We speak for forty-five minutes. It’s a weight off my shoulders and heart to see them face-to-face and to explain myself. They’re disappointed and angry, but I believe they also understand. They’re as surprised as I am that they’re here, given the seemingly minimal evidence the government has against them. I think that’s also why, against all reason, they’re determined to go to trial. They don’t understand what they’re up against, just like I didn’t in the beginning. They haven’t accepted that there’s a reason why 97 percent of federal drug defendants plead guilty.
* * *
—
On January 15, the New York Post runs a story headlined “Douglas Son Set to Sing.” My cellie is a Dominican general who’s been here for years cooperating in a major cocaine-smuggling case, so I’m not worried about him, but other inmates could be a problem. Once again, I wrestle with extreme anxiety, worried about whether I’m doing the right thing. I don’t have the highest respect for my own decision making, given some of the choices I’ve made, yet here I am going against what the people who love me are telling me to do, and what the expensive professionals they’ve hired are telling me to do. It’s scary. But I find some relief in the stubborn resolve of the decision I’m making. The alternative, doing what everyone else wants me to do, is simply unbearable to me.
After I tell the prosecutors that I won’t testify, Nick and Dad start riding me hard about it. Then I get a reprieve: the trial is adjourned, because Gabriel’s own lawyer, citing the irrationality of his refusal to take a plea deal, has asked the court to order a psychological evaluation. I’m sent back to Lewisburg.
* * *
—
In certain ways, daily life improves. After months of trying to get a different job, I’m finally switched to the grounds crew; we mow grass and whack weeds, but at least I’m outside all day, and I can work when I want as long as I keep my assigned area in good shape. And my status has perceptibly shifted. Guys on my unit who’d kept their distance until now seem reassured by my return, since it means I must not have testified. If I had, they’d surely have read about it.
I take solace in my decision, but the prosecutors ratchet up their pressure, threatening to indict me on new charges over the Xanax that Meg Salib brought me. As my stress level rises, I start letting myself do a bump of heroin a littler earlier in the day. It feels nice to do one at two o’clock and another at six. It’s only temporary, I tell myself, during this particularly anxious period. After a while, I add a third little bump right after we break down the sweat lodge and before the four o’clock stand-up count.
With Sebastian, Black, and Dash at Lewisburg.
* * *
—
Inspired by Sebastian’s laminated list of archangels, I pay an inmate named Pat, who has a contraband tattoo gun and real tattoo ink, to inscribe thirteen of their names on my ribcage. I also have him ink a teardrop on each of my index fingers, in honor of my continuing inability to shed them.
One night, when I’m complaining about my lawyers and the Garcias’ stupid choices and the judge who sentenced me and the prosecutors who are pressuring me, I crook my index fingers around my eyes, so that the tears are visible to Sebastian, and say, “Wah, poor me.”
Sebastian laughs, then laughs harder.
“Dude,” he says, “you know those are backward, right?”
“What?”
I look down and study the teardrops closely for the first time. Instead of being shaped like commas, they look like Cs. Motherfucker.
The next day, I make Pat start inking a second set of tears on my middle fingers, facing the right way.
* * *
—
My recklessness increases. If there’s a correlation between my stress level and my willingness to take risks, it’s not conscious. Some people follow all the major rules in prison, then get out and can’t follow the rules of society. I may break some of the rules in prison, but I know that when I get out I’m going to really make the best of it and not fuck up. The rules I do break in here are mainly to establish myself. In prison, you want people to think you’re a little crazy, a little aggressive.
Ramón, a kid from Elizabeth, New Jersey, who sells me my heroin, has a friend with an escort service and arranges for us to bring a prostitute into the camp. Her name is Adriana, and Ramón says she’s “a pretty li’l redbone.” Right after the 9:30 p.m. count one night, David and I and a third guy make the run to get her.
Her driver gets lost finding the barn. Finally Adriana arrives, with bags of contraband we’re also bringing in. She’s wearing a sweatsuit and a beanie. By the time we start back with her toward the unit, it’s dangerously close to midnight, when the next count will start. As we run, carrying the bags, she struggles to keep up. Just as we approach the back of the unit, we see cops coming down the path in front.
I think I’m done for. We hug the outside wall, with Adriana and the bags of stuff. She’s obviously terrified as we walk through the darkened unit, where the other inmates, who can hardly believe what they’re seeing, stand on tiptoes and stare. “I ain’t fuckin’ with y’all niggas,” she says to them as we lead her to the bathroom, where we hide her in a stall with her feet up on the toilet. I race back to my cube, toss the bags under the bunk bed, and jump under the covers just as a cop comes by with his flashlight.
After count finishes and the cops leave, Ramón is with Adriana first. Then I go to be with her. But I’m having trouble getting hard. In the bags we ran back tonight, there’s a good little knot of heroin for me, and this is how I know how sick I am: I am more excited about that than about sex with this hooker.
She’s sweet and tries to help me. “Here, Papi, let’s try something else,” she says, taking me by the hand into a bathroom stall. But all I want to do is get back to my cube to get the dope. After we’re done, David runs her back to her ride near the perimeter, and I finally get high.
* * *
—
In late August, Nick calls again. The Garcia brothers’ trials are really happening. I’ve been subpoenaed as a witness, and I have to testify or risk being indicted on new charges.
I’m bussed back to New York. I don’t know how I’m going to navigate this. My whole life, I’ve been able to land on my feet, talk my way out of situations, play this side and that side, make it work. This time, I know I’m fucked. I just don’t realize yet quite how fucked.
27
2011: Badge of Courage
On my latest return to MCC, I’ve brought provisions: Suboxone, OxyContin, and Percocet, all plastic-wrapped and double-bagged and lodged in my lower bowel. “Nice to meet you, bro,” I tell my new cellie. “I need to take a shit, okay?” It’s a funny way to make a first impression, but he nods and steps out onto the range. I string my bedsheet to the top of the bunk, erecting a privacy curtain between the toilet and the rest of the cell, and settle in for the big push.
Even with layers of packaging, drugs often end up smelling like shit, and a lot of effort and thinking goes into transporting drugs between prisons while minimizing stank. If you show up on a yard with drugs that smell like ass, you won’t be able to get as good a price for them. No one wants the aroma of your shit on the bump of heroin in their throat. The best outer packaging is latex, which you can only get from a cop. Even then, some guys just make the stinkiest shits, and their drugs still smell bad. It’s a real problem. If you’re smoking a joint, and every time you take a rip you taste that shit, it totally takes away from this small piece of enjoyment you’re trying to eke out for yourself in a miserable environment.
* * *
—
I have to be stealthy about using my drugs. I don’t know anything about my new cellie, and I wait until he’s on the top bunk, and I’m on the bottom, before swallowing a pill. This time at MCC, I’m celled on the cadre unit, on the fifth floor, which does all the maintenance work. It’s easier for people to visit me here, and it’s good to see my family and friends. But the days are awkward and un
comfortable. At least during my first stay here I could say I was awaiting trial; this time around there’s no reason for me to be here except to cooperate, and everyone knows it. Half or more of them are doing the same thing, but they have the luxury of being able to tell whatever bullshit story they want, because their cases don’t get reported on in the New York Post.
I sleep a lot. I work out a bunch of times with a sweet Albanian kid named Emil, who’s cooperating in a major case, which he admits to me. But I’m starting to keep more to myself. I cell with a guy who works in the kitchen and has a hustle fulfilling orders from the supplies there, including eggs that he lowers on a string into the ducting, through a vent in our cell, to deliver to his customers.
During the run-up to the Garcia brothers’ trials, the prosecutors tell me they already have a new criminal complaint drafted, indicting me on charges of receiving contraband from Meg Salib and distributing it. They’re going to file it unless I go forward with testifying against Gabriel and Carlos.
I’m dug in about not testifying, and Mom and Dad are freaking out. At this point they think that whatever the government is saying, and whatever Nick is saying, must be right. Dad sends Ben Brafman, who represented me years ago, to see me. Ben says, “Listen, Cameron, you’re going to get ten years. If you stick with your cooperation agreement, you’ll be out of here in a year. You don’t want to be the guy watching your release date disappear behind you and you’re still in prison.”
I grab a book off the MCC book cart one day—Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage—and am deeply affected. I relate to deserter–turned–flag bearer Henry Fleming’s inner struggle, his fear of his own fear and his need to prove himself in battle.
After Nick negotiates an immunity agreement barring the prosecutors from using anything that comes up in my testimony against me, I reluctantly agree to get on the stand.
* * *
—
Carlos Garcia’s trial comes first, on October 3. Carlos’s lawyer, anticipating my testimony, spends part of his opening statement discrediting me. “Once upon a time there was a child born to a well-known family…Cameron Douglas is a manipulator…one of the most cunning, wily individuals” the jury will ever encounter. He notes the unusual nature of my deal with prosecutors, where I was sentenced before my cooperation was completed, implying that I received special treatment. When I’m called to the stand, he grills me about the agreement.
He tries to paint me as a callous sociopath who was indifferent to the potential repercussions for Meg Salib when she brought me the Xanax. I say that my feelings for Meg were real, and that while it was my idea for her to bring me the Xanax, I didn’t press her to do it.
Meg was only bringing me anxiety medication that I’d been legally prescribed and improperly denied; she was very upset on my behalf, and angry at the Bureau of Prisons. Erin was only bringing me heroin for the same reason. But to hear myself described as a manipulative master sociopath, to know that I’ve sunk so low that this is how some people might view me, is sobering. It feels like the lawyer is talking about somebody else. In a way, he is. Addiction is sociopathic. Prison, too, encourages survival behavior more than empathy. Could I have encouraged Meg, or Erin, or both of them, not to take such a risk? Sure, but from where I was sitting, and with everything I was going through, I wasn’t about to turn away someone’s help. The goal of any convict is to get what you can get, to get what you need, to open those pathways to the outside world.
I know what the lawyer is doing, and when he tries to impeach my original statement to the DEA, I seize the chance to distance myself from it. He asks whether, when the DEA arrested me, they told me I could face life imprisonment, and I acknowledge that they did. I say that Carlos didn’t supply any of the serious quantities of drugs I talked about in my original statement to the DEA. If I said otherwise right after my arrest, well, I was detoxing from heroin at the time.
I see Erin for ten minutes in the courtroom. After I’m taken out, she’ll testify that she only learned this morning, from the New York Post, about me and Meg Salib and the Xanax. She’s humiliated and heartbroken, and I feel like shit.
* * *
—
Gabriel’s trial is next, but after testifying as unhelpfully as possible against Carlos, I’ve made up my mind that I won’t go back on the stand. This is my opportunity to get right with myself. I feel too guilty about implicating them. I’m responsible for my situation. I’m ashamed by my early cooperation. At least I can start to climb out of the reputation hole I’ve dug for myself. I meet with the prosecutor and Nick, and I tell them flat-out that I won’t testify against Gabriel. They leave angry, but I feel only relief. Now that I’ve made my decision, a weight has lifted.
* * *
—
My heroin habit, at this point, is three or four times a day, but I’m doing much smaller amounts than when I was on the street. Six weeks after my arrival from Lewisburg, the stash of contraband opiates I brought with me is running low, but MCC is flooded with heroin. It now seems bizarre to me that during my first stint here we were so unsuccessful at obtaining it. On a Saturday, Manuel, an ex-boxer from the Bronx, brings me some bindles.
The next day, in the early afternoon, I’m sitting at the table in my cell, finishing off the dope. I’ve hung a towel over the small window in the door, just as I would if I were using the toilet. Guards tend to respect that, but one suddenly enters my cell. I try sliding my left hand into my sweat pants, rubbing the heroin residue out of the bindle, but the cop notices the movement.
“What’s in your left hand?”
“Nothing.”
“Stand up and put your hands on the wall.”
Fucking Manuel tipped them off about the heroin he sold me, to gain the favor of his own prosecutors. This is the kind of shady shit that happens in here all the time.
The guard gives me a pat-down. In my left pocket he finds the small piece of paper, inside a piece of plastic. “What’s this?” I don’t say anything. He starts looking around the cell more carefully. In a bag of Q-tips near the table he finds an orange speck, the last of my Suboxone, one-eighth of a pill.
He field-tests the Suboxone and it turns purple, falsely indicating that it’s heroin. There’s no powder left on the paper, but he field-tests it anyway, and it turns blue-pink, falsely indicating that it’s cocaine. I’m arrested. The guard says I have to give a urine sample, and at 2:17 p.m. he takes me to a bathroom, hands me a cup, and stands there while I do my business. They find traces of opiates in my urine. Then I’m transferred to the SHU.
When a guard comes to give me my personal property a few days later, I ask for my bottle of vitamin B, which immediately makes the cop suspicious. He takes the bottle and looks it over, unscrewing the cap and shaking up the pills inside. I breathe an inaudible sigh of relief when he puts the cap back on and hands me the bottle. There are four OxyContin pills in there, but fortunately they’re the same color as the vitamin B tablets.
The Oxies cushion my withdrawal, and the best way to do hole time is with drugs like that. When you’re spending twenty-three or twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, in a tiny cell, trying to manage an extraordinary amount of stress, an OxyContin or Percocet feels awfully nice.
When I get the write-up for the “shot,” as violations of prison regulations are called, I say that the orange stuff is Suboxone, which I got at Lewisburg, and that there’s no way the white powder on the paper was cocaine. They assume it was heroin. I improvise a mutating story about where it came from. I got it in the television room. I got it during a church service. I found it on the floor.
* * *
—
Three days after the arrest, I go before Judge Berman to plead guilty to a new count of possession of a narcotic. “We’re having a little too much drama here, Mr. Douglas.” He asks the prosecutor to tell him what’s happening. “So what does this mean?” Judge Berman asks. “You know, maybe I am naive. When I send somebody to the MCC or the
MDC”—the Metropolitan Detention Center, in Brooklyn—“or Lewisburg, I have an expectation that those places are well managed, safe, that this kind of unlawful behavior doesn’t go on. Is that wrong or are you all doing some investigation?”
The prosecutor says that the BOP turned the matter over to the FBI yesterday.
Judge Berman says that he’s sending me to MDC, and directs that I be subjected to random urine testing.
“God knows I am sorry,” I say.
My sentencing on the new charge is scheduled for December 21.
Gabriel’s trial date is postponed.
* * *
—
At MDC, I’m put in administrative segregation, aka the SHU, pending a Unit Discipline Committee hearing for a 112—drug use—and a Disciplinary Hearing Officer (DHO) hearing for a 113—possession of drugs. I’m despondent. Next month, November, is when I was going to become eligible for the RDAP program. “You were almost to the rehab part of your incarceration and you blew it,” Patsy Webb, our old family friend, writes me in a letter. As the mother of seven kids, she has never minced words. “I know that is the nature of addiction—but we have to change your mindset.” She shares a list of ten affirmations for me to use for directed meditation.
My last four Oxies are gone now, and I can feel the familiar junk sickness creeping back, my third time kicking heroin. It’s more bearable than the first two times, since my habit now involves much smaller quantities.
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