
He can’t recall what the weather was like, The Topeka Capital-Journal (https://bit.ly/2s6lXmw ) reported. He can’t recall what he was wearing or what his attorney was wearing. He can’t recall the aesthetics of the courtroom where he stood as he heard the life sentence read aloud.
What he can recall is the feeling that his time on Earth was over at the age of 32 - that life had been sucked out of his body. As he spun around to see his family, he held back the tears, saving them for later.
“My mother cried as if I had been executed right there in the courtroom. My daughters each cried as if their own lives had just been taken,” he wrote 15 years later in a letter from a federal penitentiary.
His attorney tried to say something to allay the devastating blow. Perhaps he did say something. Again, Henderson can’t recall. Anyway, what can you say to someone who just lost a lifetime of freedom?
“The judge planned for me to actually die in prison. Hope seemed to run out of the courtroom, along with every dream I ever had,” he wrote.
Along with his own poor decisions, the political whims of two American presidents, unbeknownst to him, had steered his life to this moment. A future president, then just a state senator in Illinois, would take it in another direction.
As a young teenager on Topeka’s south side, Henderson spent most of his time focused on school, just as his mother and father had recommended. His father was an imperfect man, and yet he was everything to young Lavelle. No one has ever meant more to him.
At the age of 15, Henderson’s father died unexpectedly, sending his life in a tailspin. A hurt and anger unlike anything he knew was unleashed.
His focus on schoolwork evaporated; his hopes and dreams faded into oblivion. There was a void that could not be filled.
He was the eldest son and the second-eldest of six children. There was a perception, perhaps exaggerated, that he needed to provide for the family. No more school books; this was a time to grow up, to make money. In the hardscrabble neighborhoods he frequented, there was a way for young, uneducated men to earn sudden infusions of cash - dealing drugs.
In September of that year his father died, President Ronald Reagan and his wife addressed the nation from their living quarters in the White House. Drugs, the president said, “are menacing our society.” The first lady, with maternal warmth, said drugs “take away the dream from every child’s heart and replace it with a nightmare.”
“Today,” President Reagan told the nation, “there’s a new epidemic: smokeable cocaine, otherwise known as crack.”
Cocaine, the drug of the high-roller, the choice drug of Hollywood, could now be bought for a few bucks. Reagan had told the nation that this new drug - this “crack” - was an epidemic and Congress followed suit. Possession of five grams of crack was now punishable by five years in prison, the same punishment for possession of 500 grams of powder cocaine.
A thousand miles west, in south Topeka, Henderson was finding he had a talent for drug dealing. He thought he was smarter than the other dealers, better at the game than they were. He was popular, too, seemingly running the streets he operated in. There were new friends - friends who said they had his back.
And he was making money. Uninterested in small-time dealing, he and his best friend, Mike Reece, set out for larger deals. Between the two of them - Henderson is black, Reece is white - they could reach much of the city.
“It was simple supply and demand. The drugs sold themselves,” he recalls.
Still a teenager, he could provide for his mother and siblings in a way that his father once had. He felt like a man, a good man. He decided to start a family of his own.
“Things were dangerous but, at the time, I felt like I was really living,” he said.
Sometimes it went beyond danger, spilling over into derangement. His life and the life of his family were on the line. Violence was innate in the game he was now playing. So, too, was incarceration.
“You live in a constant state of paranoia. To live otherwise could result in your death or the death or your family, or prison.”
At first, it wasn’t drugs that sent him away. There was a series of burglary and theft convictions in 1987, then five consecutive parole violations - drugs, firearms, hanging out with felons - that kept him in prison until September 1994.
In that time, President George H.W. Bush spoke to the nation about “our most serious problem today . cocaine and, in particular, crack.” On Sept. 5, 1989, he held up a bag of drugs on national television and solemnly said, “This is crack cocaine.”
The president said the crack had been purchased in a park across from the White House. That was true, though investigators first had to lure Keith Jackson - a high school senior with no arrest record - to the park. When an undercover agent with the Drug Enforcement Agency requested the meeting in Lafayette Park four days before the speech, the young man said, “Where the (expletive) is the White House?”
Then he didn’t show up. During the next scheduled drug buy, a microphone on a DEA agent malfunctioned. Then an undercover cameraman was assaulted by a homeless person, preventing him from recording. A judge later called the episode “a Keystone Kops thing” and jurors guffawed as a federal agent described it. There was a mistrial, a retrial, then a conviction and a mandatory 10-year sentence.
For Lavelle Henderson, there would also be multiple trials - one with serious flaws - and a harsh mandatory sentence. The War on Drugs would soon ensnare him, too.
“African-Americans were being targeted and imprisoned at an astounding rate,” he wrote in a letter from Leavenworth. “This was the government’s supposed panacea for the ‘crack epidemic.’ “
By 1999, Henderson had eight children, all of them daughters. He was 28 years old and had been in and out of prison since he was 16.
On March 5 of that year, an officer at the Ontario International Airport in southern California noticed Henderson and an 18-year-old girl acting suspiciously near a parked car. A drug-detecting dog honed in on the trunk. It contained two kilograms of cocaine, worth $200,000.
“When I get there, I hug her, go to the restroom, come out and she’s surrounded,” Henderson recalled.
Henderson, who lived in San Bernadino at the time, claimed the drugs weren’t his. Three years earlier, he had been acquitted on crack cocaine charges. But this would prove to be a more difficult rap to beat. His best friend, Mike Reece, and an alleged co-conspirator, Lapreshe Wynne, were now witnesses for the government.
Prosecutors alleged that Henderson was the kingpin of Topeka’s largest cocaine ring.
It all began when Henderson took Wynne to California in 1992 to buy cocaine and bring it back to Kansas, the government claimed. Between 1992 and 1996, Wynne made several more trips with Reece’s assistance, according to the prosecution.
There was, however, a major flaw in that theory. Henderson could not have flown to California in 1992 because he was in prison at the time. Reece, too, had been in prison around that time. As Henderson’s attorney, Mark Bennett Jr., recalled years later, “It would have been impossible for these three to have been present with one another in 1992, as alleged by the prosecution and the witnesses themselves.”
Henderson remembers it more bluntly: “Each one of these allegations was absurd.”
Three weeks into the month-long trial, the prosecution amended the indictment, changing the dates when the alleged cocaine ring had operated. The operation didn’t begin in 1992, as the government and its witnesses previously said, but in 1994, they now claimed.
“Obviously,” Bennett later wrote in an affidavit, “the prosecution had become aware of Mr. Henderson’s planned defense and changed the dates in an effort to circumvent the devastating exposure that would have resulted had the jury become aware that the prosecution had adopted an evidentiary theory that was incapable of being true.”
Wynne, one of the two supposed co-conspirators testifying against Henderson, was an abysmal witness. She admitted to lying under oath, told six inconsistent and sometimes incoherent stories about Henderson’s supposed crimes and couldn’t identify Henderson, who was seated at the defense table.
Still, Henderson was convicted on one count each of engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise to distribute cocaine, conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine, conspiracy to distribute cocaine and conspiracy to engage in money laundering. He was found to have made $486,000 moving 80 kilos of cocaine from 1998 to 2001.
Fifteen years later, Henderson continues to dispute the kilo count and kingpin label without denying he was a larger-than-average cocaine dealer.
“What one would call average at best in California, New York, Miami, or somewhere big, Topeka would call a kingpin,” he wrote. “I just outgrew my city and at that point I should’ve been gone but you don’t realize that this has happened or how the numbers bring status and power, which makes you the number one target.”
Under the enhanced penalties signed into law by President Reagan in 1984, there was only one sentence for Judge Richard Rogers to choose from: life in prison. One of the few images Henderson can recall is the devastated look on his daughters’ faces.
“My father had been suddenly ripped out of my life in 1986. Now, 16 years later, their father was being taken from them,” he wrote. “I believe that a part of me momentarily shut down. There are no amount of tears or profanity or punches that could have been shed, spoken or thrown to make that moment any better.”
A dozen years later, Henderson was at a federal penitentiary in Coleman, Fla., and that former state senator from Illinois was in his second term as president of the United States. On April 23, 2014, President Barack Obama launched a clemency initiative for non-violent inmates sentenced under outdated drug laws.
“Everyone was talking about filing clemency,” Henderson said of the mood at the penitentiary. “The institutional computers offered an opportunity, for the first time, to submit an electronic filing. This was unexpected and unheard of. Attorneys were sending emails discussing the president’s clemency initiative. We were being led to believe that something unprecedented was about to take place.”
Still, Henderson was skeptical. Black inmates like him believed clemency was out of their reach, designed only to protect political prisoners, athletes and entertainers, or those with powerful political connections. He had none of that. Instead, he had Janet Henderson, his devoted mother who was prepared to move mountains of bureaucrats to free her eldest son.
When a computer error prevented his first application from going through, Lavelle Henderson told his mother he would reapply but instead he dithered. So Janet Henderson hopped on a plane from Kansas to Florida, walked into the visitation room and told her son to speak to whomever he needed to speak with to ensure his clemency application was filed.
“When she arrived, suddenly I was 12 years old again,” he said.
One by one, inmates were called into a counselor’s office at the Florida prison. Some were told they had been granted clemency. Most were told their applications had been denied. Henderson says it was akin to sitting on the Titanic as the life boats filled and the ship sank.
On Oct. 6, 2016, Henderson walked into the counselor’s office for a 3 p.m. phone call with his attorney. He expected to hear his clemency request had been denied. Instead, he was told the president of the United States had shortened his life sentence to a 30-year term, making him eligible for release in 2026.
“It was surreal. I could not believe it.”
The word spread quickly. By the time he called his family, they already knew. They had read about it, seen the news on Facebook. Henderson, who has been in prison since Mark Zuckerberg was in high school, jokes that he went “viral.”
“As with most great men, I don’t believe that President Obama is a perfect man,” he wrote in one letter from Leavenworth. “But for me and my family, he renewed our faith in America. He renewed our hope in humanity. He inspired a sense of positive change into our family that will be felt for generations.”
While only Henderson is fully responsible for the crimes he has committed, penalties for those crimes were enhanced over two decades by presidents and policymakers. Then the nation’s only black president reversed course. The rollercoaster life of this career criminal has been tangibly affected by decisions made a thousand miles away in Washington.
Now, yet another president is leaving his mark on federal drug sentencing laws. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, in a rollback of Obama-era reforms, has instructed federal prosecutors to seek the strongest possible charges and sentences for low-level drug crimes.
Those changes will not affect the sentence of Lavelle Henderson, who will be 55 years old when he leaves prison. He was 32 when he entered. His eight daughters are successful adults now with advanced degrees, internships at NASA, scholarships and children of their own. There’s no topic Henderson rants about longer and more passionately than them.
“Despite the circumstances, they make it their business to do everything in their power to see to it that we are each other’s focus point, each other’s north star, and I know they are my x-factors in the free world,” he wrote.
Reading the typed letters Henderson writes from his cell in Leavenworth, you wouldn’t think he has nine years standing between him and freedom. There’s hope in them, a focus on the future. He wants to open a franchise restaurant in Topeka with two of his daughters, a legitimate business unlike the illegitimate commerce that earned him a life sentence.
“Of course, they’ll be doing all the work and I’ll be enjoying life,” he wrote with a laugh.
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Information from: The Topeka (Kan.) Capital-Journal, https://www.cjonline.com
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