French Connection Suspect Arrested

A man who allegedly oversaw heroin distribution in Harlem for the notorious French Connection was arrested Wednesday in Los Angeles, 17 years after he fled investigators probing his ties to the narcotics underworld.

Stanton Garland, identified as the head of a street distribution network for the powerful drug ring of the early 1960s, was taken into custody by U.S. marshals as he visited his badly injured son at a Baldwin Hills hospital.

Authorities said the manhunt came to an end when Garland, 60, arrived at Meadowbrook Neurological Center on Tuesday morning to arrange for the discharge of his son, whose insurance was scheduled to expire. Marshals had been staking out the hospital for weeks.

“It just so happened today was the day. The money ran out for his son. Time ran out for him,” Deputy U.S. Marshal Robert Grossman said.

As two marshals quietly approached him in the hospital parking lot, Garland surrendered without resistance, Grossman said.

“He basically said that he was in a way relieved that he was in custody so that he didn’t have to worry about being a fugitive for the rest of his life,” he said.

Subject of Movie

Authorities said Garland, allegedly a major heroin distributor in New York through the early 1970s, was an important link in the French Connection heroin ring that was the subject of a 1971 Academy Award-winning film.

Two New York City police detectives uncovered the ring, which was manufacturing heroin in secret laboratories and packaging plants in Marseille out of morphine base supplied by the Sicilian Mafia and then transporting it to New York. When they broke the case in 1962, authorities confiscated 120 pounds of almost pure heroin that had been smuggled into the United States hidden in a car aboard a trans-Atlantic liner.

“Our understanding is he was the major . . . distributor (for the ring) for Harlem,” said David O’Flaherty, the deputy U.S. marshal in Brooklyn who oversaw the manhunt.

It was not clear when Garland initially was arrested in connection with the New York case.

At the time of his escape on Sept. 26, 1972, Garland was facing a possible 20-year sentence on heroin distribution charges in New York, O’Flaherty said. Federal drug agents were in the process of interviewing him in the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn about his organized crime contacts when they left the room momentarily and Garland fled, he said.

For years, the FBI pursued the case, then handed it over to the marshal’s office in Brooklyn in 1979. But authorities “never got a single tip,” O’Flaherty said. Relatives were uncooperative, and surveillance of family members proved fruitless.

Then, checking telephone toll records of one of Garland’s relatives, he said, marshals noticed that several calls seemed to be going to a hospital in Bakersfield and another in Los Angeles. Checking further, they learned that a Lonnie Garland, who had been badly injured when struck by a car recently, had been admitted to the Bakersfield facility and then transferred to the neurological hospital in Baldwin Hills.

Photo Recognized

That is when Grossman and his partner, Ernie Santoscoy, took over the case out of the Los Angeles office. They visited the hospital, where an administrator said a man who looked like the one in the aging, badly lit photograph had been in to visit Lonnie Garland on a few occasions.

The administrator, Grossman said, promised to telephone if he came back. But immersed in one of the most important cases of their careers, the two deputies started parking out by the hospital when they were not busy--just in case. “Just sitting in a car all day. It’s a lot of fun,” Grossman said.

Then they learned that Lonnie Garland’s insurance was scheduled to expire Tuesday and that he would have to be discharged, most likely to his family. Grossman had a hunch it would be a good day to get there early.

Grossman and Santoscoy parked in the upper parking lot behind the hospital and watched as a man answering Garland’s description walked out of the parking lot and into the hospital. Sure enough, their portable telephone rang moments later.

By prearrangement, Grossman said, a hospital administrator notified the marshals of Garland’s arrival and arranged a ruse to get him out into the parking lot, telling him that she needed to discuss his son’s hospital records outside the earshot of the rest of the hospital staff.

Once they were safely outside, Grossman approached from one side of the parking lot, Santoscoy from the other, leaving their guns in their holsters. “We just walked up very quietly to him, and we just basically said, ‘Mr. Garland, you’re under arrest,’ ” Grossman said.

‘Shocked in a Way’

“He stopped talking. Basically, he knew the jig had been had, and that was it. He was shocked in a way, I think.”

The only thing Garland expressed regret about, Grossman said, was that he would be unable to care for his son.

“He said he was very relieved he had been captured,” he added. “He mentioned it was a hardship for him to always try and live his life, but to have to stop and say, ‘What if?’ ”

Assistant U.S. Atty. Brenda K. Sannes said she had no information about any pending drug charges against Garland, and O’Flaherty had no details about the charges. U.S. Magistrate Robert M. Stone ordered him held without bail on an escape indictment and scheduled a June 9 hearing to confirm Garland’s identity.