I don’t think Mezzrow was crazy. In fact, I said that I thought Mezzrow’s strong desire to be a black man was driven by his high regard for black culture. I do though think it is likely that he was sometimes zonked out by smoking “muggles”!!
On the point of “stealing” that you raise, I think what would otherwise probably be regarded as straightforward influence is often viewed as unacceptable plagiarism when racism enters the equation. In other words, I think Mezzrow regarded most white jazz musicians as “vultures” (i.e. thieves) because he witnessed and keenly felt the racism that blacks suffered. It is admirable that Mezzrow had compassion for the plight of those who were suffering in this way, but in his anger he used a blunderbuss approach to unfairly vilify all that was white, including white jazz musicians (conveniently forgetting the fact that he himself was white!) In fact, many white musicians had similar feelings of respect for black jazz musicians as he did (some "stood by" as you put it, but others, such as Benny Goodman, I think did more to break down racial barriers than Mezzrow did).
Mezzrow’s sterling efforts to record distinguished, though at the time little known, black jazz musicians was in my mind his greatest achievement. However, he was not always liked by those he put in front of the microphone. In fact, Sidney Bechet grew to dislike him intensely and eventually accused Mezzrow of stealing money from him, at one stage banging on the front door of his house and threatening to cut him up with a knife! Thank God this deterioration in their relationship only came after Bechet had recorded some wonderful tracks at King Jazz, the recording company Mezzrow ran in the 1940s. (Unfortunately, Mezzrow insisted on playing clarinet on every track, though some of his head arrangements – such as in “Really The Blues” – are nicely conceived).
One of the last comments Bechet ever made to another musician was actually about Mezzrow. When he was dying of cancer in France in early 1959, Bechet was visited by Claude Luter. Although frail, Bechet insisted on walking with Luter up the stairs at the clinic in which he was being treated. Concerned he might trip, Luter said “Watch out or you’ll do yourself an injury” but Bechet replied “I just tell myself that I’m chasing Mezzrow for the money he owes me!” Indeed, Mezzrow may have accused his white colleagues of being “vultures” but he was a bird of prey himself on more than one occasion when it came to financial matters.
Luter possibly offered the fairest appraisal of Mezzrow when he said "He is a good amateur, but the sad thing is that some people wanted to consider him a genius and others as something useless".
Are you the same David Apolloni who posted a message on the Mississippi Rag website on January 26, 2001 concerning the Ken Burns series? If you are (I guess you must be), then I am slightly surprised that you talk about “stealing” from black musicians in this way when you said in the post: “Wynton Marsalis tells us that jazz comes from the blues; the implication is again, that since blues is a supposedly black art form, whites cannot really play this music….No one (including myself) would tolerate a parallel assertion that black people cannot do science as well as whites since science comes from the white European experience, or that since science cannot be science without mathematics, black people cannot do science, or that "as we all know, the greatest scientists are all white." But the comparison makes one thing amply clear--the omissions and presentations of questionable critical judgments as fact are racially based.”