Prison “would be a death sentence,” Larry Cole proclaimed, in addressing recently appointed federal Judge Edward Gignoux. It was February 1958, 50 years ago.

After a two-day trial in Bangor’s federal court, Cole, a 36-year-old former Air Force bomber pilot, had been convicted of bootlegging charges stemming from the sale of untaxed liquor. In making his plea, Cole spoke of his war record of 87 bomber missions, which included several crash landings. He also complained his prosecution was a technicality – a state jury had acquitted him of similiar charges.

Gignoux, at first, appeared to reject Cole’s ardent demand to remain out of prison. Six months was the judge’s decree. However, the judge suspended the sentence, and ordered just two years probation and a $500 fine.

Something bizarre and unpredictable happened next.

Near the end of the judge’s pronouncement, Cole reached into his pocket, removed a white powder, downed it, followed by a cup of water. The water didn’t stay down long. Soon after he swallowed, it flew from his mouth in a 10-foot stream. Cole staggered, then fell dead. The lethal substance turned out to be quick-acting sodium cyanide.

Along with the large number of spectators – many of whom were awaiting the start of an unrelated proceeding – the judge was shocked and bewildered. He called his former Harvard Law professor, Calvert Magruder, the then-head of the federal appeals court in Boston, and declared, “A man has just killed himself in my courtroom.”

Magruder, after questioning his former student, succinctly sized up the situation. He replied, with characteristic wit, “Well, he’s beyond your jurisdiction now.”

Though Magruder was correct – there was nothing Judge Gignoux could do – there remains a lesson in the circumstances leading to Cole’s sensational demise.

A New York City native, Cole moved to Winterport soon after his retirement as an Air Force officer in the mid-l950s. An amateur chemist with a bent toward the entrepreneurial, he soon bought a “filling station” on a stretch of Route 1A in the Bangor suburb.

But pumping gas and the occasional oil change was not enough to satisfy Cole’s craving for adventure.

Like the Korean War veteran who ran moonshine in the Robert Mitchum classic “Thunder Road,” Cole also put his prowess to work in the manufacture and sale of illicit alcohol. Unlike Mitchum’s character, who retreated to the Tennessee mountains, Cole operated from Winterport’s busiest intersection, Commercial and Main streets.

Cole’s restlessness expressed itself in other ways. An altercation with two men led to a challenge to head to a local fairgrounds to fight it out. On the way, Cole crashed his car, and in the process, his adversaries wound up dead. Authorities suspected foul play and Cole was tried for manslaughter. The jury disagreed and he was acquitted.

Cole’s brush didn’t abate his bootlegging, in part because he felt insulated by his role as an informant for the Waldo County Sheriff’s Department. That he bragged about selling liquor to not only adults, but also 12 and 13-year-olds, was enough to garner the interest of Timothy Murphy, the state’s chief liquor inspector, then one of the most indomitable figures in Maine government.

Realizing the alert and connected Cole would be a tough adversary, Murphy called for federal reinforcements. Undercover agents then approached Cole at his business. In July 1957, these authorities made several buys. He was charged under state law for some purchases and under federal law for others.

In the fall of 1957, Cole was tried at Superior Court in Belfast. Impressed by Cole’s determined defense, which included impassioned references to his combat record, the jury again found in Cole’s favor.

Federal prosecutors then privately struggled with whether to pursue their case against the Teflon-like defendant, but before they decided, Cole committed a familiar blunder. He panicked. He placed threatening phone calls to the federal agent and the agent’s wife over the pending charges.

This left authorities little choice but proceed, lest they be deemed cowed by Cole’s intimidation. In the ensuing trial in Bangor’s federal courthouse, the jury did what others refused to do: convict Cole. The day after this conviction Cole improvidently took his own life.

One day after the Bangor Daily News carried reports of Cole’s suicide, the sports section extolled a local 17-year-old for scoring 24 points in Bangor High’s 55 to 54 basketball win over Old Town.

William Cohen, who would later command the same military as Secretary of Defense in which Cole had courageously served, scored 12 of his team’s 14 points in the final period, even as “bedlam broke loose” near the end. The newspaper spoke of how “cool and calm” Cohen was in the final tense moments.

It is the absence of this temperament that captures the tragedy of Larry Cole.

Paul H. Mills, a son of a federal prosecutor in the Cole case, is a Farmington attorney well known for his analyses and historical understanding of Maine’s political scene. He can be reached by e-mail: [email protected].