The Rogue: Searching for the Real Sarah Palin by Joe McGinniss Read Free Book Online

husband left her. Then she got into a snarl with her insurance company, and coverage of the Oxycontin she received by prescription was suspended. By the fall of 2008 she was running out of money for food and electricity. On three occasions she sold ten Oxycontin pills to an old family friend named Junior Latocha, who had become an undercover police informant in return for a reduced sentence on his own drug-dealing conviction. She served several months in prison and was now a few months into a three-year term of house arrest.
    Levi’s sister, Mercede, is at the house. She has to stay there in case Sherry is called for a random drug test. The testing facility is sixteen miles away, and Sherry must get there within an hour of being called. She can’t drive herself because of the pain medications in her bloodstream.
    “It kind of sucks,” Mercede tells me. “I graduated from high school a couple of weeks ago, but I can’t even think about going away to college. I can hardly even go out on a date. Sometimes they call my mom for testing three or four times a week.”
    “Doesn’t Levi help?”
    “Levi? Forget it. He’s too busy being a star. I don’t even speak to him anymore. He’ll come to the house and I’ll be in my room and he won’t even bother to say hi. The Palins—especially Bristol—have ruined our relationship. Bristol tells him not to talk to me, so he won’t. He has to do what she says, or she won’t let him see his son.”
    Mercede is a stunningly attractive young woman, all blond hair and white teeth and tanning-salon skin. And Sherry, for all her problems,has kind eyes, a genuine smile, and the sort of resigned tranquility that can come from living with chronic pain.
    Neither has anything very helpful to tell me, but I find them utterly without guile. I like them and I’m sorry about their circumstances. I leave, after two hours of conversation, wanting to find Levi and give him a good hard shake and tell him to forget about his sputtering career for half a second and go home, because his mother needs him.
    This is what happens in Alaska. People are so open and giving and trusting, and eager to help you in any possible way, that you quickly come to care about them and to want to help them in return.
    Sherry Johnston will be confined to her home for three years for selling thirty Oxycontin pills for $800, after having been set up by a police informant. But in January, Todd Palin’s thirty-six-year-old half sister, Diana, received a suspended sentence and was released into a residential rehab program after pleading guilty to multiple break-ins at a Wasilla residence from which she stole more than $2,600. And she’d brought her four-year-old daughter along for the crimes.
    Diana Palin used the child as part of her MO. As the
Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman
reported in January 2010, “Investigators found that Palin had been doing similar things before in her own neighborhood, sometimes using her daughter as cover. For instance, the girl would ask to use a person’s bathroom, which would give Palin a pretext to get into the house and find prescription medications and other things to steal.”
    It looks like there may be two standards in the Valley: Johnston justice and Palin justice.
    Prior to her sentencing, Diana Palin had been in court twice, both times as a victim of domestic abuse. In addition, she’d first sought treatment for her methamphetamine addiction in 2007. In January 2010 her husband (who was not accused of domestic abuse) filed for divorce, seeking custody of the four-year-old child who’d been used in the burglaries.
    “I really love dysfunctional families,” Diana wrote on her MySpace page in 2009. “Especially mine.”
    Sarah certainly seems to have married into one. Before his current marriage to Faye, Todd’s father, Jim, was married to Todd’s mother, Blanche Kallstrom, and, before that, to Diana’s mother, Elayne Ingram. Kallstrom and Ingram, both part-Native, were from