A former American fugitive is desperate to return to the far north city of Queensland, where he dodged authorities for decades, but the biggest obstacle to his return home is not his secret past drug trafficking.
Oxygen tanks are constantly rotating at home in the United States where Patton Eidson – or Mike McGoldrick, as he has been known for so long – has been spending months.
His lungs are fired.
A simple conversation is a test of endurance, as the effects of chronic respiratory disease and confinement in damp, flowery cells in prison take their toll.
It’s a damn healthier sight than the piece of skin and bones of a man who came out of prison two years ago, but the years haven’t been kind.
“Every time you go through an upper respiratory infection of any kind, the smallest cold or anything, it’s probably 20 times more radical and drastic … than in a normal healthy person,” he explains with a hard breath.
The white-haired American made headlines worldwide in 2017 after more than a dozen police and immigration officials collapsed at his home in the far north of Queensland and took him to a detention center. arrest in Brisbane.
It was the most thrill the city of Julatten, at Atherton Tableland, had seen in years.
The man the locals had known as the owner of a spa Mike McGoldrick, one of the city’s top occupants, was a wanted criminal.
Patton Eidson before being extradited to the US. (Supplied by: Paton Eidson)
How the Eidsons became the McGoldricks
Eidson, also known as Peyton, because he dislikes the American general with whom he shares a name, was arrested for conspiracy to import marijuana in 1985.
He had been involved in a California hippie drug network that carried pot-laden ships from Thailand to the shores of the United States for distribution and sale.
Instead of facing court, he and his wife Sonja assumed false identities and took their young daughter, Maya, on a flight out of the country.
“We had a really good friend and he had liver cancer,” Eidson says.
“I [he and his wife] they would never leave the United States.
“Then all you needed was a birth certificate and a driver’s license to get a passport, so we didn’t actually steal anyone’s ID, they gave it to us.”
So Patton and Sonja Eidson became Mike and Anita Goldrick and, along with Maya, ended up in the sleeping tropical village of Julatten.
They built a successful business and became popular members of the community.
Everything was simple and cold beers until the computers of the land of freedom began to mark inconsistencies in 2011.
“Shit hit the fan and they busted us,” Maya says.
“Not because of anything we did, it was just the people whose names … mom and dad had assumed they were dead.
“Technology caught up with everything and they started crossing dead people with passports and things like that.
“When they went to renew their passports, it was raised that they were dead in the United States but still living in Australia.
“So they found out who we were and arrested us.”
In 2012, Sonja and Maya, who still bears the name she inherited as a 15-year-old fugitive, were found guilty of fraud-related charges related to the use of fake passports, but had no registered convictions.
The daughter’s false identity was overlooked because she was a minor when they entered Australia, and her mother’s ill health was taken into account.
Eidson was sentenced to three years in prison, but only served six months at the Lotus Glen Correctional Center for Minimum Security near Mareeba.
The United States opted for extradition and the family thought they could finally stop looking over their shoulders.
Warren Entsch was instrumental in creating an agreement with Peter Dutton on behalf of Eidson. (News video)
Immigration officials sink in Julatten
After his release from Lotus Glen, Eidson cared for his wife for two years before dying in 2016 after a battle with cancer.
She was buried on the same Julatten property where immigration officials would later take Eidson into custody in the early morning of May 2017.
He spent some time on guard duty in Cairns before being transferred to the Brisbane Immigration Transit Accommodation Center while his medical fitness for extradition was assessed.
Julatten’s locals didn’t let go of their favorite neighbor without a fight.
Immigration Minister Peter Dutton was then bombarded with thousands of petitions, the county mayor expressed his support, and Kennedy MP Bob Katter made passionate pleas on behalf of this “citizen. well-loved, popular and respectable. “
But it was the background work of Leichhardt MP Warren Entsch that had the most practical impact.
Eidson did not live in the Entsch electorate and the couple had never met, but an embassy of community appeals to the federal politician’s office was enough to convince him to investigate further. subject.
He arranged a face-to-face meeting with arrested Eidson, was convinced of his good character, and went directly to Mr. Dutton.
“I went back to Dutton and said,‘ This guy has been here for so long, he’s been a model citizen, his whole family lives here and his wife is buried here; we can’t ignore it. ”says Entsch.
“Finally, Dutton saw me again and told me that if I was ready to go back to America and face music, bear the consequences of what happened so long ago and … get a passport American, if he does and keeps his nose clean, without further ado, would guarantee that he would arrange a visa to be issued and could return and live in Australia as a resident for the rest of his life. “
Eidson was understandably suspicious of the offer, so Mr. Entsch had Mr. Dutton leave it in writing.
All attempts to challenge extradition were abandoned and the man known as Mike McGoldrick, in the midst of a long battle with chronic inflammatory lung disease, was transferred back to the United States.
In 2018, he was sentenced to three years in prison in a San Francisco court after pleading guilty to conspiracy to distribute marijuana and identity theft.
He ended up serving two years at Terminal Island, a Los Angeles federal facility that opened in 1938 and once had Al Capone as one of its inmates.
Maya left Australia fifteen days before her father’s release so she could care for him for six months under house arrest in Southern California at the end of his prison sentence.
Patton Eidson and his late wife Sonja, who are buried on the family property in Julatten. (Supplied by: Patton Eidson)
Life under house arrest
The emaciated figure that came out of Terminal Island in a wheelchair, permanently connected to a breathing apparatus from an oxygen tank, was the shadow of the man he named father.
His time in prison had been a constant rotation of hospitalization, return to the general population and reinfection, marked by several comas and two cardiac arrests.
“[The prison is] old, damp, full of black mold; they say no, but it is, ”Eidson says.
“I spent more time in the hospital … than in prison.
“Every time I went out and regained my health, they put me back in the general population, where you are in a room with 60 more people, living a foot away.
“You never go back to where you were before.
“So at the end of those two and a half years, I came out a lot worse than when I came in.”
Maya says she almost lost her father on several occasions.
“He actually died a couple of times while he was in prison in the hospital, but they revived him,” he says.
“It was very bad, it suffered a lot.”
Maya breastfed her father to a point where she only needed oxygen if she did something strenuous.
They were ready to return home, but had to wait until the sentence had ended its course.
Maya Eidson has returned to her life in the United States to care for her father until she reaches a level of health that allows her to return to Australia. (Supplied by: Maya Eidson)
Health deteriorates as the return freezes
This milestone finally reached the end of February 2020: only COVID-19 made the world go down.
“They basically didn’t process any visas or anything like that for a good year or so,” Maya says.
“When Corona got to the stage where they started processing visas again, the father had gotten sick again … he spent a couple of weeks in the hospital.”
Eidson has constantly needed oxygen again, but its condition has stabilized.
The visa approval Mr. Dutton promised is still valid, but doctors have yet to observe several days of regular respiratory patterns before giving permission for the 78-year-old to travel.
“What for you and me is just a little cough is really dangerous for him,” Maya says.
“Every time we think he’s getting close, he gets a little sick or something happens and we go back to the first place.”
Eidson has effectively made two prison sentences for his crimes: one in Australia and another in the United States.
“I’m not happy, because there was a different way to do that,” he says.
“For the crimes I went to jail for, especially marijuana, me and another guy were the only two of us who had time in jail.
“None of the other 20 people accused, none of them went to prison.
“It wasn’t a big deal then, what we were doing.
“We were a long way from the actual process of putting marijuana on a boat and taking it out … we were more involved in buying the boats.”
Eidson believes U.S. prosecutors were vindictive in their pursuit simply because he had evaded them for so long.
“They took it personally,” he laughs.
Patton and Maya Eidson before being extradited to the US. (Supplied by: Patton Eidson)
“I can’t wait to see you again”
In his McGoldrick days, the family had been one of Julatten’s most favored citizens.
The parties they organized were legendary, with hundreds of people sometimes attending long-lasting celebrations of what it meant to be alive.
The first finding that the McGoldricks were the Eidsons hit the city like a ton of bricks.
“I …