April 14, 1986
 
MY  RECORDED PHONE CONVERSATION WITH PERCY SARGENT
 
I knew nothing about robberies that Percy wrote me about. Five years previous, March 31, 1981, I had clipped a small article from the BDN about two masked men seriously injuring Charles Dolan of East Corinth when they bound his feet, handcuffed him with police-issue handcuffs and beat him severely, fracturing several ribs and facial bones and cutting off his left ear.
     It was reported that the police assumed robbery was the motive behind the crime, but there was no way to relate that article to what Percy Sargent was telling me because the article didn’t name the perpetrators.
     During the recorded phone conversation with Percy he began by saying  “I don’t know what that DA thinks up there, but they got two people up there ... trying to make a deal with the district attorney about who’s going to testify against who up there.  There was a robbery ... so they’re informing on each other and this Paul Pollard is the guy that was at the camp that night. And his brother came to pick him up after the fire was set that night. And so his brother, the boy [referring to 28-year-old Lionel Cormier] that picked him up that night is trying to make the deal with the District Attorney and saying that his—this is his half-brother [Pollard], that has set that fire that night.”

I said, “That’s the strangest thing though, Percy. What I can’t understand [is] why would Pollard want to do anything to Mike?”

“Well you see that night, the night that I left, they were listening to a police scan radio and on that radio was the whole deal going down with the drug bust that night that happened with me and they heard that whole thing on the radio, that police scanner radio that night.”

“And you think Pollard maybe thought that Micheal had something to do with it?”

“Was an informer and set the thing up,” he answered.

“Well how could he do that when he was right in the camp with Pollard?”

“Well, you know, there was other phones in the house. He could have called, you know, there were phones upstairs and he could have used one of them. I’m just speculating, you know?”

“But, you know if you informed on somebody, Percy, wouldn’t you have gotten out of there?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. All I can think of is that Pollard called his brother up that night; had him come out there.” “... I’m going to court there this year sometime on this whole thing. This Paul Pollard’s implicated myself, my brother [Richard Sargent], and his brother [Lionel Cormier] in a robbery. And this Paul Pollard has been granted immunity to testify against us on this robbery charge, which this robbery was never reported to the police because it never happened.

“How did they find out about it if it was never reported to them?”

“Because in March of 1981, a month after the fire at the camp, this Paul Pollard, Lionel Cormier, and another man went to this same drug dealer and robbed him again. “Well, this is the one and so Paul Pollard has turned state evidence on this robbery charge implicating his brother and myself, my brother, and you know, something real dirty is gonna come out of this whole thing.”

I said, “And another thing you know, that Percy Cote, that night, he was working for the police.”

“Oh yeah, I knew that the next day. So, it’s been a long time and there’s been a lot of dirty business, especially last year with that girl [Percy's sister-in-law] getting up on that witness stand saying that my brother was involved in all that crap. That was just one big lie after the other.”

I replied, “Well, you see, you know we wouldn’t know that was a lie at the time. We had no way of knowing that. I mean, what the authorities tell us we, you know, it’s hard to believe that they would pick three men up on a murder charge and they wouldn’t be guilty, you know. But we do know now they weren’t.”

Percy said, “They’ll [the police] do anything they can ’cause they’re the dirtiest people in the world. Those cops are dirty. They were giving that girl, letting her out of jail early and all this stuff, you know. She’d heard rumors around Bangor or something of whatever happened that night.” “Those two people [Cormier and Pollard] They’ve got right now, if we ever get to get them in court, they’re the ones that are gonna be the ones that are indicted on this charge.”

“Well, I think that Cormier knows what happened,” I said.

“Oh, yeah, no question about it and he may have done it and he’s putting the blame on his brother. But his brother’s putting it on him. One or the other, it is gonna come out in court. But those two guys, they did something dirty that night, [inaudible] or Lionel.