Many moons ago, a local business man was accused of having an ongoing sexual relationship with a young boy. 

The very minute I heard that the grand jury had indicted the fellow, I picked up the phone and called him. 

You know how this goes. Typically, the accused on the other side of the line will hang up before a question is all the way out of my mouth. 

Sometimes they’ll start yelling, threatening lawsuits and all sorts of unpleasantness. On occasion, they’ll advise me to perform an impossible bodily act before hanging up. 

But this guy was different. Once he realized why I was calling, he started blubbering. 

“Can I go to jail for this?” he wanted to know. 

Then he started rambling about his relationship with the boy in question. It wasn’t so much a sexual relationship, the accused insisted. He was merely showing deep affection for the lad and why, if that’s a crime these days, then lock me up. 

Eventually, they locked him up. 

One time, I tracked down a young man who was accused of robbing a pharmacy and then leading police on a wild chase, both in a car and on foot. 

From this guy, I expected the fast “no comment” or maybe another threatened lawsuit. Instead, the stick-up man heaved a sigh, shook his head and started talking about the desperate hell of opiate withdrawal. 

The man spoke vividly of the nerve-jangling stress of trying to rob a store in broad daylight just so he could get a single fix that might stave off withdrawal for six or seven hours. After that, he said, he’d have to come up with another idea to get the next fix and the one after that.

Instead, he went to jail and kicked the habit the hard way. But his description of how opiate addiction had driven him to madness stuck with me. It made me rethink some ideas I had about the people who commit these all-or-nothing types of crimes. It made me ruminate one more time on the absolute power dope has over those it has hooked. 

More recently, in 2017, former reporter Chris Williams and I had us a jailhouse chat with one Meghan Quinn, a one-time forger who had been picked up in Florida on a probation violation. 

During that chat, Quinn never once proclaimed her innocence. Instead, she told us a harrowing tale about her long ride back from the Sunshine State in a prisoner transport van that was like Guantanamo on wheels. 

Quinn’s story was so horrifying and so sickening, it was hard to listen to. What she had endured on that 1,000-mile ride through hell was brutal. Inhumane. And Williams’ story about the ugly affair ultimately opened some eyes about the failings of the prisoner transport company that had so mistreated Quinn and others. 

Three years after she was forced to kneel in a blood and urine-soaked cage during the five-day extradition, Quinn settled a lawsuit against the company. 

I bring all of this up only to reemphasize the fact that when it comes to high profile crime in our corner of the world, I’m almost always going to try to get words from the accused. 

I try and fail, most of the time, but I try nonetheless. 

Why wouldn’t I? When there is so much to be learned when a presumed boogeyman gets to speaking his mind? 

Last week, a man named Sami-Luqman Muhammad was accused of selling crack cocaine out the back door of a plant store he had just opened weeks ago. It was a tantalizing story and the readers gobbled it up like sharks in chummed waters.  

A day later, through a mutual acquaintance, I connected with Muhammad and was invited to come speak to him. 

On the fast ride down to the plant store, my mind whirled with possibilities. 

Would I get a tearful confession and a blubbering apology to the community? 

Would it be a red-hot denial of all the charges and allegations of police corruption in one form or another? 

But Muhammad was wiser than that. From the get-go he insisted that he could not talk about the criminal charges at all while they were pending in court. 

Instead, he wanted to talk about his plans for the plant store, and I suppose the argument could be made that I should have rolled my eyes and ended the interview right there.

But damn my curious mind, I wanted to hear what the man had to say. 

He mostly talked about the business, it’s true, but buried within these words of self-promotion were a few nuggets of useful information.  

Muhammad admitted that he had battled addiction. He implied, in just a few words, that these problems had made him a less-than-savory type of fellow when he was doing his thing on the streets of Boston. 

Muhammad presented himself as a flawed human being who still clung to hopes that he could make a go of the plant store and be a valued member of society.  

I didn’t leave anything  from the interview out of my story. Pretty much every word Muhammad had uttered was included so that the reader would have all the facts upon which to draw their own conclusions. 

Not everybody was a fan. 

It wasn’t just that the accused drug dealer had gushed forth such unabashed self-promotion that drew the ire of many. It was the fact that I had given him the forum to do so in the first place.

There were a few who wrote me to declare that people charged with crimes should never, ever, under any circumstances be interviewed by a journalist, an opinion I find curious, to say the least. 

Other thoughts on the matter were more measured. 

“I know a man is innocent until proven guilty but, come on here,” wrote one regular reader. “After being charged previously, he had 150 grams of cocaine and crack in his store and sold to an undercover agent. This is not petty stuff. This is what’s killing people and leading to the image of Lewiston and Lisbon Street. I’m not sure you should be elevating his legal business.” 

But here, I take exception. When I write a story, it’s not my place to elevate anyone any more than it is to knock them down. 

I’m just a messenger, bro. I don’t seek to control the narrative. If Mr. Muhammad had started raving about aliens from other worlds planting cocaine in his store, that would have been my story. 

If he had confessed openly to the charges against him and described in salacious detail how he had done the deed, that would have been the story in the morning paper. 

Accusations of dope-slinging at the Garden of Via made for a strange and compelling story, and although opinions on the sincerity of Mr. Muhammad’s words varied wildly, I can’t say that I regret seeking out that interview.

For one thing, it allowed me to engage in vigorous conversation and debate with a whole bunch of strangers throughout the day, and that’s never a bad thing, in my book.

And for another, getting an interview with the accused beats the hell out of yet another “no comment,” followed by a dry click on the end of the phone line.

A day when nobody hangs up on me or instructs me to perform one of those impossible bodily acts is a good day, indeed.