Pursuing Prager

Harvey Prager, the brilliant Harvey Prager, is back in the news. And Portland Police Chief Michael Chitwood, the dogged Michael Chitwood, is still on his case.

Any Mainer with a halfway decent memory and a strong sense of outrage remembers Prager. He’s the brilliant (his admirers in high places seem incapable of referring to him without that adjective) Bowdoin grad who got busted in 1983 for trying to smuggle 11 tons of pot into Maine.

Well, not exactly busted. He fled the country and spent the next four years jet-setting between his villa in the Caribbean and his apartment in Paris before the law caught up with him and brought him to justice.

Well, not exactly justice. While his underlings were doing hard time, Prager convinced a federal judge that using part of his illicit proceeds to open an AIDS hospice in Portland would be a better way to repay his debt to society.

Well, not exactly repay. The hospice never opened, so Prager then sweet-talked the judge into letting him care for a few AIDS patients in his home, part-time. Which gave him the time to go to law school.

And that is where his legendary incandescence really bedazzled. So brilliant was his brilliance that he was chosen for a coveted Maine Supreme Judicial Court clerkship. Law enforcement — the state’s eight district attorneys and a passel of police chiefs, including Chitwood — objected mightily to what they perceived as a conman’s reward. Despite that, and despite concerns that the quality of his AIDS care wasn’t quite up to par, the state’s defense attorneys, themselves just brilliant enough to know better than to buck the judiciary, rallied around Prager and the job was his.

Then it was on to Massachusetts, the completion of a law degree and an application for admittance to the bar. And there was Chitwood, giving the Bay State the story behind the story. Massachusetts wisely decided it could continue to struggle along without benefit of Prager’s monumental intellect.

Now he’s popped up in New York and so has Chitwood, firing off a letter to the state’s law examiners that includes the word “reprehensible.” Prager fully deserves a relentless pursuer, an Ahab, and Chitwood is doing a splendid job of it.

Prager’s fan club says it’s unfair; he served his sentence and deserves a fresh start. The flaw in that argument, of course, is that Prager wrote his own sentence, amended it to suit his needs and then still didn’t follow through. Prager deserves a fresh start, not a free pass.

Chitwood’s diligence is commendable for a couple of reasons. It reminds the legal establishment that the amount of justice one receives too often is tied to one’s station in life. While Prager was living in a Victorian mansion with a view of Portland harbor and going to law school, his less connected, less engaging, less brilliant subordinates were getting three hots and a cot. It reminds all that small mistakes not admitted to can grow like Topsy. Prager snookered the original judge with that hospice scheme. Instead of acknowleging it, the judiciary covered its blunder with several more, until Prager had snookered his way into a cushy job writing opinions for the state’s highest court.

But the best thing about Chitwood’s hounding may just be that it drives Prager, in his search for a place to hang his shingle, farther and farther from Maine’s dooryard. Massachusetts was good, New York even better. If Chief Chitwood wants to keep it up for another state or two, most Mainers would appreciate it.