DEAR MR. PRESIDENT: WILLIE AIKENS WANTS TO BE FREE

You don't even know how this pardon request reached your desk. You're the
president of the United States of America, by gosh, and you might have time
to consider, say, a billionaire who gave loads of money to a friendly
nation or the son of the education secretary or maybe your brother. People
like that.

But this? A man who sold crack to an undercover officer four separate
times? Please. And there was a gun. And it all happened near a school. And
the guy's only defense was that he sold her the junk because he wanted to
get her into bed. Now, how does something like this get to the desk of the
president? Someone on your staff must have fallen asleep. You reach
instantly for the "Pardon Denied" stamp -- if there is such a thing --
because you don't have time for this. You have 20 million more presidential
things to do. You raise the stamp high above your head, bring it down hard,
only then, just an instant before stamp smacks paper, maybe, you catch the
name on the request.

The name is Willie Mays Aikens.

Willie Mays Aikens?

The ballplayer?

The doctor came up with the name. That was Oct. 14, 1954, less than two
weeks after the World Series ended. Less than two weeks after the first
charmed season of Willie Mays. Say hey. What a player. Mays hit home runs,
stole bases, chased fly balls all over New York. The doctor suggested the
name, Willie Mays. He figured that this baby without a father, born in a
little South Carolina town called Seneca, might be blessed by it.

Twenty-six years later to the day, Willie Mays Aikens played in his first
World Series game. He hit two home runs. In the fourth game of that 1980
World Series, he hit two more home runs. Nobody had ever done that before
in a World Series, not even Willie Mays. Nobody has done it since.

Guilty? Affirmative, Mr. President. He's guilty as sin. No need to call the
FBI. Willie Aikens sold 63 grams of crack to an undercover officer. He was
a pathetic figure. He wasn't even 40, but he looked about 78. Weighed more
than 300 pounds. Addicted to the core. You couldn't tell where the drugs
stopped and Willie began.

He did crazy things. Once, his girlfriend claimed he dragged her down the
stairs. Aikens pleaded guilty to that. Once, he was charged with trying to
bribe a guy $100 to get him out of a drug test. He pleaded guilty to that, too.

Does it matter that before, when he was young, his teammates unanimously
loved him? Such a sweet guy when he wasn't high.

"He had a lot of laughing in him," former Royals star Frank White said. "He
was just one of those guys who, when he started laughing, everybody around
him started laughing. You just wanted to be around him."

The cocaine ripped Aikens apart. He got hooked in California, free-basing
while playing with the Angels. Then, in Kansas City, cocaine became part of
his daily routine. He got high in the late morning, then before games ran
furious laps to sweat out the junk. He got high again at night. He was
arrested for drugs in 1983, along with three Royals teammates, and he
served three months in Texas. After that, major-league teams really didn't
want much to do with him. He went to play ball in Mexico, and one year in
Puebla, he hit .454 with 46 home runs and 154 RBIs. They still talk about
that year in Puebla. Then, Willie Mays Aikens could always hit.

Guilty? Affirmative, Mr. President. For a long time, Aikens at least could
hit. That helped fill his days. But when baseball ended, all he had was the
high. Police caught him with drug paraphernalia in 1992, but the truth is
they could have caught him any day and twice on Sunday. Cocaine was his life.

"He was such a good guy you wanted to believe he would beat it," said his
former agent and longtime friend Ron Shapiro. "But he never got to the root
of the problem. He would not come to grips."

Police said they heard complaints of heavy traffic around Aikens' Kansas
City home. An undercover officer went to check it out. She drove up, asked
Aikens for directions. Aikens plainly tried to pick her up. She called him
a couple of times. He kept trying to pick her up. She mentioned drugs.
Aikens told her that he could get her all she wanted.

And that was that. She asked him to get her drugs. He did. She asked him to
cook it into crack. He did. The officer kept going back -- four times total
- -- until he had sold her enough crack to score major jail time.

Then, the police closed in.

"I'm a drug addict, I'm not a drug dealer," Aikens pleaded in court.

The judge sentenced Aikens to 20 years and 8 months in prison. With good
behavior, the sentence could be knocked down to a little more than 17 years.

When Willie Aikens played in Toronto, he would sometimes go talk to
recovering alcoholics. It was hard for him, partly because his stepfather
was an abusive alcoholic, partly because he never fully mastered the
stuttering that had troubled him since he was a kid. And, of course, Willie
Aikens liked to drink. And, of course, he had not kicked cocaine.

Still, he spoke from the heart.

"I've made a lot of mistakes," he told them. "Don't make the mistakes I made."

Nobody claims that Willie Aikens actually used a gun in the drug sale. He
owned a gun, yes, but it was so unobservable that the undercover officer
never once mentioned it in her police reports. Only after the police
searched the house and found the gun did she file a special report.

Aikens got slapped with five years for using a gun in a drug sale.

Then, there is no mercy in the law for people involved with crack, Mr.
President. There may be mercy for embezzlers and tax evaders and even
people who sell other drugs, like powder cocaine (which has the same
chemical structure) but not crack. You remember, America went into crack
hysteria back in the '80s -- crack babies in the news every day -- and a
law was passed to slam crack addicts and dealers, to punish them at 100
times the rate of cocaine offenders.

Willie Aikens sold 63 grams of crack to an undercover officer, about 2.2
ounces, enough for at least 500 doses. He swears he never sold to anyone else.

He was sentenced as if he had sold 15 pounds of cocaine, enough for at
least 50,000 doses.

"If you want to punish the crime, punish the crime," said Marcia Shein, an
attorney in Atlanta who tried unsuccessfully to get Aikens' sentence
reduced. "But if Willie Aikens had sold powder to the officer, he would be
out already. Instead, with good behavior, he's looking at another 11 years."

Crack vs. powder has become one of the hottest issues in American law. Many
judges, lawyers and advocate groups have railed against the 100-to-1 ratio,
saying it is unfair and quite possibly racist. Consider that, according to
the U.S. Sentencing Committee, more than 90 percent of people charged with
crack offenses are black or Hispanic.

"It's like we're going back to the 1950s," said Shein, who is one of the
nation's leading advocates for getting the law changed. "How can we live in
a country where we punish black crimes 100 times more than white ones?"

Truth is, this already has gone before Congress twice. The House asked the
Sentencing Commission to look into this in 1995 and again in 1997. Both
times, the Commission recommended significantly lessening the penalties for
crack offenses. Both times, they pointed at the unfairness of the law.

Both times, the House voted to keep things as they are.

Let's face it, nobody gets to Congress by being soft on crack.

"The politicians know it's wrong," says U.S. District Court Judge Scott
Wright. "If they don't know it's wrong, they're idiots. They're just
afraid. They're afraid to appear soft. So, this unfair law goes on."

Willie Aikens is no lawyer. He does not get into the national debate. He
has no great insights into the subject. He simply serves his 20-year,
8-month sentence. As author Frank Deford said on National Public Radio:
"Serial murderers pull less time."

Willie Aikens may have been the slowest player ever to play for the Royals.
He stole three bases in his career. His teammates can remember him running
from first to third... it seemed like the man was running in a bucket of
jelly. Mountain ranges moved faster than this guy.

But man, could he hit. That was his gift. He didn't have much growing up,
and guys would poke fun at him for his small-town ways, but when he was
right, Aikens could hit the baseball anywhere you threw it. He hit .400 in
that 1980 World Series. Those Philadelphia pitchers couldn't figure out any
way to get him out. He even hit a triple, and man was it something to watch
him lumber around those bases.

Here's what his teammates remember most about that Series. Game three, 10th
inning, game on the line, Philadelphia's Tug McGraw walked George Brett to
get to Aikens. And Aikens promptly smacked an opposite-field single,
scoring Willie Wilson and giving the Royals their first-ever World Series
victory.

That's how Willie Mays Aikens was, when he was right.

The law can't help him, Mr. President. Late last year, Judge Dean Whipple
closed the book on Aikens. Shein made one last desperate attempt to knock
some years off Aikens' sentence, but the government put together a strong
case, and Judge Whipple ruled as he had to rule. The law is crystal clear.
Crack dealers, even small-timers, will do harder time than almost any other
kind of criminal. That's America.

"Until the laws are changed," Judge Wright said, "there's just nothing any
of us can do."

So, Willie Aikens does his hard time. He has graduated from at least three
different drug programs and says he has been drug-free for six years.
Friends say he's back to being the sweet guy he was before drugs turned him
inside out. He is back to his playing weight, maybe even a little less.
Aikens also says he has found religion. Yes, Mr. President, that's a
familiar story -- inmate finds God -- but his friends say there's a
serenity about Willie Aikens.

"This wasn't an evil man," Shapiro said. "This wasn't a pusher. This was a
man who had a weakness, who did terrible things because of that weakness.
It took incarceration to get him to come to grips with who he is.... It's
not like he had to be remade. He has always been a good man."

Shapiro is the one who sent the pardon request to your desk, Mr. President.
In the letter, he writes much of what you just read, and he mentions that
Aikens has two daughters who are growing up and a mother who is dying. He
includes letters from more than a dozen people, some of them old
ballplayers, like Hal McRae and Dusty Baker and Jim Fregosi and Bobby
Richardson. They all vouch for Aikens' character. Several prominent
journalists -- including Deford and HBO's Bryant Gumbel -- have appealed
for leniency in this case.

Then, there's a letter from Aikens himself. He calls himself Willie M.
Aikens. He doesn't use his full name.

"I did commit some crimes while I was using drugs," he wrote. "I have done
something about my drug problem.... I made some bad choices in my life
which led to my incarceration. Does the time of 20 years fit the crime I
committed?"

In Article II, Section II of the U.S. Constitution, it says the president
of the United States "shall have Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for
Offenses against the United States." There are no rules there, no
guidelines even, it all comes down to whether or not the president looks
your way with mercy in his heart.

On Jan. 20, two hours before leaving office, President Clinton pardoned 140
people and commuted 36 sentences. Among the 176 were numerous drug
offenders, a handful of disgraced politicians, Patty Hearst, the
president's brother, and, of course, the now-famous Marc Rich.

Aikens was not on the list.

He remains in Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. He is all out of appeals.
Aikens sold 2.2 ounces of crack to an officer when he was a lost soul. He
is paying for it with his life. Willie Mays Aikens will be at least 56
years old when he's released from prison unless an American president,
maybe even the current president, an old baseball owner, has mercy in his
heart for an old ballplayer.