With a mix of comedy and drama, and packed with tales of lesbian sex and inmates abused by guards, the edgy, fictionalized version of Kerman’s life in prison has become one of the hottest shows in Hollywood this year. But in the real story behind the experiences of the fictional “Piper Chapman,” the central character is the accused drug kingpin, a Nigerian businessman and political boss who has avoided U.S. authorities for 15 years.
Buruji Kashamu, who is frequently given the royal title “Prince” in African news reports, claims he was targeted in a case of mistaken identity. Rather than being the international drug smuggler known as “Alaji,” he says he was actually a U.S. government informant who provided information about terrorist attacks on the U.S. before and after 9/11.
The U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago won’t say much about the case because Kashamu is still wanted on charges alleging his drug ring moved millions of dollars worth of heroin from Europe and Southeast Asia through O’Hare International Airport during the 1990s.
Buruji Kashamu: wanted in the US
Over the years, a series of Chicago lawyers have argued on Kashamu’s behalf, most recently in an unsuccessful 2011 appeal to the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals attempting to have the charges dismissed.
Kashamu claims the real “Alaji” was his dead brother and that he has been mistakenly identified by everybody involved in the case. The government has argued that those claims are absurd, given that the witnesses include his former American lover and her sister, who recruited Kerman into the ring.
“We’re still trying to figure out ways we can fix this for Buruji,” said his Chicago lawyer, Scott Frankel. “They’re trying to bring this guy back and then have a bunch of people who haven’t seen him in years testify that he’s the guy.”
In her book, Kerman makes a few references to “Alaji,” but she never mentions Kashamu by name and says she never met him. But her girlfriend “had stayed at his compound (in Benin) and been subject to ‘witch-doctor’ ministrations and was now considered his sister-in-law.”
Published in 2010, five years after Kerman was released from a federal prison in Connecticut, “Orange is the New Black” immediately drew attention from Hollywood. By early 2012 — just a few months after appellate judges in Chicago refused to dismiss Kashamu’s charges — Kerman had sold her story to Netflix.
The popularity of the show has helped Netflix shake the foundations of the television industry this year. Because it streams over the Internet and is producing hit shows, Netflix is starting to challenge the very definition of “television.” Although the Washington political drama “House of Cards” caused a stir this year by winning multiple Emmy awards without airing on broadcast or cable TV, Netflix officials announced this fall that “Orange is the New Black” will finish the year as the company’s “most-watched” original program.
Kerman did not respond to requests for comment through her own email or Netflix’s chief spokesman. Her Chicago attorney, Patrick Cotter, initially said he would consider commenting but then stopped responding to inquiries.
While Kashamu’s lawyers try to clear his name in Chicago, he has become a player in Nigeria’s chaotic politics, according to African news reports. He runs a faction of the ruling People’s Democratic Party near the capital, Lagos, and is frequently quoted criticizing other politicians in the West African country.
Recently, newspapers there have reported that the Nigerian courts are reconsidering whether to extradite Kashamu to the U.S. Such a decision would be unlikely, and the development is more likely a bargaining chip in some dispute among competing players of the People’s Democratic Party, said John Campbell, a former U.S. ambassador to Nigeria who is now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.
While Kashamu has remained free, 14 other people in the case have long since been convicted, served prison time and been released. All but one pleaded guilty. Most were like Kerman, Northeasterners without criminal backgrounds, recruited into the smuggling ring with the promise of adventure and travel.
Kerman writes in her book that she was raised in a genteel Boston family, went to Smith College and stuck around the Northampton, Mass., campus after she graduated in 1992. Living a bohemian and aimless life working in bars and restaurants, she started a romance with an older woman, who also lived near the prestigious women’s college.
Dazzled by the woman’s jet-setting life and looking for adventure, Kerman was intrigued rather than repulsed when her new girlfriend told her she helped an African drug dealer move heroin around the globe, she wrote.
According to her plea agreement, Kerman admitted to making three overseas trips for the trafficking ring in 1993. On her second trip, in October of that year, she acknowledged carrying a suitcase containing about $50,000 on a flight from Chicago to Brussels.
Kerman does not identify her former girlfriend by her real name in the book, but court records identify the woman as Catherine Cleary Wolters. Her sister, Ellen Wolters, allegedly had a romantic relationship with Kashamu, according to court papers. Both women pleaded guilty in the case.
Kerman writes that her moment of reckoning came when her girlfriend asked her to ratchet up her involvement by carrying heroin instead of just money onto a flight. Kerman wrote that she got scared, had had enough and flew home.
She moved to San Francisco, got a real job, fell in love with a man and eventually moved to New York with him. They were building a life together when two federal agents showed up at their apartment in New York one day in 1998 and told Kerman she was under indictment in Chicago, she wrote.
One of Kerman’s former co-defendants spoke to the Tribune on condition that he not be named. He acknowledged he made a terrible mistake that led to more than two years in prison and has been trying to put his life back together ever since. He said he met Kerman multiple times and once shared a hotel room with her and her girlfriend, Catherine Wolters.
The man, who grew up on the Northwest Side and still lives in Chicago, said he was recruited by his boyfriend, who had himself been recruited by a college friend. The Chicago man said he originally was told he was being hired to work as an assistant on a travel book, but when he arrived in Indonesia, Catherine Wolters and another recruiter told him the truth. They reassured him he wouldn’t be committing a serious crime.
“I was 22 or 23, I don’t make a lot money,” he said. “And, basically, they lied to me a lot. They said they had lawyers, and if you get caught, you might get probation.”
The Chicago man and his boyfriend realized that wasn’t the case when the first defendant was arrested at O’Hare with a suitcase full of heroin in 1994.
“They had no lawyers. They stopped talking to him. He was cut loose,” the Chicago man said. “We saw that and we wanted to get as far away from them as possible.”
But as with Kerman, the past caught up to him. He said federal agents broke down his apartment door in Uptown in 1996.
He said he was unaware that Kerman wrote a book and didn’t make the connection between his experience and the Netflix show until the Tribune contacted him. He had seen a few episodes but found it too painful to watch in light of his own time behind bars.
“It was all just too close to home,” he said. “Now I know why.”
Cotter, a former federal prosecutor, quickly advised Kerman to make a deal because she could face more than a decade in prison if she went to trial and lost, Kerman wrote. While prosecutors would not comment on the case, the plea agreement signed by then-U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald expressed appreciation for her attitude.
“Defendant has clearly demonstrated a recognition and affirmative acceptance of personal responsibility for her criminal conduct,” the agreement stated.
Fitzgerald arrived in Chicago to take over the U.S. attorney’s office in 2001 when the case was several years old. However, he was familiar with Kashamu from his former job as a terrorism prosecutor in New York. While Kashamu was in jail in England, he claimed to have learned information from other inmates about terrorist activities in the U.S.
Court records show a flurry of activity and correspondence in spring and summer 2000 as his then Chicago lawyer, Thomas A. Durkin, contacted Fitzgerald in New York and sought to make a deal for Kashamu in exchange for information about the 1993 World Trade Center bombers, whom Fitzgerald was then prosecuting in New York.
After the 9/11 attacks, Scotland Yard investigators paid several visits to Kashamu in London’s Brixton Prison and received his written statements about terrorism information he’d gleaned in the jail, according to an affidavit written by a Brixton officer that was filed in court records.
During meetings with the inmate, the investigators “Thanked Mr. Kashamu for the information and stated it was extremely useful. They then continued to ask about terrorists living in London who were linking with a terrorist who had been arrested in Washington,” the officer wrote in his affidavit. “In concluding his … meeting they confirmed that the U.S. government found the information extremely valuable.”
Fitzgerald did not respond to a request for comment on the case, and Randall Samborn, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office, declined to discuss whether Kashamu cooperated in terrorism cases. But Samborn pointed out that in 2011 court documents, prosecutors denied Kashamu’s claim that Fitzgerald offered him a plea deal on his heroin case if his terrorism information panned out.
.This article was first published by Chicago Tribune last 14 November under the title: ‘Orange is New Black’ drug case still open in Chicago federal court. It was written By David Heinzmann, Chicago Tribune reporter
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