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When I scanned the names of the people who received Grace Grants from President Donald Trump on Wednesday morning, one of them stood out as if it was written in bright red.
Not Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist. Not Lil Wayne, the famous rapper.
This person has no connection to Trump and has never recorded a hip-hop album.
His name is Gary Hendler. He’s my uncle.
Uncle Gary, 67, who pleaded guilty to drug conspiracy charges in 1984 but did not serve jail, never expected to receive a pardon from Trump.
For good reason: he never asked the 45th President for one.
He did, however, send a nearly 90-page pardon request to the Obama Justice Department in 2016. But it seemed to have been in vain.
Obama granted some form of clemency to 1,927 people at the end of his second term, but Gary was not one of them.
“I thought that was the end of me,” said Gary, a Pennsylvania radio show host and former drug addict who has spent more than 30 years helping people recover from their addiction.
He has had no contact with the Trump administration in the past four years. No one even contacted him to tell him that a pardon was on the way.
“I couldn’t believe it,” he said, using a curse to insist, when asked for 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 in the White House. I know he was going to forgive people,” said Gary, who voted for Joe Biden. “Did I think I would be on the list? It was so far away it wasn’t even funny.”
Gary’s story began in 1973, when he became addicted to quaaludes, a popular recreational drug in the 1970s, while attending Temple University in Philadelphia.
He wasn’t your average student. He had already gotten a taste of the fast-paced life working at Universal’s Philadelphia record label in high school.
“I was 19 and had a Bentley,” he says. “And I met the most famous artists in the world: the Temptations, the Four Tops, Barry Manilow.”
Her roommate at university introduced her to quaaludes, triggering an almost decadalong battle with addiction.
He and three other drug addicts opened a “stress clinic” in the Philadelphia area and hired a psychiatrist to prescribe quaaludes to anyone who requested it. The clinic, Health Centers Inc., opened in January 1981.
Gary’s partners severed ties with him the following month, before any of them made a profit on the company, he said. He walked the streets the following year before entering rehab in 1982.
“The only good thing about being kicked out of the clinic is that it forced me to face the life I had lived,” he wrote in his 2016 pardon request.
“About a year later, in May 1982, I enrolled in the Pennsylvania Hospital drug treatment program that saved my life.”
The clinic remained open until 1984, when federal agents raided the company and arrested its former partners, as well as the doctors and pharmacists who worked for them.
Gary, whose name still appeared in company newspapers, was questioned. He was sober and about to get married.
“I had changed my life and saw the clinic’s involvement as a bad chapter in my ‘old life’,” he wrote in his request for forgiveness to the Obama White House.
He agreed to plead guilty and cooperate with the government. He was sentenced to three years of supervised probation and a fine of $ 300.
“I’m lucky,” he said in Wednesday’s interview. “If it weren’t for the falling out, I would have gone to jail with the others.”
He became the father of two daughters and started a successful real estate business in the Philadelphia area.
In 1985, he began AA meetings in a synagogue outside of Philadelphia which continue to this day. He also hosts a radio show, “Clean and Sober Radio,” which features musicians, athletes and politicians discussing their struggles with drug addiction. And in 2015, Governor Tom Wolf appointed him to serve on the Pennsylvania Advisory Council on Drug and Alcohol Abuse.
He has “mentored many people on their sobriety journey with his radio shows,” read Gary’s description released by the Trump administration.
“His former probation officer noted that Mr. Hendler has become ‘an integral part’ of the lives of many in the community struggling with substance abuse issues.”
Gary, who lives with his wife in Ardmore, Pa., Said FBI agents visited him and conducted interviews with his neighbors and family members in 2016. He still has no idea. how his name ended up among those who reached Trump’s office.
His pardon attorney, Margaret Love, said the wording of Gary’s description – that pardon was supported by former Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and the pardon attorney’s office – shows he followed the normal Ministry of Justice transmission process. at the president’s office.
“It was quite regular,” said Love, who headed the pardon’s office during the George HW Bush and Bill Clinton administrations. “No special advocacy or influence peddling. Of the 149 grants, only 18 went through the Department of Justice process. He’s a lucky camper.”
Gary said he broke down in tears when he saw his name on the grace list on Wednesday morning. He still remembers the exact date of his last drug or alcohol use: May 3, 1982.
“This is the last chapter, the end of my life in addiction and all the horrible things that came with it,” he said.
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