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RANDY CREDICO, the stand-up comic better known as a flamboyant advocate for inmates serving sentences under the Rockefeller drug laws, hurtles along the quaint confines of Gay Street from Joe's, the coffee shop where he routinely fuels up like a Hummer at a gas pump. His destination is "the Kunstler house." He's not actually late, yet he's in a rush -- always. Recent legislation has made it possible for 446 inmates convicted under New York's drug laws, among the nation's harshest, to appeal their sentences, but that leaves roughly 15,000 prisoners still doing time for, in his opinion, too long. So Mr. Credico's mission is far from accomplished. And it's unpopular. But it makes perfect sense to him. His father, convicted of safecracking, spent eight years in an Ohio penitentiary. Dad was paroled, rethought his career (he went into the nightclub business in Ontario, Calif.), and told horror stories about prison. The cautionary tales caught up with Randy Credico in 1997 when, alone in a Florida motel room trying to quit cocaine, he saw a news program on the Rockefeller drug laws and had a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God epiphany. "I felt like I had dodged a bullet, because I'd violated those laws a million times but never came close to being arrested," he says. He was insulated, he claims, by his milieu: white, privileged and connected. "If I were black or Latino I'd be in prison right now," he says. "I feel like a lot of these guys are doing my time. Fighting these laws, which are unjust and racist, was a perfect platform for me: the antiwar movement is 0 for 50, you can't stop a war, but a movement to repeal the Rockefeller laws is something local. You can put a face on it." He did: the distraught faces of the inmates' mothers at a 1998 vigil to protest the 25th anniversary of the laws. Mr. Credico figured he would put a year into the issue, then reignite his comedy career. One year became seven. His comedy gigs are limited to Tuesday nights at Rocky Sullivan's. It's a start. "There's not a lot of money in left-wing political humor," he says. David Frye was Mr. Credico's original comic template; he blames Mort Sahl for getting him into political humor. He is 47, a dangerous disclosure since his much younger Argentine girlfriend thinks he is 39 -- the never-married Mr. Credico began lying about his age in his teens to appear younger than Freddie Prinze, "who made it at 19." After a couple of decades of drug and alcohol abuse on the Vegas-Hollywood-Boston-New York comedy circuit, where cocaine flowed like a condiment, he expects his body to give out by 60. As penance, he has whittled his addictions to caffeine and the odd martini. And the limelight. Can't kick that. "SIXTY Spins Around the Sun," a documentary that chronicles his trajectory from comedian -- his most momentous lowlight is bombing on the "Tonight" show with Johnny Carson 20 years ago when he strayed from mimicry into a harangue against United States foreign policy -- to political activist is making the rounds at independent film festivals. The actor Jack Black financed the film. Mr. Credico says Arianna Huffington is pushing a possible feature version; her wish list has Ben Stiller in the Credico role. The documentary portrays Mr. Credico as passionate, annoying and "a sometime weasel." He has no quarrel with the depiction. "I have a lot of clay feet," he says. Snowflakes trickle down at an unobtrusive rate as he closes in on 13 Gay Street. He met his hero, William Moses Kunstler, when an old flame from his Vegas days, Joey Heatherton, was "on the lam" and needed a lawyer. Mr. Credico hooked them up and found himself a mentor. "I'm an opportunist," he says. He wears cowboy boots (for height), jeans and a tired sport jacket above a rumpled tie that, once he reaches his office, will be dumped on the floor. He grips a supersize espresso in one fist; in the other, he brandishes, ludicrously, a plaid Burberry umbrella as if, like Mary Poppins, he might levitate to a rooftop at any moment. He pops up the front steps of an aged town house where one of his spent cigars soils the snowy front stoop. The William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice, the counterculturish legal aid service he directs alongside Mr. Kunstler's widow, Margaret, a lawyer specializing in civil rights defense, occupies a messy warren of rooms on the second floor. Libby, the Kunstlers' water-hating Portuguese Water Dog, awaits his arrival. Besides his role with the fund, Mr. Credico is resident dog-walker. As with the rest of his jobs, he is obsessive about it: wet days are hell for Libby. When he is too beat to trudge home to Sunnyside, Queens, he bunks here. During his siege against the Rockefeller laws, there were plenty of all-nighters. Even though the State Legislature approved, on Dec. 7, an easing of the harshest sentences -- inmates serving 15 years to life can appeal for a quicker release -- his angst is unappeased. Inmates with lighter sentences were ignored. And those inmates have mothers, many of them members of Mr. Credico's New York Mothers of the Disappeared, a group he patterned after the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, mothers of vanished political dissidents in Argentina. He and the mothers want the Rockefeller laws repealed with an emphasis on rehabilitation. "This isn't a great victory," he says, irritably, about the new legislation, which was implemented on Jan. 13. "We cashed in our chips, basically. It's like going from the electric chair to lethal injection and saying you changed the death penalty." Not funny. "We've got to remobilize." |
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