FORGOTTEN MAN

Steve Tucker Served a 10-Year Prison Sentence for Selling Light Bulbs. Is
America's Drug War Worth It?

A year has passed since Steve Tucker made his unheralded return to
Atlanta.

His one-bedroom flat, tucked into a sprawling Sandy Springs apartment
complex, is furnished sparsely: a recliner, TV, computer and a small,
picnic-style table that serves as both dining hutch and desk. The
stark white static of the walls is interrupted only by three small,
web-like dream catchers tacked to the Sheetrock.

It's the sort of Spartan minimalism one might expect of someone who,
until recently, had to content himself with staring at bare
cinderblock. "Watch out, you're talking to a notorious ex-con."
Wrapped in a sharp Middle Georgia twang, Tucker's voice betrays a
suppressed smile. The slight, balding, 50-year-old Atlantan is hardly
an intimidating figure.

But he's only half-kidding. Nearly a decade ago, he was sent to prison
as a result of a once-infamous federal drug case that sparked national
outrage for its rough interpretation of justice.

In the spring of 1994, the Tucker family received lengthy prison
sentences -- 10 years for Steve, 16 years for his older brother Gary,
and 10 years for his brother's wife, Joanne -- without possibility of
parole, for the curiously worded federal crime of "conspiracy to
manufacture marijuana."

Yet federal prosecutors never charged them with buying, selling,
growing, transporting, smoking or even possessing marijuana. An
18-month DEA investigation had failed to turn up direct evidence
connecting the Tuckers to even a single joint.

Instead, they were locked away for selling the lamps, fertilizer and
gardening hardware from the small hydroponic supply shop Gary operated
on Buford Highway that enabled their customers to grow pot.

In the mid-'90s, the Tucker case became a cause celebre among
libertarian activists and other advocates of marijuana legalization.
It served as an oft-cited, cautionary example of the runaway powers of
the federal government and the worst excesses of the War on Drugs.

And yet, in the long years since, the Tucker case has faded from the
radar. No TV cameras or microphones awaited Steve Tucker when he
finally shed his prison uniform and came home.

His mother would rather it remain that way. "I'm just scared to death
of the federal government," she says. At the same time, Doris Gore
realizes her son has an important story to tell.

And he's determined to tell it. As he reads weekly accounts of federal
agents in California arresting licensed medical-marijuana growers,
he's convinced he must speak out.

"The feds don't like it when you buck them, but I'll be damned if they
break me," Tucker says. "What kind of American would I be if I just
kept my mouth shut?"

Steve Tucker's Nightmare Began With the American Dream.

The funny thing is, the dream initially belonged to his older brother
Gary, a balding Vietnam veteran with a house in the suburbs and a
comfortable marriage. For nearly two decades, he and Steve had worked
side-by-side, installing commercial fire-control systems for a
Buckhead company. But by the fall of 1987, Gary was 40 and he yearned
to be his own boss.

Gary's choice of businesses was pioneering: a store devoted to
hydroponics, the technique of growing plants without soil or sunlight,
using only powerful lamps, chemical nutrients and a self-contained
irrigation system. It was, Gary decided after some research, the "wave
of the future."

Whose future, however, was the question. While hydroponics is highly
effective at boosting vegetable growth, the systems are so costly as
to be of practical use only to orchid breeders. And, of course, to
marijuana growers, who are lured by the promise of high yields that
could be produced in basements and attics, away from the prying eyes
of authorities.

Gary wasn't naive. He knew his customer base would include few
deep-pocketed tomato enthusiasts. But just as Wal-Mart doesn't ask if
the handgun ammunition it sells will be used for target practice or
hold-ups, the Tuckers decided it was best to adopt a "don't ask, don't
tell" policy.

"Look, we weren't stupid," Steve says with a weary smile. "We figured
a percentage of our customers were growing pot. But we had store rules
that if anyone asked us about marijuana, we'd ask them to leave. What
someone was planning to do with fertilizer or grow lights wasn't our
concern. Most of the stuff we were selling, you could buy at Home
Depot. We had a legitimate business."

To finance the start-up, Gary mortgaged his home in Gwinnett and, in
the spring of 1988, his business opened in a small shopping center on
the edge of Norcross. It was the first hydroponics store in Georgia.

The name Gary chose for his store - Southern Lights And Hydroponics
- - was a nod to a successful Mid-Atlantic chain called Northern
Lights, which itself was named after a particularly potent strain of
Alaskan weed.

Steve, who had begun making child-support payments after his 10-year
marriage ended in divorce, kept his regular job, but helped out
weekends in his brother's store. Joanne, who worked for an insurance
company, kept her husband's books.

To compensate for hydroponics' somewhat questionable image, Gary
wouldn't allow High Times, rolling papers or Mr. Natural posters to be
sold in the store. Any product or packaging that arrived bearing the
familiar hemp-leaf silhouette would promptly be shipped back. Adding
to Southern Lights' air of respectability, the brothers were invited
to install working hydroponic exhibits for the agriculture departments
of Gwinnett Tech and a local high school.

That's not to say the Tucker brothers didn't enjoy a joint now and
again. Gary had first smoked during his tour in Vietnam and Steve
would get arrested in 1991 for growing his own stash at home. For that
offense, he would serve six months in a county work-release program.

"Getting busted was just my dumb luck," Steve explains. "I used to
smoke pot, but I wasn't dealing. I never claimed to be 100-percent
innocent, but I never conspired with anybody to do anything illegal."

What the Tuckers didn't know while they were busy preparing to launch
Southern Lights was that, in Washington, the DEA was grappling with
how to go after the booming number of marijuana growers who were
taking their crops indoors to avoid aerial detection.

Activist Who Had Been That Party's 1992 Vice-Presidential Candidate.

With only one major drug case on her resume, Lord had just moved to
Atlanta to practice under the tutelage of prominent defense attorney
Tony Axam. Lord and Axam signed on to separately represent Joanne and
Gary, respectively. An acquaintance of Lord's was hired for Steve.

From the beginning, Lord was passionate about her assignment,
appearing at press conferences and local forums to protest the Big
Brother tactics of the federal drug war and attack the flimsiness of
the government's case against the Tucker family.

Certainly, to the layperson, it would have appeared weak. Despite 18
months of constant surveillance, boxes of confiscated documents,
dozens of confidential informants and the DEA's own terrified mole
managing the store, the agency had failed to come up with any physical
evidence linking Gary to his customers' crops.

No marijuana -- growing or dime-bagged -- was found in Southern
Lights, Gary's house or Steve's apartment. No paper trail of drug
deals. No incriminating messages. No videotaped handoffs of suspicious
packages. No blurry photos of Gary inspecting a customer's harvest. No
secretly recorded advice on the finer points of cultivating Maui Wowie.

After a $1 million investigation, the only tangible exhibits the feds
had to show the jury were a set of precision scales that could have
been used to weigh leafy contraband, and an old pipe that Gary and
Joanne readily acknowledged they had used for smoking pot.

The government's sole weapon seemed to be a lengthy list of freshly
indicted, former Southern Lights customers desperate to prove
themselves useful enough on the witness stand for prosecutors to let
them off lightly.

The Tuckers and Lord, however, failed to fully appreciate that federal
conspiracy law is far less concerned with what you did than with what
you knew.

"Conspiracy law has been the darling of federal prosecutors since the
1930s, because you don't need direct evidence to score a conviction,"
explains Axam, now recognized as one of Georgia's top death-penalty
lawyers. "The reason they use it is because they may have no hard,
physical evidence, but with conspiracy, they can bring in hearsay,
rumor, innuendo."

Indeed, it's tough to imagine how anyone gets acquitted, considering
the standard description of conspiracy law given to federal juries:
"The fact that a defendant's acts appear not to be illegal when viewed
in isolation does not bar his conviction. An act innocent in nature
and of no danger to the victim or society suffices if it furthers the
criminal venture."

Lord, who now specializes in patent law and FDA drug approval at her
solo practice outside Las Vegas, admits she underestimated the
far-reaching power of conspiracy law. "I was shocked that this little
evidence could send someone up for 10 years," she says.

Still, why were prosecutors willing to let admitted pot-growers and
convicted drug dealers off easy so they could nail a tax-paying
businessman who hadn't been caught with any grass?

Doris Gore is convinced there was an element of vengeance in the DEA's
pursuit of her sons because they had refused to roll over, to name
names, to cop a plea. "They hated Gary because he wouldn't do what
they said," she says.

She may be on to something. During the trial, Garfield Hammonds, then
the Southeast's top DEA official, announced to the press that Gary was
no mere entrepreneur: "He's a bum, he's a parasite, he's a master of
deceit, he's a marijuana czar." Hammonds, who now sits on the state
Board of Pardons and Parole, didn't return a CL phone call.

It didn't help that Joanne had followed Lord's lead in publicly
baiting her accusers whenever the chance arose. "My husband is a
political POW," she told one reporter. "We're fighting a political
war, not a drug war." Steve Tucker still believes he and Joanne were
charged primarily as added leverage against Gary. When they wouldn't
give him up, the government simply steamrolled over them as well.

Axam, who's since represented such high-profile defendants as Ray
Lewis and Jamil Al-Amin, won't discuss the particulars of the Tuckers'
defense, but he recalls vividly the feds' take-no-prisoners
determination.

"The government had a clear policy that it didn't want hydroponics
stores in business," he says. "If it looks long and hard enough at any
industry it doesn't like, it can find those connections."

Scheduled to begin in federal court in November 1993, United States v.
Gary Tucker et al got off to a spectacularly inauspicious start.

On the morning of jury selection, activists with the Fully Informed
Jury Association -- a radical libertarian group that believes juries
should be empowered to dismiss charges and reject unjust laws -- were
handing out flyers to everyone entering the Russell Federal Building,
effectively disqualifying an entire day's jury pool for the Northern
District of Georgia.

When Chief Judge William O'Kelly, who was to preside over the trial,
was told Lord had been seen outside exchanging pleasantries with one
of the activists, he was livid. Their courtroom relationship went
downhill from there.

Resuming the first week of January 1994, the trial lasted four days.
Assistant U.S. Attorney James Harper oversaw a parade of a dozen or so
nervous plea-bargain witnesses, some of whom testified that Gary, and
to a lesser extent, Steve and Joanne, had given them hemp-growing
tips. Several claimed Gary had bought pot from them or traded
hydroponic equipment for high-end herb. One said he'd glimpsed a
freezer crammed with weed in the couple's garage. Another said Gary
offered to look after his buds while he was out of town. A couple said
Gary had privately confirmed that the vast majority of his customers
were breaking the law.

The defense, spearheaded by Lord, scored too few points to overcome
the damage. One witness didn't believe the Tuckers had done anything
illegal. Another recalled bragging about his hemp garden, only to have
Gary tell him to get rid of it. Several acknowledged hoping their
testimony would spare them prison time.

One former Southern Lights customer, a 66-year-old ex-con we'll call
"Bob" (who spoke to CL on condition he not be named), now says DEA
agents tried to coax him into claiming the Tuckers were growing pot at
their house, but stopped short of asking him to lie.

"'You help us and we'll help you,' is how they put it," he
explains.

When asked to wear a wire into the store, Bob agreed -- then fled the
state rather than aid an investigation he believed was intent on
"railroading" the business owners.

Even though he eventually testified after police tracked him down, Bob
received a four-year sentence, rather than the 18-month stretch he'd
initially been offered.

"I disappointed [prosecutors] because I didn't say what they wanted me
to," he says. "To my knowledge, the Tuckers didn't do anything other
than sell chemicals and lights -- except for indulging."

Steve's own years behind bars have taught him not to be shocked at
what someone might say on the witness stand.

"I was in prison with people who'd swear their own mother was Hitler
if it would help them," he says, shaking his head. "I'll never have
another close friend. I'll never be able to trust anyone that way, now
that I've seen what people will do to protect their freedom."

While he concedes that he can't speak for his brother's actions, Steve
insists he never offered growing advice or swapped weed with customers
- - although he shared a joint on occasion.

Plain-spoken to the point of abrasive, Nancy Lord continued to
criticize the DEA, pointedly suggesting that witnesses had been
coerced to lie.

When the judge warned her at one point that Agent McLaughlin wasn't
the one on trial, she shot back: "He should be." O'Kelly fumed that he
was citing her for contempt. "If I go to jail, I go to jail," she shrugged.

"Nancy had some balls," Steve recalls, laughing. "She stood up to that
judge."

Steve was able to see Gary toward the end, but Joanne -- who'd been
transferred from a Connecticut woman's prison to a Macon halfway house
- -- wasn't allowed to visit her husband the week before he died.

The diagnosis was non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer closely associated
with exposure to Agent Orange, the deadly herbicide used in Vietnam.
It would seem Gary's government had succeeded in killing him after
all.

Even though his prison sentence has been served and he's returned to
his old job, Steve Tucker wouldn't call himself a free man. Not when
he has to call in every morning for the next four years so a recorded
message can tell him whether he's been randomly selected to pee in a
cup that day. Not since he had to give up his lifelong pastime of
hunting because he can never again hold a gun. Not after he's seen
politicians get elected on the promise to pass more draconian drug
laws, and knowing he's forever lost his right to vote.

For the first time in nearly a decade, Steve brought his son and
daughter, in their mid-teens, to spend Thanksgiving with his mother in
Cochran, a half-hour south of Macon. He was required to seek written
approval from his probation officer weeks in advance of the visit.

"When I got out, I had to learn my way around Atlanta again, but I
went back to work like I'd never left; there was no adjustment
problem," he says. "The hardest part is the probation, because you
have to get permission to do just about everything."

In prison, Steve met guys who told him they had violated their
probation on purpose because another 16 months in the big house was
better than three more years of having people always looking over your
shoulder, waiting for you to fuck up.

The thing about federal prison that made the biggest impression on
Steve was how many inmates were much like himself: small-time,
non-violent offenders serving big-time sentences for reasons that made
little sense. "Even if I was guilty, 10 years seems excessive when
there were bank robbers who were in there for two or three years, and
I got 10 years for selling light bulbs," he says, his voice rising as
if framing a question.

"This drug war forced two little kids to grow up without their dad and
my ex-wife to go without child-support for eight years, and for what?"
he continues. "I'm not saying I'm above the law, but I know in my
heart I'm not the type of person who needed to be in prison."

And yet, once there, the outrageousness of his circumstances blended
into a background of statistics: He simply became another of the
anonymous drug offenders who make up 57 percent of all federal inmates.

If anything, the War on Drugs has only built momentum through the
political backing of such powerful interest groups as prison guard
unions; the billion-dollar drug-testing industry; private prison
construction and management companies; and, of course, the DEA, which
commands a $1.8-billion budget and has, in the past 30 years, more
than tripled the number of special agents on its payroll.

Over the last decade, drug convictions have accounted for more than 80
percent of the growth of the federal prison population, so it's hardly
surprising that, as the drug war swirled outside, amassing new
victims, Steve Tucker was essentially forgotten.

His sister-in-law, Joanne, now remarried and relocated, wants to
forget as well. Declining to be interviewed, she explains: "Digging up
something from 10 years ago isn't going to help anything now."

Trying to piece together a ruined life takes time, but there's a
freedom that comes with starting over, and Steve is hoping to write
his own second act.

He's looking for a literary agent to publish one of the novels he
wrote in prison, a mystery set in a town modeled loosely on Cochran.
As they say, you write what you know.

"People ask me if I'm going to write about everything I've been
through, but I don't think so," he says wistfully. "Who wants to read
about some guy who got busted for pot?"