Kim’s Nine Lives : Ex-Drug Addict Cop Cashes In on Book-Film Deal, but Not Everyone Is Praising Her Work

By Beverly Hills standards, it’s a ho-hum book party.

See the author kiss actress Daryl Hannah. See the author hug actor Armand Assante. See the author pose with tycoon Marvin Davis.

See the author look for a place to lock up her purse.

“Doesn’t it just say everything?” confides one of the party’s organizers. “She still has that mentality.” But that mentality is why, though the party may be ordinary, its guest of honor isn’t.

After all, how many first-time novelists besides Kim Wozencraft have gone from narcotics officer to drug addict, from rookie of the year to corrupt cop, from prison inmate to Ivy League graduate, from struggling writer to overnight millionaire? Much less become the toast of Hollywood, as evidenced by this love-fest thrown by Oscar-winning producers Richard and Lili Zanuck at Noa Noa, a new restaurant so trendy it pipes bird calls into the bathrooms?

It’s a rush for anyone, especially the author of “Rush,” an autobiography masquerading as a novel. The plot, like Wozencraft’s life, involves a young woman cop working undercover in the booming Texas narcotics trade who falls in love with her partner and falls victim to the fast times and hard drugs of her double life. Among other adventures, the roman a clef relives the fear and excitement of police work and the drug culture--including what it’s like to inject heroin and get shot--as only someone who’s experienced it can describe it.

The very news that such a book was being written was enough to spur a frantic bidding war among some of Hollywood’s top filmmakers, all panting after an anti-drug message spiced with sex and violence. The winner was Zanuck, who last year shelled out $1 million in cash for the movie rights--the most ever paid for what was then only an unfinished manuscript.

Still to come is the lucrative sale of the paperback rights to “Rush,” which will be timed to the movie’s release, sure to make Wozencraft even more wealthy and famous.

But even Zanuck admits that what makes Wozencraft’s work such a hot property is not so much the words she has written but Wozencraft herself.

“Her story is an incredible story,” says Zanuck, who hopes to cast Jodie Foster and Tom Cruise in the title roles. “A lot of it is in the book. But a lot of it is not in the book.”

But along with Wozencraft’s success has come censure. At the same time that the national media is applauding Wozencraft for picking up the shards of her shattered life and making sense of it through writing, her former associates in Texas are raising disturbing questions about the morality of getting rich by divulging details of misconduct.

“I know some people are complaining that crime pays. But what they miss is that there was no one waiting at the prison gate with a check for $1 million when I walked out the door,” says the 35-year-old Wozencraft, the muscles in her strong jaw clenching and unclenching fiercely with frustration at having to once again defend herself.

“I have sweated and struggled and cried over this book. It’s been my reason for being for the last six years. And because some people think I ruined their lives, they want a piece of $1 million. An easy piece of it. Well, I worked for it. And I feel good about it.”

Others feel good about her success, too.

Good and angry.

One of them is Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot, who as chairman of Texas Special Task Force on Drug Abuse in 1979 ordered his own security staff to protect Wozencraft and her ex-partner Creig Mathews when he believed their lives were in danger after they made the biggest drug bust in East Texas history. But that was before he found out the truth about them: that they faked evidence, used drugs and lied under oath.

“I assumed they were good, straight undercover policemen. It later turned out that they weren’t,” says Perot.

“But I really object to a publishing industry and an entertainment industry that will pay $1 million to a dirty undercover officer and nothing to a clean one. They ought to sit back and think whether they’re rewarding the wrong people just so they can shock the American people. Because any society that rewards crooks is a society in trouble.”

Also enraged is Wozencraft’s former police department in Tyler, Tex., as well as other state law enforcement officials who weathered years of scandal resulting from the couple’s illicit activities. So is Matthews, Wozencraft’s one-time mentor and husband who says he plans to file a lawsuit to prevent his past from serving as the stuff of headlines yet again.

“Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy for her success,” he says when reached by telephone in Dallas where he now lives, his voice drenched in sarcasm. “But I feel that Kim has taken advantage of people to get it, particularly me. It’s not fair.”

Until last month, Matthews, who also went to prison and now works for a landscaping service, literally kept those years buried in a stack of court records at the bottom of a closet. But while he was remarrying and having children, Wozencraft was graduating from Columbia University, enrolling in a prestigious writing program and working on her book.

Now that “Rush” is in the bookstores (becoming No. 5 on bestseller lists in Texas), he has had to explain his past criminal activity to his sons, to his bosses and even to his neighbors who didn’t know all the sordid details.

If the book is successful, he says he may even have to move. But not before he hires a lawyer and tries to get some kind of compensation from his suddenly rich ex-wife.

Last year, he refused to sign a release form which Wozencraft sent him seeking his rights to their life story in exchange for one-tenth of her book advance, or $3,500. Matthews refused to sign when he found out that Wozencraft’s literary agent was negotiating with Hollywood.

Today, he’s anything but excited about the prospect of being the subject of a movie. “This is just that much more exposure I’m going to have to deal with,” Matthews complains.

Answering all her critics, Wozencraft insists that her book about “Kristen Cates” and “Jim Raynor” is not a blow-by-blow account of their lives or the Tyler police department. “I know there are some parallels but it really is a novel,” she maintains.

“That’s a crock,” counters Matthews.

At least in its beginning, Wozencraft’s personal story was unremarkable. As a middle-class Dallas native, high school athletic star, college drop-out and 21-year-old divorcee, Wozencraft was working a dead-end job in an ice cream parlor in a suburb of Dallas in 1976 when friends talked her into trying to become a cop.

Immediately, she was accepted by a police department in Plano, a nearby community of tract homes, shopping malls and industrial parks north of Dallas, and recruited as an undercover narcotics officer. Her youth and lack of experience provided the perfect cover.

Her trainer, partner and eventual lover was Matthews, then a veteran narcotics officer with the Plano department who moved 90 miles east to Tyler in 1978 to begin a nine-month drug trafficking investigation for the Tyler police department. Wozencraft followed him.

While he infiltrated groups of hard-core criminals, she worked her way into a group of young upper-middle-class kids using cocaine.

Together, Wozencraft and Matthews were responsible for the indictments of 121 alleged drug traffickers in April, 1979--an event big enough to make headlines only in Texas.

Still, they were cast immediately as the local hero and heroine, especially when a shotgun blast almost killed Matthews and grazed Wozencraft in an attempted assassination. Wozencraft identified a local crime figure as the gunman.

But then, as the indictments wound their way through the criminal justice system, the darker side of Wozencraft’s and Matthews’ investigations started to emerge. Beginning with a Dallas Morning News article, and followed by polygraph examinations and other testimony, it was revealed that the pair were not just drug fighters but also drug addicts who had used and sold illegal narcotics and siphoned off amphetamines, Valium, Quaaludes and cocaine from the purchases they made with state funds. In addition, they had violated a policy of the Tyler police department not to use drugs.

Later, she and Matthews admitted that they had framed their alleged assassin (no one has ever been charged with the shooting). Today, that individual, too, accuses Wozencraft of ruining his life and wants a part of her “Rush” windfall.

As Wozencraft explains it, “There was a test of integrity, and I failed it.” At first, she enjoyed the rush from her police work and from the drugs. “But then when I became addicted and drugs became the whole focus and reason for living, it wasn’t fun any more.”

But Wozencraft also claims that it was understood by the Tyler Police Department that in order to do her job she had to take drugs so as not to blow her cover. She also maintains that Matthews, in Svengali fashion, was responsible for her drug addiction and other crimes by using their professional and romantic relationship to lead her astray.

“I don’t deny that I was the person who taught her how to shoot dope in a life-and-death situation. And not for one minute would I imply that I did not influence her or train her. But it’s been so misconstrued,” Matthews counters. “I feel as an adult that she could have pulled the string, stopped the train and got off any time she wanted to.”

As the investigation into the Tyler arrests heated up, Wozencraft and Matthews married. In 1981, the FBI came calling.

After intense interrogation, the pair finally admitted that they had used drugs, planted evidence and committed perjury while trying to make their drug cases stick. A federal judge immediately freed the alleged drug traffickers that the pair confessed they had imprisoned by lying “about 1,000 times.”

Yet another person’s life was turned upside down by Wozencraft’s and Matthews’ activities: Tyler Police Chief Willie Hardy, who was tried on federal charges he covered up wrongdoing by the pair. In 1983, he was acquitted, but also fired from his job. Today he is a private investigator who says he won’t comment on Wozencraft’s book.

In the end, Wozencraft and Matthews pleaded guilty to violating the civil rights of defendants by planting evidence.

On March 15, 1982, they were sentenced to the federal correctional institution in Lexington, Ky., a co-ed medium-security facility--Matthews for three years, Wozencraft for 18 months.

“That was a trip,” she says, laughing for the first time. “I thought, ‘Gee, what do I pack for prison? Should I bring my bathing suit?’ ”

The worst thing about prison life, she recalls, was the “fear going in, and the fear coming back out.”

But it was while in prison that Wozencraft received her first encouragement as a writer, from an ABC “20/20” producer who had done a segment on the Tyler scandal. Wozencraft sent the producer a story about her stay in a psychiatric ward, and the journalist sent back a copy of Strunk and White along with a note saying, “You can write.” Wozencraft was shocked.

Coming out of prison after serving 13 months of an 18-month sentence, she was afraid to go back into the world with a felony conviction on her record and no plans for the future. But, once again, her life was changed by a man.

Divorced from Matthews, Wozencraft became romantically involved with a man she only identifies as John, a New Yorker whom she met in prison. Well-educated and well-connected, he settled her in New York and encouraged her to return to college with the help of part-time jobs and student loans. After two semesters at Hunter College, she was accepted at Columbia where she graduated in January, 1986, with a bachelor’s degree in creative writing.

That autumn, she was accepted into the school’s prestigious graduate writing program, where her thesis was a bloated novel titled, “The Rose Capital of the World” which eventually became the taut “Rush” (which is dedicated to John).

After as many as 15 revisions, including three front-to-back rewrites, and a dozen rejections by New York publishers, Wozencraft’s manuscript was read by top New York literary agent Amanda (Binky) Urban, who represents such other hot writers as Jay McInerney and Brett Easton Ellis. Urban sold the book to Random House for a $35,000 advance and went after Hollywood’s money as well.

Wozencraft says she has no desire to take drugs anymore. But getting clean took a long time, she admits. “I would say that it’s only in the last couple of years that I haven’t sometimes thought about wanting drugs.”

Harder to kick, she says, was the bitterness she felt against Matthews, the Tyler Police Department and the war on drugs. “My hatred was as powerful as the highs from the drugs. It’s gone now, but it’s nearly made me crazy at times. I guess I just realized that it was hurting me an awful lot more than it was hurting anyone else. The book helped me do that, though I know you’re not supposed to write as therapy.”

At work on her second book (a novel about prison life) and free from financial worry, Wozencraft by all appearances seems to be another successful writer living in Manhattan. “I think some people are surprised that I haven’t changed that much. I didn’t run out and buy a Ferrari and start going to clubs and all that stuff.”

She winces. “I feel like I’ve done all that.”

More importantly, she pledges to live her life “in an honorable way.”

“I guess it’s a case of learning that I have my own standards and to live by them, which is to learn as much as I can about life, and not to harm others.”

That last part comes as a shock to Matthews, however.

“If Kim has as much talent as is indicated from the results of this book,” he sighs, “then my question is why couldn’t she have written something that wouldn’t hurt anybody?”