A former professor gets a five-year sentence for dealing crack.
By Lisa Chmelecki
Staff Writer

PORTLAND – At Bates College, Linda Williams was known as an accomplished scholar and talented jazz musician.

She made tenure after less than six years, and her classes were always some of the quickest to fill.

On Monday, as Williams sat beside her lawyers in U.S. District Court in Portland, her closest friends and colleagues described her as extremely gullible and nave.

So gullible and nave, they said, she had no idea she was part of a major drug operation that was supplying crack cocaine to hundreds of people in the Lewiston and Augusta areas. So gullible and nave, they said, she didn’t even know the difference between a gram and an ounce when she was arrested last April on drug-trafficking charges.

These friends and colleagues, along with Williams’ two lawyers, hoped their testimony would help keep the 51-year-old out of prison.

“Linda did commit a crime but she is not a criminal,” said Dr. Eveleigh Williams Goodall, Williams’ sister who traveled from Chicago to speak at the sentencing hearing. “She doesn’t need to be in prison. She needs rehabilitation.”

In the end, however, federal prosecutors got exactly what they wanted. U.S. District Court Judge George Singal sentenced Williams to five years in a federal prison, followed by five years of probation.

“You have had a remarkable ability to impress people across this country with regard to your generosity, your intellect and your devotion to your students,” Singal told Williams before announcing her sentence. “I have confidence in you, Dr. Williams, that even in a federal institution, you will find ways to help people using your God-given talent.”

Williams’ arrest came as a shock to many of her students and co-workers. Many wondered how a noted intellectual could be mixed up in the dangerous world of crack cocaine.

Investigators say it began when Williams hired a local nursing assistant, who was also a crack addict, to care for her ailing mother. This woman introduced Williams to two Jamaican men who were running a local cocaine network, and it snowballed from there, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Jonathan Toof.

Starting in June 2002, investigators said, Williams let the men use her Bardwell Street home to do business and use her car for cocaine runs to Boston and New York. She did it, they said, in exchange for regular payments of crack.

Last spring, drug agents sent informants wearing body wires to Williams’ home to record drug transactions. Police raided her house on April 11, after learning that she was about to conduct a $1,000 cocaine deal.

Williams was initially charged with two counts of distributing cocaine and one count of conspiracy to distribute the drug. The first two counts were dropped in January when she agreed to plead guilty.

Inability to say no

Wearing an orange jail uniform, Williams cried several times Monday as her colleagues spoke about her talents and her faults, including her inability to say no.

James Parakilas, the head of Bates’ music department, told the judge about a time when Williams got a call from a director of a music band at another college. The director wanted her band to perform at Bates.

Williams knew there was no time for such an arrangement. Still, she couldn’t say no, Parakilas said. She put the woman on hold and asked him to take the call.

It was Williams’ inability to say no, Parakilas and others said, that made her vulnerable to the local drug dealers. Her involvement in the operation became compounded, they said, as she became addicted to the drug.

Williams’ lawyer, Roger Wareham, of Brooklyn, N.Y., described Williams as a deer in headlights.

“Despite having a doctorate, despite all of her travels, there is naiveté and gullibility to her,” he said. “She is here because of her inability to say no and her denial of being a drug addict.”

Regret

Williams accepted the offer to speak at the hearing.

Although she claimed to be oblivious to the vastness of the operation and told the judge that many of the cocaine deals took place when she was out of town, she didn’t deny her role.

“I will for the rest of my life regret what I have done,” she said, her voice trembling.

Some of Williams’ supporters tried to convince the judge that Williams has already been punished by losing her job, by having to miss her own mother’s funeral and by having to appear before her colleagues in handcuffs and a jail uniform.

“Her punishment is that I have to sit here and look at her and she has to sit there and look at me,” said Cathy Littleton, a childhood friend who flew from Michigan to speak at the hearing. “Putting her away? What is that going to do? It is not going to do anything.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Toof acknowledged Williams’ talent and accomplishments. But he reminded the judge that she is also a crack addict.

“Whether you are a tenured professor at Bates or you are living off S.S.I, your main goal in life is to get the drug. There is nothing that sets her apart from any other member of this conspiracy,” Toof said.

Under federal guidelines, Williams, who has no previous criminal record, could have gotten up to nine years in prison.

Williams officially resigned from Bates last October. The college is currently looking to fill her space.

“It is going to take two people to replace her,” Parakilas told the judge.

lchmelecki@sunjournal.com

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