PORTLAND (AP) – Sitting inside a windowless jailhouse interview room, former Bates College professor Linda Williams said that her own drug use kept her from recognizing a crack cocaine ring that was being run out of her home.

“I knew that the men were involved in some type of trafficking, but I did not realize the magnitude and extent of it,” Williams said. “The use of a certain substance could give you the illusion that everything is OK.”

Though prosecutors have said Williams was part of an international cocaine smuggling ring, former colleagues said she was too trusting – and too naive – to understand what was going on in her home.

Williams said she only understood after the government had taped her selling drugs to wired informants that crack cocaine was being processed and distributed from her home.

“I’m learning to understand that I am gullible,” she told The Associated Press during an interview at the Cumberland County Jail, where she is being held before her transfer to a federal prison. “Even here in Cumberland County, many of the inmates have told me that I am just too gullible.”

Williams was a tenured music professor at the Lewiston college. She pleaded guilty last summer to possessing and conspiring to distribute crack cocaine as part of a ring that intended to sell the drug in central Maine.

What others may call gullibility may be a Southern small town girl’s generosity, Williams said. And even in jail, Williams feels she should help others if she can.

“If I have one teaspoon of coffee left, I would give that to an inmate if she asked for it,” Williams said. “There’s this softness or gullibility which has been critiqued and criticized, but I feel totally comfortable being that way.”

Williams taught music performance for ten years before earning her doctorate in ethnomusicology at Indiana University. She said one of the hardest things about being locked up is being cut off from the musical outlet she loves.

“I have not performed or touched an instrument in seven months, and it’s very, very, very depressing,” she said.

Without the chance to perform, she has turned her creative impulse inward, writing poems.

“I have been writing a lot of poetry about the system, about the illusions of how we think we are when we aren’t,” she said.

Those illusions, fed by a drug addiction, kept her from seeing the truth about what friends were doing in her home, Williams said.

According to authorities, two Jamaican men used her house as a base for an international drug ring.

Williams said she began using drugs “just recently,” but would not elaborate because related trials are ongoing. Williams said the work of teaching, leading performance groups and caring for her dying mother was overwhelming.

When her mother died, she was not allowed to attend her funeral because she was considered a flight risk. But the jail’s chaplain, along with a chaplain from Bates, organized a simultaneous service in Portland.

“The mortician faxed the obituary and we were singing and performing at the same time my family was actually grieving in South Carolina,” Williams said. “That was, in a sense, closure for me.”

Williams said she had planned to seek counseling to help her deal with her problems, but was arrested before she could.

“I wish that I had received counseling very, very, very early in my life,” she said. “There are many inward problems that I overlooked because of the responsibilities that I had.”

An expectation of excellence was part of her upbringing as a teacher’s daughter and an oldest child, Williams said. She was 14 when she helped integrate her South Carolina hometown’s public schools and was one of four black students in a graduating class of 180.

Williams said she has gotten more than 450 letters and cards from former students around the world.

“My room is now just a Hallmark store,” she said.

She said she has tried throughout her life to repay society for the gifts she has received. But when she gets cards from students, she gets upset thinking about how she has disappointed them.

“I feel that I’ve let down a lot of people,” she said. “I’m regretful and very remorseful that I was not strong enough to see beneath the surface, to allow this to happen to myself.”

AP-ES-02-25-04 2309EST

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