A CRIME AGAINST WOMEN

You Be the Jury: Does This Woman Deserve To Be Locked Up For 24 Years?

A harsh law punishes women unjustly and lets drug lords off easy.

Amy Pofahl's Drug-Kingpin Husband Cut A Deal That Dumped Her In Prison For
A Quarter Century - And Freed Him After Four Years. Glamour Investigates
How She And Thousands Of Other Women Guilty Of Relatively Minor Crimes End
Up Doing More Time Than Men Due To A Controversial Federal Law.

HERE IS AN INTENSE CALIFORNIA SUN on the morning. I pass the two rows of
gleaming razor wire, the metal-detector arch, the armed guards and two
vault-like doors before arriving at a brick patio inside FCI Dublin, a
low-security womens' federal correctional institution outside of Oakland.
Amy Pofahl stands on the other side of the terrace, her feet next to a
patch of pansies with a sign stuck in it that reads, "No Inmates Allowed
Beyond This Point." She was once an exceptional beauty and a very wealthy
woman, and even in her regulation beige work shirt and slacks, she is still
striking -- graceful and leggy, with silken hair that drapes her shoulders
in countless shades of gold. With her top two buttons undone, revealing a
glimpse of her simple white T-shirt, she looks like she is ready to leave
on a safari, which couldn't be further from the truth. Amy last saw freedom
eight years ago, when she was a 30-year-old nightclub promoter in Los
Angeles. Now, the toll of her long incarceration shows on her face,
particularly on her lazy eyelids, which are as creased as crackled pottery.

As the warden's assistant and I approach Amy, he points to her neckline and
commands, "Button your shirt." She complies with a slow hand. Later, she
whispers to me, "Being in here is very much like that. Everything starts to
focus on these little things like how to wear your shirt. And whenever
you're trying to focus on something that's maybe going to get you
free....." Then her eyes leave mine, and she flutters the long fingers of
her right hand in the air, pawing for emotional control.

Amy Pofahl broke the law, but she is not a hardened criminal. Like
thousands of women in prison today, she is a once-productive member of
society who made a series of bad decisions, all for a man she loved.
Unbeknownst to Amy, for most of the time she was married to him, Charles
"Sandy" Pofahl - a Stanford University Law School graduate and wealthy
Dallas businessman with whom she exchange rings when she was 25 and he was
44 -was the mastermind of a secret and illegal international syndicate that
made and distributed the drug MDMA, or Ecstasy. Sandy revealed his
involvement to Amy after his arrest on February 16, 1989, three years into
their marriage. But then he begged her to handle some financial matters
that she felt might be shady while he awaited trial. Out of love, she
agreed. "I have the kind of personality that was just right for him to rely
on," she explains. "It's a flaw in my character. I'll jump off and do
things and ask questions later."

Its bad enough that Amy became criminally embroiled in an operation her
husband ran and had kept her in the dark about. What's worse is that Sandy
Pofahl, an Ecstasy kingpin who directed nearly two dozen accomplices to
smuggle millions of pills into America, served just four years in prison.
Amy Pofahl, his blindly loyal wife who did nothing even remotely like that,
got 24 years with no chance of parole.

Women Bear the Burden

It is a peculiar facet of the federal sentencing guidelines that women,
many of them young, who are convicted in drug rings often draw much longer
sentences than men. Almost always, their connection to the drug ring is as
a gofer, delivery person or patsy for the men they love. As a result, there
are more women in prison today than at any time in the nation's history.
The latest data, from July 1998, shows that 146,507 women are serving time
in federal, state and local facilities, up from 63,015 a decade earlier
Nearly half of that increase is drug-related, according to the Bureau of
Justice Statistics, part of the U.S. Department of Justice. This is
certainly the most unanticipated and least logical consequence of the war
on drugs.

At the height of crack cocaine's terrible march through American cities in
the mid-eighties, entire neighborhoods succumbed to crime of such violence
and scope that it seemed as if the fabric of American civilization was in
danger of unraveling. Congress responded by passing The Anti-Drug Abuse Act
of 1986, which removed sentencing discretion from federal judges and
established a schedule of mandatory-minimum prison sentences in drug cases,
based solely on the type and quantity of drug involved. The only way
defendants can earn a "downward departure," or reduced sentence, is to give
substantial assistance in the prosecution of other drug dealers.

The Anti-Drug Abuse Act has drawn sharp criticism, largely because it
penalizes low-level participants and drug users as harshly or - as in Amy
Pofahl's case - more harshly than people guilty of running major drug
operations. The mandatory-minimum sentences established by the Act have
been slammed by the American Bar Association, the U.S. Sentencing
Commission, Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and an
astonishing 86 percent of federal judges. Barry R. McCaffrey, the four-star
general who heads the Office of National Drug Control Policy, has called
mandatory minimums "bad drug policy and bad law," and decried the fact that
they dominate the drug-war budget: Some $35 billion a year are spent on
incarcerating drug convicts, many of whom McCaffrey considers mere foot
soldiers for big-time dealers.

Even the congressional staffer who wrote the law, Eric Sterling (now
president of The Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, a Washington, D.C.,
think tank), works tirelessly today to undo his legacy. "The statute has
been profoundly misused," he says. "The price has been a tremendous
injustice and a tremendous tragedy for the [less culpable] individuals,
their children, their parents, their siblings and their spouses."

The Price of Loyalty

The primary reason women have been hit hard by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act is
that the original statute was amended in 1988 to add "conspiracy" to the
list of offenses covered. Technically, a conspirator knows about criminal
activity and has agreed to participate. But federal prosecutors have been
able to convict people they believe simply should have known about the
ongoing crimes, says Marc Mauer, an authority on crime trends at The
Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group. Frequently,
that means the wife or girlfriend of a dealer ends up behind bars, says
Monica Pratt, of the national organization Families Against Mandatory
Minimums. "Almost half of the women in prison today under mandatory-minimum
sentences have been convicted of conspiracy. Taking messages for a drug
dealer, driving him to a bank to deposit his money - that can make you just
as liable as the dealer," she says.

In part because of the crackdown on "conspirators," the female prison
population is growing faster on average than the male population - 7
percent versus just 4.5 percent a year since 1990. Also, of the 8,207 women
currently serving time in federal prison, 60 percent have been convicted of
drug charges.

Casualties of the drug war include women such as Kemba Smith,27, a former
Virginia debutante. She ended up facing the same stiff penalties as some of
the principal dealers in her college boyfriend's drug ring, even though
evidence at her sentencing showed that he beat her, and that out of fear,
she sometimes participated in illegal activities for him. She was convicted
not of specific crimes related to those few incidents, but for many
offenses the drug ring had collectively committed. At the age of 24, she
was sentenced to 24-and-a-half years without parole. By comparison, the
average maximum sentences that state courts handed down for rape and
robbery in 1996 were 11-and-a-half and eight-and-a-half years,
respectively, while the average minimum state sentence actually served for
rape was only six years, and for robbery, five.

Why are women like Pofahl and Smith receiving such long sentences? Because
when wives and girlfriends are caught in the net, especially, if they
genuinely know little about the drug operation, they seldom have the kind
of information to trade for a "downward departure." So the law that was
meant to crush drug-world master-minds actually rewards them with shortened
sentences, while their less culpable sweethearts are vigorously punished.

Even if women have information to trade for reduced sentences, however,
they often decline to cooperate out of loyalty. In 1989, Serena Nunn, now
29, refused to inform against her boyfriend, Ralph Nunn (no relation), a
member of a Minneapolis drug ring. "I would not hurt someone else to save
myself," Serena said. "I'm just not made like that." For her minimal role,
she got a 16-year sentence. Had she informed on her boy friend, she might
have received as few as eight months. Instead, Marvin McCaleb, a senior
partner in the drug ring, informed on Ralph Nunn, who received a 25-year
sentence. McCaleb, who had previously been convicted and served time for
manslaughter, major drug dealing and rape, got seven years -- less than
half Serena's sentence.

In response to such cases, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif ), a long-time
advocate of Kemba Smith, introduced a bill in Congress last month to
eliminate mandatory minimums. "If you had to define injustice at the turn
of the century," says Eric Sterling, "these cases are Exhibit A: the
girlfriends of king-pins who get sentences that are two and three and four
times longer than the guys who head it all up."

The End of Innocence

Amy Pofahl was once a shy girl from little Charleston, Arkansas, where her
mother was the newspaper editor and her father served a term as mayor. She
preferred her 4-H Club activities to dating, and only begrudgingly attended
her junior and senior proms. That changed when, after a year of college,
she moved to Dallas, a 19-year-old with dreams of becoming a model. At a
party in March 1985, she struck up a conversation with another guest, Sandy
Pofahl. He was 19 years older, a balding businessman who reminded her of
Gene Hackman. But he had tremendous magnetism. "I was feeling emotions I
never felt before. I thought he was the greatest thing in the whole world,"
Amy says.

A few days later, they met for dinner at Cafe Pacific, one of Dallas'
finest restaurants, and he handed her an Ecstasy tablet. Although it was
sold legally as a diet aid at the time, Ecstasy is a psychedelic drug, like
LSD, that fosters feelings of intimacy and love. Popularized in the
eighties by San Francisco marriage therapists, it was sold in night clubs
and herb shops until it was outlawed in October 1986. Using the drug
tightened the bond between Amy and Sandy. They were engaged within eight
days and married before the year was out. "She called and said, 'You're
just going to love him. He's my soulmate!'" recalls Amy's mother, Nancy
Ralston. "When we met him and realized he was not a big, handsome man, I
thought, It must be love!"

He bought Amy a blue Mercedes and made her sales vice president of one of
his businesses, Commonwealth Bancorp, specializing in home-improvement
loans. She earned $4,000 a month plus commission.

Sandy Pofahl was one of the frenetic entrepreneurial high-fliers who
distinguished Texas in the eighties. He had graduated from Stanford before
storming the business community in Dallas. By the time he met Amy, he owned
or co-owned businesses including a mortgage lending company, an oil and gas
business, a computer software company, a computer hardware company, a real
estate brokerage and a half-dozen other concerns. He and Amy lived in a
sprawling home in Highland Park, Dallas' most exclusive suburb, and
traveled the world. "These were people who in Texas we call highfalutin,"
says an attorney familiar with the case. And though Amy says they never
tried any harder drugs, the Pofahls continued taking Ecstasy at a time when
it was exceedingly popular and entirely legal.

Sandy entered the Ecstasy business in early 1985, several months before he
and Amy were married. Together with Morris Key, Ph.D., a Dallas chemist,
Sandy established Ecstasy International Export and Import Organization
(EIEIO) and sank nearly a million dollars into start-up costs. Their main
plant was in Guatemala, and they employed a network of above-board
distributors. In October of1986, however, Ecstasy was added to the Drug
Enforcement Agency's (DEA) list of illegal drugs. Despite this, Amy says
neither she not Sandy stopped taking it occasionally. Still, Amy has
consistently said she was unaware that Sandy and Key continued with their
business, and her protestations seem credible: "Sandy went from one
business meeting to another, all day long. It was impossible to keep up
with his affairs," she says. "it was like being Jane Fonda married to Ted
Turner." EIEIO eventually established production contacts in Germany, where
it was easier to get the necessary materials, smuggling millions of
??pills?? into America over the next two years, according to federal
authorities. "I knew he had access to Ecstasy, and he had said he could get
as much as he wanted, but I didn't think he was manufacturing it," Amy says.

Meanwhile, their marriage was crumbling. Friends say Sandy had a drinking
problem, which fueled grossly inappropriate behavior. "I couldn't stand
him," remembered Cathy Johnston, a friend from North Dallas. "It seemed
like anytime you'd even get close to him, he'd try to touch you, I found
him obnoxious. But Amy was in love with the creep."

In love or not, by January 1988 Amy had had enough of Sandy's drunken
flirtations. She moved to Los Angeles, leaving Sandy behind. She thrived
there, and was soon throwing such glamorous parties in her home that the
owners of Tramp, the exclusive Hollywood supperclub that Jackie Collins
opened, hired her as their promoter. She earned $80,000 a year and hosted
celebrities from Jean-Claude Van Damme to Eddie Murphy. "She knew
absolutely everybody," says a soap opera star who befriended her then and
still keeps in touch. "I liked her independence; I loved that she was out
there doing this on her own."

But Sandy's spell was not easily broken. He wrote letters with lovelorn
salutations like "Dear Better Than Bestest" and visited her often. He even
signed the lease on a $42,000-a-year house in the Hollywood Hills to be
close. His campaign worked. "If Sandy could get within a 20-foot radius of
me, he could just completely melt my heart," she says.

Amy agreed to move into the rented home with him, but before she did, Sandy
left on a mysterious business trip to Germany. A week later, on February
16, 1989, he was taken into custody by German federal agents. Two days
later, his partner, the chemist Key, was arrested in New York City and
extradited to Germany for trial. When word of the charges reached Amy, she
was blown away - not by her husband's criminal activity, but about the
danger the man she adored was now facing. "I was going to do whatever I
needed to do to help him. I didn't care what he'd done," she said.

Kept in the Dark

Other members of the EIEIO drug ring were rounded up by the DEA, but many
didn't even know Amy Pofahl's name. When agents from the U.S. attorney's
office interviewed her husband and Key in their German prison, both said
that Amy - like all wives and girlfriends - was told nothing about the
Ecstasy operation. Daniel Bernard, one of Sandy's main U.S. distributors,
would later write in an affidavit: "I never believed Amy to be
knowledgeable as to the particulars. Quite the contrary. I personally
observed numerous attempts made by Mr. Pofahl to shield Amy from his MDMA
enterprise, and I aided his endeavor to hinder Amy from knowing about the
operation."

But after Sandy's arrest, Amy, who had moved into the rented house alone,
became very involved. Sandy anticipated (wrongly, as it turned out) that he
would be offered a chance to post bail. So he sent his wife a series of
coded faxes imploring her to help recover his hidden drug profits and
cryptically telling her where to find them. Amy wanted him out on bail
badly enough to take the risk. "What kept going through my mind is that
incarceration is worse than losing someone to death," she says, fighting
back tears. "You know that they're unhappy, and you know there's nothing
you an really do." Besides, she convinced herself that as his wife trying
to help him ferret out cash, she would not be breaking any laws. The crime,
she reasoned in her distress, remained his responsibility.

In any case, by the end of the summer of 1989, she had collected more than
$780,000 from the various places Sandy had stashed it, and had hidden the
cash in attics and shoe boxes in Dallas and Los Angeles. But then she found
out that Sandy would not be offered bail, and she was stuck with the dirty
cash. "The money," she says, "became this enormous albatross."

Having secretly monitored Amy's actions, federal authorities descended on
her one afternoon in September 1989. She arrived home to find agents
rifling through her things. The list of seized items included six Ecstasy
tablets found in one of Sandy's coats and $7,000 in cash earmarked for rent
on the house, which, of course, was leased in Sandy's name. She recalls an
agent saying, "You're in deep, sister."

One who questioned her was Charlie Strauss, an assistant U.S. attorney from
Waco, Texas. "She was told we were just interested in what knowledge she
had, and we wouldn't use it against her husband," Strauss remembers. "Had
she come to the table at that time - cooperated, been truthful, honest and
candid - I would say there's a probability she wouldn't have been
prosecuted." Amy says she didn't believe them. She says they wanted her to
visit Sandy to collect incriminating information. (Strauss could not
confirm this.) Out of love and respect for her marriage, she says, she
refused.

Sandy, it turned out, had fewer compunctions. In exchange for a promise of
leniency, he soon told German and American authorities everything he knew
about the operation, from the street dealers to the smugglers. He also
offered information about his wife's handling of his money. Rewarding him
for the assistance, German authorities handed him a six-year sentence.

Sold Out and Set Up

In a vague note he sent to Amy, Sandy told her he'd come clean about
everything, and encouraged her to cooperate, too. She was livid that she'd
covered for him for no reason, but she did nothing. She did not know how
much trouble she was in. "Once they had him and he had told them
everything, I was sure they didn't want me anymore." On the contrary, they
were building a major case against her based upon her husband's sworn
statements. Federal authorities seized her car and plundered her bank
accounts, asserting that the money was ill-gotten. They even confiscated
her wedding ring. Agents asked Tramp regulars if they'd ever seen her
dealing drugs. Nobody had, but she lost her job anyway.

For about 19 months, federal agents kept on the pressure, and Amy nearly
broke down. Her bank account empty and her credit cards canceled by the
bank, she started spending the money she had collected at Sandy's behest.

Early in 1990, she says, she asked her attorney to tell the authorities
that she would direct them to the remaining cash if they in return would
stop investigating her. Strauss says the message never got to him. "Either
she's lying, or she misunderstood, or somebody's given her some
misinformation," he says. "But those overtures never came to us."

Fearing that her arrest was imminent but still convinced of her own
innocence, Amy fled. She recognizes in retrospect that this was a mistake,
but at the time, she says, sitting around and waiting to be indicted was
just too stressful. "Every time I tried to do something to make it better,
I got in deeper. I never made a right decision in this whole thing." On the
lam for about three months, she found her way to Florida. But the isolation
from friends and family soon caused her to despair, so she headed back to
Marina Del Rey resolved to fight. Agents from the DEA arrested her thereon
March 27, 1991, and charged her with conspiracy to import and distribute
MDMA and money laundering. She was shipped to Waco, Texas, to await trial.

Her court-appointed attorney, John Hurley, urged her to plead guilty in
hopes of a reduced sentence. She refused. "How would you like to be told
you need to plead guilty to something you feel you're absolutely positive
you didn't do?" she asks rhetorically.

At trial, there was no evidence that she ever had direct contacts with
Ecstasy manufacturers or importers or personally sold the drug after it
became illegal. But her efforts to retrieve her husband's money were well
documented. Sandy, still in his German jail cell, was not called to testify
by prosecutors. He wrote to Hurley, pleading with the lawyer to be called
as a witness on Amy's behalf. For some reason, Hurley did not take him up
on the offer. (Hurley refused to comment for this article.) A jury of eight
women and four men found Amy guilty on all counts. According to the
mandatory-minimum sentencing laws, her involvement in the "conspiracy" made
her just as culpable as if she had built the organization herself. Unable
to weigh her relative conduct, a federal judge was forced to hand Amy a
24-year sentence. If she had been found guilty of money laundering alone -
the only charge alleging her direct involvement - she would probably have
received a sentence of just five years.

Today, even the prosecutor, Charlie Strauss, seems chagrined that Amy
received such a harsh punishment. "I don't think Amy was the linchpin
here," he says. "If she were not married to Sandy, she would not have done
this. She got involved through her association with him."

Life Behind Bars

At FCI Dublin, Amy Pofahl shares a closet-size room with another prisoner,
their beds just a foot apart opposite a sink and an open toilet. Amy has
been an exemplary prisoner with only two minor reprimands, the more serious
for feeding sardines to the cats that dart between the squat prison buildings.

Amy has had plenty of time to reconsider her actions. She now concedes that
the government's money-laundering case against her, charging that she
removed and spent money from Sandy's vaults, is valid. "From my soul, I
knew that the money was illicit, and I did spend it, and if that
constitutes money laundering, absolutely. Absolutely, I regret it," says Amy.

"I've thought about the whole thing a million times," she continues. "It's
going to sound phony, but it's really truth - I just feel now that my
loyalties were displaced."

Sandy Pofahl, meanwhile, served only four years and three months in a
German prison, and although the authorities there expected him to serve
another 17-and-a-half years behind bars in America, the Justice Department
elected not to require more time because he had cooperated with U.S.
authorities. He left prison in 1993 and spent two years in the Netherlands,
while his attorneys confirmed that he would not be prosecuted in America.
He returned in 1995 and has since rebuilt his legitimate business empire in
Dallas. The first time Amy heard anything from him after her conviction was
two years ago, when she was served with divorce papers. After 12 years of
marriage, Sandy cited irreconcilable differences.

In a guarded, hour-long phone interview with Glamour, Sandy Pofahl rejected
any responsibility for Amy's incarceration. He put the onus on her, despite
his well-documented pleas for Amy to retrieve his ill-gotten cash. (Sandy's
faxes asking for Amy's help were used as evidence against both of them.)
"She had a need to help," he says, explaining Amy's attempts to free him
from a German prison. "I went over to Germany, and I truly don't know what
happened when I was over there." Asked why he chose a divorce filing as his
first contact with her after his release, he said: "I was considering
getting married ... so I needed to divorce her. It was important for both
of us to get our lives going."

Sandy finally visited Amy a year and a half ago when he was in the San
Francisco Bay area for a school reunion at Stanford. She agreed to see him
because she had questions: Why had he told authorities about her role
gathering up his funds? Why had he implicated her instead of protecting
her, as she had protected him? They sat beneath a craggy pine tree on a
terrace behind the FCI Dublin visitors center. He was nervous. She was
suspicious. When he tried to kiss her on the side of the head, she pulled
away. "It was heartless," Amy recalls. "I said, 'Sandy you could clarify a
few things for me!' He was dead set against it and wanted to talk about
surface stuff. I said, "In case you haven't noticed, there's razor wire
around this little place where I live. Stop acting like we're sitting at a
side-walk cafe in Los Angeles, because I would really like to talk to you
about some of the things that happened."'

Sandy showed no sign of guilt or remorse, Amy says. Regardless, she harbors
no anger - at her ex-husband, the prosecutor or anybody else. But it is
harder for her mother, Nancy Ralston, to let go "I pray that I will not be
bitter. But its difficult, it's very difficult."

Endless Sentence

Only one other target of the EIEIO prosecution besides Amy is still behind
bars. Amy herself has filed two appeals citing incompetent legal counsel
and plans to seek other remedies, but in truth, her chances of early
release are slim. If she serves the full term of her sentence as expected,
she'll be55 years old when she gets out in 2015. Even if she were set free
tomorrow, Amy would have already spent twice as many years behind bars as
her husband, a fact she knows will never be changed.

"I have regrets, of course I have regrets," Amy tells me on the last day of
our prison visit, her voice heavy with emotion. "I'm getting to the period
in my life where I just feel like I'm losing my youth and the opportunity
to have children and to set up some kind of a future. I lost the prime
years of my life. Nothing's worth losing that, nothing."