(This is part one of Hell’s Angel Danny Bifield’s quest for freedom in his final year of life.)
Think of being at male-strength stud apex, 6’3, 220 pounds, a tatted body sharing cinematic stories longing for freedom, a Hell’s Angel biker’s life, loaded with contradictions, a romantic figure, adored by mountain ranges of women, whose pelt federal investigators wanted pinned to their resumes.
Now, fast forward to 2023, your 72 years old in an Alabama hospital, shackled and cuffed to the bed watched by prison guards 24/7 because of a reputation fanned by ambitious federal agents, a sepsis infection burning you to the bone, a piece of your foot amputated and now you’re 145 pounds close to death, no shower in a month, not even a tooth brush for the sake of dignity, hobbling to a bed pan. There’s minimal contact with the outside world.
Shackled and cuffed? What would the old guy do in this condition, gum the guards to death?
Your name is Danny Bifield, now to many that conjures various thoughts, the guy a federal probation report circa 1980 branded “the most dangerous man in Connecticut.” But the various charges, including drug dealing, gun possession, loansharking that led to more than half your life in prison, including installation as John Gotti’s cell neighbor at the brutal Marion supermax penitentiary in Illinois, did not come close to the embellished narrative.
No murder charge, no rape charge, no assaults on children, didn’t cut out a liver and saute it with fava beans complemented by a fine Chianti.
In Bifield’s day, in his prime, he was called Diamond Dan, an accused mob enforcer who, with the correct fashionable direction, could easily have graced billboards on Madison Avenue and Hollywood Boulevard.
Bifield was Rambo story-book stuff. Suffering a kidney stone with no medical attention in 1981 he vanished a jail cell in the North End of Bridgeport leading to a six-month federal manhunt that ended without drama in Colorado. If he was so dangerous, as they asserted, wouldn’t he go down fighting?
Along the way young Connecticut U.S. Attorney Richard Blumenthal (yes, the same guy, now U.S. senator) announced to the media that the FBI fished Bifield’s dead body out of New York’s East River. The FBI countered we said no such thing. It was media madness, for those (like me) that covered it.
Certainly, an embarrassing law enforcement moment that received media saturation well beyond Connecticut.
Curiously, Bifield watched it all play out comically on television from a friend’s house in Bridgeport, while pondering his next move that included the Bahamas.
This recent OIB story explains the background of that “most dangerous” narrative.
Bag a cop, pinch a mobster, indict a politician, investigate biker gangs. These cases charge straight to the top of an investigator’s bona fides to flip into high-paying corporate and law firm positions.
Don’t always assume the investigators are better than the people they want to put away.
Strangely, or accordingly, call it karma or not, the late James Pickerstein, the young federal prosecutor who put Bifield away for his longest stint in the early 1980s, would himself do federal time, decades later, for fleecing $600,000 from a mobbed-up client. And so it goes.
Make no mistake, besides induction into Hell’s Angels, Bifield never considered himself a halo. He toiled in a world of frontier justice, as so many did then and still do today. If you don’t pay the IRS, they garnish wages and take your house. If the bank won’t give you a loan, you go to outside forces that will. The vig will be higher but that’s the price of doing business in a frontier justice world. You don’t pay, you get a visit.
Bifield admitted to breaking the law but protested he was a victim of undue punishment because of a sham reputation.
That was then, this is now.
Danny Bifield was out of options in Birmingham, Alabama’s Brookwood Medical Center in 2023, left to rot in prison.
Bifield certainly battled his demons, and when in that state it’s hard to sort out the devils and angels, when the minister of death looms.
Bifield had one diamond in the rough though, an angel of sorts, who stepped up inspiringly to take on the powerful, obtuse, multi-layered bureaucracy that is the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Her name is Debra Willis who’d become Debra Bifield.
For decades she loved Danny from afar, but she eventually became the person in his life, pen pals, prison visits, lovers, husband and wife, protector. In this extreme case when there’s a Willis there’s a way.
For a year plus she stopped at nothing to snap to attention the bureaucracy that failed to treat his multiple illnesses, COPD, MRSA staph bacteria, sepsis and others.
Letters, phone calls, visits, begging elected officials for help. In the end it came down to a hand-written appeal from Willis to the federal judge presiding over Bifield’s situation, pleading for a compassionate release.
This story chronicles the final year of Bifield’s life, and the dramatic measures Willis enacted to fight for his freedom in her care, a nurse by profession.
Covid took its toll on the prison population and Bifield was no different. Prison protocol: 23-hour lockdown, an hour a day, if you’re lucky, to sniff the outside air. It lingered to create other medical issues.
November 2021, Bifield, incarcerated at Talladega Alabama Federal Prison, undergoes a medical hearing. “All they were concerned about was who he was, what they say he did, his past and any and affiliations,” says Willis.
For Willis, it was a long drive from North Carolina.
“I was fortunate enough before his hospital stay to go every month once a weekend, to visit him in the federal prison. It was almost a 12-hour drive, that’s stopping a few times for gas and for a bathroom break. It was still a very long one-way trip.”
Prison house medical facilities are often archaic, barbaric and unsanitary. Willis wanted to get Bifield into an outside hospital facility.
“Now prison officials will write up a great note on how they do this and how they do that, but they don’t do anything like they write up in their pretty little notes.”
September 5, 2023, Bifield’s suffering from MRSA, sepsis, multiple infections, including an unattended blood-soaked foot, COPD, gut issues and protruding hernia.
Collapsed in his cell, an emergency call was issued to the medical unit. They found Bifield in his cell completely out of it, shaking, cold sweats. He was rushed to the hospital where physicians discovered sepsis infected the big toe and partially right foot that had been amputated by a prison surgeon. They had chopped off a piece of his foot and let it bleed out with no attention.
Bifield was transported to Brookwood Medical Center in Birmingham. Two prison guards were stationed at his room.
From Willis:
“The guards that were on him 24/7 like with half of the right foot what did they think he was going to do run down the hall and jump out of the 8th floor story window?
“He stayed in the hospital for 65 days, treated like a complete animal; chained and shackled to bed. He wasn’t even allowed to brush his teeth for at least two weeks, no shower or bath for over a month. He bled out two times and had to have blood transfusions. He was not allowed to make any phone calls, or at first to receive any mail for over a month.
He lost use of his right arm and was chained to his left, so he could not even feed himself and they were so scared of him they’d barely help him.
Danny was so sick, and so tired, that he barely had strength to even move 10 feet. He heard the guards in his room say that they were waiting for him to die. On that day something changed Danny and he realized that he needed to do something different. He turned to God and started to pray! The two times that I got to speak to him on the phone, I told him you need to talk to God, ask him to heal you to the point of satisfaction to where you can get out of that hospital. I reassured him that I was fighting for him even though he was in that hospital my fight went on. I worried sick about him day in and day out night in and night out to where I became sick myself from worry and stress. All that did was make me fight harder for justice for Danny.
Bifield was also diagnosed with osteomyelitis, a bone infection.
“At this time, it had come to the point to where he was going to start losing limbs if something different didn’t happen soon,” Willis explains.
In early November 2023, after 65 days in the hospital, Bifield was transferred back to the prison unit where she was finally allowed access to all the medical records he sent to her.
As a medical professional, Willis composed a five-page letter to Bifield’s sentencing judge, Cameron Currie, compiling his recent myriad medical history and lack of consistent care. Currie had sentenced him to 20 years for narcotics trafficking 10 years prior in a federal round up of Hell’s Angels in the Carolinas, during a period Bifield was back on the outside.
Bifield also had assistance from an inmate who had been a lawyer on the outside about his condition.
From Willis:
“On November 8th Danny received a message that he had been granted a Zoom meeting which was also like a hearing. I’m sure when that judge saw him since 2013 and this was 2023 he looked a lot different. She asked him questions. He answered her completely honest.
She then asked the doctor from the prison who had only been the prison doctor for three months and also one unit manager who had been there about two weeks some serious questions about Danny and his medical care and neither one of them could answer her truthfully because they didn’t know. They hadn’t bothered to even read his file. When she asked why he did not have physical therapy, and she showed it had been canceled, the doctor said because he had gained a few pounds and then she said to him excuse me! What does that have to do with anything?
Then she turned to the unit manager: From your ability to see Mr. Bifield does he need to be released home? Within the blink of an eye the unit manager said yes, your honor, yesterday!”
The judge asked Bifield about his past biker affiliations and history. Could he go back there?
Your honor, I am always a Hell’s Angels he responded, but added, as a man, I stand before you crime free.
The judge paused, then explained to Bifield she’d issue an order for a compassionate release to home confinement immediately in the care of Willis. Bifield’s term of custody, with some conditions, was reduced to time served.
“On December 15th, 2023 our son and I were in the car at the gate waiting for him to be rolled out into a wheelchair,” says Willis.
Danny Bifield was a free man.
(Next Debra Willis shares thoughts on Bifield’s freedom and final days.)
Terrific article Lennie, but not as terrific as Debra (She knows what she’s talking about) Willis.
And we didn’t run this guy for Mayor?
Nice read, Lenny. Seems like there’s a book that could be mined from that life — which you did a good of humanizing in the context of everything that we’ve always heard about Danny Bifield…. Looking forward to reading more about his life…