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Clip 8: Author alleging Bush drug arrest reportedly a felon / He denies being Texas convict, says similar names led to mistake

Published on By Pete Slover

The author of a book alleging that Gov. George W. Bush covered up a 1972 cocaine arrest is himself a felon on parole, convicted in Dallas of hiring a hit man for a failed attempt to kill his employer with a car bomb in 1987, records show . James Howard Hatfield, 41, was convicted of solicitation of capital murder, served five years of a 15-year sentence in a Texas prison and was paroled in 1993, state and Dallas County criminal records show. 

Author J.H. Hatfield flatly denied in an interview that he is the same man. But a parole officer in Arkansas confirmed Wednesday that Mr. Hatfield the author is Mr. Hatfield the ex-convict, who is on parole from Texas through April 2003.

In his new book, Fortunate Son: George W. Bush and the Making of an American President, Mr. Hatfield quotes three anonymous sources saying that Mr. Bush was arrested for cocaine possession but that Mr. Bush's father arranged for the charges to be dropped and expunged.

The Bushes and Houston courthouse officials from that era have denounced the account as false. The Bush campaign had no comment on the revelations about Mr. Hatfield's past, said spokeswoman Mindy Tucker.

Reached this week in New York during a book tour, Mr. Hatfield insisted that any link to the convicted man is a case of mistaken identity and that his middle name is Hathaway, not Howard.

"If I've got a secret past, I'm damn sure not going to be going all over the country plastering myself all over the newspapers or TV, or attacking the man who may be the next president of the United States," he said. "It's not me, and we're supposed to be pursuing the governor of Texas."

The biographical materials released with Mr. Hatfield's books and his earlier works reveal many similarities between the author's background and that of the convicted man, as revealed in his criminal and parole records.

Both Hatfields share the same month and year of birth, lived in Dallas at the same times, and both now reside in the same region of Arkansas.

When questioned about those similarities, Mr. Hatfield declined to give his Social Security number, address or any other information to distinguish him from the convicted man.

And the author, who would not disclose his date of birth, also refused to fill in gaps in his employment record corresponding to years that James Howard Hatfield was in prison.

Told of Mr. Hatfield's background, an attorney for the book's publisher said Wednesday that the company had no knowledge of the criminal history.

"If it's true, we're going to be shocked," said David Kaye, general counsel for St. Martin's Press. He declined to comment further.

Dallas court records show that in July 1988, Mr. Hatfield pleaded guilty to paying Charles Ray Crawford $5,000 to bomb the car of a manager at a financial firm for which he had recently quit working.

The bomb exploded in the parking lot of the Cotton Exchange Building in Dallas in February 1987, but the two people in the car were not injured.

Sentenced to 15 years in prison, Mr. Hatfield earned extra credit for time served and was released in April 1993. State records show that he was briefly sent to a federal penitentiary in Oklahoma to serve time for a charge related to the 1987 bombing, but details were not available.

By 1994, he was paroled to Benton County, Ark., where state officials oversaw his Texas parole under an interstate pact that requires them to annually report Mr. Hatfield's status to Texas.

The most recent report in his Texas file confirms he is an author but does not specifically link him to the Bush book or any other works by J.H. Hatfield.

Eddie Cobb, the Arkansas official overseeing Mr. Hatfield's parole, would not talk about the Bush book, saying he could only comment on things contained in the public record.

But, he said, public records confirm that Mr. Hatfield, the parolee, is the author of Patrick Stewart, a biography of the Star Trek actor. The profile of Mr. Hatfield in the Bush book confirms he wrote the Stewart biography.

Mr. Cobb would not comment on whether Mr. Hatfield had requested permission to leave the state for his current book tour.

Mr. Hatfield's other works were mostly "unauthorized" TV and science-fiction trivia books on series including Lost in Space, Deep Space Nine, The X-Files and Star Trek.

Even as Mr. Hatfield denied he is the man in the Dallas case, he said it would not be newsworthy if he were that man.

And, he suggested that any records showing him to be a convict were not to be trusted.

"Doesn't it sound a little bit weird to you that all of a sudden, the guy that's accusing potentially the next president of the United States of having his record expunged, all of a sudden miraculously has a record himself in the state of Texas?" he said. "This is just a little bit too bizarre."