SEIZING THE SPOTLIGHT

A Stand-Up Comedian Fights The Drug Laws By Working The Media

When Randy Credico is feeling bored or angry or anxious, he stands outside
Brooklyn State Supreme Court and hollers at strangers. "Read about the
racist Rockefeller drug laws!" shouted Credico, who is white, on a recent
afternoon, waving photocopies of newspaper stories. "Spread the word!
They're taking black children out of your neighborhood and putting them in
Attica! This is a modern-day slave auction block!"

When he is not holding one-man protests outside courthouses, Credico is
trying to build a movement to publicize what he believes are the injustices
of New York's drug laws. For three years, Credico, a 45-year-old comedian,
has been the project director of the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial
Justice. Despite having no full-time staff and an annual budget of only
$50,000, he has managed to start a small but scrappy movement of drug
prisoners and their relatives.

Acting as their press agent, Credico has drawn unprecedented attention to
their plight, winning media exposure from virtually every major news outlet
in New York:

* An anti-drug-law rally Credico organized in Albany in March 1999
generated nearly 40 newspaper, television, and radio stories in outlets
from New York 1 to the Albany Times Union and the Syracuse Post-Standard.

* In 2000, Credico hooked up a New York Times reporter with Terrence
Stevens, a wheelchair-bound drug prisoner who was serving 15-years-to-life.
After the reporter wrote two columns about Stevens, Governor George Pataki
granted him clemency. The inmate was released in January.

* Earlier this year, when the INS moved to deport Melita Oliveira, a drug
prisoner who had just received clemency from Pataki, Credico got her story
on Court TV, WABC-TV, and in three issues of the Daily News. In early
February, the INS agreed to set Oliveira free while reconsidering her case.
El Diario ran a photo of her release on its cover.

* From 1998 to 2000, Credico organized semiregular vigils at Rockefeller
Center, which generated dozens of news stories in a wide range of media
outlets, including Newsday, the Financial Times, the Daily News, BBC Radio,
and The Charles Grodin Show on CNBC.

"He has been effective," says Jimmy Breslin, the Newsday columnist who,
like dozens of reporters around town, hears from Credico every few days.
"He's put it on people's minds." But "you can't write one [column] every
day about the Rockefeller laws, which is what he wants."

Governor Nelson Rockefeller enacted the so-called Rockefeller drug laws,
which require lengthy mandatory prison sentences for anyone convicted of a
drug crime, in 1973. From its start, New York's drug war has been fought
not only in the streets and courts, but also in the media.

Credico's side appears to be gaining ground. In recent months, there have
been signs that drug-law opponents may finally succeed in convincing state
legislators to soften the drug laws. Governor Pataki unveiled a detailed
reform proposal in January. And leaders of both the assembly and senate
have said that they too favor reform.

There is one major opponent of change, the New York State District
Attorneys Association, but Credico remains confident. "It's a propaganda
war," he says. "This is show business, and we have a much better act than
the other side. They don't have a fucking act. Theirs is dead; it's stale.
Ours is a quality show."

When they first meet Credico, most people find it tough to take him
seriously. Maybe it is the coffee stains on his jeans, the half-open fly,
the chewed-up cigar in his shirt pocket, the unlaced sneakers, or the pin
showing Mayor Rudy Giuliani sporting a Hitler-esque moustache. Or maybe it
is because he seems to operate in overdrive-always manic, as if he just
downed a few double espressos.

On a recent afternoon, Credico leaned back in a chair in the middle of his
West Village office, pressed a phone to his ear, and worked himself into a
lather. An Associated Press reporter was on the line. A few weeks earlier,
Credico had steered the reporter to Denise Smith, who is serving a
10-to-20-year prison sentence for selling crack. According to Credico, she
was an addict-not a dealer-and only guilty of passing along a couple $30
bags of crack.

"They should have put her in the hospital," Credico shouted into the
receiver. "It's like having somebody with cancer out there. What was the
point? It's a dirty thing for a cop to do. Just to pull that woman off the
streets-a sick person off the street-and into prison? Now we're going to
pay the tab and it's going to be up to $700,000 for 20 years when we could
have fixed her by putting her into a treatment center for $12,000 a year."

A few days later, the reporter faxed over his story. Credico tossed it into
a plastic bin overflowing with newspaper articles about the state's drug
prisoners. Not all of the inmates Credico promotes are as sympathetic as he
claims. (Another he mentioned to the Associated Press reporter turned out
to have a federal conviction for possessing a gun while selling drugs.) But
most of the headlines in his plastic bin tell Credico's side of the
drug-war story: "Rockefeller Drug Laws Are Too Harsh, Protesters Charge,"
and "The Other Victims of the War on Drugs."

For years, drug-law-reform advocates relied mostly on data, reports,
lobbying, and editorials to make their case against the Rockefeller drug
laws. Favorite statistics include the fact that the state's prison
population soared from 12,500 in 1973 to more than 70,000 in 2000, and that
94 percent of the state's drug prisoners are African American or Latino.
Those most directly affected-the state's 21,000 drug prisoners and their
families-had long been left out of this political debate.

Enter Credico, armed with a red Nokia phone, a 1500-minute plan, and 13
reporters' numbers programmed into his speed dial. "There was no way things
were going to change without a street movement," he says. "There were a lot
of people who worked on statistics, but it doesn't mean anything without a
face on it. We needed human interest stories written. It's all show
business; that's carrying on the tradition of Kunstler. Everything is tried
in the court of public opinion."

Prosecutors complain that Credico plays fast and loose with his facts, and
his aggressive style and unorthodox tactics have alienated some drug-law
reformers. But few could dispute his success. As state legislators who
support drug-law reform now try to sway their more conservative colleagues,
Credico's stories of prisoners' woes have become invaluable. "They have
been extremely effective in trying to personalize this battle, to show the
human tragedies associated with the laws," explains Queens assemblyman
Jeffrion Aubry, a Democrat, who has led a fight to repeal the Rockefeller
drug laws.

"Different people are moved by different [media] outlets," Aubry says.
"Editorials are very helpful for one level of education, but when you get
these stories in a smaller market in other regions [outside of New York
City], it makes people think. And from a political point of view, it puts
it on your radar screen."

When he was growing up in California, Credico heard horror stories about
prison every day. His own father had been a safecracker during the
Depression and had spent a decade in an Ohio prison before Credico was
born. Credico was reminded of his father's ordeal one night in 1997, while
watching a debate over the Rockefeller drug laws on C-SPAN.

At the time, Credico was holed up in a $30-a-week hotel near Tampa,
Florida, trying to kick his own drug habit. He had spent the last 22 years
working as a stand-up comedian, once even performing on The Tonight Show
with Johnny Carson. Performing at clubs along the Las Vegas strip, he had
been introduced to cocaine in 1976; ever since, he had been battling
addiction. Now, on C-SPAN, Credico watched Anthony Papa, who had just been
released from Sing Sing, talk about spending 12 years in prison for
possessing and selling four-and-a-half ounces of cocaine. When he returned
to New York City, Credico tracked down Papa and took him out for a few
rounds of margaritas.

Together, the comedian and the ex-con hashed out a strategy. Credico spoke
about starting a street movement patterned after the Mothers of the
Disappeared, the women who marched weekly at the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina
to draw attention to loved ones killed by military troops. In New York,
Credico said, they could recruit drug prisoners' relatives and hold similar
vigils.

"I thought he was-I don't want to say weird-I thought he was a little
eccentric in a good way, in terms of thinking about things in ways that no
one else was," Papa recalls. Looking back on all that has transpired since
then, Papa says, "In that sense, he was a genius."

Fifty people and a handful of reporters came to Credico's first vigil, held
at Rockefeller Center on May 8, 1998, the 25th anniversary of the
Rockefeller drug laws. Back then, he had help from several other drug-law
reform groups. Most of his fellow organizers thought the vigil should be a
one-time event. Credico disagreed. He took home the garbage bag full of
posters and began a seven-day-a-week campaign. He spent Friday and Saturday
evenings at Columbus Circle, handing out flyers to the hundreds of
relatives and friends boarding buses to visit prisoners across the state.
As his literature circulated, Credico began receiving five to 10 letters a
day from inmates.

Credico set about searching for the most sympathetic cases. He weeded out
those who had a history of violent crime or long rap sheets. His system
certainly was not foolproof, but he did find dozens of cases of prisoners
with no prior records who had been sentenced to 15 or 20 years. (These
inmates are the minority; only 611 of the state's 21,000 drug prisoners are
convicted of A-1 felonies, which require sentences of at least 15 years.)

Every now and then Credico would hit the jackpot, like the day he received
a letter from Terrence Stevens, a first-time offender who is nearly
paralyzed from muscular dystrophy and was then serving 15-years-to-life for
cocaine possession. Credico phoned Terrence's mother, Regina, who lives in
East Harlem, and invited her to come to the vigils he continued to hold at
Rockefeller Center. Regina, who was unemployed at the time, became one of
Credico's most enthusiastic supporters, showing up at every vigil.

"I think he's a nut, but he's true to what he's doing," says Stevens, now a
cafeteria worker at Chelsea High School. "He puts his all into it. It
really touched me because he doesn't have anyone in prison, and he works
just as hard, if not harder, than people who do. You just don't find that
devotion."

Sometimes, Credico's vigils attracted only five or six people. Other times,
the crowd would grow to 20 or 30. The small numbers bothered Credico less
than the absence of reporters. If the media would not come to his vigils,
he would schedule events where he thought they would be. He was often in
Manhattan, holding demonstrations outside glitzy fundraisers for George
Pataki or George W. Bush.

A day or two before, he would send out hyperbolic press releases, which
were usually riddled with typos. "PATAKI, SUPPORTER OF ALLEGED COCAINE
ABUSER GEORGE W. BUSH, LETS ADDICTS ROT IN NY PRISONS," stated one release.
Another, from 1998, claimed that his three-month-old petition opposing the
drug laws "already boasts 100,000 signatures." Asked if this figure was
accurate, Credico says, "It looked like 100,000 until I started counting."
What did it look like after he started counting? "About 13,000 or 14,000,"
he says.

Terrence Stevens showed up at his first anti-drug-law rally on February 28,
four weeks after he left prison. Credico had decided to hold the event in
front of the office of Queens district attorney Richard A. Brown, who is
defending the drug laws on behalf of the state's prosecutors. Credico sent
invites to 200 prisoners' relatives, then hired Terrence to make follow-up
calls.

"Terrence is now a huge weapon because he's smart," says Credico. "He's an
MX missile. When you see him on TV, people are going to say, 'What the fuck
are we doing? We spent $300,000 to keep that guy in a prison?' You do that
to Hannibal Lecter. But a kid in a wheelchair? The guy did four more years
than Sammy Gravano."

A few days before his rally, Credico sent out a press release accusing
Brown of sending "countless" poor people to prison in what "many reform
advocates label 'ethnic cleansing.' " Credico faxed the release not only to
about 30 media outlets, but also to Brown's office. "I like to piss people
off," he explains. His motto, he says, is "Educate. Agitate. Irritate."

Sixty prisoners' relatives and other supporters showed up at the noon
rally. Many had worked double shifts, skipped classes, or scraped together
cash for babysitters so they could stand in 30-degree weather and hold
posters. It felt like a family reunion as Credico and the prisoners'
relatives greeted each other with hugs.

Most of the protesters were rally regulars, including Anthony Papa, Regina
Stevens, and Al Lewis, the perennial Green Party candidate who played
Grandpa on the 1960s TV show The Munsters. There was also Hilda Garcia, 73,
whose 68-year-old husband Jose, a first-time offender, died in prison while
in the eighth year of a 15-years-to-life sentence. Credico had gone to
Jose's funeral, organized a memorial vigil, and called a Daily News
reporter, who wrote a column headlined, "A Loving Dad Dies in Prison."

"We are going to show the skeletons in the closet," Credico hollered toward
Brown's office. "You are a fraud and this is a fraudulent prosecution of
the laws. . . . Come out here and face your accusers!"

The audience for this show was a dozen police officers, plus whoever
wandered by. There were also seven photographers, eight reporters, and four
documentary filmmakers. After several prisoners' relatives took turns at
the microphone, Terrence rolled forward in his wheelchair. Suddenly, all
the photographers edged closer.

"There is so much suffering going on with the families that something needs
to be done," Terrence said, as Papa held the microphone for him. "I have to
be put on and off the toilet. I have to be bathed. . . . What kind of
threat to society am I, to be warehoused in an upstate maximum-security
state prison for 15-years-to-life?"

The next day, Credico would declare the event a success. Stories about the
rally appeared in the Daily News, Newsday, and El Diario. Newsday also
published a photo of Terrence. Ninety minutes after the rally began, nearly
all the journalists had left. Credico seized the microphone.

"I want to thank everyone for coming out," he began, before being
distracted by passing workers.

"You guys who are assistant D.A.s, get a real job!" he hollered. "Quit
destroying lives!"

Turning back to his ralliers, he spelled out plans for future protests. "I
want everyone to show up for the next one," he said. "You'll get a call
from us."

He paused for a moment.

"OK, now I need $500 to pay for this sound system," he said, shoving a hand
in his pants pocket. "Does anyone have $20?"