When I examined the names of the people who received President Donald Trump’s leniency grants on Wednesday morning, one stood out as if it were written in bright red letters.
Not Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist. Not Lil Wayne, the famous rapper.
This person has no connection with Trump and has never recorded a hip-hop album.
His name is Gary Hendler. He is my uncle.
Uncle Gary, 67, who pleaded guilty to drug conspiracy charges in 1984 but did not serve a prison sentence, never expected to receive Trump’s pardon.
For good reason: he never really asked the 45th president for one.
He, however, sent a nearly 90-page pardon to the Obama Justice Department in 2016. But it seemed to have been in vain.
Obama granted some form of leniency to 1,927 people at the end of his second term, but Gary was not among them.
“I thought it was the end of it for me,” said Gary, a Pennsylvania radio host and former addict who spent more than 30 years helping people recover from addiction.
He has had no contact with the Trump administration for the past four years. No one even reached out to say that a pardon was on the way.
“I couldn’t believe it,” he said, emphasizing a dirty word when asked about his reaction to the news.
He said he checked the list just out of curiosity after waking up Wednesday morning.
“It was his last night at the White House. I know he would forgive people,” said Gary, who voted for Joe Biden. “I thought it would be on the list? It was so remote that it wasn’t even funny.”
Gary’s story began in 1973, when he was addicted to quaaludes, a popular recreational drug in the 1970s, while studying at Temple University in Philadelphia.
He was no ordinary college student. He had already experienced a taste of the hectic life while working at the record label Universal, headquartered in Philadelphia, in high school.
“I was 19 and I had a Bentley,” he said. “And I was meeting the most famous artists in the world: the Temptations, the Four Tops, Barry Manilow.”
His college roommate introduced him to quaaludes, sparking a nearly decade-long battle with addiction.
He and three other addicts opened a “stress clinic” in the Philadelphia area and hired a psychiatrist to prescribe quaaludes to anyone who asked. The clinic, Health Centers Inc., opened its doors in January 1981.
Gary’s partners cut ties with him the following month, before any of them profited from the deal, he said. He wandered the streets the following year before entering rehab in 1982.
“The only good thing about being expelled from the clinic was that it forced me to face the life I was living,” he wrote in his 2016 forgiveness request.
“About a year later, in May 1982, I signed up for the drug treatment program at the Pennsylvania Hospital that saved my life.”
The clinic remained open until 1984, when federal agents invaded the company and arrested its former partners, in addition to the doctors and pharmacists who worked for them.
Gary, whose name was still in the corporate papers, was taken for questioning. He was sober and about to get married.
“I had changed my life and saw the clinic’s involvement only as a bad chapter in my ‘old life,'” he wrote in his Obama White House apology.
He agreed to plead guilty and cooperate with the government. He was sentenced to three years of supervised probation and fined $ 300.
“I’m lucky,” he said in an interview on Wednesday. “If it weren’t for the fight, I would have gone to prison with the rest of them.”
He became the father of two daughters and opened a successful real estate business in the Philadelphia area.
In 1985, he began AA meetings in a synagogue outside Philadelphia, which continue today. It also features a radio program, “Clean and Sober Radio”, which features musicians, athletes and political figures who discuss their battles against substance abuse. And in 2015, Governor Tom Wolf appointed him to serve on the Pennsylvania Drug and Alcohol Abuse Advisory Board.
He “guided many individuals on their journey to sobriety with their radio broadcasts,” read Gary’s description released by the Trump administration.
“His former parole officer noted that Mr. Hendler had become an ‘integral’ in the lives of many members of the community who were dealing with substance abuse issues.”
Gary, who lives with his wife in Ardmore, Pennsylvania, said FBI agents visited him and conducted interviews with his neighbors and family in 2016. He still has no idea how his name got among those who arrived at Trump’s table.
His pardon attorney, Margaret Love, said that the language in Gary’s description – that the pardon was supported by former deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein and the Office of the Forgiveness Attorney – shows that he went through the normal flow process of the Department of Forgiveness. Justice for the president’s table.
“It was completely regular,” said Love, who headed the Office of the Forgiveness Lawyer during the administrations of George HW Bush and Bill Clinton. “No special requests or influence peddling. Of the 149 grants, only 18 went through the Department of Justice process. He’s a lucky camper.”
Gary said he started to cry when he saw his name on the forgiveness list on Wednesday morning. He still remembers the exact date he last consumed drugs or alcohol: May 3, 1982.
“It’s the final chapter, the closing of my life in addiction and all the horrible things that came with it,” he said.