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Free wheelin'

The one thing that makes Michael Wiley feel free keeps landing him in jail.

By THOMAS LAKE
Published August 20, 2006

[Times photo: Zach Boyden-Holmes]

Free on bail a few days after a June arrest, Michael Wiley demonstrates his driving technique, using the stump of his left arm to turn the steering wheel, at his home in Port Richey. He puts the key in the ignition with his mouth and starts the car with his toes. He uses his knee to shift gears . For Wiley, it isn’t just driving. It’s therapy.

	[Family photo]
	Michael Wiley was 7 when his family went to Fort Lauderdale on vacation in 1974. Six years later, he would lose three of his limbs.
	In a May 1998 Pasco County court document, it is noted that fingerprints could not be obtained from Wiley.

See the green Corvette blazing east toward the dawn, miles beneath the moon, seconds beyond the law.

Pasco County, nine winters back. A pursuit call crackles into Sgt. Gary Albin's cruiser. Albin summons the cavalry and drives north to intercept.

Sparks fly as the Corvette blows a tire at nearly 120 mph. The driver veers off the highway and pulls into a Citgo. Nearly a dozen deputies descend.

"Put your hands behind your back!" they yell.

Then Albin recognizes the driver.

"He hasn't got any," he says. "It's probably Wiley."

So it is.

Michael Wiley has lost both arms and half his left leg. Nevertheless, he drives. Those who know him say he drives with great skill. They have even seen him drive a stick shift.

This is not to say he obeys traffic laws.

He has been caught breaking them at least 46 times since 1984, the year before he got his first driver's license. That license has been suspended or revoked at least 19 times. And most of the three-plus years he has spent in jails and prisons can be traced in some way to driving.

*   *   *

We like stories about people who overcome their afflictions to accomplish great things. These things usually involve math or marathons or the Tour de France.

So what about Wiley, a 39-year-old man who can't tie his own shoes, who won't let three amputations stop him from gunning the motor as sirens chase him through the dark?

"Dead straight ahead," says his father, George Wiley. "Never mind the consequences."

He is describing his son both before and after the accident.

The fall

He tumbled toward Earth, dead from the shock, dead before touchdown. This is how he tells it. The impact jolted him back to life.

Michael Francis Wiley was 13 on that day in 1980, blue-eyed and freckle-faced, in New York City, his hometown, where he spoke his first sentence, which he swears was "Daddy fix car."

His father fixed buses for the transit authority, and his father and grandfather were also mechanics. Michael whipped through the streets on his BMX bike, toting an adjustable wrench, nipping old carburetors and selling them for scrap.

Now imagine an abandoned train-switching station where truant boys in leather jackets and motorcycle boots play tag on the catwalks near the elevated tracks. Picture Michael running.

He trips. Falls. Grabs at anything he can, including wires that carry something like 12,000 volts. Dangles three stories above the ground, feeling for a foothold.

Finds one. Metal. Completes the circuit. Electricity floods his body. He plummets maybe 25 feet. Bones shatter. Boys scatter. Michael feels someone cut away his clothes, load him in an ambulance, pack him in ice.

George and Sue Wiley find their son with hands perpetually clenched, a fist-sized hole in his left thigh. According to medical records provided by Sue, third-degree burns cover both arms and his lower left leg. Doctors say they must amputate.

Then come the skin grafts and the prosthetic leg. Then his father begins drowning in vodka. Then, barely a month after his fall, Michael leaves his bed, hobbles around Bellevue Hospital and escapes through a utility tunnel.

He comes home, of course, because he cannot feed or clothe himself, but he will not face his new reality. This much is clear to Stanley Portnow, a Park Avenue forensic psychiatrist who evaluates Michael and files a report dated Sept. 18, 1981. Nearly 25 years later, his exasperated mother shares it with a St. Petersburg Times reporter. She says it still applies:

. . . classic post-traumatic neurosis . . .

. . . attempts to keep up a rather tough guy facade which is meant to say that nothing can really hurt him . . .

. . . not only out to prove that he is as good as but rather better than he was before the accident . . .

. . . his continued denial of his realistic state will produce more and more social adverse effects . . .

None of this registers with Michael. He returns to the streets. One day the next year, in an inexplicable show of good faith, his friend Tommy rolls up in an old Pontiac Catalina and tells Michael to give 'er a whirl.

Michael takes off his fake arms, which only get in the way. He presses himself to the wheel and hits the gas.

Full speed

Now picture a fourth-generation Monte Carlo SS, black on black, tinted glass, V8 to rattle china.

It's Florida, 1985, and Michael Wiley is driving.

He guides the key into the ignition with his mouth. Turns it with his toes. Shifts with his knee. Bites the headlight switch. Jams his stump of a left arm into the steering wheel and whips it around.

Driving becomes his therapy. He puts nearly 50,000 miles on that car the first year. He goes to California and New Mexico and Tennessee and back.

The car is bought with cash from his personal injury settlement, the one from the railroad company that gives him annual living expenses plus a lump sum every five years.

His parents had moved to Pasco County to get him off the New York streets. But trouble followed him.

Late in 1984, just before he got the Monte Carlo, he was walking past a used car lot he can walk up to a quarter-mile at a time on his prosthetic leg when he saw a Volkswagen, unlocked, key in the ignition. He got in and sped off.

Sgt. Albin and his partner chased him down a dirt road in Port Richey. The car turned south, ran off the road and hit a tree. The deputies drew their guns.

Wiley says they told him to put his hands out the window. He told them he had no hands, climbed out and surrendered.

But Albin remembers seeing Wiley spring out of the car and hop 2 or 3 feet into the air, pulling crazy flying kicks.

It was the only time Albin ever burst out laughing while holding a suspect at gunpoint.

Blue lights

Wiley may not have been amused that day, but he did love a good time. He once went to a Halloween party made up like a shark attack victim. He always had plenty of friends. He had beer money, and they had fingers to pop the tops. He drank with the can in his teeth.

They bathed in the Anclote River, basked at Clearwater Beach. Sometimes they'd leave a party and stop somewhere to hose him down because he couldn't hold it any longer and wouldn't ask for bathroom assistance.

Wiley got married, got divorced, got married again, had a daughter, sold timeshares and magazines by phone. He racked up so many speeding tickets and careless driving citations that the state suspended his license, and he had his license suspended so many times that the simple act of driving became a felony. Still he drove.

In 1992, the state declared him a habitual violator and revoked his license for five years. He was caught speeding again less than six months later.

And again three months after that.

And again 16 days after that.

One night in Hudson in October 1996, a maroon Pontiac smashed another car and drove away, trailing debris. A witness called authorities. A state trooper saw a damaged Pontiac outside a nearby house. He touched the hood. Still hot.

Out came Wiley's wife, Wendy. She said it was her car, according to the trooper's report. She said she crashed and got scared and came home.

The trooper didn't believe her. He asked again. Who was driving?

My husband, she said. Michael Wiley.

Then Wiley came out. There was a struggle. He kicked the trooper's knee. He lay down on the patrol car's seat and kicked the door into the trooper's chest.

Wiley was convicted of leaving the scene of an accident and battery on a law enforcement officer. But he maintains he wasn't driving that night. He insists the trooper pressed that charge out of spite and embarrassment.

"It'd be kind of hard to live it down in the locker room," he would say nearly 10 years later, "if a no-armed man put you on your a-- twice."

Impounded

Now we are in the interview room, deep in a concrete stronghold, divided by reinforced glass. Fire burns in Wiley's blue eyes. Fire and desperation.

It is June 1, 2006. The latest charges involve cocaine and marijuana and habitual traffic violation. Even his mother says she is no longer behind him.

"I'm an excellent driver," he says. "If I could just get my license back, I'd never be in here again."

Jail hurts. Jail especially hurts if you have only one good limb, if you depend on others to help feed you, dress you, take you to the bathroom.

His attorney, John D. Hooker of Tampa, says Wiley gets so frustrated in jail that he provokes the detention deputies. This makes things worse. Wiley claims that over the years he has been beaten, pepper-sprayed, left in a holding cell for days with no way to eat but to dip his face in his food.

He says he needs medication to manage his pain. In 2003, he was caught trying to smuggle Xanax and Valium into jail hidden inside his prosthetic leg.

During that 30-day sentence, he asked a fellow inmate to feed him. When the man agreed, Wiley found himself beholden to a violent criminal.

He let the man and his wife stay at his house when he got out. The man was later convicted of killing her in Wiley's living room while Wiley and his family slept.

Wiley's daughter, Felicia, is 16. "She's the breath in my lungs," he says. He taught her how to drive. Her license was recently suspended because she missed too much school. He says his prison time made her rebel.

His lawyer wishes he would buy 5 acres, cut private roads and do all the unlicensed driving he wants. His mother thinks he should build his own racetrack.

Wiley wanted to buy an RV and take his wife across America. But he and his wife separated in July for reasons he won't discuss, and his driver's license is revoked until 2009.

When asked what he would give to get his license back right now, he does not smile or hesitate:

"I'd give my right leg."

Thomas Lake can be reached at tlake@sptimes.com or toll-free 1-800-333-7505, ext. 6245.

Postscript: Wiley went free on bail shortly after his jailhouse interview. He claimed he had stopped driving. But barely two weeks later, a sheriff's deputy spotted him on Kimberly Oaks Drive in Holiday. He was back behind the wheel.

[Last modified August 18, 2006, 15:09:31]