A Lawyer’s “Miracle”

WHEN WE LAST WROTE ABOUT hot-shot defense attorney Mike Wilson (“The Thin White Line,” November 1990), he had been sentenced to 15 years in federal prison on charges of drug possession. Under indictment for accepting 21 pounds of cocaine in lieu of legal fees, Wilson fled the country’ in 1990 with Joy Aylor, a Dallas woman accused of hiring a hit man to kill her estranged husband’s mistress. Wilson was arrested in Canada. Aylor was finally taken into custody in the south of France and, after a long legal battle, extradited two years later.

Wilson’s original sentence meant he was unlikely to get out of prison until at least the year 2003. But on appeal, his sentence was reduced to four years. He was released from the federal prison in Seagoville on Dec. 3, 1993.

“What happened to me is easy to answer,” says Wilson, who’s now married with a two-year-old daughter. “I became addicted to a powerful drug called cocaine that literally took over my life. I feel like my being alive and not in prison is an absolute miracle.”

Wilson, now on federal probation, works as a legal assistant, making him one of the most highly skilled paralegals in town. If he regains his law license, which he lost when convicted, Wilson says he would avoid taking on drug dealers as clients.

And as for bis former lover Joy Aylor, still in federal prison?

“She’s where she needs to be,” Wilson says.