Neglect and Abuse in North Carolina Prisons!

Levon Wilson,  a resident of Winston Salem, North Carolina, who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, was arrested on August 31, 2010, on misdemeanor charges and sent to the state’s Central Prison to await trial. Five weeks later, he was dead.

An autopsy showed that Wilson had been transferred from the prison to Wake Med Hospital in Raleigh with “moderately high levels” of lithium in his bloodstream ten days before he died. Lithium is often prescribed to treat manic symptoms common with bipolar disorder. But taking too much lithium is deadly. Patients taking lithium must be monitored with blood tests because too much lithium can impair the kidneys and obstruct bowels. 

The autopsy revealed that Wilson had died from “complications of lithium therapy,” which led to him suffering impaired kidneys and bowel problems. Despite the obvious — that someone in the prison system had screwed up in dispensing lithium — a state doctor ruled that Wilson’s death was the result of  “natural” causes. No one was reprimanded. No one was fired.

Click to continue…

Hollywood Buys WITSEC for TV Drama

 

 

My good friend, Gerald Shur, and I have received lots of inquires from Hollywood about  our nonfiction book, WITSEC: Inside the Federal Witness Protection Program since it was published ten years ago. For those of you who have not read it, Gerald is the Justice Department lawyer who came up with the idea of creating a government program that would protect mobsters and give them new identities in return for their testimony against their Mafia Godfathers.

 By the time Gerald retired in 1995, he had overseen the handling of such famous gangsters as Joseph Valachi, “Jimmy the Weasel” Fratianno and “Sammy the Bull” Gravano.  The witness protection program that he created helped shatter the mob’s code of silence.

Interested screenwriters and producers would call us and ask about WITSEC. But for a variety of reasons, we never sold the dramatic rights — until now.  The trade magazine, Publisher’s Weekly, announced the sale.

Click to continue…