Long Way Home

by Cameron Douglas

  Going from the comforts of Mom’s house to the privations of this cell is a shock. Guards pass our meals to us through a slot, and the food tends to be just a colder, more congealed version of the slop non-SHU prisoners receive. We get no recreation time outside the cell. We’re locked in twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The unit is surprisingly loud, as prisoners communicate by yelling from one cell to another, and some inmates scream just because they’re angry or out of their minds, a feeling I’ll come to fully understand. I can’t have visitors, and I’ll be allowed only a single fifteen-minute phone call in my three weeks here.

  “Is this even legal?” I ask Juan.

  “Right? And we got it good compared to the guys up there,” Juan says, nodding in the direction of the staircase that rises from the unit’s corridor to two sets of metal doors: behind them, there’s an even more restricted unit, a wing of six cells known as 10S, or 9½, where the highest-risk prisoners are held in true isolation. That’s where Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the stumpy, escape-prone Sinaloa Cartel boss better known as El Chapo, will be held a few years from now. The fluorescent lights are kept on twenty-four hours a day, and guards monitor the prisoners through two cameras in each cell. Another resident, a terrorism suspect previously held at Guantanamo Bay, will later describe Gitmo as more pleasant.

  Without heroin, I’m crawling out of my skin. The MCC doctor puts me on a seven-day course of tapering, twice-daily doses of methadone, which offer some relief, but after all these years of not missing a day of injecting heroin, I’m in bad shape, with torrential diarrhea. Juan is understanding. As I learned to do in county jail, I hang up a sheet when using the toilet, holding one arm behind me and pushing the flush button over and over, while I do my business, to minimize the odor.

  On the top bunk, I stare at the ceiling. It’s cement in a honeycomb pattern. Hot water pipes, painted glossy red, run across it. I close my eyes and allow myself a sliver of fantasy, imagining that when I open them the honeycomb is gone, I’m back in my own bed at the Gansevoort, and I can say, “I was only dreaming, thank God.” I’m praying this is simply the most realistic nightmare I’ve ever had. But when I open my eyes, I’m staring at the concrete honeycomb and the red pipes, and the weight descends again on my chest. I’m really here. This is happening.

  Hey Pop…

  I’m sorry about all of this, I really am…

  I really was shooting for bigger and better. Also please apologize to Pappy, Granny, and the rest of the family for all this, I feel really ashamed for being the source of any embarrassment and/or shame…

  Thank you for your support and standing behind me on this one. It means the world to me.

  Your son,

  Cameron

  DJing in Hamburg.

  * * *

  —

  My meetings with Nick in the attorney consultation rooms are the only times I get out of my cell. It’s humbling and scary to see how muscular the other prisoners are. I’m in the worst shape of my life, bloated and with no muscle tone. In this environment, where you’re either prey or predator, that’s dangerous. You want a potential predator to worry that you might not simply roll over for him, so he’d be better off pursuing a softer target. I’m still going through withdrawal, but I start working out with Juan, who does a typical prison routine: 500 to 1,000 push-ups in a two-hour session, in sets of 30. My first set, I make it to 15. The second set, I get to 10. The next one, I can do only 7. I go until around 100, when I can’t do another push-up. I’m surprised and concerned by how weak I am.

  * * *

  —

  At my first proffer meeting with prosecutors, they put my initial confession in front of me. I’m not too worried. Gabriel and Carlos, the only real people I named, have gone AWOL, and the prosecutors assume they’ve fled to Mexico. Maestro is an invented name.

  The prosecutors remind me that if I go to trial, I could face a sentence of up to life in prison. Because of the intercepted toothbrush, they’ve already added a charge of heroin possession to my indictment. Now they want details about exactly what I did and how I did it. Dates and places. Weights and dollar amounts. Methods of packaging and shipment. They need to know exactly what I’ll testify to at any trial of my suppliers.

  I’m dragging my feet and not being forthright. Little of what I tell them is entirely true, and they catch me in blatant lies. I refer to Trevor Mitchell—who gave me $72,000, and who I never sent crystal to—as someone I know only as the Professor. My reticence is misplaced: I’ll later learn that he’s CW-2, one of the cooperating witnesses who helped the DEA build a case against me.

  I’m going along with what Dad and Mom and Nick are telling me is the smart course of action, but afterward I tell Nick I’m uncomfortable with how things are progressing. He stresses that it’s extremely unlikely Gabriel and Carlos will be found. Even if they are, they’ll almost certainly cooperate, so the case won’t go to trial. I can’t comprehend how they could even be indicted, based on my drug-addled, half-fictional confession, and I’m momentarily pacified.

  At least I’m not an informant. An informant is out on the street, backstabbing people he knows, wearing a wire, arranging deals, and trying to set other people up.

  Hi Cam,

  So what have you been up to lately? (bad joke) Thank you for your letter and apology. Your whole family’s heart goes out to you. We’re not embarrassed, we love you, just feel it’s a hard road you’ve chosen. You’ve got a lot of support out there Cameron. I can’t tell you the number of calls from friends I received, all wishing you the best, and all speaking of what a great guy you are; smart, funny, considerate, brave, and just pray you get your shit together. I haven’t told the kids, and I think it’s better that way. We are all back in the city for much of the fall.

  Dad says he’s filling out the necessary forms so he can visit me. He updates me on Carys and Dylan, and on his work.

  Just know, Cameron, I say a prayer every day for you, and I do love you. Thinking of you.

  Dad

  * * *

  —

  After three weeks in the SHU, I’m moved to 11S. It’s a large open dorm with more than a hundred inmates. I have the top of a bunk bed I share with a Puerto Rican kid named Pete. His charges carry a five-year minimum sentence, mine a ten-year minimum. We tease each other about how old each of us will be when we’re released.

  Even in gen pop, being at MCC is like being on the moon. We’re always indoors, except for one hour, three times a week, when we’re let out on the roof. There’s no chow hall; meals are brought to the unit, where we line up to get our trays of barely edible food. Every day, inmates head off to court to learn what the future holds for them, only to return with their lives shattered. We’re all under extreme stress, and a smothering darkness settles on me like a blanket.

  “If I get ten years,” I tell Pete, “I’m either going to try to escape or kill myself.”

  * * *

  —

  The physical agony of detoxing has faded, but the mental symptoms persist. At night, I lie in bed with what addicts call “crazy legs”: I constantly feel like I need to move them. I toss. I turn. I sit up. I can’t get comfortable. I can’t get a good night’s sleep.

  I have an unshakable sense of anxiety. For years, heroin was my crutch to function normally. Sometimes just to make a phone call, I’d do a shot. Without it, and at the very moment when I’m having to navigate a new and much scarier environment, my social discomfort returns. Having strangers make assumptions about me is always unsettling, but here it could be dangerous too.

  There are lifers on my unit. In my second week on 11S, I’m watching a kid get a haircut when another kid comes up behind him and stoves his head in with a mop wringer. The metal gears get caught in his face, and there’s skin hanging off, and a lot of blood.

  An alarm sounds, and guards come running. I’m stunned, kind of in shock, and for a moment I just stand there. This is the first real violence I’ve seen here. I don�
�t know what’s going to happen next. Is the fighting going to spread? Then I snap out of it and, like the other inmates nearby, move away from the scene. Moments later, I see the attacker being dragged away in handcuffs, and the victim being carried out on a stretcher. I never see him again. It’s one of the bizarro facts of prison life that victims are treated the same as or worse than predators: they’re taken care of medically, but then they’re the ones who are seen as a risk by prison guards, a pain in the ass, and get involuntarily relocated to a different unit or different prison. People think: What did you do to get yourself so fucked up like that? I’m frightened. What did he do to provoke that? Could the same thing happen to me?

  Outwardly I’m able to maintain my composure, but I start getting stress rashes. Dr. Millman, who specializes in drug and alcohol treatment, is visiting me once a week, and we’re trying to get a prescription filled. The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) routinely prescribes anti-anxiety meds and narcotics, including Klonopin and OxyContin, but when Dr. Millman prescribes me Xanax and Suboxone, the BOP won’t give them to me. We bring the request before the judge in my case, and he instructs us to hire a specialist to make a diagnosis. I do this, but the BOP still won’t give me the medication. We can’t figure out whether I’m the target of a sadistic bureaucrat or of a prosecutor striving to keep me on edge as a point of leverage.

  * * *

  —

  Dad’s been out of town, and I haven’t seen him since my arrest, but in early October he comes for a visit. He’s focused and encouraging, and there’s a feeling of optimism between us, like we’re going to work this thing out.

  Afterward, I meet with my lawyers. I’ve learned, far too late, that Nick has never defended a drug case of this magnitude, and Dad has hired a second law firm to join our team. One of the new attorneys, an associate named Meg Salib, floats the idea that I could be eligible for something called “the safety valve,” a legal mechanism that exempts first-time nonviolent drug offenders from mandatory minimum sentences. Over the past twenty-five years, she explains, a sentencing reform movement, spurred by the unduly harsh sentences often meted out to low-level drug offenders, has gained steam in the U.S., and the safety valve was created as part of this movement.

  It gives you an out without your having to fully cooperate. You have to debrief—revealing what you did, how you did it, and who you did it with—but you don’t have to wear a wire or testify against anyone. There’s some question as to whether I qualify, because of my DUI from 2005, but it turns out that the DUI is actually due to be expunged this month, so the safety valve would have been an option for me. But at this point, it’s moot; I’ve already agreed to much more than I would have needed to, including a complicated bail package that my addiction made inevitable I would violate, leading to the added heroin-possession charge.

  In our meetings with prosecutors, the outlines of a plea agreement have begun to take shape. Erin and I haven’t been allowed to speak. And I still haven’t heard from Jay. I’ve been trying to keep both Erin and Jay out of my accounting of my crimes. I have so much buyer’s remorse about this deal with the prosecutors that I’m trying to be slick, oblivious to the reality that they’ve sat across from thousands of bullshitters before and can see right through me. When I’m withholding information or making stuff up, they say things like, “We’ll go pick up your friend Jay right now and add him to the indictment,” and I acquiesce.

  Nick tells me he’s concerned about my level of transparency with the prosecutors. The next week, I get another letter from Dad. He and Nick have clearly been talking.

  As you know we are trying to do everything we can from the outside, but a lot of it depends on your cooperation. You have to remember that you don’t know what evidence they have; taped conversations, video tapes, witnesses, etc. I know the meeting THEY had with you after we met didn’t go great. If they feel they can’t trust you, reduced sentences will be more difficult. The legal fees, etc., are no small amount, let’s try to make it worthwhile…PLEASE UNDERSTAND THE REPERCUSSIONS IF YOU DON’T COOPERATE.

  In this moment of crisis I really value Dad’s opinion. But I’m a mess inside. Every day that goes by, I’m more anxious and angry and frustrated with the advice I’ve received and with my own missteps. However much I’ve let myself and my family down, until now I’ve taken comfort from a bedrock belief: if nothing else, I’m brave, and I don’t flinch from danger. But here I am, committing what feels like an act of ultimate cowardice.

  * * *

  —

  After three months on 11S, I’m moved to another unit, whose manager has taken a maternal interest in me. On 5N, I’m in a cell on a two-tier range surrounding a dayroom. The cell, which I share with another inmate, is a little bigger than my SHU cell; there’s a desk with a chair, and each of us has a locker and a separate storage bin. This is a working unit, meaning many of the inmates on 5N have jobs, most of them in the kitchen. That makes 5N a hub for wheeler-dealers earning money by channeling contraband from the kitchen to inmates on other units. The cluster of Italians on the unit is ruled by Jackie “Nose” D’Amico, a seventy-year-old Gambino street boss who was John Gotti Sr.’s right hand. Norman Hsu, a Hillary Clinton fund-raiser charged with running a Ponzi scheme, is here, as is Mahmoud Banki, a Princeton Ph.D. holder who has been indicted for using the illegal hawala money-transfer system to receive money from Iran.

  Soon after I’m moved here, I’m approached by a huge guy known as Ohio. He says he was one of the inmate observers on my suicide watch, the night I was brought to MCC. “You were one fucked-up motherfucker,” Ohio says. He hands me a letter from Alex, who I’m pissed at. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about who helped the DEA against me. I know now, from reading discovery documents, that Alex is CW-3, the person who got me linked into the investigation in the first place; he’d had me on a recorded phone call, though I didn’t say anything incriminating during that conversation. Alex’s letter doesn’t mention his involvement in my arrest, or that he was released from prison on the same day I was brought in. He just says he heard what happened, he’s upset about it, and he tried to get word to me about the investigation. I feel like I’ve been good to Alex, and I’m hurt by his betrayal, but I understand that he did what most people who find themselves in his situation do.

  My cellie, George, is a dope fiend in his forties who’s doing time for a marijuana distribution case and is connected to the Bonanno crime family. He has a heavy Bronx accent, has been in and out of prison his whole life, and looks like Bugs Bunny, because his only remaining teeth are the two upper front ones. He’s been waiting for months for dentures, but he has such a good attitude about it, and he’s always friendly and full of jokes.

  I find myself spending most of my time with three other guys. Mark Clancy has long gray hair and a handlebar mustache and is in his seventies, but he has a youthful face and is in great shape for his age. Clancy’s a tough career criminal who was convicted of armed robbery and aggravated kidnapping in the late 1960s, and was released from prison after forty years. He’s here now, doing an eighteen-month bit, because after being released he was a no-show at his halfway house and got picked up again.

  Clancy has endless war stories. He claims that a friend of his cut off another inmate’s head and ran around the cellblock holding it. His real trademark, though, is that he’s an escape guy. In 1966, armed with a gun smuggled in by his girlfriend, Clancy and three other inmates broke out of Cook County Jail in Chicago. He also claims to have been part of a notorious attempted helicopter escape in 1981 from the rooftop right here at MCC.

  Eddie Callegari has been in prison for fourteen years. He’s solidly built and heavily tatted, with a head Bic-razored clean. His street names were Crazy Eddie and Eddie Wrecker, and the government alleges that as a member of a Queens crew called the Ozone Park Boys, he served as a Gambino family enforcer who took part in strong-arm robberies. He was also a suspect in three murders in South Florida. Eddie’s at MCC to testify on beh
alf of John Gotti Jr. He’s missing a front tooth, which makes him seem like a big kid, and I know him as friendly and boisterous. In here, he’s like Dennis the Menace. He makes terrible booze and pro-grade knives with rubber handles, and one time he steals an overhead speaker from the chapel to use in his cell.

  The guy I become closest to, Dave Hattersley, is thirty-five, has dirty blond hair with a touch of ginger, is lean and muscular, and walks with a strut, swinging from side to side. He’s a vicious heroin addict who went to prison for robbing banks. He’s constantly shadowboxing, has a short temper, and is quick to violence. His father, who was a Vietnam vet, has always been disappointed in him, which Dave is angry about. Despite our differences, I see some of myself in him: the severe addiction, the willingness to be crazy, the disappointed father. Like me, he was a fuck-up teenager.

  As I’ll learn, he also has a swastika tattooed on his chest, and he claims ties to the East Coast Aryan Brotherhood, which started in New Jersey prisons and despite its name has no connection to the original Aryan Brotherhood. It’s difficult to explain how race plays out in prison. It’s very different than out in the world. As I learned in juvie, and in county jail, race lines are starkly drawn. You break bread with “your own kind.” It sounds terrible, but that’s just how it works.

  Despite his swastika and gang affiliation, Dave isn’t necessarily racist, and I’ll eventually conclude that that’s true for a lot of white gang members in prison. It seems to me that many of them click up and band together for camaraderie and survival, rather than from any ideology, and wear their big swastika tattoos as symbols of intimidation rather than signs of any personal belief system.