Richard Stratton - Free Library Land Online - Nonfiction

Defending Alice

Sat, 15 Oct 2022 08:45:13 +0300

Kingpin

Sat, 06 May 2017 10:52:04 +0300

This fast-paced sequel to Smuggler's Blues is a harrowing and at times comical journey through the criminal justice system at the height of America's War on Plants.
Captured in the lobby of the Sheraton Senator Hotel at LAX following a fifteen-year run smuggling marijuana and hashish as part of the hippie mafia, Richard Stratton began a new journey. Gulag America tells the story of the eight years that followed, through two federal trials and the underworld of the federal prison system, at a time when it was undergoing unprecedented expansion due to the War on Drugs. Stratton was shipped by bus from LA' s notorious Glass House to jails and prisons across the country, a softening process known as diesel therapy. Resisting pressure to falsely implicate his friend and mentor, Norman Mailer, he was convicted in his second trial under the kingpin statute and sentenced to twenty-five years without the possibility of parole.
While doing time in prisons from...

Defending Alice: a Novel of Love and Race in the Roaring Twenties

Sat, 17 Dec 2022 13:46:54 +0200

"Gripping courtroom drama and social commentary . . . the story flows well . . . [the author is] masterful in building suspense."—Kirkus Reviews

Set in 1920s New York, an addictively readable, thoroughly entertaining historical novel involving sex and secrets, race and redemption, and power and privilege—based on a sensational real-life case that made international headlines—in which the marriage between a working-class black woman and the scion of one of America's most powerful white families ends in a scandalous annulment lawsuit.

When Alice Jones, a blue-color woman with at least one Black parent marries Leonard "Kip" Rhinelander, the son of one of New York's most prominent society families, the scandal rocks high society—and eventually sets the city afire when Kip later sues for an annulment, accusing Alice of having hidden her "Negro blood" and intentionally deceiving him that she was white.

While...

In the World

Wed, 06 May 2020 10:52:03 +0300

The Hollywood ending of an adrenaline-filled and, by turns, harrowing and funny odyssey of crime and redemption in America's War on Drugs.
Smuggler's Blues, the first book in Richard Stratton's memoir of his criminal career, detailed his years as a kingpin in the Hippie Mafia. Kingpin, the second book, traced his eight-year journey through the criminal justice system, through two federal trials and myriad jails and prisons and culminating in his success as a self-taught jailhouse lawyer winning his own release. In this final volume, Stratton recounts his return to civilian life, as a convicted felon who had been forced to confront his demons and an aspiring writer who yearned to make his mark.
From parole to Hollywood to marriage and fatherhood, he found his way in the free world. Working in the New York office of a criminal defense attorney, he somehow adhered to the stringent conditions of his release not to associate with other felons. When his...

Smuggler's Blues

Sat, 26 Nov 2016 17:39:44 +0200

Goodfellas meets Savages meets Catch Me If You Can in this true tale of high-stakes smuggling from pot's outlaw years.
Richard Stratton was the unlikeliest of kingpins. A clean-cut Wellesley boy who entered outlaw culture on a trip to Mexico, he saw his search for a joint morph into a thrill-filled dope run smuggling two kilos across the border in his car door. He became a member of the Hippie Mafia, traveling the world to keep America high, living the underground life while embracing the hippie credo, rejecting hard drugs in favor of marijuana and hashish. With cameos by Whitey Bulger and Norman Mailer, Smuggler's Blues tells Stratton's adventure while centering on his last years as he travels from New York to Lebanon's Bekaa Valley to source and smuggle high-grade hash in the midst of civil war, from the Caribbean to the backwoods of Maine, and from the Chelsea Hotel to the Plaza as his fortunes rise and fall. All the while he is being...