Seventy-one people in Vermont received pardons in 1977 for their drug convictions after the officer involved in their arrests was convicted of perjury and providing false information.
Paul Lawrence, then 28 years old, began working as an undercover narcotics officer in the City of St. Albans on August 6, 1973. Prior to this assignment, Lawrence had bounced around Vermont’s law-enforcement community, working with the Vermont State Police and as chief of police in the town of Vergennes.
At the time of Lawrence’s hiring, St. Albans, which is about 20 miles south of the Canadian border, was struggling economically and socially. The Back-to-the-Land movement had brought thousands of outsiders to the state, unemployment was high in St. Albans, and residents and city officials complained about hippies and idle young people congregating in the parks and local bars. The death of a young woman from a drug overdose in June crystallized the issue.
Less than three months after Lawrence was hired, on October 24, 1973, officers with the St. Albans Police Department, the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office, and the Vermont State Police arrested 30 people in St. Albans and Franklin County, charging them with selling drugs to Lawrence. The controlled substances, according to the arrest reports, included LSD, cocaine, heroin, marijuana, hashish, and methamphetamines.
St. Albans Police Chief George Hebert told the Burlington Free Press that much of the credit for the arrests belonged to an “unnamed city police officer” who had worked undercover in the city for the past three months. Hebert also said that the substances that the officer said he bought from the persons arrested had been analyzed by the New York State Police laboratory, which reported that the cocaine and heroin were of high quality.
Other smaller, mass arrests followed in 1973 and into 1974, with more than 100 people eventually facing drug charges.
Norman Young, who was 22 years old at the time of his arrest, was the first defendant to go to trial. He had been charged with selling five tablets of LSD to Lawrence for $25 on August 21, 1973. Young testified that he had not sold Lawrence drugs, but Lawrence testified he had.
“It boils right down to a case of who you believe,” said Prosecutor William Keefe of the Vermont Attorney General’s Office.
The jury convicted Young on January 30, 1974, and he received a sentence of four months to three years in prison. Sonny Cross was convicted in early March of selling Lawrence methamphetamines and was sentenced to 30 months to five years in prison.
The third man to go to trial was Gary Burbank, who tended bar at Tuner’s Place, a popular gathering spot that was a crossroads of sorts in St. Albans. According to the arrest report, Burbank had sold Lawrence $25 of methamphetamines on September 22, 1973.
James Levy, Burbank’s attorney, thought he had a strong case. First, Burbank was a Navy veteran who had served in Vietnam. He had no prior police record. Second, the owner of the bar had records that supported Burbank’s account that wasn’t working on the day that Lawrence said the sale occurred.
In addition, according to Mocking Justice, a book about the Lawrence scandal by Hamilton Davis, the cadre of lawyers who had been representing the defendants in these cases had researched Lawrence’s past and found a wide range of issues that called his credibility into question.
Prior to working in St. Albans, Lawrence had been the chief of police in the town of Vergennes, but he had been forced to resign after an issue over expense vouchers. In addition, the prosecutor in that judicial district had soured on Lawrence and said he wouldn’t handle cases that the prosecutor didn’t approve in advance.
At Burbank’s trial, Lawrence testified about the purported drug sales. On cross-examination, Levy tried to ask Lawrence about Vergennes, but the judge disallowed that line of questioning. As at Young’s trial, Lawrence was asked about why he left the U.S. Army, and he said his discharge was due to complications after an appendectomy.
The bar owner testified that Burbank wasn’t working that night, and that Lawrence had testified incorrectly about other matters concerning the bar and its activities. Levy was unable to introduce evidence of Lawrence’s problems in Vergennes or with the local prosecutor. At the time, Vermont law allowed testimony on a person’s reputation to come only from the community in which they lived, and Lawrence lived in Rutland, not Vergennes.
While Burbank testified that he never met Lawrence or sold him drugs, he also admitted that he had used marijuana numerous times.
The jury convicted Burbank on March 20, 1974, and he was fined $500 and received a suspended sentence of two years in prison.
Only two more of the Lawrence defendants went to trial. The rest entered pleas.
During the winter and spring of 1974, Lawrence continued to make drug arrests across northern Vermont, but his time in St. Albans was coming to an end. The city had a population of about 7,500, and Lawrence’s face was well-known, potentially limiting his effectiveness. Hebert approved a swap with the Burlington Police Department, sending Lawrence south in exchange for two narcotics officers from the larger city.
According to Mocking Justice, Lawrence made 10 drug arrests in his first month in Burlington, but Officer Kevin Bradley, who worked with Lawrence, began having questions. The alleged drug sales always happened when Bradley wasn’t there. On one occasion, Lawrence was unable to identify a potential dealer whom Lawrence said he knew well. Bradley took his suspicions to his supervisors, who had been hearing other complaints about Lawrence’s work, and they decided to set a trap.
Captain Richard Beaulieu recruited his nephew, 17-year-old Thomas Lauzon, to act as the decoy. The police created a fake identity for the boy, complete with a criminal record, and showed it to Lawrence. Then, Lauzon waited in a park in downtown Burlington. Lawrence would later claim that Lauzon sold him methamphetamines on July 4, 1974, and another substance on July 5.
Because of Beaulieu’s relationship with Lauzon, the Burlington police decided they needed a more solid case.
The police recruited Michael Schwartz, a detective with the Kings County District Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn, New York. He arrived in Vermont on July 10, and officers created a police file for him, complete with a nickname: “The Rabbi.” They told Lawrence about Schwartz, claiming he was an out-of-state dealer who visited Burlington every so often to sell drugs.
The officers set Schwartz up in the park across from City Hall. On July 11, Lawrence said he bought $30 of heroin from Schwartz. Lawrence returned to the office to file the report, identifying Schwartz as the person involved in the transaction.
Police arrested Lawrence the next day. He was charged with two counts of perjury, three counts of giving false information, and three counts of false pretense.
After the arrest, the prosecutor in Franklin County dismissed 35 open cases involving Lawrence’s work as an undercover officer.
In September 1974, Governor Thomas Salmon appointed Robert Gensberg as a special prosecutor to investigate the Lawrence cases and make recommendations.
On February 5, 1975, a jury in Chittenden County, which includes Burlington, convicted Lawrence on perjury and false information charges related to the Schwartz sting.
On May 24, 1975, a jury in Franklin County convicted Lawrence of giving false testimony at Norman Young’s trial. Lawrence had testified at the trial and in a deposition that he was discharged from the Army because of complications after an appendectomy. That was incorrect. He was discharged for “character unsuitability, for behavior disorders unrelated to the operation, and for apathy as a soldier.”
Lawrence was sentenced to four to eight years in prison on the Schwartz case and 10 years on the perjury conviction in Young’s case. The other charges were dropped.
Gensberg finished his report in February 1976. He recommended that Salmon pardon all those convicted based on Lawrence’s accusations during his time as an undercover officer in Franklin and Chittenden counties. You can read the summary of the report here.
According to the report, Lawrence’s misconduct started almost immediately after he began working in St. Albans.
On August 7, 1973, Lawrence said he bought LSD from Steven Paquette at 3:20 p.m. At the time, Paquette was an inmate at a jail in Burlington but had a day pass. An instructor at the jail had an attendance log showing Paquette’s presence at a 3 p.m. class.
The report said that Lawrence claimed to have bought heroin from Thomas Badamo at 9:45 a.m. on May 21, 1974. But Lawrence’s daily report said Lawrence was in Albany, New York, that day, and Badamo’s probation officer said he was with Badamo from 9 a.m. to 11:30 a.m.
The report noted that in many instances, the amount of drugs Lawrence said he bought were in tiny amounts and at a price that was far above their street value. After his arrest, the report said, police searched Lawrence’s apartment and car and found two vials of heroin, one that said “99 % heroin,” and the other that tested at 51 percent purity.
Gensberg had a chemist retest heroin samples associated with Lawrence’s cases. He would write in his report, “Our analysis shows that, of these 27 samples, 17 exhibited such a high degree of commonality that I conclude they came from the same source,” which Gensberg believed was a sample that originated with the New York State Police Scientific Laboratory, which had sent Lawrence a kit of regulated drugs for training purposes in early 1973.
Similarly, Gensberg said that he believed some of the LSD that Lawrence said he bought from defendants also originated from a sample provided by the New York lab.
Gensberg’s report said that Lawrence was not properly supervised by the St. Albans Police Department nor by the prosecutors who worked with the department. These persons lacked sufficient knowledge of undercover drug work. But Gensberg said that the prosecutors had “sufficient information about the questionable nature of Lawrence’s personal history and police activities to indicate the need for a careful inquiry into these matters, which was never carried out.”
Gensberg recommended that applicants for law-enforcement positions in Vermont be required by statute to furnish full personal histories, which would have to be verified by the agency or department where they sought employment.
When Lawrence resigned from the Vermont State Police on September 30, 1971, he said that it was based on problems with a proposed transfer to the station in Bethel, which required a move that he didn’t want to make. But that wasn’t the full story, according to Gensberg’s report. Five days earlier, Lawrence had answered a call and ended up beating a handcuffed person with a flashlight and kneeing him in the stomach. The Vermont Department of Public Safety investigated the incident. No charges were filed. Lawrence’s final performance evaluation rated him “outstanding.”
Captain Harold Dean disagreed with the department and said that Lawrence should have been fired. Gensberg said: “Had his advice been followed, and his recommendation confirmed after a fair hearing, the subsequent abuse by Mr. Lawrence of the criminal justice system in this state could never have occurred. The point is not whether Lawrence was guilty of an assault; indeed, he has never had a formal opportunity to defend himself on this charge. The point is that the state police, having concluded after investigation that Lawrence committed an assault on a subdued prisoner, permitted him to resign with the highest recommendation possible.”
Gensberg also recommended that all persons who were accused by Lawrence of drug possession or sale receive a pardon. That didn’t happen.
In late December 1976, Salmon said he would pardon 71 of the Lawrence defendants. This was based in part on the work of a special committee that recommended pardons only in those cases where there was no testimony or evidence to corroborate Lawrence’s allegations. The pardons occurred in early 1977; a specific date isn’t available.
Lawrence appealed both convictions. The Vermont Supreme Court affirmed the conviction from the Young case but reversed the conviction based on the false purchase from Schwartz. The court said the trial judge had erred in allowing the state to introduce damaging character testimony that lacked any connection to the charges.
On October 7, 1977, Lawrence pled guilty to reduced charges in that case and was sentenced to three to eight years in prison, with credit for the 16 months he had already served.
At his sentencing, Judge Edward Costello said: “The tragedy of this case is the large number of innocent people that went to jail because of your false testimony. This is not a 10-cent burglary charge. If people in positions of trust cannot be relied on to tell the truth, the whole system of justice collapses.”
According to the Free Press, at least 40 defendants took part in lawsuits filed against Lawrence and the City of St. Albans, seeking $3.5 million in compensation for their wrongful convictions. The final resolution of all these cases is not known, but 19 plaintiffs received a total of $92,000 in 1979.
Mark Paul received just over $4,000 in his part of that settlement and told the Free Press that his attorney fees for both the civil and criminal cases would eat up about half that amount. He said he smoked marijuana occasionally but was shocked when he learned he had been charged with selling LSD and methamphetamine, along with marijuana.
He said he initially didn’t want to settle, in hopes of getting Lawrence before another jury, but then changed his mind. “I thought nothing more than I want to get it over with, and I need the money,” he said. “I didn’t want it to drag on anymore. By signing the paper, we were saying, ‘This is equal compensation,’ but we all know it’s not.”
– Ken Otterbourg
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Posting Date: 07-11-2025
Last updated: 07-11-2025