The millionaire Nigerian jailbird – and the bizarre inspiration for Netflix’s must-see lesbian jail drama
Real-life ‘heroine’ of hit TV show tells the stranger-than-f iction story of...
IT IS an extraordinary real-life tale of a bisexual upper-class American girl who naively smuggles a suitcase of drugs money to please her older female lover and pays for her naivety by serving time in a tough women’s prison.
The exotic adventures of Piper Kerman, a beautiful but guileless blonde from Boston, Massachusetts, are transfixing millions in this summer’s must-see TV series Orange Is The New Black, made for the web-based subscription service Netflix.
The show, a glossy, funny modern take on the grim prison drama Prisoner: Cell Block H, has earned a fanatical following thanks to its pacy plotlines, gasp-out-loud one-liners and lashings of steamy lesbian sex. Indeed, it is estimated that 44 million people worldwide, will be glued to the second series on release this weekend.
Now the MoS can reveal that the central premise of the show – Piper’s ferrying cash to Europe as a favour to her lover, which is portrayed as a comical offence – masks a grubby truth. The real story involves heroin, dirty money and a Nigerian alleged to be a ‘Mr Big’ who served five years on remand in a British jail before the courts accepted he was the victim of mistaken identity.
Yet despite her alleged links to a man still on the US Justice Department’s wanted list, Piper, now 44, has become a familiar figure on the red carpet. At the premiere of the new series, she posed with the actress who plays her, Taylor Schilling. Meanwhile she is campaigning to reform US drug laws, which she says ‘overpunish’ offenders like herself.
Piper says she was enlisted in the money-laundering scheme only after her lover, played in the show by Laura Prepon, came home in a new convertible with a suitcase full of money. ‘She dumped the cash on the bed and rolled around in it, naked and giggling,’ Piper says.
The central figure of the conspiracy is a shadowy West African, known only as Alaji, whom she never meets. But according to legal documents, Piper was working for a Nigerian called Buruji Kashamu, who is still being pursued on charges that he smuggled heroin through Chicago.
An international operation to bring him to justice began in 1998 and has moved from London – where he spent five years in Brixton Prison after being caught with nearly a quarter of a million pounds in cash – to Nigeria, where he lives, after accumulating one of Africa’s largest fortunes. Piper, along with her former girl
friend and a dozen other accomplices, had already been arrested when they learned Kashamu was being held in London. He has always insisted he is innocent of all the charges. Kashamu first claimed he was being falsely held after it was found that the US had not disclosed that one of his fellow defendants had been unable to identify him in a line-up.
Then the man known to Piper as
‘She lay on the cash, naked and giggling’
Alija claimed his was a case of mistaken identity and the man the US actually wanted was his dead brother. The British High Court found for Kashamu and agreed that he should be released. US prosecutors say the case against him continues. His legal defence now includes the Netflix show, arguing he will not receive a fair trial because of the Hollywood take on his exploits.
Piper told the MoS that she never met Kashamu, but was recruited into his alleged ring in 1993 by her then lover, Catherine Cleary Wolters, now 51. They began a passionate affair after Piper graduated from university.
However, in a recent interview with American Vanity Fair, Wolters cast a shadow over Piper’s account of events, saying they did not become romantically involved until after they had trafficked either heroin or money.
‘When we were travelling I started developing a crush on her,’ Wolters said. ‘And that turned into a crazy, mad love affair. But that was after she had already done the deed that made her complicit.’
She also denies the show’s key plotline, that she and Piper continued their affair behind bars. They were, she said, in separate prisons but spent around five weeks in a Chicago jail together. She added that the real story is ‘so wretched and stinky, it would quite possibly result in a collapsed universe’.
Piper, meanwhile, stands by her version and defends the Netflix series, for which she is a consultant. ‘The show is an adaptation,’ she says. ‘They have licence from me to really come up with these outrageous story lines.’
Piper claims to have travelled the world for four months on cash-smuggling missions with Wolters, which she describes as more like a holiday. She began smuggling money on Wolters’s behalf, but when she was asked to smuggle drugs she cut all ties with Wolters and put her criminal life behind her. Or so she thought.
Five years later, in May 1998, US prosecutors accused Kashamu and 14 of his underlings, including Piper, Wolters and her sister Ellen, of conspiracy to smuggle heroin. By then she was a law-abiding citizen and had embarked on a relationship with New York journalist, Larry Smith.
Played by Jason Biggs in the show, he accompanied her to court where she admitted to making three overseas trips for the ring. Six weeks later, however, she got a call from her lawyer. Kashamu, he told her, had been arrested at a British airport.
‘Suddenly my date with prison was postponed while the US tried to extradite him,’ Piper says. ‘I was required to testify.’
The delay initially sounded like a blessing but it stretched on and on for nearly six years as Kashamu fought extradition.
‘I was 28 at the time. It was impossible to make plans. If Alaji did come back here, maybe I would not have to go to prison. And I was dating Larry and I wanted children and of course I started thinking
‘It was like Lord Of The Flies on oestrogen’
about my biological clock.’ After Kashamu was freed, Piper was sentenced to 15 months.
‘I was very depressed,’ she says. ‘I felt I had destroyed my life. The strain was larger because it was a secret from almost everyone that I was going to prison.’
She was assigned to share a room with five other women. She says prison life was far from the colourful and humorous experience portrayed on the Netflix show, likening it to something ‘like Lord Of The Flies on oestrogen’.
She says she was sexually harassed by a supervising officer and that a gynaecologist subjected her to a brutal internal examination.
Piper was released in 2005, with two months clemency for good behaviour. A year later, she married Larry and they now live in Brooklyn with their three-year-old son.
Orange Is The New Black by Piper Kerman is published by Abacus, €10