It's 15 years in federal prison for former longtime Montreal journalists Wendy Kraus-Heitmann, 43, (aka Wendy Hechtman) and her husband Ken Hechtman, 49.Both pleaded guilty to charges of Conspiracy to manufacture Carfentanil - a form of the powerful drug Fentanyl - and were each ordered to serve 180 months behind bars.
Wendy Kraus-Heitmann was sentenced on October 26, 2018 and her husband Ken on December 6, 2018 in Omaha, Nebraska.
Both are American citizens who lived in Montreal for several decades before moving to Omaha, her hometown, in February 2016.
Kraus-Heitmann came to study at Concordia and was well-known in university newspaper circles and beyond.
She has four children with two previous husbands.
Hechtman attended Colombia University and received considerable attention in Canada in 2001 when he was kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan working on a freelance feature article he was trying to sell to the Montreal Mirror.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons website has not made clear where they are serving their sentences.
I enjoyed reading this; glad you are posting again.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this follow up, and the original entry months back. It says a lot about the lack of local "alt press" that this is the only place I've seen the story. Though, after the first installment, web searches hasn't turned up US stories.
ReplyDeleteIf Ken wasn't born in Canada, he must have come soon after he was born, the whole family is here. I thought he got US citizenship through his father.
I remember seeing Ken and his then girlfriend at used booksales, and I guess elsewhere, almost thirty years ago. They stood out, and I thought they'd be together forever, but apparently not. It was only well into the Fringe era that I learned he was Jeremy's brother.
I thought he was more an accidental journalist. He wanted to go to Afghanistan for whatever reasons, and writing about it legitimized it. I think that was the limit of paper journalism, I don't even remember seeing him in the letter columns. Though in retrospect, he did write on the web.
I thought he was a computer guy. I know he handled something related to that for one or two editions of the Montreal Fringe.
He also was involved in some April First event around 2000, with former Rhino Party candidates, bringing some well known counterculture types like Paul Krassner and Wavy Gravy. Jeremy was in awe, or disgusted, by the government money they got.
And then a few years ago, I started seeing him at used book sales again, me thinking maybe looking for books for his father. My memory says it was recent enough to overlap with his move to Omaha.
This is a sad story, I'm sure it deeply affects his father. It just seems like a stupid thing, especially given the times. Even Owsley only got a few years for making LSD, but people are dying now from opioids.
Ken is just someone I vaguely know, but I'm saddened by his loss of freedom, the only hope that he gets an early release. I only spent a weekend in jail once, for civil disobedience, and I've never been in a more irreversible and absolute place. I think it will be very hard on Ken.
The move to Omaha doesn't seem like a good idea, in retrospect. But maybe the marriage wasn't a good thing either. This all seems so stupid, a waste.
I hope his father Peter is doing okay right now.
Michael
Ken Hechtman was a friend of mine although I only got to know him after his Afghanistan escapade. He was and is one of the most intelligent people I have ever met in my life. Unfortunately his drug addiction and alcoholism did not help him and his marriage to Wendy didn't benefit him either.
ReplyDeleteGoing to Omaha might have been a good turning point had he been willing to make it so. He was perfectly lucid with me about going into the construction trade. He knew that he had no chance to do anything else. I wish him well. Can't say the same thing for Babykins aka his ball and chain.
Ken's father died last March (2020), I only noticed a month later. The last times I saw him, he had an oxygen tank, so Ken didn't drive him to an early grave.
ReplyDeleteI was curious now (Jan 2021) if anything changed about Ken's status, maybe an early release. I see nothing.
But somehow Wendy got released, I think because of the Pandemic. But under house arrest, from what she wrote on her blog, she's still serving 15 years. No mention of Ken, just a reference to her co-conspirators still in prison.