Amish Confidential (11 page)

But he insisted, and she went along. That went on for a couple of years.

Anna might have felt her years of horror were finally over when her mother caught them one day. But, she recalled, her mother didn’t punish the brother. She punished Anna. “I was locked in my room,” she said.

She said she’d wanted to speak out when she was younger, but the cost was unthinkably high. Finally one day, Anna used a telephone in an English house she was cleaning to call a battered-women’s shelter in Mount Vernon, Ohio. The counselors on the other end of the line didn’t take her seriously at first. Anna couldn’t give up. She needed help. After a month of relentless calls, the shelter finally alerted Knox County’s Children and Family Services Division. A child abuse investigator spoke to Anna about her ordeal and alerted the police. But before detectives launched any kind of criminal investigation, Anna Slabaugh’s family moved out of the state to Tionesta, Pennsylvania.

The abuse finally stopped there. But Anna said she still didn’t feel safe with her family and was determined to leave. She told anyone who would listen, including a Pennsylvania state trooper, that she wanted to get away from her family, that she was too frightened to stay. Somehow, her family found out. Now they were steaming mad.

One day when Anna had a toothache, her mother took her to see an Amish dentist and the dentist yanked out all of her daughter’s teeth. Even though she’d had just a simple toothache, now she had a full mouth of horrible pain. Toothless, she felt terribly disfigured. But her mother didn’t express any sympathy. Recalled Anna: “After he had pulled the last tooth, my mom looked at me and said, ‘I guess you won’t be talking anymore.’ ”

Although the report to the state trooper prompted an invesigation, Anna says she recanted her story at a court hearing because she was so depressed and feeling so defeated from her prior efforts to speak out. So, no one has ever been convicted of sexually abusing Anna. Neither of her brothers had to stand trial. In fact, no formal
charges were ever filed, although the young girl had sought help in two different states.

Anna finally made her break with the help of a friend’s family. She spent the next two years with foster families. She finally feels safe, she says, but worries about her younger sister.

“I know that she’s been beaten,” Anna said of her sister. “She was when I was still there. But whether she’s been sexually molested, I just pray to God that she hasn’t.”

CHAPTER 11

BUI

T
here’s a T-shirt with a slogan I think is funny.

It shows the silhouette of an Amish man with hat, beard and suspenders and offers an excellent piece of advice:
DON’T DRINK OR DRIVE
, as if the Amish are always opposed to both.

There’s a lot of confusion and misconception when it comes to alcohol and the Amish. Many people I’ve met seem to believe that the Amish aren’t permitted to drink at all. That’s not true. The Amish aren’t Mormons or evangelical Christians or devout Muslims. Alcohol isn’t the devil’s nectar, as far as the Amish are concerned. Wine especially is all over the Bible. At the feast at Cana, Jesus didn’t turn the water into chocolate milk.

It’s
excessive
drinking or
inappropriate
drinking or
dangerous
drinking that conflict with key Amish values such as clearheadedness, personal responsibility and hard work. The occasional glass of wine at dinner is one thing. Getting loaded on Saturday night is something else entirely. You might have a hangover at church! I’m just waiting for someone to print up the Amish Country bumper sticker that says:
FRIENDS DON’T LET FRIENDS BUGGY DRUNK
!

I understand: The intoxicated operation of a horse-drawn carriage is just as dangerous as the intoxicated operation of a motorized one. Well, maybe not
just
as dangerous. Very few horses can gallop seventy or eighty miles an hour, even when you’re late for church. And a horse-drawn carriage, by definition, has a horsepower of one, about one two-hundredth of the oomph of a typical American family car. But BUI, buggying under the influence, is still best avoided.

Believe me, I know. I’ve tried it. I’ve been caught driving a car under the influence, twice. But this happened in my buggy, and it wasn’t pretty. One night, I went weaving past the Rail Road Diner on Race Street (I swear, that’s the street name) near my house in Richland, too loaded to walk safely much less steer a carriage and a horse. I must have thought I was chasing Jeff Gordon at the Pocono Raceway. I just kept slapping the reins and shouting, “
Go! Go! Go!
” Thank God I was alone. It’s hard enough maintaining control of a horse when everyone’s stone-cold sober—the driver and the horse. I was lucky to get back home without being arrested or killing anyone.

I don’t remember the ride back home at all. But every Amish kid knows that if you get drunk and fall asleep in the buggy, the horse will take you home. Somewhere in that horse brain is a foolproof GPS system. The only problem is it has only one destination plugged in: home. Always home. I proved it again that night. The horse must have known the way, because I sure didn’t. I was still totally wasted when I stumbled into the house.

The first Amish guy I ever heard of getting arrested for buggying under the influence was Elmer Stoltzfus Fisher. Elmer was a young Amish carpenter in his early twenties. One Sunday evening in early December, he might have had a little too much Christmas cheer. He was heading back to his farm in Paradise.

A quick aside: Paradise is one of those Pennsylvania Dutch Country places whose name is fitting for a religious community, unlike Blue Ball, Bareville, Mount Joy and the always hilarious town of Intercourse, Pennsylvania, whose names make the tourist snicker, especially the tourists under ten years old. Paradise holds the special distinction of being the setting for a very funny 1994 Christmas-themed crime comedy called
Trapped in Paradise
, which starred Nicolas Cage, Jon Lovitz and Dana Carvey. I hear that Intercourse has been featured in some movies too, though I don’t believe I have seen any of those.

Anyway, Elmer was at the reins of his buggy that night, moving very, very slowly along North Ronks Road, which is a two-way thoroughfare with cars whizzing by. He wasn’t riding to the left. He wasn’t riding to the right. He was creeping along the center line. I’m not sure if that was his decision or the horse’s. Either way, the buggy wasn’t difficult to catch up to.

Jesse Blank, an off-duty police officer in my hometown of Quarryville, happened to be driving by in his personal car. Sensing that something wasn’t right, he slipped behind Elmer’s buggy. Nate Perry, who was riding with the off-duty cop, jumped out and trotted alongside Elmer’s slow-moving buggy. The young Amish man didn’t seem to notice a thing, and no wonder. Through the window, Nate saw that Elmer seemed to be sleeping, slumped way down in the seat. The cop knocked on the buggy door—hard, several times. Only then did Elmer stir.

The off-duty cop called it in to the East Lampeter Township police, who reported to the scene. The incident report noted that Elmer and his horse had been “straddling the center line of the roadway.” The responding officer detected a “strong odor of an alcoholic
beverage” on Elmer’s breath and noticed his “bloodshot, watery eyes.” When Elmer took a Breathalyzer back at the station, he blew a .18 percent, more than twice the legal alcohol limit in Pennsylvania. On the official police report, the officer identified Elmer as the driver and, as well as he could, described the vehicle involved: “Year: NA [not applicable]. Model: NA. Make: HORSE & BUGGY.” That might have happened elsewhere before this incident, but I’d never heard about it.

Elmer went quietly. Levi Detweiler, age seventeen, did not. In Leon, New York, a deputy from the Cattaraugus County sheriff’s department observed Levi’s buggy go through a stop sign without even slowing down. The moment the lights and siren went on, Levi and his horse took off. Rather than cooperate with his own arrest, Levi must have thought it wiser to take the police on an alcohol-fueled cruiser-buggy chase—a slow-speed chase from the officers’ perspective, a very high-speed chase from the horse’s. For a full mile, the cop stayed right behind the Amish speed demon. As the road turned sharply, Levi’s buggy failed to negotiate the curve, ending up in a roadside ditch. That should have been the end of it, but Levi still wasn’t ready to submit. He took off on foot, leaving the horse and buggy behind, with two deputy sheriffs in hot pursuit.

Levi didn’t get far. He was grabbed, cuffed and charged with underage possession of alcohol, reckless endangerment, failure to stop at a stop sign and failure to yield to an emergency vehicle. He was driven, by car, off to jail.

“T
hese cases aren’t uncommon at all,” says Steven Breit, a criminal-defense attorney who has represented quite a few Amish
clients over the years. He’s had BUIs, SUIs (scootering under the influence), HRUIs (horseback riding under the influence) and pretty much everything this side of butter churning under the influence. He also reps many non-Amish clients accused of normal DUIs.

Breit has made such a specialty of drunk-driving defense that he has printed up bar coasters with his name and phone number and distributed them to taverns across Lancaster and Lebanon Counties. Business got even brisker when Pennsylvania, like many states, lowered the drunk-driving threshold from .10 percent to .08 percent alcohol in a person’s bloodstream. Just like in New York, the state put in a super-strict limit for anyone under the age of twenty-one, making it illegal to have an alcohol count even as low as .02. The Amish may not like mingling with outside legal authority, Breit says, but these days, police and prosecutors are perfectly happy sweeping up Amish drunk drivers along with all the rest.

“Back in the day,” the lawyer says, “maybe the cop would just give a warning to the Amish buggy driver who’d had too much to drink, ‘Just get on home, sir. Drive safely now.’ But today, the police don’t care if you’re Amish or English or what you are. All these laws apply just as much to Amish teenagers and adults—during Rumspringa or coming home from a field party or just being out on a Saturday night.”

There are some legitimate safety concerns. Even under the best of circumstances, buggies aren’t that easy to see at night. Most of them are now outfitted with bright orange hazard triangles and flashing red safety lights. But the lights are battery powered. They’re dim even when they are turned on. Because it’s such a hassle recharging
the batteries, some Amish buggy drivers turn off their flashing lights until they know someone’s behind them. That gives hardly any warning before a car screeches up, and that’s if they haven’t been drinking too much to remember to flip the switch.

When it comes to drunk buggying, things are a little looser in some other states. In those places with fewer Amish on the roads, the vehicle has to be motorized before the drunk-driving laws apply.
Motorized
includes a lot—cars, trucks, SUVs, motorcycles, snowmobiles, motorboats and, if they’re taken onto a public roadway, even riding mowers and golf carts. (And don’t forget Dennis LeRoy Anderson’s infamous drive home in a motorized La-Z-Boy. Police in Proctor, Minnesota, certainly haven’t. Really, you can look this up under
CUI
—chairing under the influence.) In all those places, if the vehicle doesn’t have a motor, the authorities have to make do with lesser charges such as disorderly conduct, public drunkenness or, in rare cases, reckless endangerment, if they can show the drunken buggier or bicyclist or scooter pusher is truly a danger to himself or others. Those offenses tend to carry lesser penalties than a normal DUI, and I don’t think repeat offenders could be subject to Pennsylvania’s habitual-offender five-year license-suspension law. No driver’s license, no suspension, right?

But in several states with large Amish populations, Pennsylvania included, the drunk-driving laws don’t even require that a vehicle be motorized. “In our state, the law applies to buggies, scooters, bicycles, tricycles, horseback, it doesn’t matter,” Breit says—damn near anything with wheels, blades or hooves. Drunk driving is drunk driving is drunk driving, and the handcuffs quickly come out.

Still, experienced defense lawyers do have a range of arguments they have learned to make on behalf of their Amish clients. They’re not so different from the ones they make for the non-Amish. If the buggy hit a tree and there are no other witnesses, how do we really know what occurred? “There’s a lot of things you can question,” Breit says. “And how do we know the horse wasn’t at fault? Horses can buck. Horses get spooked.”

However, Breit says that so far, none of his Amish clients have wanted to blame the horse.

CHAPTER 12

COKE BROTHERS

A
bner King Stoltzfus should have paid more attention. There were warnings all over the Bible, as there so often are when a nice young man is sliding down an obviously perilous path. How much plainer could 1 Corinthians have been? “The sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God, and I do not want you to be participants with demons.”

Things started out innocently enough. Abner agreed to give a long-haired English guy a ride home. The Amish are neighborly like that.

Abner came from the close-knit Amish community in Gap, an old nickel-mine town in Lancaster County named for the nearby gap in the Appalachian Mountains. He was a thin twenty-two-year-old with curly, dirty-blond hair, a friendly young man five or six years into a fairly routine Rumspringa. He had his own company, AS Roofing. I don’t believe he and I are close kin, though we do share middle and last names.

Lancaster County is crawling with people named Stoltzfus. You could say that
Stoltzfus
is the
Smith
or
Jones
of Pennsylvania
Dutch Country, but Smith and Jones don’t hold a candle to Stoltzfus if we’re just talking percentages. Nearly one-quarter of the thirty thousand Amish people in the Lancaster area are named Stoltzfus, and many, many more have Stoltzfus blood running through their veins. Genealogists say that almost all of us are descended from one man, Nicholas Stoltzfus, who came to Pennsylvania from Germany in 1766. Ben Riehl, a know-it-all farmer from Intercourse who tracks Amish heritage, was asked about Nicholas Stoltzfus’s widespread impact. “It’s even more than people realize,” Ben said. He estimated that 98 percent of the Amish population of America descends from Old Nick. “If he hadn’t made the decision to move over here, we’d all probably still be in Europe,” Ben said.

Back to Abner. He and another Amish friend had driven out of the county to see a demolition derby, where they had a grand time watching perfectly good cars smash each other up. The hippie needed a ride, and the Amish are nothing if not polite.

It was in the car that their grateful passenger pulled out a small pipe.

“You want a little?” he asked.

After some brief reluctance, Abner and his friend each agreed to take a hit. It was pot, of course, and, of course, they liked it. By the time they crossed back into Lancaster County, Abner had agreed to buy a $20 bag.

That was his introduction to an element of modern American life that his strict Amish upbringing had mostly shielded him from. Apparently, this was not the case with every Amish kid. Weed, it turned out, had become quite popular with some Crickets, Antiques, Pilgrims and other Amish young people. The kids even had a special Amish name for the intoxicating weed:
green corn.

Then things got really interesting. One day, a friend and fellow roofer from Gap whose name was also Abner Stoltzfus (no kidding, and also no close relation to the first Abner or to me—let’s call him Abner Two) turned him on to the devil’s white powder, cocaine. Like a character in a back-roads remake of
Reefer Madness
,
he went spiraling into places he never even knew existed before. He discovered a far-flung subculture of fun-loving Amish druggies. Abner liked the coke even more than he liked the special green corn, and that was saying something. He liked the coke so much, in fact, he wanted more of it and more of it and maybe just a little more of it—
now
! In no time, the two Abners went to see a large, tattooed biker whose nickname was Juke.

“We went over to the guy’s house,” Abner would explain later to a writer from
Philadelphia
magazine. “I was scared. I thought, I don’t want to be here. There was this big four-hundred-pound guy on the sofa, just looking at us. I was scared to death. What am I doing here?”

Buying coke was how the visit began. The coke-dealing biker Juke and his nearly-as-large friend Big Dwayne mentioned proudly that they ran with a motorcycle club called the Pagans. The Pagans, Juke and Big Dwayne added, had excellent connections in the world of illegal narcotics distribution—or words to that effect.

Despite the initial discomfort, everyone seemed to be getting along just fine. Juke apparently had worked a roofing job with Abner Two. They had that bond. And the bikers sniffed a unique business opportunity in their new Amish friends. Where some people viewed the Amish as distant, backward or impossibly devout, Juke apparently saw the younger generation of plain people as an untapped market for Pagan cocaine.

Nearing the end of their Rumspringa days, the Abners found a special role for themselves connecting two worlds, Amish youth and drugs. The real action, they knew, was at band hops and other large field parties where hundreds of Amish teens gathered under the stars for kick-your-shoes-off nights of laughing, singing, dancing, drinking and fun.

Once the Abners turned up with their special powder, those nights would include some heavy drugging, too.

A
lot of outsiders were surprised that the Amish and the bikers connected so easily. I wasn’t surprised. I’ve always gotten along well with bikers, whichever clubs they ran with. Like the Amish, bikers often work construction. They follow rules of their own. Like the Amish, they have their own cohorts and their own sense of style. They dress differently and talk differently and work differently from most other people. They aren’t too concerned about what straight society thinks.

As it happened, the Abners were not very shrewd drug dealers. For one thing, they made a classic amateur mistake: They couldn’t seem to decide if they were looking to make money or friends. They laid out piles of cocaine just as the young Rumspringa partiers were arriving. They didn’t collect any money up front. They let their friends and friends’ friends pay on the honor system for however much they used. Bad idea. That approach fell short of the Pagans’ usual standards of inventory control. The Abners were moving six or seven thousand dollars’ worth of coke some weekends—but they still had trouble keeping up with their supply bills.

As Abner said later: “I’d start drinking beer and lose track of who I gave to.”

It didn’t take long for the authorities to catch a whiff of this Amish-Pagan drug connection. The multistate motorcycle club, with sixteen chapters in Pennsylvania alone, had attracted plenty of police scrutiny over the years—and not just for their provocative name. Various members and associates had been accused of a wide variety of criminal activities—drug running, violent extortion, domestic abuse and many, many open-road traffic violations.

When state and federal undercover drug agents began hearing talk that the Pagans were reaching into the very heart of the Pennsylvania Amish community, the agents could hardly believe their ears. “Bikes and buggies—it’s a rather strange combination,” said Pennsylvania state police major Robert Werts. “Our drug investigations are taking us to places where years ago we didn’t think we had a problem.”

“It’s something in my twenty-six years in the FBI I’ve never encountered before,” agreed Robert Conforti, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Philadelphia office. Yes, Amish teenagers sometimes referred to their youth groups as “gangs.” But no one ever thought they meant the organized-crime kind.

The state police took the direct approach. Two troopers showed up at Abner’s front door. The troopers explained that they were investigating a large-scale drug ring that two young Amish men were a small part of. No one had to shine bright lights in Abner’s eyes or whack Abner Two with a rubber hose. Abner confessed immediately. Without much prodding, he agreed to wear a wire and record his next drug buy with the Pagans. He hid the little microphone in his
black Amish hat, where even the famously paranoid bikers didn’t think to look.

When the indictment was returned at the federal courthouse in downtown Philadelphia, it detailed a seven-year, $1 million drug-sale conspiracy that had involved the Amish for the final two years. The conspiracy allegedly began in 1992 when members of the Chester County chapter of the Pagans, joined by assorted “hang-arounds,” started selling multikilogram quantities of powder coke and meth through the bars and taverns of Chester and Lancaster Counties.

Some weekends, it was said, the Abners sold just a couple of thousand dollars’ worth. But sometimes, when the parties grew to five hundred people or more, the dollars went way higher than that. Eight-thousand-dollar nights were not unheard of.

Leading the Pagan conspiracy, the prosecutors said, was Emory Edward Reed, forty-seven, of Millersville, and his sergeant at arms Dwayne Blank of Gap. If the indictment was to be believed, Reed broke a fellow Pagan’s leg with an ax when the man refused to follow an order. He allegedly knocked out another man’s teeth when he was late in making drug payments.

What can you say? Abner should thank his lucky stars no one noticed his hat wire.

I
t had once been possible to deny that the Amish had a drug problem at all. George H. W. Bush, the first President Bush, came to Lancaster County in March of 1989 and did exactly that. He brought with him Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and the new White House drug czar, William Bennett. They met that day with a
dozen Amish and Mennonite elders at the Penn Johns Elementary School in Bird-in-Hand. The president started on a cheerful note, declaring that he had come “to salute [the Amish and Mennonites] because as we look at a national drug problem, we find that in communities such as yours—because of your adherence to family values and faith—the problem appears to be close to nonexistent, hopefully nonexistent.”

Really?

The president asked if anyone in the room could account for this complete absence of drugs in their world. A Mennonite man said he believed he could explain the phenomenon. “I think the fact that we have no trouble with drug addiction is because of the close family ties and the children are taught obedience at a very young age—and self-denial—that they don’t have everything they wish as they’re growing up,” the man said. “And because they are taught of God and urged to pray, and in school have prayer and Bible reading. And as they grow up, they have a sense of value that they’re not just out seeking thrills and drugs or any other.”

President Bush said he couldn’t agree more, suggesting maybe he’d found the solution to America’s drug problems right here in Lancaster County. “I am absolutely certain,” he said, “that family values and community and faith—where those abound, the problems that we’re talking about of fighting narcotics, the fight is easier and the problem less big.”

But others at the meeting didn’t sound so sure. A couple of people said they’d already picked up signs that illegal drugs were creeping into their communities, too. One man said that his son had accepted a ride in a pickup truck and was offered marijuana. “It makes me almost quiver in my boots,” the man said, “when I think
that that youth could have been tempted to do that because he was exposed to it.”

The drug czar, Bennett, tried to gauge the feelings in the room. “Are things better than they were five years ago? Are they worse than they were?”

Again, the doubts were raised. One man stood and said, “In my opinion, it would be worse because our two oldest sons work at public places and they both were exposed to drugs and had opportunity to buy.”

Attorney General Thornburgh finally took the floor to remind everyone that the president was deeply committed to keeping communities like theirs drug-free. “President Bush, I’m sure you’ve heard it said, has established a goal of providing a kinder and gentler America. And I think that’s one that we support to a man or woman throughout this country. But a kinder, gentler America is not one where drugs are abused and where drug traffickers rule the streets of some of our communities.”

O
f course, that turned out to be wishful thinking. President Bush’s policies didn’t cure America’s drug problem, any more than any of his predecessors’ had. And the Amish weren’t living in total isolation. They’d find out that they weren’t any more immune to drug abuse than people in any other community.

People in Amish Country seemed to get that eventually, much as they wish it weren’t true. One Amish father, Ed Miller, told a reporter who came snooping around: “The devil doesn’t care where we live, whether in the city or in the country. He seeks out the weakest.”

Every group has its “weakest.”

A year before the two Abners hit the headlines, an anonymous letter was circulated to Amish parents and youth, warning about the dangers of drug abuse. No one took public credit, but the language certainly sounded ominous. “Beware of the evil changes your children might be going through,” the letter warned.

As requested, the letter was read aloud in Amish churches throughout Lancaster County. Clearly, the writers knew there was a problem and how pervasive it was. The letter specifically mentioned marijuana, cocaine and heroin, saying all three were available to their children. “May the Lord help us and grant us wisdom, strength and grace to work on this problem we have with some of our young people using drugs,” the letter said.

It was signed, “With heavy hearts, Concerned Parents of Our Youth Today.”

But the Amish are very private people, and while they were willing to address the problem among themselves, they weren’t at all happy that this embarrassing episode was now very much in the spotlight. Suddenly, it seemed everyone was talking about the Amish tradition of Rumspringa and all the antisocial behavior it seemed to keep sparking. Church leaders were appalled that their quiet communities were being portrayed as places that tolerated drugs and partying—not just tolerated those evils but almost seemed to condone them. “It is a gross inaccuracy to talk about accepting the sowing of wild oats,” said one bishop, who refused to allow his name to be used. “It’s a small minority that everybody notices who does that. Ninety-eight percent never do.”

There was no actual data, of course—but also no shortage of wishful thinking.

In a further attempt to distance his rule-abiding flock from the two Abners, the bishop reminded everyone that while they were raised Amish and were both active members of Amish youth groups, neither had yet been baptized. “These fellows are no more Amish than I am Nazi,” the bishop said.