The real-life ‘heroine’ of hit TV show Orange Is The New Black reveals the stranger-than-fiction story of...
IT IS an extraordinary real-life tale of a bisexual upper-class American girl who smuggles a suitcase of drug money to please her older female lover and pays for her naivety by serving time in a tough women’s prison. The exotic Sapphic adventures of Piper Kerman, a beautiful but guileless blonde from Boston, are transfixing millions in this summer’s must-see TV series Orange Is The New Black, made for Netflix – with actress Taylor Schilling in the lead role.
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 lesbian sex.
Indeed, it is estimated that 44million people worldwide, including 1.5million in Britain, will be glued to the second series, available to watch this weekend.
Yet the Mail on Sunday can reveal that the central premise of the show – Piper’s ferrying of cash to Europe as a favour to a buxom lover, which is portrayed as a rather comical offence – masks a very 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 Brixton Prison before UK 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, the real-life Piper, now 44, has become a familiar figure on the red carpet and at literary and political gatherings.
At the New York premiere of the new series, she posed alongside actress Taylor. Meanwhile she is campaigning to reform American drug laws, which she says ‘overpunish’ offenders like herself.
A huge swathe of the Netflix show centres on the sexual relationships between the inmates, with many scenes of nudity and women having sex with one another, including one tryst in the prison chapel.
Piper herself says she was enlisted in the moneylaundering scheme only after her lover, played in the show by Laura Prepon, came home in a brand-new white Mazda 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 seen by The Mail on Sunday, Piper was working for a Nigerian called Buruji Kashamu, who is still being pursued on charges that he smuggled heroin worth millions of dollars through Chicago.
In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Piper insists she never met Kashamu, but says she 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 Smith College, a women’s private arts university in Massachusetts. ‘I’m a bisexual person,’ she says. ‘I came out of the closet in college.’
However, Wolters casts 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 in a recent interview. ‘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 while waiting to testify against another member of the ring. 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 fictionalisation for Netflix. She is a consultant for the series. ‘The show is an adaptation,’ she says coldly. ‘Truly insane things happen and they have licence from me to really come up with these outrageous story lines.’
In fact, an international operation to bring Kashamu to justice began in 1998 and has moved from London – where he spent five years in jail after being caught with nearly £250,000 in cash – to Nigeria, where he lives, after accumulating one of Africa’s largest fortunes.
Kashamu’s wealth includes a business empire that stretches from cement and petroleum imports to property development. He has also become a chieftain of Nigeria’s ruling party and a powerful associate of embattled president Goodluck Jonathan.
Piper, along with her former girlfriend 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 charges.
Moreover, his lawyers insisted that he could provide evidence about the terrorists in the 9/11 attacks from information gleaned while in prison. According to the court records, two Scotland Yard investigators visited him in Brixton and took written statements. Detectives even ‘thanked Mr Kashamu for the information and stated it was extremely useful’.
Kashamu first claimed he was being falsely held after it was found that the US had failed to disclose that one of his fellow defendants had been unable to identify him in a line-up.
Then Kashamu 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. American prosecutors say the case against Kashamu continues and according to documents seen by the Mail on Sunday, his legal defence now includes the Netflix show. He argues he will not receive a fair trial because the witnesses’ memories of events will be distorted by watching the Hollywood take on his – or Alaji’s – exploits. The court papers state that Wolters’s sister, Ellen, was having ‘an intimate relationship’ with Kashamu. However, Piper claims she never met him.