FUGITIVE TURNED BUSINESSMAN JAILED IN VA.

MARTINSVILLE, Va. - Life was almost perfect as far as Alfred Martin was
concerned. His mortgage business was booming, his 26-year marriage was
strong and his four grown children were thriving. He owned a brick colonial
in a modest neighborhood, vacationed in the Caribbean and loved to tinker
on vintage cars.

Martin was driving his beloved 1979 white Porsche 911 near his office in
suburban Detroit last month - talking to a client on his cell phone,
looking forward to his noon racquetball game - when police lights flashed
behind him. He didn't usually take the Porsche out in the colder months and
hadn't put the plates back on. When the patrolman ran his name through the
computer, the response that came back would stun those who thought they
knew this man:

Alfred Odell Martin III was an escaped felon, wanted by the state of
Virginia for the last 25 years.

His supporters compare him to the hero of "Les Miserables," but Martin's
tragedy is neither epic nor enduring. Back in 1974, Martin pleaded guilty
to selling $10 worth of marijuana to an acquaintance in his home town of
Martinsville, near Virginia's border with North Carolina. He expected to
receive probation but instead drew a 10-year prison term.

All but one year was suspended, though, and with good behavior, prosecutors
now say, Martin likely would have been freed after three months. He was
sent to an honor camp on the outskirts of town. But while working on a road
crew after serving just a single day, Alfred Martin decided to give himself
what the system had not: another chance.

He simply walked away.

What happened over the ensuing years would stir considerable controversy
and vitriol, leaving unclear even today whether the case is one of justice
miscarried - or justice manipulated.

Why did Martin run away, and why does it still matter?

The answers render themselves like a hologram or one of those trick posters
where a certain image appears, only to vanish when the eyes refocus,
revealing something else entirely.

Dread becomes denial, and an ordinary petty criminal becomes an ordinary
family man.

Now, Martin, who is black, awaits his fate in the overcrowded city jail,
facing an adversary he could not have imagined growing up in this
hard-knock mostly white town: a black prosecutor determined to make an
example of him. And that could mean 25 years in prison for the soft-spoken
businessman.

Martin expresses neither anger nor remorse. "If I had it to do over again,
I think I'd still do it," he said in a telephone interview. "I've had a
good life in spite of the burden I suppressed." He then said aloud what the
furor surrounding him already has made plain:

"This is bigger than me."

Cars have often been his comeuppance. Five months after slipping away from
the honor camp, Martin made an illegal turn in Detroit and landed back in
jail when the police officer discovered the outstanding Virginia warrant.

Rallying support from prominent politicians including then-City Council
member Carl M. Levin, now a U.S. senator, and U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr.,
Martin was widely portrayed back then as a law-abiding young black man set
up by a white undercover cop in a prejudiced Southern town.

In a memo to the court, Martin's public defender, Carrie J. Thompson,
warned that "the grotesque head of racial bias arose from its fresh grave,
from whence it emerges more often in places like Martinsville whenever a
black man acts in a manner which might threaten to fasten the latches of
its coffin."

Thompson argued that Martin's life was in danger and that he "should not be
sent to Virginia to meet his death when there is a chance of rehabilitation
in the state of Michigan."

Finally, after two years of court fights, then-Gov. William Milliken took
the unusual step of granting Alfred Martin asylum, noting that he was
leading "a most responsible life." As long as he stayed in Michigan, there
was nothing Virginia could do about it.

Martin took full advantage of his fresh start, earning his high school
equivalency degree and enrolling in community college, never again running
into real trouble with the law. His fugitive status popped up on police
computers now and then when he was stopped for a traffic violation, but it
always carried a special notation: "Asylum."

Martin put what had happened in Virginia further and further behind. He
became the dad who barbecued at block parties and scraped to send his
precocious daughter to an exclusive prep school. His children all knew his
story, and Mary, the youngest, would often vow to become a lawyer so she
could erase the cloud hanging over her father's head.

The illusion that he was a free man lasted until 1996, when a series of
federal court rulings made it virtually impossible for a governor to refuse
another state's demand to extradite a fugitive. The word "asylum" was
dropped from the national law enforcement database that listed Martin as a
fugitive.

The fourth of 16 children, Martin had dropped out of school in 11th grade
and left Martinsville to live with relatives in New York. He worked at a
succession of menial jobs and had a few scrapes with the law as a young man
- - possession of burglary tools, throwing ammonia in a man's eyes during a
brawl, unauthorized use of a motor vehicle - but never served time. He
defends the infractions even now as "all innocent things."

Martin married and, with their first baby on the way, he and his wife, Ann,
returned to his home town, where Martin began work as a freelance
photographer in hopes of opening his own studio.

By his own account, he was a flamboyant figure in the gritty textile town.
"I dressed Superfly-ish, you know, platform shoes and multicolor leather
coats, a heavy Afro," he recalled. He organized an interracial fashion show
and showed no qualms about frequenting restaurants considered hostile
toward blacks. He stayed out of trouble.

Martin's nickname since childhood was Top Cat, after the cartoon character
whose snickering laugh he can still perfectly imitate. "I later heard some
other guy in town used that same nickname who was a drug dealer," he said.
Court records note that police did not consider Martin part of the town's
drug scene.

His current attorneys forbid him to discuss the old marijuana charges,
which they hope to have overturned. The lawyers said Martin was set up by a
young white woman who "begged him" to sell her two nickel bags, then
reported him to the police.

Martin said he pleaded guilty under duress, "because I was afraid I would
get 20 years. My lawyer told me a black man selling drugs to a white woman,
the jury would chew me up and spit me down the river. My wife and I were
petrified."

Although his lawyers both then and now claim Martin faced an all-white
jury, court records show that his guilty plea was entered before a jury had
even been drawn, and that the roster of 300 juror names was 26 percent black.

When he sought asylun im Michigan in 1974, the assistant commonwealth's
attorney back in Virginia referred to the campaign on Martin's behalf as "a
con job."

Half his lifetime later, Alfred Martin basically admits as much. There were
no threats against his life, he said. He was never mistreated after his
arrest. The dire warnings issued by his young public defender - since dead
of an aneurysm - were "sensationalization," Martin said with a heavy sigh.

The real reason he gives for walking away that February day 25 years ago:
"I felt I got shafted. . . . I wasn't happy. I wanted to get out, to get
away."

Family is trying hard to be brave.

The fireplace mantle is crowded with pictures: the children in graduation
gowns, the three grandbabies, Alfred looking handsome in his business suit
and graying temples. A pot of pink silk tulips rests on a lace runner atop
a coffee table stacked with books - a dictionary, a biblical reference.

A month after being pulled over on the traffic violation, Martin was
extradited Wednesday to Martinsville. Back home in Detroit, the phones
haven't stopped ringing. Lawyers, friends, reporters, clients, Alfred.

"It's Daddy," murmured Mary, now 19, handing her mother the phone. The
other line rang. One of Alfred's brothers. Mary put her father on the
speaker and relayed her uncle's side of the conversation.

"What do you want him to do?" Mary asked. Her father chuckled.

"Tell him to drop back five yards and punt," he instructed.

"He wants to know how you're feeling," Mary reported back.

Alfred suddenly sounded weary.

"Tell him I feel like crap."

Martin's wife tried not to cry.

"I don't quite understand why they don't look at his life," Ann said later,
before piling into the car with Mary and son Alfred Jr. to drive through
the night to Virginia. "I think justice has been done."

His family insists Martin never hated the place that had done him what he
considered a horrible injustice. He missed it: the big family reunions in
Virginia, his mother's special ham and fried apple breakfasts.

Martin himself was surprised at what he felt, coming home in handcuffs.
Driving past the woods on his way to jail, he was flooded with fond
memories of his boyhood spent playing in the trees. Even now, locked up,
there is only one emotion that overwhelms him:

"Relief."

His voice, on his lawyer's speakerphone, was warm and well mannered against
the jailhouse din. Martin said he feels good, considering. He will likely
spend Christmas behind bars, pending his arraignment Jan. 6. The town's
lone judge is considering a request to release him with an electronic monitor.

"I'm not that person they were trying to portray," Martin insisted, "not
then, and not now. I was not guilty of what I pled guilty to."

As the commonwealth's attorney for Martinsville, Joan Ziglar offers the
most compelling evidence she can that this city of 16,000 is not a hotbed
of redneck injustice.

"A black female prosecutor in a city where the minority population is small
- - how do you explain that, me being here, if it's so racist and we're all
such hicks?" asked Ziglar, who was elected as an independent a year ago.

She considers Martin nothing special. "He is a person who committed crimes,
pled guilty and decided he didn't want to do the time. We don't know this
person [as] Michigan does. We know Mr. Martin as a drug dealer."

Ziglar said she has "no intention" of reinstating the nine suspended years
of Martin's sentence. Instead, she intends to try him on charges of escape
and larceny by conversion - the latter stemming from a stereo and TV for
which Martin owed $1,000 when he fled.

Conviction on felony escape could bring him five years in prison, and the
larceny charge could bring a maximum of 20 years.

The Detroit press refers to Martin as a businessman and publishes family
photos; the Virginia papers call him a fugitive and run his mug shot.

Ziglar acknowledged that she plans to make a certain example of Alfred
Martin. "Do you realize how many inmates are watching this case? . . . If
we say you can just walk away and we won't pursue you, you know what that
would mean? There would be a mass exodus out of Martinsville."

Even more important, she said, is the message it would send in a town where
70 percent of criminal cases involve drugs. "Marijuana is an illegal drug
in the United States, and I will not send the message to any child or any
individual that you can just turn away and we will not pursue you."

From his confinement, Martin talked about setting an example, too.

"I think I'm not the only one on trial here," he said. "I think in part the
system may be, too. If you're harsh on me, what message would you send to
anyone who might turn their life around?"

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski