LIFE AND DEATH OF THE LAST GREAT APPALACHIAN OUTLAW
‘WE WERE LIKE BONNIE AND CLYDE,’ TAMMY LYNN WILKIE SAYS OF CATSKILL OUTLAW LEGEND GARY ARTHUR HAWLEY. "I RODE THE LIGHTNING WITH HIM FROM THE MOMENT WE MET UNTIL WE WERE ARRESTED.’
Gary Arthur Hawley’s high school graduation photograph. Photo credit: unknown, courtesy of Naomi Hawley.
July 13, 2025
One of my new friends in prison was the Last Great Appalachian Outlaw Gary Hawley. He and his female Crack-dealing, cattle-rustling crime partner earned life sentences. Hawley taught me how to bake rhubarb pie at the Collins Correctional Facility in western New York in 1992.
"We were like Bonnie and Clyde," Tammy Lynn Wilkie, 61, told me in 2021, long after my 2003 release on parole, when I started a new life as a journalist. "I rode the lightning with him from the moment we met until we were arrested."
Wilkie and Hawley hailed from Delaware County, upstate New York's own patch of persistent Appalachian poverty. Most Americans associate Appalachia with the South. In truth, the Appalachian Mountain range stretches from Alabama all the way to Canada. Within the range, a distinct, largely poor cultural region exists called Appalachia. Appalachia is smaller than the greater Appalachian mountain range but not by much. It occupies 13 states, from New York down to Mississippi. Appalachia and "its people have not shared properly in the Nation’s prosperity," Congress declared in 1965.
60 years later, the region's 25.7 million people remain mired in "persistent economic disparities," according to the Appalachian Regional Commission—a public-private economic development partnership created by Congress in 1965 to help "the Region’s 13 states achieve economic parity with the rest of the Nation."
Hawley lived in a lush valley beside the West Branch of the Delaware River. He was surrounded by the steep hills, deep hollows, farms and forests of the west Catskill Mountains. Steady work was hard to find, and harder for Hawley to keep. He lived in a trailer home, parked on a postage-stamp sized plot of land. He was in his early 40s when he started bootlegging in the late-1980s. Instead of moonshine, this Appalachian bootlegger sold cocaine. He sold it by the ounce, and he sold it throughout the rural Northeast. He sold it out of his trailer home, and he sold it on the road. He sold it from the Allegheny Mountains to the Adirondack Mountains to Maine.
He also logged trees, raced horses and rustled cattle, but cocaine dealing is what made Hawley a notorious, front-page criminal.
“He was the biggest drug dealer I put away," recalled retired judge and prosecutor Carl J. Mugglin. “It was the biggest drug case Delaware County had ever seen. We’d never seen anything like it before."
I knocked on the door of Mugglin's modest, immaculate home in 2021. He lived in the same Delaware County town he grew up in. The 84-year-old retired jurist was gracious. He pleasantly invited me to sit with him on his couch as he recalled the Hawley case and his legal career. He smiled easily as he spoke. Before Mugglin was a judge, he started out after law school as a defense attorney. His first high-stakes criminal case was representing one of three brothers accused of selling drugs in another Delaware County town.
"I never thought to tell the jury he was innocent," Mugglin said. “I didn’t decide to do that until one of the other guys’ attorneys went first in summation and said it. When it was my turn, I said it too. My guy was acquitted."
Mugglin was elected Delaware County District Attorney in 1965. He served until the end of what was then a three-year term, 1968. It was a part-time job, paying a part-time wage, but it required full-time work, he said. So when his term was over he decided to go into private, civil practice instead of seeking re-election. Except for emergency appointments, judges have to be elected under the law of New York State. Mugglin said he decided to run for a local judgeship because the man holding it announced he was retiring and would not seek reelection. Mugglin won, and served 22 years as a New York State Supreme Court Justice, 1985 until 2007.
There was zero illegal drug activity in Delaware County before the 1960s. "We went from nothing before then to a very active now," Mugglin said. He dated its start to the near-completion of State Route 17. The four-lane state highway is also known as "the Quickway." The Quickway connected the Catskills to New York City, via the New York State Thruway or New Jersey State Route 4. New York officials intended the Quickway to promote tourism to the Catskills, which it did. It also promoted the trafficking of illegal drugs.
“The drug activity all came here in the last 50 years," Mugglin said. "I link it to the completion of Route 17 to Roscoe. Once that happened, we started getting drugs. 1968 or so."
The New York State Police arrested Hawley, then 44, and Wilkie, then 24, the day before Thanksgiving 1988. The Crack epidemic was ravaging America at the time. Wilkie was Hawley's live-in girlfriend. She was also his cocaine-dealing crime partner.
"We made runs up-and-down the coast," Wilkie said. "We went to Maine, New Hampshire. Gary had friends everywhere."
The Hawley family first arrived in Delaware County after the American War for Independence. The original Hawley family farm was along the East Branch of the Delaware River near Downsville, New York. Today, that farm lies buried beneath New York City's Pepacton Reservoir—largest of the 19 reservoirs in New York City's sprawling, 2000-square mile reservoir system. Pepacton covers 5,763 acres of land, has a 50.7 mile-long shoreline, draws water from an area 371-square miles wide, including parts of 13 towns in three counties, and, at full capacity, holds 140.2 billion gallons of clean, cold Catskill water, according to the New York City Department of Environmental Protection. The great, life-giving reservoir was formed by damming the East Branch at Downsville. The dam's construction began in 1947 and was completed in 1955. Before the land behind the new dam was flooded, it was purchased by the City and its inhabitants relocated. Farms, houses, entire towns vanished. Even cemeteries were relocated.
“They dug everybody up and replanted them,” Naomi Hawley, Gary's only sibling, now 84, told me in 2021. She had not been home the two times I knocked on her door so I left a note with my telephone number and a message to call me. She did, three hours later, as soon as she got home from the dentist. I offered to call back later, but she was eager to talk even though her mouth was still numb from the novocaine injections the dentist gave her.
"My great-great grandfather’s farm was demolished. They moved a lot of the families," Naomi explained. "But hey the City needed water."
"My brother would give the shirt off his back and the last penny in his pocket," she said. "He just got in with the wrong people.”
Gary Arthur Hawley was born in a bedroom of his parents' modest farmhouse along the West Branch of the Delaware River, on Back River Road in Delancey, New York, December 1, 1943. He was two years younger than Naomi. The Hawleys were dairy farmers, like many if not most of the families in the area at the time. Their grandparents bought the farm they were born on at the start of the 20th Century, Naomi recalled. Besides farming, their father was a heavy equipment mechanic. He abandoned farming soon after his children were born and started working as a mechanic on the giant machines then being used to build New York City's new dam on the East Branch at Downsville. The same dam that would, when completed, flood his own family's farm.
"Dad decided he didn’t like farming so he went back to being a mechanic for all the big machinery. He worked on the dam," Naomi explained.
Her brother was never interested in becoming a farmer.
"Gary was a wanderer," Naomi said. He was also an "outdoorsman. You couldn’t tie him to a desk.”
Still he had been a "blue baby." His lips turned blue if he vigorously exerted himself. It was a symptom of a congenital heart defect. His heart was "enlarged," Naomi said.
Hawley sat still long enough to go to school for forestry. He worked as an independent logger after that. He also "worked at the zoo in Binghamton for seven or eight years. He did animal control," Naomi said. Hawley moved to Harpersville, New York, married and had a daughter named Tammie Lee in 1970—the same year his own father, Henry Hawley, died. Soon he began breeding horses, and selling them. He raced the best of them at tracks in Tioga and Saratoga. A decade later, his mother, Virginia, said "yes" when he asked her to sell him a small corner of the family farm to park a trailer home on. It was white with black trim and located on the opposite side of a barn from Virginia's house. Gary's wife and his daughter came with him.
Donna treated Gary "like shit on the bottom of a shoe," Naomi recalled. "Many nights" she found him sleeping in the barn. Eventually Donna moved out and took Tammie Lee with her.
Before Hawley turned to drug dealing to make a living, he was successfully sued twice for non-payment of debt, according to Delaware County court records. James Thomson sued him in 1983. Thomson alleged Hawley "purchased timber from Plaintiff and agreed to pay for said timber at an agreed rate," totalling $1,388.72, but never paid. Hawley settled the lawsuit by paying Thomson $500. Hawley was sued a second time in June 1986. This time his insurance broker alleged Hawley ducked a $726 home and car insurance bill. Hawley didn't file an answer to this lawsuit, so a default judgment was entered against him for the full amount, plus interest. Court records do not show whether it was ever collected, suggesting it was not.
The first time Hawley could have been in real legal trouble he was still in high school. He beat up his next door neighbor's son, Alex Gielskie.
"He beat that boy up bad," Naomi recalled. "He was covered in black-and-blues. We didn't see him for a week."
Gary told his sister Alex "picked on him on the school bus." That was like her brother, Naomi recalled. “He wouldn’t start it," she said, "but he sure would finish it.”
Alex Gielskie died in 2021, but his wife of 44 years, Betsy, still lives on the Gielskie family farm next door to Naomi. The Gielskie and Hawley families share a common border. Betsy recalled her husband's fight with Hawley differently from the way Hawley's sister Naomi remembered it. She said her husband told her that Hawley jumped Alex with a gang of his friends.
"Very scary man. Very scary man," she said. "Stealing. Cock-fighing. Dogs. You name it, he was into it."
He was so scary, she said, she was glad he died when he did.
"I'm just glad he was gone by the time my kids become teenagers," she said.
Even though the beatdown Hawley delivered to Gielskie did not result in his arrest, it still echoed through the decades that followed. That's because Alex Gielskie's brother David Gielskie served as Hamden Town Judge for two terms in the 1980s. Hawley was charged with two counts of assault in 1985, and Judge David Gielskie was assigned to preside over the case, Delaware County court records show. Hawley's lawyer asked Judge Gielskie to recuse himself from presiding over the case because he was allegedly biased against Hawley. Judge Gielskie apparently agreed, because he granted the request, according to a letter he wrote Delaware County Judge Robert Estes dated October 1, 1985. He asked the higher-ranking judge to transfer Hawley's criminal prosecution out of his court and explained why.
"Knowing the defendant as well as I do is the real reason why he wants a transfer," he wrote.
Delaware County court records do not show what happened to the prosecution after that. Neither do those records show what, exactly, Hawley allegedly did to be charged with two counts of assault. It is almost like it never happened, according to the official court records available to the public.
"The law never touched him," Betsey Gielskie said about Hawley. "He had the law in his pocket. He was invincible."
"Everybody backed him up," Betsey explained. "Nobody would turn him in on anything. It's hard to get witnesses if they're terrified."
Justice Mugglin had another explanation for it: the area's traditional distrust and dislike of Government.
"There's no one more anti-Government than a Delaware County farmer," Mugglin said. "Every time someone from Government goes to a farm they make life for the farmer harder, not easier."
The trailer Gary Aruthur Hawley lived in and dealt crack cocaine out of in the late 1980s in Walton, New York circa 2021. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
While court records are silent on the subject, local residents remember. The six-foot, four-inch tall Catskill "Clyde" caught "some kid stealing from him," one former associate recalled in an email in 2018. Instead of summoning police, Hawley treated the would-be thief to his own brand of rough Appalachian justice. He tied him "to a clothesline post, and—using a remote control—"shocked him with a dog training collar for a few hours." Fellow members of a local hunting club Hawley belonged to joined him. "All of the guys sat around drinking and making fun of the unfortunate bastard, zapping him intermittently as they saw fit."
"As you can imagine, this brought the attention of the local law, and Gary ended up in the newspaper over this one," said the former associate. He could not recall if Hawley "did any time over it—if he did, it wasn't much, as the thief had a bad rep in town and I don't think anyone felt really sorry for him." The former associate, then 42, wrote that "One of my friends had the original clippings, and I've seen them numerous times over the years, but they were lost when he passed away in 2005. I've looked for the articles online, but haven't had any luck so far."
He added, wistfully, "guys that knew Gary and the 'outlaws' of his generation are getting harder and harder to come by."
Hawley first started dealing cocaine in 1986 or 1987, it appears to me. At first he partnered with a man named Rene Martinez. That's what Hawley himself and the former associate told me in his 2018 email. Martinez's obituary, published on the website of the Ernest H. Parsons Funeral Home in Binghamton, New York, slyly suggests Martinez's secret involvement in that trade. He was "a survivor with a tenacious spirit," it starts off. Born in Cuba, 1934, Martinez fled the Communist Regime of Fidel Castro on a raft with 11 people in 1979. In America, Martinez "lived between New York City and Miami"—both centers of Cuban emigre life as well as the cocaine trade. Martinez, his obituary says, spent "most of his life as a self-employed jack of all trades. He protected and provided for his family." He also married "the famous singer Emilita Dago," with whom he had three sons. "He was a strong presence and will be greatly missed by all of his loved ones."
While Martinez lived most of life in New York City and Miami, he died in Binghamton, New York, 2016. He moved there in 2004 "to be closer to his family," his obituary says. It is likely he was traveling to Binghamton to visit family before that. I'm sure I would have asked Hawley how he, the Appalachian Mountain Man, met Martinez, but I have long-forgotten what he told me. However, I do know that Binghamton is only 64 miles west of Hawley's Delancey home. I also know that if you drive from New York City to Binghamton on the Quickway, you come within 27 miles of Hawley's home at Roscoe.
The cocaine trade is roughly divided into three categories or levels, shaped like a pyramid. At the bottom are the retail dealers who sell grams and less directly to drug users. In the middle are the wholesalers who sell ounces and, once in a while, maybe a kilogram or two, to the retail dealers at the bottom. High-level, multiple-kilogram dealers supply the wholesale ounce dealers with kilograms residing at the top. The level of distrust a dealer has is directly related to his or her position in the hierarchy. Retail dealers are relatively easy to find, if you know where to look. Unless you're a federal law enforcement agent with unlimited surveillance resources, wholesale ounce dealers are difficult to find and kilogram dealers are almost impossible to locate. You're not going to just walk up to an ounce or kilogram dealer and transact business. Someone has to introduce you, and vouch for you that you're not a cop or snitch. These introductions are extremely serious affairs. If you make a mistake you die. Simple as that. Thems the rules.
The wary drug dealers who survived by instinct in the violent cauldron that was 1980s New York City would never have allowed Hawley near them without a proper introduction. So it seems likely to me it was Martinez who first introduced Hawley to them, in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan. The poor, predominantly Dominican neighborhood is adjacent to the George Washington Bridge and bisected by Interstate 95. It has long been synonymous with heavy-weight cocaine trafficking, supplying the Northeast states and beyond.
Hawley and Martinez were very close. They were so close that when Hawley was accused of gunning down a trophy-sized male white-tailed "buck" deer in a neighbor's backyard in 1987 Martinez testified in Hawley's defense at his criminal trial. Hawley faced three charges: illegally shooting a deer from a vehicle, illegally carrying a loaded firearm in a vehicle and illegally discharging a firearm within 500 feet of an inhabited residence. Martinez testified he was with Hawley and a third person, a woman, the morning the deer was shot. It wasn't Hawley who shot the deer, Martinez testified. It was the woman who pulled the trigger and dropped the big buck instead. Judge Gielseki did not recuse himself this time. This time Judge Gielskie presided over Hawley's trial. The jury of Delaware County farmers knew shit when they smelled it. They did not believe Hawley or Martinez. The jury convicted Hawley of all three charges. He was fined, not jailed--even though the law at the time allowed him to be caged for up to 15 days.
Hawley met the then-24-year-old Wilkie—his future cocaine-dealing, cattle-rustling crime partner—at a local bar in April 1988.
“Everybody went to the Bear Spring Inn," Naomi, Hawley's sister, recalled. "It was a quaint little place. They had live music Fridays and Saturdays and everybody went there to dance. It was rustic. It was countrified. They only played country music to dance to.”
Hawley sat in a booth, drank beer, sold cocaine and sniffed cocaine out of a Neo-Synephrine bottle, Wilkie remembered. He would take the top off the distinctive small, round white bottle and add cocaine mixed with water. One time, she remembered, they got pulled over by police while driving and the cops actually inspected the liquid cocaine-filled bottle. The cops gave it back to Hawley in the end, and let the two go.
Wilkie was already doing cocaine regularly when they met. She was dating the bar's owner at the time but broke up with him and started dating Hawley. Hawley had a girlfriend at the time too, and she started dating the bar owner. It was a swap, Wilkie said, which she got the better of because Hawley was "charismatic." He would show up some place where "five guys were sitting around staring into their beers and turn it into a party. That's who he was."
Still, the six-foot, four-inch Hawley could be violent.
"If he hurt you," Wilkie recalled, "it was because you deserved it."
"He was a sweetheart to me," she quickly added. "I was his princess."
Hawley regulated life at the Bear Spring Inn with an iron fist.
“If Gary saw something he didn’t like there could be people back behind the bar that didn’t come in without a black eye," Naomi admitted. “He just didn’t like anybody treating anybody badly.”
There was no question, Wilkie said, that Hawley "could be brutal. I'll give you an example. They way he trained his pulling ponies."
Pony-pulling is a variation of classic New England-style horse-pulling competitions. The sport began informally in the 19th Century among farmers, to see whose horse or team of horses were the most powerful. Today, formal competition is governed by the Easter Draft Horse Association. The group holds the sport's biggest competition every October in New Hampshire. They call it the "Round Up." Competition at the Round Up and other sanctioned events typically entails two draft horses or ponies harnessed to a weighted sled on a dirt surface. A winner is determined by which team can pull the heaviest sled the farthest distance, or sometimes at all.
Hawley trained his pulling ponies to start pulling at the sound of his whistle.
He tied rocks to sticks and hit the horses’ ankles while he whistled.
"He trained them to jump and started pulling at his whistle like that," Wilkie revealed. "He was so, so much more than that though," she emphasized.
Hawley had other ways to make money, in addition to selling cocaine. He cut pine boughs every November and December and sold them in New York City to florists and street Christmas tree dealers to make wreaths and other holiday decorations out of. He was also paid by various farmers and ranchers to castrate bulls in their herds. Wilkie went with him when he did that too, she said. Sometimes while he was on a farm being paid to castrate a bull, he would also steal a cow. "We just took them," Wilkie said. They sold the stolen animals at livestock auctions. Sometimes Hawley did not sell the cows he stole. Sometimes he butchered them and put the pieces in his freezer.
"He had a flatbed truck parked outside the bar with a tarp covering the back," a former neighbor and acquaintance of Hawley's remembered. The man, who insisted on anonymity in 2021 despite the fact Hawley was long dead, recalled a time when he and a couple of friends were outside the Bear Spring Inn and saw Hawley's flatbed truck parked outside. A tarp covered the back of the truck. The men were curious what Hawley had underneath it. It could have been anything, the acquaintance said. They had heard so many stories about him. Their imaginations ran wild. Finally, they tip-toed over to the truck and slowly lifted up the tarp. They saw a butchered cow, and started taking pieces of it. Hawley came out of the bar, the man recalled, saw them and said "Hey put that back I stole that."
The law began to close in on Hawley and Wilkie in October 1988. That's when one of Hawley's neighbors informed the New York State Police Hawley was dealing drugs. It wasn't the Glieskies. It was a man they sold a small patch of property to—directly across the road from Hawley's trailer home. The informant owned a pair of binoculars, and spied on Hawley regularly, according to Delaware County court records. He told the State Police "GARY HAWLEY used various vehicles to obtain and transport quantities of COCAINE from the Metropolitan New York/New Jersey area for subsequent distribution in the Delaware County area," according to a State Police Investigation Report detailing their criminal investigation into Hawley. An "unusually large number of vehicles would arrive at the GARY A. HAWLEY residence and remain for a brief period of time and return to their vehicles and depart the area," the report says.
Two centuries of public records are kept by county clerks in New York State. Along with public libraries, files held by the county clerks are a repository of history as lived by average Americans. Here the Delaware County Clerk’s office in Delhi, New York, which holds the records of Hawley’s run-ins with the law. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
A relic of their birth as a horse-borne police force, the State Police are organized by "Troop." The Troop C Narcotics Enforcement Unit, headquartered in Binghamton, was assigned to investigate Hawley. The group is referred to in official State Police reports as the "Narco Unit." The Narco Unit "developed" a second source during their investigation of Hawley, the State Police Investigation Report says. The report refers to this second source as "Confidential Informant #2." Confidential Informant #2 "had personal knowledge of GARY HAWLEY's trips to the Metropolitan New York/New Jersey area for the purpose of acquiring additional supplies of the narcotic drug COCAINE for distribution in the Delaware County area."
It was the Wild West when it came to the use of snitches by the State Police in 1988. There were no laws, rules, regulations or guidelines that regularized their use. The only informal practice the State Police had at the time was that use of a confidential informant had to be authorized by the local State Police Troop Commander, according to State Police testimony at a court hearing before Justice Mugglin in the criminal prosecution of Hawley and Wilkie.
"They were documented at the troop level," State Police Investigator Stephen M. Bernardi testified at the hearing. "Supervisory personnel were advised of the confidential informant being utilized by members of the Narcotic Unit. But not where they were registered in Albany."
"The State Police has just recently begun registering their informants by assigning them numbers," Bernardi explained. They received "hundreds" of tips from citizens everyday, he said in 1989. "Not all of these confidential sources are utilized. If they are utilized for an investigation, certainly they are documented."
Based on the information provided by the snitches, the Narco Unit applied for a warrant to search Hawley's trailer, his mother Virginia's nearby house, two cars belonging to area residents (but not reported stolen) parked in Hawley's driveway, and the persons of any individuals found in the residences or vehicles at the time of the searches. The law allows confidential informants to make their allegations remotely, should circumstances require it. The Narco Unit actually brought their informants into the Delaware County Courthouse. The courthouse, built in 1878, is an imposing, Church-like building constructed of bricks with a tall spire. Inside a courtroom in this historic, gothic courthouse, the judicial system came face-to-face with the then-emerging Crack epidemic. The snitches told Justice Mugglin, in their own words, what they had previously told State Police about Hawley and Wilkie, Delaware County court records show.
To obtain a legal search warrant, the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires police to show that it is "more probable than not" that contraband or evidence of crime exists in a particular place, according to a long line of Supreme Court decisions interpreting the amendment. What the snitches said satisfied Justice Mugglin that it was more probable than not that cocaine, or evidence of cocaine dealing, existed on the Hawley property. He granted the Narco Unit's request for a search warrant, but it was not open-ended. It was legally valid for only 10 days. After 10 days, the warrant expired. The Narco Unit let the first warrant expire. Judge Mugglin issued a second warrant on November 15. The second search warrant, like the first, was only valid for 10 days.
The Narco Unit let the warrants expire on purpose. They were waiting for Hawley to make a re-supply run to the City. They only wanted to execute the search warrant after he returned from a resupply run. Doing that, they reasoned, would catch him with the greatest quantity of illegal cocaine possible. Under the penal law of New York, most states and the Federal Government, the penalty for possession of any kind of contraband is generally linked to and determined by its weight. The greater the weight of the contraband, the longer the prison sentence. The Narco Unit wanted to send Hawley away to prison for years, not months.
"We wanted just more than what maybe he was holding for his own use. Instead of grams we wanted ounces," State Police Investigator Douglas O. Vredenburgh testified.
But the Narco Unit's strategy was stymied for a time by the very nature of its investigation into a drug dealer and user.
"He was a very difficult individual to predict," State Police Investigator Bernardi testified. "Examples of him at 11 o'clock going out to work on the engine of his car, getting up at pre-dawn with a rifle and taking a ride on the back road as if he was going hunting. No, I never—I never saw a pattern to anything he did."
After Judge Mugglin issued the second search warrant, Confidential Informant #2 told the Narco Unit on November 19 that Hawley would be leaving for "the western part of New York State, where he would pick up pine boughs and transport them to the New York City area for resale. The monies then received from the pine boughs would then be used to purchase additional amounts of COCAINE," according to the State Police Investigation Report. The informant said Hawley would be driving a "1983 Chevrolet flatbed truck." Judge Mugglin issued a third search warrant for the Chevy truck and the Narco Unit staked out Hawley's trailer.
State Police practice requires two Troopers for any surveillance operation for safety reasons. Two Troopers sat in unmarked vehicles and surveilled Hawley's trailer from two sides, with binoculars. They observed Hawley and Wilkie leaving on November 19. They followed them west for 40 or so miles—confirming Confidential Informant #2's report—before letting them go. It appeared that the targets of their investigation were indeed headed to gather pine boughs in Western New York.
Hawley and Wilkie surfaced five days later at the home of Ricky Lynn Hackett, in Andover, New York. The area is a distinct part of the larger Appalachian mountain range called the Alleghenies about 185 miles west of Hawley's home in Delancey. The then 29-year-old Hackett provided a sworn, three-page statement to the Narco Unit. Hackett started off by writing "I moved back to Andover after I got divorced from my wife in Louisiana. My apartment is right next to the Blarneystone bar on Main Street in Andover. I spend a lot of my time in the bar."
Hackett met Hawley at the bar.
"I had heard that he was supplying some heavy quantities of coke to people in the area. The word on the street was that it was real pure stuff," Hackett wrote.
That first time Hackett met Hawley they left the bar and went to Hackett's room to smoke Crack cocaine.
"Gary showed me how to freebase the cocaine. We spent a day together just smoking the stuff. We drove around in his Dodge Dart, went to his room at the Wellsville Hotel with his girlfriend Tammy and stopped at a lot of places where Gary tried to sell his Cocaine." Hawley told Hackett he had a half-pound of it--almost a quarter kilogram. "I never saw so much coke in my life," Hackett told police.
Hawley was back a week later. He "walked into my room with his girlfriend Tammy," according to Hackett's police statement. "He showed me about four ounces of Cocaine and asked me if I'd help him get rid of it." Hackett made some telephone calls, "but couldn't find anyone who wanted to buy the quantities of coke that Gary wanted to sell." All his friends around Andover "just wanted grams. I couldn't find the people I thought could handle the larger quantities."
Hawley was back at Hackett's door on Tuesday, November 22. Thanksgiving was two days away. Hawley told Hackett "he was having problems with his truck" and needed a ride, his police statement says. "Gary told me was going to pick up some Cocaine in New York City." In exchange for driving Hawley and Wilkie the 270-or-so miles to New York City, Hackett told police Hawley "was going to front me a half ounce of Cocaine at his cost, $450.00, and let me sell it and make a profit off it so I could repay him and get myself set up in business."
The trio rode in Hackett's 1981 Pontiac Grand Prix. Hawley had a "wad" of $100 bills in his pocket. "We got to the city about five this morning." Hackett couldn't, or wouldn't, say where Hawley had taken him. "I was only to the City as a kid once. I drove where Gary told me to." Hackett said Hawley left him and Wilkie in the car. "He was gone for an hour and a half. We just sat in the car waiting for him." When Hawley finally returned, he said he'd purchased seven ounces of powdered cocaine. Hawley wanted more, but "said that that was all they had."
Wilkie remembers it a little differently. "I went with him every time. I never just sat in the car. I always carried it."
The indictment charging Hawley and Wilkie with violating the Rockefellor Drug Law on file in the Delaware County Clerk’s office. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
I knocked on Wilkie's front door a few minutes after I walked out of Mugglin's home in 2021. That's how long it took me to walk the three blocks that separate them in the same west Catskill town they have both lived almost their entire lives in. A bear of a man in overalls with a long beard answered the door. She wasn't home, he said. I explained why I wanted to talk with her and left my mobile telephone number. She called me early the next morning. I knew she might be hesitant to travel back in time and dive deep in the dark memories of her past, but I also knew that speaking your truth can be life-affirming—especially if the person you're spilling your twisted guts to is another outlaw. I started slowly, saying I had met Hawley in prison and always wondered how he ended up there.
"Are you kidding? It's a miracle he didn’t end up in jail sooner," she shot back. "Did you really know him?"
"He was crazy. We used to go to his probation with ounces of cocaine in our pockets. You have no fucking idea," she barked.
"That's exactly what I want to know," I replied. "I want to know about the stuff I have 'no fucking idea' about."
The tough talk seemed to sway her. I could almost hear her smile through the telephone. We agreed to meet and talk more at the town diner, T.A.'s. She liked T.A.'s because it was the first place that gave her a job when she was released from prison all those years ago.
"No one else wanted to take a chance on me," she explained.
She brought her barrel-chested husband along with her. He had his own memories of Hawley to share. The diner was a quiet place, filled with locals. I was worried the presence of so many of her neighbors might inhibit her from being less-than-fully candid. It almost seemed to have the opposite effect. Wilkie sat there and spoke her truth clearly, powerfully and proudly. In the quiet confines of the small town diner, she also spoke loudly. Other diners quickly silenced their mundane conversations about laundry and local politics to listen closely to wild tales rarely spoken about so openly and shamelessly.
Wilkie said Hawley "had a few places he would go" to buy cocaine in New York City, Wilkie said. "It wasn’t just one or two."
More than 30 years later, Wilkie would not say where, exactly, in New York City Hawley copped the coke he sold. The place and people she encountered had been that scary.
"We went over a bridge, I'll tell you that," was all she would say.
The fastest way to New York City from Delaware County is down the Quickway to New Jersey State Route 4. That leads to the George Washington Bridge, which carries Interstate 95 across the Hudson River into Manhattan at Washington Heights.
She doesn't recall how Hawley knew the dealers they dealt with, or why they trusted him.
"He was already doing what he was doing when he met," she explained.
One trip to the City stands out in Wilkie's memory. It was the time Hawley brought his hunting dogs along for the re-up ride. After copping several ounces of cocaine, Hawley decided it was a good time to take his hunting dogs for a stroll—through Central Park. Then the dogs ran away from them.
"We ran through the park in the middle of the night chasing the dogs until we found them," Wilkie remembers. "We had all this shit on us," referring to the large chunks of rock cocaine she was carrying in her purse.
The day before Thanksgiving 1988, Hackett drove Hawley and Wilkie from New York City back to Hawley's trailer and dropped Wilkie off. From there, Hackett drove Hawley to Delhi for a mandatory 9:30 am appointment with his probation officer. He was on probation because he had been arrested and pleaded guilty to drug charges in New Jersey a year or so before, according to Delaware County court records.
"Gary left all the Dope with Tammy before we left for Delhi. In fact, Gary gave Tammy all the Coke when he got back into the car in New York City. She put it in her purse," Hackett's police statement says.
Hackett waited for Hawley outside the probation office. When he returned, they drove back to Hawley's trailer and "we sat around his kitchen table smoking coke. The whole time I was with Gary we were smoking the stuff."
The two were still sitting at Hawley's kitchen table smoking Crack when State Police crashed through the door.
After they left Hawley and Wilkie traveling west on Route 17 the week before, Confidential Informant #2 told the Narco Unit that the Chevrolet truck Hawley was traveling in had broken down. The snitch also told the Narco Unit Hawley and Wilkie were still making a re-supply run to New York City. They "would be returning in a different and this time, unknown, vehicle." The Narco Unit had planned to conduct a car-stop of Hawley's Chevrolet truck traveling along his most likely route back to Delaware County: State Route 17. Not knowing what kind of vehicle Hawley would be driving made that plan impossible to execute. The Narco Unit was reduced to periodically driving-by Hawley's trailer home to see if he had returned.
When Hawley, Wilkie and Hackett did return from their re-up run to New York City the morning of November 25, the Narco Unit was supposed to be enjoying a day off. It was, after all, the day before Thanksgiving. Everyone in the group had been working hard. Not just on the Hawley investigation but others, Delaware County court records show. It was time for the men to enjoy a couple of days off. They deserved it. Leadership decided that instead of executing the warrants they already had in their hands, they would apply to Justice Mugglin for yet another search warrant. So shortly after noon, with the warrant authorizing the search of Hawley's trailer and his mother's house expiring at 1:45pm, they did just that. They called up Mugglin's law clerk and asked him for a fourth search warrant. They considered it a routine request.
Justice Mugglin remembered that moment, more than 30 years later. Something like glee glimmered in his eyes as he spoke.
"My law clerk looked at the clock and told the Trooper 'You got enough time. Get over there and arrest them!," Mugglin said.
The law men scrambled to assemble enough Troopers to safely conduct the raid with overwhelming force. The suspects were smoking Crack and had access to at least one high-powered rifle. To discourage any impulse to resist, best police practice dictated surprise and overwhelming force. Frantic telephone calls caused individual Troopers to stop whatever they were doing, put on their bulletproof vests, load their guns, jump in their cars and speed toward Hawley's trailer home. The clock was literally ticking. They had only minutes to get there, formulate a tactical plan and execute the warrants before the most important one, the warrant for the search of the residences, expired at 1:45pm. It was already after 1:00pm when the Troopers mustered a short distance from their target. They didn't have all the Troopers they wanted, but with the uniformed Troopers they pulled from regular patrol assignments at the last minute they had what they felt was enough. They surrounded Hawley's trailer and rushed inside.
It was 1:23pm; they beat the clock by 22 minutes.
The State Police Investigation Report dryly documents the dramatic scene.
It says Hawley and Hackett "were involved in smoking the purified form of COCAINE (CRACK)" at "the time of the execution of the search warrant." Hackett was arrested "without incident." Hawley, however, "began suffering an apparent COCAINE related seizure." An ambulance was called. Hawley was transported to the closest hospital, in Delhi, New York. "At O'Connor Hospital, Dr. VERENDA SINGH and Dr. JANA MAHADEVA, stabilized the condition of GARY A. HAWLEY." From O'Connor, he was transported by ambulance to Binghamton General Hospital. Doctors from "the Emergency Detoxification Unit met with HAWLEY, who refused treatment." From there, Hawley was put in a State Police vehicle and driven to a local State Police barracks, "for the required processing."
Wilkie wasn't inside Hawley's trailer when the Narco Unit finally came calling. She was next door, at Hawley's mother's house, doing laundry—with a large amount of cocaine secreted on her person.
"I had a bunch of it hidden in the front of my pants," Wilkie recalled. "When I saw all the cops, I went out the back door and ground it into the grass with my foot. I tried to remember exactly where so I could get it later. Then they arrested me."
Wilkie seemed sad one time and one time only during our talk in T.A.'s diner. That one time was when she described her physical condition at the time of her arrest. Instead of being arrested, what she said made it sound like she was rescued. She slumped a little in her seat and spoke somberly after that.
"I was 85 pounds. My teeth were loose. I was malnourished," Wilkie grimly recalled. "I couldn’t eat real food. All Gary and I could eat were shakes."
"The police asked me who the president was and I had no idea. I was out of it," Wilkie said, flatly.
State Police touted their arrest of Hawley and Wilkie to local news media. Wilkie said her parents first heard about it "on the radio." It was also reported by local newspapers the next day. "It was on the cover of The Daily Star"—a daily newspaper published in Oneonta, New York.
The Narco Unit seized the following items from Hawley's trailer, according to the State Police Investigation Report:
P-1 - one hemostat
P-2 - One MARIJUANA pipe and MARIJUANA contained in a small brown box
P-3 - One glass COCAINE smoking pipe
P-4 - One glass vial containing white powder (COCAINE)
P-5 - One piece of paper containing CRACK (COCAINE)
P-6 - One brown box label WILD TURKEY containing drug processing paraphernalia
P-7 - Two containers of Butane (drug processing paraphernalia)
P-8 - One red plastic bag containing white powder (cutting agent)
P-9 - One red plastic pipe with smoking vial attached
P-10 - One glass vial containing clear liquid
P-11 - One brown paper bag containing plastic envelopes with white powder, One marijuana pipe, one hemostat, and one blue tin with plastic bags with residue
P-12 - One brown bag containing drug processing paraphernalia
P-13 - One plastic bag containing COCAINE
P-14 - One plastic bag containing green vegetation (MARIJUANA)
P-15 - One white napkin containing a plastic bag containing COCAINE
P-16 - One glassine envelope containing numerous other glassine envelopes
P-17 - One glass vial containing water and white powder residue
P-18 - One growing MARIJUANA plant
P-19 - One wallet containing miscellaneous papers and $1,603.00 in U.S. Currency
P-20 - One tin foil packet with white powder residue
P-21 - One foil packet with cloth wadding
P-22 - $83.00 in U.S. Currency from the purse of TAMMY LYNN WILKIE
P-23 - $154.00 in U.S. Currency contained in a money clip and a receipt for certified mail from the Sussex County (New Jersey) probation Officer.
P-24 - One folded dollar bill containing COCAINE
Hawley, Wilkie and Hackett were arrested and charged with "acting in concert" to commit the crime of Criminal Possession of a Controlled Substance in the First Degree, according to the criminal complaint filed against them by State Police Investigator Vredenburgh. The law was one of New York’s strict Rockefeller Drug Laws. It was championed by Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller in the early 1970s in response to the first heroin epidemic then sweeping America. Gov. Rockefeller was also considering a run at the Republican nomination for U.S. president at the time. His harsh drug laws burnished his Conservative credentials. Under the Rockefeller Drug Laws, Criminal Possession of a Controlled Substance in the First Degree is comparable with murder. It carries the same maximum sentence: life in prison. The only difference is the mandatory minimum sentence: 15-to-life for murder, versus three-to-life.
Wilkie and Hawley sobered-up and stewed in county lock-ups: Hawley in the Delaware County Jail, Wilkie in the Greene County jail.
"They kept us as far away from the other as possible," Wilkie remembered.
District Attorney Hughes compromised with Wilkie's attorney and reached a deal that she be released on $20,000 bail. Justice Mugglin, however, quashed the compromise and imposed $50,000 cash bail or $100,000 bond. He had, he said according to a transcript of Wilkie's bail hearing, "serious reservations" about allowing Wilkie to go free "because of the severity of the crime that she is charged with and the potential sentence she could receive."
Besides that, Justice Mugglin added, Wilkie's family was "not native to the area."
Naomi, Hawley's sister, thought Judge Mugglin was biased against her brother. "He had a grudge," she said.
Hughes, the prosecutor, served as one of Mugglin's assistant district attorneys when Mugglin was Delaware County District Attorney. At Mugglin's suggestion, I telephoned Hughes. Hughes did not remember the Hawley case, but he did remember Mugglin. Hughes told me that while he had once worked closely with him, the two hadn't talked in decades.
"Some judges could be kind of bastardly. For no real reason," he said. "Mugglin was never like that. He was an excellent judge. He didn’t get excited. He didn’t get mad. He was a very bright guy. Good sense of humor."
At the same time, Hughes added, Mugglin "was no pushover. He could be tough. Tough on the law. Tough on procedure. But you always left his court with dignity. He never took that away from you."
A farm in the West Branch Delaware River valley near where Hawley lived in the west Catskills outside Walton, New York. The area is still dominated by farming and forestry, as the log-filled truck and milk tanker to the right of the tractor show. Photo credit: JB Nicholas.
Back in 1988, Hawley and Wilkie asked Justice Mugglin to dismiss the case against them. They alleged the search warrants Mugglin himself issued were legally defective. Mugglin held a hearing on the request in March 1989, but since it was Mugglin who issued the search warrants in the first place, Hawley and Wilkie were at a severe disadvantage. They were, in effect, asking the judge to examine the correctness of his own decision. Unsurprisingly, Mugglin ruled that his issuance of the search warrants was legally correct and justified by facts.
Hawley and Wilkie changed their pleas from not guilty to guilty. Mugglin sentenced Hawley to six-to-life and Wilkie to three-to-life. Hawley did not have anything to say when he was sentenced, but when he pled guilty he told Mugglin he felt the need to tell
the flat truth.... I got hooked bad on it, on that rotten drug and the day they came in I had, according to the charge I guess it's more than two ounces. Got to where I couldn't quit it, Judge. I don't know if you've ever been into drugs but I'm telling you it's a bad thing. Can't stop. Sometimes you want to and you just can't. It's a vicious thing. It's—I don't know really how to explain it to you but you don't want to do it, but it calls you.
After Wilkie was sentenced to life in prison she had her attorney make one, last request, a transcript of Wilkie's sentencing hearing shows. She wanted the $83 dollars she had in her purse when she was arrested returned to her. It had been held as evidence. Hughes consented to the request. Mugglin ordered its return, then closed the proceeding on an optimistic note. "Good luck to you, Miss Wilkie," he said.
Hackett was also held without bail, at first, but the prosecutor cut Hackett a break and he was home in time for Christmas 1988. The prosecutor and Hackett reached a plea-bargain deal five months later. In exchange for pleading guilty to Criminal Possession of a Controlled Substance in the Fifth Degree, Hughes agreed that Hackett be sentenced to time-served in jail and five years' probation on May 1, 1989. Hackett successfully completed the probation without getting into more trouble, according to court records.
Meanwhile, Hawley and Wilkie began serving their state prison sentences. The New York State prison system, run by a state agency then-called the Department of Correctional Services, or DOCS, sent Hawley to the Collins Correctional Facility—where I met him in 1992. DOCS sent Wilkie to a special program for drug offenders called "shock" incarceration. It was a six-month long "bootcamp"-style program. Wilkie successfully completed the program and was back out on the streets in less than a year.
"It’s one thing to go to prison and be a guy. It’s another to be a girl. They judge you harder," Wilkie told me.
Wilkie worked as a drug counselor for years, but grew tired of listening to all the "sad stories," she said. She wanted to work as a hairdresser instead, but state law required she get a license first. Because of her felony criminal record, the state agency charged with issuing the legally-required licenses would not give her one. It wouldn't even let her take the required test. She and her husband enlisted the aid of the area's state senator, Charles D. Cook—first elected to the state legislature, as an Assemblyman, in 1973.
"I couldn’t get my hairdresser license," Wilkie recalled. "Senator Cook called the Governor’s office, then it was Mario Cuomo. He got them to let me take the test."
She passed the test, and was granted a license. Wilkie left her old life in the dust and built an entirely new one. She eventually saved up enough money to open her own salon. She also married and had two children.
“She turned her life totally around. She’s a respected, productive member of the community," Justice Mugglin said of his neighbor in 2021.
"She cuts my hair," he added. "What’s left of it. It started with my mother. Tammy cut her hair."
When I spoke with Tammy, I asked her about her feelings for the judge who once sentenced her to life in prison.
"I cut his hair yesterday," she said. "I’m not mad at Judge Mugglin. He didn’t make me a drug dealer. I did that myself."
Still, the fallout from her felony conviction persists like social radioactivity. More than 30 years later, her husband's sisters still will not step foot into the house he lives in with Wilkie, they said.
I had one last question for Wilkie: Did Hawley ever apologize to her when he was parole?
"I saw Gary once after he got out in 1994. He didn’t apologize. Never gave him the chance," she said.
I felt some kind of coda was required when our talk was over.
"You made it through. You survived," I told her. "Not everybody does."
She understood what I meant before I did. "Gary didn't," she replied right away.
I thought I saw tears briefly well up in her eyes, but no tears fell. Then I hugged her and her husband and said goodbye.
Gary Hawley was granted parole in September 1994. He had a heart attack and died a month later. Before he died, Naomi, his sister, remembers he built a fire-ring behind his trailer home. He sat there alone, night-after-night, watching the fire burn and staring up at the stars.
"Prison changed him," Naomi said. "When he got out he didn't want to be around people."
Hawley followed the rules of his parole, which included a curfew that kept him confined to his home after dark. But following the rules was killing his wandering soul. So he died wandering, a month later—at the annual Eastern Draft Horse Association Round Up horse pull competition in New Hampshire on October 14.
"Truly an example of a man dying doing what he loved," a former associate told me in an email.
Hawley wasn't supposed to have left New York without his parole officer's permission, but he went to New Hampshire anyway. Because he wasn't supposed to leave the state, New York dispatched the State Police to New Hampshire to verify Hawley's death.
"The State Troopers came and fingerprinted and took pictures of him. Which was very upsetting for my mother and I," Naomi said.
Back in New York, the two went through Hawley's trailer home and made a startling discovery: he never took the medication doctors prescribed for his enlarged, Crack-damaged heart.
"When he died his pill bottles were full. He was prescribed two heavy duty medications. They were full," Naomi said. “Whether he had a premonition or wanted to go, I don’t know.”
"I miss him terribly," she added. "They should have sent him to rehab."
I had one last question for Naomi. Did she visit her brother in prison and bring him raw rhubarb? The rhubarb we used when he showed me how to bake rhubarb pie in prison in 1992? She hadn't. She'd been living in Chicago running a factory making automobile mirrors for American car-makers at the time. She only visited him once. But their mother Virginia visited him every month, she said, and Virginia loved rhubarb.
"I hate the stuff," Naomi said.
The rhubarb we used when Hawley showed me how to bake a rhubarb pie had come from his mother's west Catskill garden.
Send tips or corrections to jasonbnicholas@gmail.com or, if you prefer, thefreelancenews@proton.me