20 Years for Drug-Dealing
Paul Dalrymple
He was convicted as drug wholesaler
04/19/01
By Michael Perlstein
Staff writer/The Times-Picayune
Lips quivering, hands clasped, Isaac Knapper's family had gathered like this
once before, when he was just 17, convicted of a murder he didn't commit and
saddled with a life sentence that would take 13 years to undo.
While that decades-old injustice weighed heavily on people's minds, it had
no legal bearing on Wednesday's proceedings in federal court. This time
there was no question. Knapper, a one-time Olympic boxing contender, had
earlier pleaded guilty to cocaine trafficking. Now, his family watched from
the courtroom's wooden benches as he rose to accept his sentence from U.S.
District Judge Stanwood Duval Jr.
Knapper faced 13 to 27 years; Duval gave him 20.
The sentence did not come as a surprise, but it still unleashed a quiet
flood of tears. Family members recalled Knapper as a 12-year-old, lacing up
boxing gloves and chasing his dream of fighting for a gold medal. They
recalled how a skinny youngster survived the harsh confines of prison by
becoming a champion boxer at Angola State Penitentiary. And they recalled
his fleeting moments of glory in the ring after he was released. An
over-the-hill amateur, he was knocked out of contention one fight shy of the
1992 Barcelona Olympics.
"If I had made it, it would have been a whole different story for me,"
Knapper said in an earlier jailhouse interview. "If you represent your
country in the Olympics, your first professional fight is for a lot of
money. I fell short by one fight."
A different situation
In court, however, Duval thumbed through the case file and saw a 38-year-old
man who admitted to buying more than 50 kilos of cocaine from Colombian
dealers in Houston over the past few years. He saw a narcotics wholesaler
who sold to a string of local customers, dragged family members into his
activities, and used his liquor store as a money-laundering front. And he
saw how Knapper reveled in the easy wealth of the drug game, driving luxury
cars, buying a two-story house in Tall Timbers, paying for a backyard
swimming pool "in small bills, bound together with rubber bands in bundles
of $1,000."
"It's a substantial sentence," Duval said, "but it was a substantial crime
and a substantial amount of drugs."
A larger conspiracy
When Knapper walked into court, his tattooed biceps bulging from an orange
prison jumpsuit, he appeared upbeat, optimistic. He flashed a smile and a
wave at his mother, Clara Lee, who checked herself out of Lakeland Hospital
to attend even though she was suffering chest pains. His attorney,
John-Michael Lawrence, made several arguments for a sentence at the lower
end of the range, pointing out that Knapper was a nonviolent first offender
and suggesting that his admission of guilt had been instrumental in securing
pleas from another 13 drug dealers who followed his lead.
"I think he is the reason the dominoes began to fall in this case," Lawrence
said.
In the rigid scorecard system that determines a federal prison term, Knapper
faced two critical allegations by the government that would dictate his
punishment. One, Knapper used guns during his crimes, and two, he was a
ringleader of the drug conspiracy, prosecutor Maurice Landrieu contended.
Lawrence convinced Duval that the guns Knapper kept in his Algiers home were
legal, intended only for the protection of his family. But Lawrence had a
tougher hurdle in arguing that Knapper did not call the shots of his drug
operation. Landrieu noted the hours and hours of government wiretaps in
which Knapper was caught on tape advising, directing, hatching plans. He
reeled off a partial list of co-defendants who pleaded guilty: Knapper's
brother, nephew, wife, girlfriend, trusted friends.
"But for Isaac Knapper," Landrieu said, "none of this takes place." In the
end, Duval agreed, and Knapper was designated a drug boss.
An unjust past
Lawrence made one last pitch for a lighter sentence, voicing what nobody in
the courtroom could push out of their minds.
"He already served 12 years in jail for something he didn't do," Lawrence
said. "We ask that this not be another bad prosecution by piling on Mr.
Knapper. I think the court should use its discretion to minimize the blow as
much as possible."
Lawrence said that at times during Knapper's plea-bargaining sessions with
prosecutors, Landrieu called him the "Hyatt Regency killer," referring to
the 1979 murder in which Knapper was wrongfully convicted because an
assistant district attorney did not show defense attorneys a police report
that eventually would exonerate him.
"And I jumped up on the table every time he said that. I can't help but
think that it had a part in the government's attitude toward this case,"
Lawrence said.
Knapper also spoke in court, reading from a statement he wrote the night
before.
"I want to take this opportunity to apologize for my wrongdoing," he began,
in a low, soft voice. "I know God can't help change what happened in the
past, but he can help me in the future. . . . I don't ask you to sympathize
with me, but I do ask you to sympathize with my family."
In fact, Knapper said in the earlier interview, he pleaded guilty in the
first place in an attempt to shield family members from prosecution.
"That's the sad part about it," he said. "They (prosecutors) threatened to
give them all kinds of prison time even though they had no part in this. I'm
willing to pay the price for the wrongs I did, but my family members played
no part in this."
In the end, Knapper's attempt to fall on the sword for his family didn't
work. Weeks ago, his brother Carneal Knapper was sentenced to 65 months for
participating in the cocaine conspiracy. At Wednesday's hearing, his
girlfriend, Denise Harris, got 21 months for concealing a felony, and his
wife, Mary Knapper, received five months in a halfway house for the same
charge. Knapper's sister, Hazel Lee, and nephew, Brian Lee, await
sentencing.
Outside the circle of his weeping family, Knapper found tempered sympathy
among some unlikely onlookers. "I feel bad for what he went through and I
feel bad for his family," said Raymond Gregson, spokesman for the local IRS
criminal division, which teamed with the FBI, Drug Enforcement
Administration, U.S. Customs Service, State Police and New Orleans Police
Department on the case. "But there's no reason Mr. Knapper couldn't have
gotten a legitimate job. A lot of people . . . have been in a similar
situation and they haven't turned to drugs to make a living."