John Paul Sr.

Ball State University's Art Museum

John Paul achieved his first racing successes in a Chevrolet Corvette 427

Cockpit of a Porsche 935 . 935 chassis were converted into successful racing cars for US sports car racing at JLP Racing

North American Racing Team - Ferrari 512BB LM . With his partners Alain Cudini and John Morton , John Paul finished ninth overall at the Le Mans 24-hour race in 1982

John Lee Paul , born as Hans-Johann Paul (born December 3, 1939 in the Netherlands ) is a former American car racing driver , racing team owner and drug dealer.

Origin and education

John Paul was born in the Netherlands a few weeks after the start of World War II . In the early 1950s , his family emigrated to the United States . The Paul settled in Muncie in Delaware County in the US state of Indiana , down. After graduating from Ball State University , he received his PhD from Harvard University in economics . In the 1970s, he changed his name to John Lee Paul and worked as a fund manager on Wall Street , where he made sizable personal fortunes. The value of the mutual fund he manages increased from 600 million to 4 billion US dollars in just a few years and the resulting commissions made Paul a millionaire .

His first wife Joyce, the mother of his son John Paul Jr. , who was born in 1960 , left him in 1970, moved out of their home in southern Florida and moved with the child to Indianapolis . John Paul sold his property and bought a 56-foot sailing yacht on which he lived in the future. With the yacht he crossed the Atlantic Ocean twice with one hand , lived briefly in the Caribbean and increased his fortune with real estate business in Florida. Joyce, like her mother (John Paul's first mother-in-law), later died of Huntington's disease, an incurable hereditary disease of the brain. This neurodegenerative disease was also diagnosed in 2014 in John Paul junior.

Criminal activity

First drug trade

In 1979 the criminal activities began, in which his son John junior was involved from the beginning. On January 10th, John Jr. and a friend were arrested at a bayou in Louisiana while loading boxes onto a pickup truck . Customs and drug investigators who became aware of the duo had found traces of marijuana on the back of the car . The following investigations led the investigators to the father's new 42-foot sailing yacht, which was nearby in the river. In addition to US $ 10,000, there were other traces of drugs on board. Nearby in a clearing stood a truck rented by the Pauls , in which investigators found 710 kg of hashish . All three involved were charged, sentenced to three years probation each and a fine of US $ 32,000.

The assassination attempt on Stephen Carson

In the early 1980s, the first illegal activities turned into a drug ring that included the two Pauls and more than a dozen people. Stephen Carson was one of them. Carson had made himself available to the authorities as an informant and enjoyed state immunity . According to his testimony, on April 19, 1983, John Paul forced him to get into the trunk of a car at gunpoint in Crescent Beach . When he refused and ran away, Paul opened fire and shot him five times. Carson was hit in the stomach and legs, but survived the assassination attempt. When one of Carson's companions shouted loudly for help, Paul fled, but was arrested by police a little later. John Paul was charged with attempted murder, was released on bail , and escaped trial. In January 1985 he was arrested in Switzerland . The Swiss authorities charged him with a forged passport and sentenced him to six months in prison. After serving his sentence, he was extradited to the United States. The drug ring trial also brought charges against his son, who refused to testify against his father and grandfather, who was also involved in the drug trade. During the trial, he pleaded guilty to the first-degree murder attempt and was sentenced to 20 years in prison for it. For other offenses, including charges of smuggling 90,000 kg of marijuana from Colombia to the United States between 1976 and 1981 , the sentence increased to 25 years. On May 10, 1987, Paul attempted to escape with a fellow inmate while staying outdoors from Leavenworth Federal Prison , where he was serving his sentence. They sprayed a security guard with a hot sauce on the face and wanted to climb over a 12-foot fence to reach a getaway vehicle parked in a parking lot. However, the guard fired two warning shots and the fugitives surrendered. On July 2, 1999, Paul was paroled .

Lost

The whereabouts of his second wife, his future partner and John Paul himself are mysterious. In his second marriage, he was married to Chalice, born on August 31, 1947 as Chalice Alford, who separated from him in 1981 and shortly afterwards disappeared without a trace. Allegedly, after a discussion at their home in Atlanta , where he originally wanted a divorce , she was supposed to fly to Florida for a reconciliation weekend, but she never got there. Their whereabouts are still a mystery and unexplained. In 1983 Paul officially divorced a judge in Haiti and married Hope Haywood, the sister of racing driver Hurley Haywood , for the third time .

Shortly after his release from Leavenworth, he met Colleen Wood, an office worker who worked in Boca Raton and owned a small apartment . Paul was then living on a 55-foot schooner that was named Island Girl . When Wood John met Paul for the first time, he was looking for a fellow sailor to circumnavigate the world . Wood fell in love and gave up his job and home for Paul. She gave the proceeds from the sale of the property, 43,000 US dollars, to your partner as an investment for the planned turn. According to her son, Colleen Wood lived with John Paul on his yacht in the Florida Keys in December 2000 . One last contact with her was a friend who she promised to come to a Christmas party on the mainland. Since she did not appear there and her son had not heard from her for two weeks, he began to look for his mother. The Wood family had never met John Paul personally and was unable to find him for a long time. After the son filed a missing person report, local authorities also took action. When John Paul was found on one of the Keys in February 2001, Colleen Wood's son and officials were serving different versions of their alleged breakup around Christmas 2000. It was once said that she broke up with him out of jealousy of other women. Another time he stated that she had fallen in love with another man and had therefore left him. In a third version, he stated that they had argued about the return of the 43,000 US dollars demanded by her and that this would have broken up. Despite the efforts of the authorities to find her, Colleen Wood's absence remains unexplained to this day.

In the end, John Paul did nothing to clear up the case. This was also due to the fact that he himself disappeared in spring 2001. He left the United States in violation of his probation obligations, allegedly to avoid further questioning on the Wood case. Tourists recognized him later that year from a feature on the US television series Unsolved Mysteries in the Fiji Islands . The US authorities learned of this just as late as of the sale of his yacht through an Italian agency in Thailand . This disappearance, too, has not been resolved to this day.

Career as a racing driver and racing team owner

Between 1960 and 1983 John Paul was active in motorsport, where he contested his first demanding race in 1969 after sporadic starts in club races. When the World Sportscar Championship in 1969 scoring 6 Hours of Watkins Glen was he and Robert Esseks on a Chevrolet Corvette 427 ninth overall. After separating from his first wife, John Paul turned his back on racing for a few years and lived on his sailing point. In 1977 he came back and founded his own racing team. JLP Racing was one of the most successful teams in US sports car racing in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

From 1978 to 1980, the FIA awarded a driver's title to the most successful sports car driver of the year through the FIA World Challenge for Endurance Drivers . Some of the races were part of the sports car world championship, but the challenge was not an official world championship title. The championship for drivers was introduced in 1981 . John Paul won this challenge twice: in 1978 before Bonky Fernandez and Peter Gregg and in 1980 before John Fitzpatrick and Dick Barbour .

He achieved his first individual success at the 6 Hours of Daytona in 1978 , where Jim Downing was his team partner on a Mazda RX-2 . This success was followed by 14 more overall victories, plus six class wins. John Paul was not seen as a fast driver, but as persistent and determined in a duel. Away from the racetrack, he was one of the most unpopular people in the paddock of the IMSA races for many years . His nickname was Old Pirate and colleagues called him an arrogant, intolerant mocker. He feared his uncontrolled outbursts of anger, which randomly hit his driver colleagues, team members and, not infrequently, his racing son. John Paul junior was far more talented than his father and formed a successful driver duo with him in the early 1980s. The highlights were the overall victories in a Porsche 935 at the 1982 Daytona 24-hour race , where Rolf Stommelen was third driver, and at the Sebring 12-hour race in the same year . John Paul competed three times in the Le Mans 24-hour race . The best place was the fifth place in the debut in 1978 .

statistics

Le Mans results

year	team	vehicle	Teammate	Teammate	placement	Failure reason
1978	Dick Barbour Racing	Porsche 935/77	Dick Barbour	Brian Redman	5th place and class win
1980	JLP Racing	Porsche 935 JLP-2	Guy Edwards	John Paul Junior	Rank 9
1982	North American Racing Team	Ferrari 512BB LM	Alain Cudini	John Morton	Rank 9

Sebring results

year	team	vehicle	Teammate	Teammate	Teammate	placement	Failure reason
1977	John Paul	Porsche Carrera RSR	John O'Steen	John Graves	Bob Hagestad	failure	Engine failure
1978	JLP Racing	Porsche Carrera RSR	Bonky Fernandez			4th place and class win
1979	JLP Racing	Porsche 935 JLP-1	Al Holbert			failure	Power transmission
1980	Thunderbird Swap Shop	Porsche 935K3	Al Holbert	Preston Henn		Rank 4
1981	JLP Racing	Porsche 935JLP-3	John Paul Junior			failure	suspension
1982	JLP Racing	Porsche 935JLP-3	John Paul Junior			Overall victory

Web links

• The John Paul story at Sports History
• John Paul and John Paul junior at Sportscar
• John Paul at Historic Racing
• John Paul at the Driver Database
• John Paul at Racing Sports Cars

Individual evidence

1. ↑ John Paul on Wall Street
2. ^ First divorce and first boat
3. ↑ John Paul Jr. developed Huntington's disease
4. ^ First drug trafficking and first punishment
5. ↑ Report in the New York Times, June 1983
6. ↑ John Paul is extradited
7. ↑ John Paul condemns
8. ↑ John Paul Sr. in court
9. ↑ Report in the Los Angeles Times
10. ↑ John Paul Prison Registration Number
11. ↑ Wedding of Chalice and John Paul ( Memento of the original from April 8, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
12. ↑ On the disappearance of Chalise Paul ( Memento of the original from November 10, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
13. Jump up ↑ Drugs, Races, and Marriages of Father and Son Paul
14. ↑ Report on the Disappearance of Colleen Wood
15. ↑ Another account of the disappearance of Colleen Woods
16. ↑ John Paul before his disappearance
17. ^ Report on racers who committed criminal offenses
18. ^ FIA World Challenge for Endurance Drivers 1978
19. ^ FIA World Challenge for Endurance Drivers 1980
20. ^ 1978 Daytona 6-hour race
21. ↑ 1982 Daytona 24-hour race