The Clients of Linda Pence: The Yogurt Connection

You just can’t make this stuff up…

Meet “The Yogurt Connection.” In the 1980s, it was the largest marijuana-smuggling ring in history. Started around 1975, it spanned eleven states and shipped 125 tons of marijuana valued at anywhere between $50 and $100 million from Columbia, Jamaica, and Thailand. And it was operated out of (believe it or not) Indianapolis, Indiana.

The drug ring was operated by Linda Leary and her two sons, Richard and Paul Heilbrunn. The Yogurt Connection (a term coined by prosecutors at their trial) got its name from the yogurt franchise that the family owned.

Mrs. Leary and her sons were high class dealers. They sold drugs on the side and circulated, their dealing unknown, at the highest levels of Indianapolis society. Paul Heilbrunn was a broker and a financier. He wrote a column for a local business news magazine (his business acumen helped to launder the gang’s drug money in various Caribbean and Latin American banks). The family made frequent loans to such places as a radio station and a cable company (and even to that ubiquitous hotel room staple, the Indianapolis Dining Guide).

Leary was the head of the Indy League of Women Voters and was president of the local chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women. She held fundraisers for the Indianapolis Zoo and publicly supported the drug enforcement policies and good government campaigns of Dick Lugar, who was then the mayor of Indianapolis.

(Read more after the leap)
A trail of violence followed the yogurt gang. Richard Heilbrunn was once shot four times at a drug meeting gone wrong and later walked with a limp. One employee of the drug ring (who actually shot Richard) ended up hanging himself in a jail in British Columbia in Canada; he supposedly killed himself to spare his younger brother, who was being used as leverage to prevent the employee from giving information to the authorities. The aforementioned article notes, “A string of unsolved murders were attributed to the gang, including the 1976 death of Philip Winkler, the son of an Indianapolis oil company executive. None were ever prosecuted.”

For eight years, Leary and her sons lived a double life. In 1983, however, their luck ran out. The government arrested a cocaine distributor that was a former employee of the yogurt gang. In exchange for immunity, he agreed to tell all. By late 1985, Leary and her sons had fled the country to escape a grand jury investigation into their drug ring.

In 1987, four years after the arrested distributor tipped the government, the grand jury issued a 53-count indictment of Linda Leary, Richard Heilbrunn, Paul Heilbrunn, and thirty-plus people involved in the yogurt gang. By that time, Leary and her sons were long gone. Almost two years later, in the spring of 1989, they were found living the high life among a community of American expatriates in Salzburg, Austria.

The three were soon extradited to the United States for trial, where they were convicted and sent to prison. The archive of the New York Times and an issue (of all things) of People Magazine have more.

But when Leary and Sons were hiding in Austria, and Uncle Sam came calling, they knew which lawyer to call to keep them from being extradited back to the United States (or at least delay their extradition). And once they were back on American soil, they knew who to call to defend them.

Yup. They called Linda Pence.

But it’s okay.

Linda Pence said when she started her campaign that she was going to fight drug dealers. She also said that she wasn’t afraid to take them on. One could see why; she has a history of fighting for and defending them.

In November, Indiana gets to choose.

One choice is a guy that has made his career in public service, and in standing up for the good guys as the deputy of a popular and successful attorney general. That candidate, Greg Zoeller, has also been endorsed by the Fraternal Order of Police.

The other choice is someone that has made her career in the defense of shady characters, and in standing up for the bad guys. That candidate, Linda Pence, has been “endorsed” in by the likes of Sam Smith, Carl Liebowitz, the co-defendants of Bob Pastrick, and “The Yogurt Connection.”

As I said, you can’t make this stuff up.

If you wrote it for a movie or a television series, nobody would believe it.

An attorney general candidate that has defended convicted murderers, co-defendants in the biggest corruption case in state history, drug dealers, and corrupt state senators?

Nobody would buy that as a plot for a John Grisham novel or a Boston Legal multi-episode story arc, and Hoosier voters shouldn’t either.