By Jason Hancock

The sun had just peeked out over the horizon when federal agents kicked down the door of Amel Lueth’s Council Bluffs home.

“I looked down the stairs at three or four drug agents with .357 revolvers, and they all had them pointed at me,” he said. “I will never forget that moment. I figured, ‘This is it. I’m going to jail.’”

On March 24, 1983, federal agents found just what they were looking for inside Lueth’s home: three pounds of marijuana, a half ounce of cocaine, $65,000 in cash and several bags of silver coins. Later, they used what they had found to get a search warrant for his parents’ farm, where they found six pounds of cocaine, 50 pounds of marijuana and more silver coins.

The reign of a man accused of being the kingpin of the largest drug organization in the Midwest was over.

More than two years after the agents raided his home, Lueth began serving his sentence in a federal corrections facility, becoming the first Iowan ever to be convicted under federal racketeering laws.

Now, 23 years later, Lueth is a free man. But the events that led to his demise still haunt him. Was justice really served? Not a single person during his trial testified that Lueth had ever used violence or even carried a weapon. But the government painted him as a violent drug lord.

And the informant — the first domino that brought Lueth’s organization down — was called unreliable by the agents who later used his testimony to justify the search warrant.

Lueth doesn’t say he’s an innocent man. He even admits that, with a little more work, the DEA would have gotten him legitimately. But despite whatever crimes were committed, he deserved a fair trial, the one thing he believes was denied him.

“They stripped me of my rights as a citizen,” he said. “Now some people will hear that and say, ‘Who cares? Fuck him, he was dealing dope.’ But it doesn’t matter. Everyone has the right to a fair trial. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. The facts speak for themselves. I want to make sure that no one else ever has their rights stolen from them in the so-called ‘War on Drugs.’”

He may finally be a free man, but Lueth is still trying to get the justice he feels was stolen from him more than two decades ago.

Humble beginnings

For three generations, the Lueth family farmed the rolling hills outside of Manilla, a small town in western Iowa, making a living from cattle and grain.

Lueth’s great-grandfather came to Manilla from Germany and bought three sections of land in Crawford County. His grandfather, who he is named after, eventually took over the farm, and when Lueth’s father returned from World War II, he did the same.

His mother was a saint, Lueth said, but her family did have an interesting history.

“She told me that her parents were moonshiners from Kentucky who moved to Florida during Prohibition and became rumrunners,” he said. “But my mother never even got a speeding ticket. She lived by the law of the land every day of her life.”

Farming was never in Lueth’s plans. He had other goals in mind. At first he thought about becoming a chiropractor, since he had done a lot of research on the field after a back injury years earlier. But he decided against it, instead opening up a rock ’n roll bar in Mason City in the mid-70s.

“The bar is where I met my wife, Sharon,” he said. “I really enjoyed that bar, but I started going to these outdoor concerts and I said to myself, ‘I can do this. That’s where the real money is.’”

So Lueth sold the bar and moved with his wife to Council Bluffs to pursue his new dream.

“A buddy of mine told me his friend had inherited this 120-acre farm that would be perfect for outdoor concerts,” he said. “I went and talked to him, and we became really good friends. So we started planning a big outdoor concert for July 3, 1976.”

Lueth sold stock in his newly formed company to pay for the construction of a stage, and booked several touring artists and about a half dozen local bands.

“My son, Jeremy, was born a couple days before the concert,” Lueth said. “And I’m shriveling up because I’m working my ass off to put this together. It was a lot of work, but I pulled it off.”

Unfortunately, in order to break even, Lueth had to charge $12 a ticket. This would have been fine, except that a rival concert promoter in Omaha, hoping to protect his turf from this Iowa upstart, put on a free concert on the same night, killing turnout to Lueth’s show.

“I lost $40,000 that night,” Lueth said. “I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t have a penny to my name. I didn’t even know how I was going to pay to get my wife and new son out of the hospital.”

But then his bad situation got worse. The people who had set up the stage, set up the lighting and ran sound started showing up looking for their money. They were not, as Lueth describes, the most reputable people he could have dealt with.

“At first it was, ‘Where’s my money?’” Lueth said. “Then it was threats like, ‘We’re gonna burn your house down if you don’t pay.’ It was getting really serious. I was scared my family was going to get hurt.”

So Lueth called a friend he’d met during his short stint at Midwestern College in Denison. The man came from a rich family in Chicago, and Lueth hoped he might be able to help him.

“He asked me if I could get to Chicago,” he said. “I told him I had barely enough money to pay for gas to get there. But he said if I get to Chicago, he could help me.”

Lueth’s friend helped him by giving him five pounds of marijuana.

“I sold it and made $500 really quick,” he said. “So I went back to him with his cut of the money, and he gave me 10 pounds. Pretty soon he was giving me 100 pounds. Then it was 200. Then it was more than my trunk could hold, so I bought a van. I was able to pay all my debts and was making $5,000 a week. Then $10,000. Then $20,000. Eventually I was making $40,000 to $50,000 a week. Once the ball got started rolling down the hill, it was hard to stop it.”

It got so involved, Lueth eventually had to hire a crew of people to help him, including two of his brothers. As his organization grew, so did his profits.

“I remember one time I bought 6,000 pounds of weed,” he said. “The balance that I owed them was $938,000. I had to put three suitcases full of cash in the back of my car. It took us two-and-a-half hours to count all that money, but the weed was sold in three weeks.”

Despite dealing with “shady individuals,” Lueth maintains he never carried a gun during the entire time he was involved in the drug trade.

“I didn’t have to,” he said. “I was always able to talk my way out of situations. What is war except failed foreign policy?”

One time, near the gulf coast of Texas, Lueth was stuck in a hot, humid warehouse with nearly 5,000 pounds of marijuana and four “huge Columbians with Uzis that wanted me to hurry up and pack up so they could get out of there.”

“I told them I wasn’t buying anything that I didn’t inspect first,” Lueth said. “They started making threats. Now these were 6-4, 250 pound guys with machine guns. Not really people that you want to cross.”

Lueth had driven to the warehouse in a motor home with one of his crew. He told the Columbians that his friend had a .44 Magnum revolver pointed at one of their heads.
“If they wanted to run the risk that it was them, they could keep making threats,” Lueth said. “Otherwise, let’s do some business.”

However, there was never a gun in the motor home.

“But they didn’t know that,” he said.

A few weeks later, he met the head of the organization in charge of the men he had threatened.

“He said to me, ‘That guy with you …he didn’t have no gun, did he?’ I asked him if he played poker. He said he did, so I said, ‘Well, you know how to play. You don’t call my bet, you don’t get to see my hand.’ He actually came over and hugged me and said, ‘You’ve got some big fucking cajones. We need to do business.’”

According to court documents, Lueth quickly became the biggest drug trafficker in the Midwest, encompassing an area between Minneapolis, Kansas City, Denver and Chicago. Lueth had drug connections in Florida, Texas and the East Coast, and paid an inner circle of associates to bring the drugs into Council Bluffs and break them down from bulk amounts into smaller, salable packages.

The beginning of the end

Lueth met Gregory Bixler around 1981. He said they both connected over a shared love of golf.

“He was a very assertive, aggressive personality,” Lueth said. “And he always had women around him. He was a real snappy dresser and a real B.S.er. He was the one that eventually talked me into expanding into cocaine.”

He really didn’t want to get involved in cocaine, Lueth said. He didn’t like it and felt the “karma wasn’t good.”

“But it was everywhere. Everyone was doing it.”

Eventually, selling cocaine turned into doing cocaine.

“The problem was that I was drinking all the time, so I was using cocaine as a pick-me-up,” he said. “I had millions of dollars, so money was no object. My life started revolving around women, cocaine and drinking.”

He split up with his wife in 1981, and she moved to Colorado with his son.

“Looking back, I can see now that Greg Bixler was my downfall all along,” Lueth said. “But I was so strung out on cocaine, I couldn’t see it.”

It was Bixler’s word as an informant that was used to attain a search warrant for Lueth’s 22-acre home in rural Pottawattamie County. Before that, Lueth said, he had managed to somehow fly under the radar.

The raid on Lueth’s home turned up plenty of evidence on his activities, but no charges were filed. Lueth was let go after only five hours in a holding cell. Instead, the investigation became the first in Iowa to utilize racketeering charges, which joins state, federal and local law enforcement agencies with the Internal Revenue Service in an attempt to build stronger cases against suspected drug dealers.

It was nearly two years later before Lueth was finally arrested and charged with engaging in a “continuing criminal enterprise” in which he committed a series of drug felonies with five or more co-conspirators and derived “substantial income” from those felonies, according to court documents and newspaper accounts from the time.

Lueth figured he had dodged a bullet and was working to get out of the illicit drug business.

“[My girlfriend] and I were going to get married,” he said. “She had two kids and I was ready to adopt them. I loved those kids. Life was really good. I thought I got a reprieve and was trying to turn my life around. I thought it was over.”

On Feb. 8, 1985, federal agents once again paid Lueth a visit, this time with an indictment that had been handed down by a grand jury. He was arrested and transferred to Des Moines to stand trial in U.S. District Court. Sixteen others were indicted that day, including his two brothers and his 62-year-old mother.

After a three-week trial, U.S. District Judge Harold Vietor sentenced him to 20 years in prison.

“The moment he said 20 years, I started crying,” Lueth said. “The courtroom was full of people crying.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Ron Kayser had recommended Lueth be given a 45-year prison sentence, according to newspaper accounts from the time. Vietor instead told Lueth he would have to serve 13 years of his sentence, but if he was an “exemplary inmate” he could be paroled after 11 years.

Of his 16 co-defendants, 13 went to trial. A jury convicted seven and acquitted six, including Lueth’s brothers. His mother pleaded guilty to tax evasion to avoid the drug charges.

Prison life

Lueth began his sentence at the federal correction facility in Sandstone, Minn. Over the course of his 11 years in federal prison, he would serve time in Oxford, Wis.; Rochester, Minn.; Springfield, Mo.; and Inglewood, Colo. As expected, Lueth’s time in prison changed him.

“You become what you have to become to survive,” he said. “It’s a lot like being in a war zone. There is definitely post-traumatic stress that comes from this.”

He admits to having nightmares about some of his experiences in prison, but said he’s probably more stable than most people who serve the amount of time he has.

“I went in as a strong person,” he said. “If I had gone in when I was a 17-year-old kid, it would have been tough.”

He served three months in Sandstone before being transferred to the much tougher prison in Oxford, where he spent 15 months “surrounded by guys I knew were psychopathic killers.” His cellmate woke him up one night to inform him “I already killed three white boys. One more ain’t gonna make much difference to me.”

“When they slammed the door closed at night and locked us in, I had to learn to sleep with one eye open,” Lueth said.

Prison has a way of making people give up hope, Lueth said, and breaking them down until there is very little left.

“Those are the most dangerous guys,” he said. “The ones with nothing to lose.”

After a couple months in Oxford, Lueth had an altercation with a guard that resulted in getting 60 days in the hole.

“The sensory deprivation is something that, until you experience it, you can’t possibly realize the devastation,” he said, his eyes beginning to fill with tears. “It’s a horrendous thing to happen. People need to realize that 98 percent of people who go to prison eventually get out. Why should we destroy them and then turn them loose on the world?”
But an old interest of Lueth’s began to serve him well during his days at Oxford.

“I had the healing hands,” he said. “I had studied chiropractic medicine. As soon as I hit the compound, I went to see who were lifting weights. I’m pretty good at seeing when someone is hurting, and being able to do little things to relieve the pain. I fix your back pain in 30 seconds, and all of a sudden I have a pal.”

He also managed to finish his education, earning a bachelor’s degree in human resources and an associate’s degree in culinary arts, as well as becoming a certified tennis instructor.

When he arrived in Springfield, Lueth got to meet Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, boss of the Genovese crime family in New York from the 1970s until his arrest and conviction in 1986. After Lueth was paroled in 1996, he was able to get a job as an extra in the movie “Any Given Sunday,” starring Al Pacino.

“I got the chance to talk to him, so I said ‘Hey Al, I know one of your homeboys. I know Fat Tony,’’’ Lueth said. “So Al said to me, ‘Fat Tony who?’ Now, he didn’t believe me at all, until I told him where I met Fat Tony: Springfield, Mo. Then he said, ‘Damn, you do know Fat Tony.’”

New beginnings

On Dec. 10, Lueth served his last day of probation.

“I was so tired, but I vowed to stay up until midnight when my sentence expired,” he said. “I did it, too. But I was asleep five minutes later.”

There are moments of exhilaration when he sits down and thinks about the possibilities he has now that he’s free. But there is also the throbbing sting of regret over the fact that he made life harder on people he was close to.

Despite his newfound freedom, the injustice he feels he suffered still troubles him.

“Was the crime I committed so heinous that I didn’t deserve a fair trial or due process? Murderers get a fair trial in our country, so why should I be denied that inalienable right?” Lueth said.

His point of contention stems from the initial search warrant issued in 1983, and the character of his old friend turned informant, Greg Bixler.

“The agents who eventually broke down my door told a U.S. magistrate that they had an informant of proven credibility and reliability that had stated that I was involved in drug trafficking,” he said. “They were granted a warrant because of those assurances.”

In a letter dated Feb. 7, 1983, more than a month before Lueth’s home was raided, a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigations wrote a letter to an agent in the DEA’s St. Louis office with regard to an informant named Greg Bixler.

“Between Dec. 29, 1982, and Feb. 4, 1983, the FBI in Omaha conducted an inquiry regarding the suitability of [Greg Bixler] to be utilized as a source for the Omaha Office of the FBI,” the letter reads. “This inquiry revealed that it is strongly alleged that Bixler is currently dealing heavily in narcotics in the Omaha area and has, in the past, been not entirely truthful with other narcotics investigators. Accordingly, the Omaha office is no longer utilizing this individual as a criminal informant.”

Bixler’s control agent testified during Lueth’s trial that he had seen the letter, but that it didn’t impeach the use of Bixler’s testimony to get a warrant. The FBI agent who wrote the letter also testified that he didn’t have any reason to have sent that letter, and that Bixler was a credible witness.

“That just didn’t make any sense,” Lueth said. “Those guys don’t write those kinds of letters for no reason. They clearly didn’t think he was credible, but they got greedy and wanted to come after me.”

If police had done things correctly, Lueth feels he would have eventually slipped up and they could have busted him legally. But that’s not what happened, and because of this, all the evidence the police garnered from the initial raid should not have been allowed.

“That was their whole case,” he said. “They used the evidence they collected in that raid to scare other people into testifying against me. But the initial evidence was obtained illegally.”

It’s a legal doctrine called the “Fruit of the Poison Tree,” and it’s used to describe evidence gathered with the aid of information obtained illegally. The logic of the terminology is that, if the source of the evidence (the “tree”) is tainted, then anything gained from it (the “fruit”) would be likewise.

But Lueth’s attorney at the time couldn’t find any evidence that would impeach the testimony of the federal agents or Bixler.

Two years after his conviction, while being held in Oxford, Lueth became friends with Charlie Smith, who was the pilot for televangelist Jimmy Swaggert. Smith had been sentenced to 35 years in prison when he and a friend were busted smuggling cocaine from Peru in a private jet to Missouri.

“Charlie looked at my case and realized my attorney had never filed a motion of discovery,” Lueth said. “I never knew that, because we had boxes of stuff, but it was only the stuff the government wanted to give us.”

So with his new friend’s help, Lueth filed his motion, and found a 60-page report on an investigation in which a drug dealer named Christopher Kahn helped the DEA and FBI to set up Greg Bixler.

“Greg wanted to buy a half pound of Ultracain, a look-a-like cocaine mixture you mix with cocaine to increase how much you have,” Lueth said. “Kahn was a government informant, and they set Bixler up in January of 1983. He was caught dealing while he was an informant, then they turn around and say he was a credible witness?”

In the new files, Lueth also discovered a court transcript in which the judge in his case presided over Kahn’s sentencing, and thus, had to know the agents were not being truthful in their sworn testimony during his trial.

“The whole thing just stinks,” Lueth said. “I didn’t get a fair trial and I didn’t have competent representation. But I didn’t know that then. The government wanted to get me, and they didn’t care what they had to do.”

Rob Warden, executive director of the Center on Wrongful Convictions at the Northwestern University School of Law, said that since the information in the affidavits used to obtain a warrant proved accurate, it would be hard to argue at this point that the warrants were obtained illegally.

“But it would be possible,” he said. “If the federal agents swore to a material fact that they knew was not true, that would be perjury.”

However, usually affidavits for warrants say that the informant has provided credible information in the past.

“It would be hard to disprove such a statement,” he said. “No matter how much information the informant provided in the past that was not credible, as long as at some point he had supplied some information that did prove correct, an assertion that he had provided credible information would be true, no matter how misleading that assertion might be.”

Bob Riggs, associate professor of law at Drake University and director of the school’s criminal defense program, said there have been plenty of cases in the recent past where the federal government, in its zeal to convict a drug dealer, went too far and relied on questionable characters, with the end result being the case was overturned.

“But the government has a lot of wiggle room with these informants,” Riggs said. “They’ll point out that they’re casting a play in hell, so they can’t cast angels.”

Even if it is proven that he didn’t get a fair trial, sadly, most people wouldn’t blink an eye at a little perjury if it meant taking a drug dealer off the streets, Warden said.

It’s talk like that that makes Lueth furious.

“We’re not just talking about my rights,” he said. “When they strip me of my rights, it makes it easy for them to do it again and again.”

He did the crime, and he did the time, Lueth said, and there is no way the government can give him his 23 lost years back.

“You can’t turn back the hands of time,” he said. “But I’ve lost more than just time. The government seized my family’s farm, the farm that had been in my family for more than 100 years. That is where I grew up, where my dad was born. They stole it from us.”

Making amends

So what does the former kingpin of a multi-state drug organization do with himself now that he’s paid his debt to society? Well, maybe save the world.

Lueth has a good friend who owns a company that builds and sells hydrogen engines. He also has become acquainted with a father and son who designed a new state-of-the-art wind turbine. With global warming becoming a huge issue, and countries around the world trying to move to more eco-friendly technology, Lueth sees amazing growth potential in these industries. So, he plans to go into business selling green technology for his friends.

“The reason I succeeded in what I did is just the simple stuff you learn in any freshman business class in college,” he said. “Buy low, sell high. Treat your customers the way you want to be treated. Be honest. If you say something, make sure you mean it. Don’t cheat.”

Being a drug dealer is just being an entrepreneur, he said.

“Let’s be objective about this,” he said. “Why do people knock little old ladies down and steal their purse? Because they need to pay for expensive drugs. The intrinsic value of marijuana is about five bucks a pound. The expense comes from it being illegal.”

In the eyes of society, drug dealers are the worst of the worst, Lueth said. But that simply isn’t true. Like any profession, there are good drug dealers and bad drug dealers.

“I’d like to think I was one of the good ones,” he said. “I wasn’t dealing to kids or anything like that, and usually I was dealing with good people. Recreational drugs are a cottage industry in this country. It will never stop. If they truly wanted to eliminate most of the problems with drugs in this country, as well as free about 2 million non-violent offenders from prison, all they have to do is legalize it.”

It’s just like alcohol, Lueth said.

“There are problems, like drunk driving, but look at what happened when we made it illegal. We got organized crime. Let’s legalize it, tax it, regulate it and make help available to anyone who needs it to overcome an addiction. Instead of spending thousands of dollars every year to keep someone locked up in prison, let’s pay half that to clean them up and send them to college.”

Amel Lueth is a man who went from the highest of the highs to the lowest of the lows. He went from making $50,000 a week and living in luxurious homes in the mountains of Estes Park, Colo., to living in a one-bedroom apartment in Ames. Now he’s headed south to do some traveling. But he’s determined to finally get his share of justice, and to get his life back in order, this time in the so-called legitimate world.

“I’ve had a lot of people tell me, ‘You should write a book,’” he said. “My experiences are not just about the drug culture. They cut across the spectrum of life, and there is a lot to be learned.”

If he could do anything with his life, Lueth said, he would love to tell every child in America not to get mixed up with drugs.

“Those kids out there who think they are tough shit and think they can get away with whatever they want, they need to know how it can wreck your life,” he said. “I’m living proof. But this is my second chance.” CV

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