The Fall of an Angel

The Fall of an Angel

Billy Leland

Copyright © 2018 Billy Leland

All rights reserved

First Edition

Page Publishing, Inc

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc 2018

ISBN 978-1-64350-308-0 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64350-309-7 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Preface

I originally started writing my story because I didn’t want my family to remember me how the US justice department portrayed me. On October 27, 2005, I was sentenced to twenty-one years in federal prison for conspiracy to sell drugs. I was forty-nine years old at the time and thought that I would die in prison. I was devastated to think that my children and my grandchildren and the rest of my family would believe everything that was said about me. They didn’t know what really happened and my role in it. I wanted them to know the truth. I have been fourteen years writing this. I am out of prison now, but I have an electronic monitoring device attached to my right ankle. I have a lot to learn about the new technology, and while I write this, I am learning.

A very special lady let me move in with her, and she made me a little office out of a spare bedroom. My special thanks goes out to Patricia Stoddard. She’s a really good friend, and she wants me to succeed and that means the world to me. She’s teaching me how to use a computer to write my books. I’ve never been on a computer before. I hope she has a lot of patience. I have the books all written, but they are written in my own handwriting, and at times, I can’t even read it myself. I wrote constantly in prison. Sometimes all night long. I look at it now and can tell when I was so tired that I couldn’t see straight. So here I am typing this myself. I never thought that at sixty years old, I would be sitting here typing a book. I never even knew how to type. I learned while in prison because my hands were falling asleep while writing. I hope you enjoy this book. Remember, it’s all true!

I have the original pictures of the people I talk about. I have their DEA reports, their grand jury testimonies and all relative documents. I have been writing notes and the actual stories as they unfolded. Today, I am attempting to put them all together, so I can tell my side of the story. You will never hear me say I was innocent. I did drugs; I sold drugs; and I partied all the time. What you are going to read though is how the government took me down with absolutely no evidence at all. I am not the one who got caught. I am the one who did the time though. The ones that got caught red handed are the ones the government let go. Some of them did a little bit of time in prison but nothing compared to what the government gave me. It was because I was a Hells Angel, and they wanted big headlines. You will see though that I was not who they portrayed me to be. I was not the ring leader or the organizer. I was not the leader of a criminal organization.

In the US justice system, if you are the leader of a criminal organization, the government will give you a lot more time. They try to put that title on a lot of people. They usually get what they want too because they have a 97 percent rate for guilty pleas. If you don’t plead guilty, and you take your case to court in the federal system, you will be found guilty, and just for going to trial, they will give you ten years or more on top of the sentence they offered you for a guilty plea. There is no justice in the United States justice system. The government threatens your family if you go to trial. They threaten to put you in prison for life if you take it to trial and lose. They do everything they can to force you to plead guilty, that’s why only 3 percent of the federal defendants go to trial. The only reason I pled guilty is because they were going to arrest my twenty-two-year-old son and charge him with conspiracy also. They waited right up until three days before I was going to pick a jury, and then they told me that if I didn’t plead guilty that day, they were going to go to Berwick and arrest my son Derek. My son had a good job at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, and I didn’t want him put through what I had just gone through for the past year and seven months. So I pled guilty to some things I didn’t even do.

The government will threaten your family, friends, and they will arrest anyone close to you to get you to plead guilty. I have read hundreds of cases in the law library of every prison I’ve been in that proves that the government knows you will be pleading guilty eventually because they find what is near and dear to you, and they will destroy it if you don’t plead guilty. They threaten to take your parents’ house, leave your wife on the street, and take your kids away from you. They do take everything they possibly can from a defendant. They’ll take everything you’ve worked for your whole life and empty your bank account. They do it all the time. The Justice System in America is far from just. They conveniently lose evidence if it helps your case. They did it to me, and in a lot of cases, I’ve read.

This is what I looked like when I first became a Hells Angel, and the bike I rode.

This is a picture of Tony Amendola

AKA—Fat Tony

Tony was one of the ones that was very instrumental in getting me involved with the federal justice system. He used me and betrayed me to get himself a lighter sentence. You will be reading a lot about this guy. He is from New Haven, Connecticut, and I was introduced to him by the Bridgeport, Connecticut, Hells Angels and told that I could trust him. But as you will see, they were wrong.

This is a picture of a guy named Bobby Stewart from the Rockland, Maine, area. He was a prospect for the Maine Hells Angels.

Bobby is another one that betrayed me. When I got my discovery, and found out about Bobby, I was surprised as hell because Ollie Olivera, the president of the Maine Hells Angels brought Bobby to the club personally and gave his word that Bobby was a stand-up guy and can be trusted. You will read a lot more about this guy too. These two men are only the tip of the iceberg in my case. I am going to tell you about all of them briefly in this book. I will show you what they all look like if I can find the pictures. This picture was in my photo album for the whole fourteen and a half years I was in prison. As you can see, I wrote on the picture itself to let everyone know who looks at my pictures just what I think of Bobby Stewart.

This is what the back patch looks like of the Saracens.

It was the club I was in before I was a Hells Angel.

In this book, you will read how Hells Angels were brought to Maine. It is the main reason the judge gave me a twenty-one-year sentence for my first offense and nonviolent crime. He told me he was going to make an example out of me; it had nothing to do with justice. Killers oftentimes don’t get as much time as Judge John Woodcock gave me. I hope you enjoy this book and learn from it. I would not have thought the United States justice department could do what they do until I went through it myself.

Chapter One

How it all started:

I was born on September 8, 1956, in Portland, Maine, at the Mercy Hospital. My parents are Francis H. Leland and Shirley M. Leland. They both died while I was in prison, and I never got the chance to be with them. My dad’s nickname was Lee, a name he got while in the Coast Guard. It’s short for Leland, and it just stuck. My dad was a very good father. He was a good provider and sacrificed a lot for his family. He loved us all very much, right up until the end. He loved me unconditionally, and he believed in me. He was my biggest supporter while I was in prison. He didn’t hold it against me that I made mistakes and got a long prison sentence. He was proud of me and that meant the world to me.

This is how I remember my mom and dad.

They were the best parents anyone could ever have.

My mom was the best mom in the world too. She would have been my biggest supporter, but she died just ten months after I got arrested. I can’t even begin to tell you how much that hurt me. I was a federal detainee at the Maine State Prison in Warren, Maine, and the United States Marshalls wouldn’t let me go to my mom’s funeral or even to the wake. I’ll never forget that.

I have four brothers and one sister. My brothers are Mark Butch, Bobby, Thomas Bud, and Mathew. My sister’s name is Tammy Theresa Leland. Kennedy now because she’s married. I call her Theresa still to this day. My brothers and sister have supported me through all of this too. Without my family, I’m sure I wouldn’t have survived as long as I have. It was because of them that I tried so hard to always do the right thing and try to make them see that I’m more than a drug dealer and federal inmate.

My mother was always the glue that held the family together. My dad was always gone on a ship somewhere for long periods of time in the Coast Guard. My mom had to be both father and mother at the same time. My mom was a lot more than a mom to me; she was my best friend. It might sound funny to you, but I could tell my mom anything. I knew she loved me with all her heart, and she wanted the best for me. I often called her Shirley—her first name. I called her that when I was speaking to her as a friend and not a mother. I called her Mom the rest of the time. After she found out she had pancreatic cancer, I never got to see her because I didn’t get bail. I was put in the Maine State Prison in the Maximum-Security Unit with convicted murderers and every other violent criminal there is in Maine. I wasn’t even convicted of a crime, yet but there I was in prison!

Since her passing on February 18, 2004, my dad really stepped up and did his best to hold the growing family together. He became the glue. My mom was a very friendly person, very generous with everyone she met. She also had a firm side though, and she was never shy about standing up for what she believed in. If she thought she was right, watch out! Especially when it came to her family. Our house was always open to everyone in the neighborhood, and everyone who ever visited the Leland’s never failed to notice the genuine love and respect the Leland children had for their parents, and the acceptance that we showed to other people. They definitely noticed the love our parents had for all of us.

My mom and dad made their home a happy place for us to grow up in. Every one of our friends felt very comfortable there. We always had a close, loving family, and we were always encouraged to enjoy life, be happy, and proud of who we are in spite of our humble state in life. We didn’t have a lot of material things or a lot of money. We had more than that. We have the closeness that you don’t see too often in families. We could look for the American Dream without being afraid to fail.

I loved both of my parents more than anything in the world, and they are always in my mind and in my heart. I have a lot of regrets. I feel like I’ve failed my father’s expectations of me. I’m sure he never expected to hear a judge sentence me to a twenty-one-year prison term. It’s a feeling that I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life. I know he still loves me very much, and that’s what counts. My mom died before she heard the judge sentence me. If she was in the court room that day, she would have died of a heart attack right then. She loved me so much, hearing that would have killed her. Now, I have to change my life and make them proud of me before it’s too late. I know they are watching.

I’ve always been the real black sheep in the family. Not the way that most people would think of a black sheep. I was never an outcast or treated any differently than the rest of my brothers or sister. I say black sheep because I never acted the way the rest of the Leland kids did. I did things my brothers and sister would never think of doing. I was the rebel in the family. I was rebellious at an early age with a mind of my own and a strong will. I never wanted to be like anyone else. I never had a hero, or a role model I wanted to be like when I was younger. I never really thought about the future either. I just lived for the moment and the hell with the consequences. I wanted to do what I wanted, and I usually did it. The sad part about that is I never grew out of it. That is why this book was written mostly from a federal prison.

I’ve learned so many lessons now though, and they’ve been very painful. One of the most painful lessons a prisoner learns is who his real friends are. Every prisoner goes through it. For me, it was very heartbreaking. Some of the people I really loved betrayed me in the worst ways possible. Everyone wants to be around you when you are on top of the world. I was handing out drinks and paying for parties and made a lot of people happy. I was the go-to-guy when it came to cocaine, methamphetamines, and some others such as marijuana and ecstasy. I was a Hells Angel after all; I had access to a lot more things than anyone else around. But when the going gets rough, your so-called friends hang you out to dry. They are cowards and can’t take responsibility for what they did. They betray you to stay out of jail. They don’t care how long you have to go for though, or that it will ruin your life, just as long as they are not the ones doing time. I learned that most of my friends were not friends at all. It really hurt when I read the grand jury testimonies of the ones I really loved. They obviously didn’t love me the way that I loved them. They were just using me for what they could get.

The hardest one to learn was with my wife Ganessa. I learned that I was nothing to her but a Sugar Daddy. She was sleeping with one of the confidential informants in my case. She was in another man’s bed within ninety days when I got arrested. She had a different man’s baby on Thanksgiving Day in 2004, and the channel 5 news aired it on TV because it was a Thanksgiving baby. I just happened to have a small TV in my solitary cell and was watching the news that night. Of course, she used her maiden name on TV and not Leland. She used Ganessa Bryant. We were still married, and I knew she was messing around but to see that, it was devastating to me. She couldn’t have hurt me any worse no matter what she did. While I was doing time, she was talking bad about me because she believed everything bad that anyone said about me. I think she wanted to believe all the rumors about me to justify in her own mind what she was doing. She needed another sugar daddy now that I was locked up. I hope she reads this book, and she will see that they were lying, and they were working with the feds to put me in prison. I guess it didn’t really matter to her anyway because she did her own grand jury testimony against me. I am not sure what the feds had on her, but