Mailer died peacefully surrounded by loved ones. His work will endure for as long as there are books and people to read them. Gotti Senior choked to death on his own blood while in solitary confinement in a prison hospital cell. John Gotti Junior is still a free man and a devoted father. Joe Stassi died alone in assisted living still believing that I had betrayed him by telling his story. His son remains at large. That should give me some indication going forward which path to follow, which division in my conflicted psyche to fortify and honor.
And it has. I rest my case. Let the troops lay down their arms. The artist won. And let the truce endure.
Afterword
A PLACE YOU NEVER WANT TO BE
IT HAS NOW been just more than thirty years since I was released from prison. Yes, thirty years. It hardly seems possible. The experience is still as much a part of who I am today as it was on the day I walked out of the front gate at the federal prison in Ashland, Kentucky. I may not think about it as much. I may not have the nightmares of being locked up in some abstract prison anymore. But I am still conditioned by the experience. It informs my sensibility. I am not easily intimidated. Nor do I bitch and complain about minor inconveniences. I still measure everything I am forced to endure, as well as everything I hear or read or see on TV or on the news or in the movies about crime, criminals, and prison life in America against my own experience of having lived in that world and having been locked up for eight years in the vast American federal prison system. I am still, and always will be, an ex-convict with all of the depth of experience, stigma, and advantages and limitations that entails.
When I read that James “Whitey” Bulger had been shipped from the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City to the United States Penitentiary in Hazelton, West Virginia, and that, within hours of his arrival, as he sat alone in his diaper in a wheelchair in a temporary holding cell awaiting formal classification and cell assignment, a couple of prisoners entered the unlocked cell and proceeded to beat Bulger to death with the old lock-in-the-sock prison sap, and cut his tongue out, and gouged his eyes out, I thought: Okay, good riddance. The guy had it coming. It is business as usual—that is what happens to high-level rats in the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Civilians less familiar with the way things work in the BOP might ask, “How could something like that happen?” How does a well-known rat like Whitey Bulger, easily the most infamous FBI informer in federal custody, how does he manage to get transferred to a prison like Hazelton in the first place? There had already been a couple of recent prisoner killings at Hazelton; it was known to be a serious joint. Other organized crime figures from mafia families who had been ratted on by Bulger were doing time there—convicts who are serious men serving life sentences for murder, men who have nothing to lose and only much to gain in underworld status and personal satisfaction by killing a famous and despised rat like Bulger.
Clearly, there is something wrong here. In the first place, given how well-known Bulger’s long history with the FBI as a Top Echelon Criminal Informant is to prisoners throughout the federal prison system, Whitey should have been in protective custody. He never should have been transferred to Hazelton in the first place, and he never should have been allowed in the general population or left alone in an open cell where other convicts could get their hands on him. Even if he declined PC, the Bureau should have been required to keep him separated from known organized crime figures and convict killers under what is known in the system as a separation order. Bulger should have been designated to a federal prison where there were no other organized crime figures who may have known Whitey or been ratted out by him, and so wanted him dead. He should have been locked up in one of several federal prisons where there are isolated, protected units specifically set up to house organized crime rats. None of this happened. Leading me to believe that Bulger was set up to be killed.
It must have been a raucous murder. One can only imagine that Bulger did not go quietly to meet his maker. Yet no one did anything to stop it. A killing like this can happen only with high-level compliance and even coordination by Bureau of Prisons officials from the top echelons in Washington, DC, and down to the warden at Hazelton, the captain and lieutenants on duty, and the unit guards in Receiving and Discharge where Bulger was to meet his unwelcome welcoming committee.
It makes perfect sense when you understand that prison staff, guards, and most administrators hate informers and jailhouse rats almost as much the convicts do. Snitches think they deserve special treatment; they expect to be coddled by the prison staff for having assisted law enforcement, and so they gripe and complain and make demands when they are not accorded the acceptance, comfort, and advantages they feel they deserve. This engenders resentment and even malice. Prison guards live, at least for the time they are on duty, in the same moral world as the convicts. From all I’ve read, Bulger was a pain in the ass to staff at every prison where he served time. Typical narcissist, he believed the institution should be run on his terms. Apparently, he was still running his games: manipulating a female contract employee into letting him use her cell phone to make unauthorized calls; signing his name to some other convict’s drawings and paintings so they could be sold to suckers on the street, with Whitey getting a piece of the proceeds. And just generally acting like he was special when the only thing special about him was his relationship with the FBI.
No sooner was Bulger summarily dispatched to that great penitentiary in perdition than an equally evil, perhaps an even more heinous human, the pedophile rapist and scam artist Jeffrey Epstein, met a similar fate at the federal holding facility in Manhattan, the Metropolitan Correctional Center. Here is another case where, to me at least, no matter what they say, it was a hit sanctioned, set up, and coordinated by prison staff under direction from higher-ups in the Bureau. There are two things you don’t want to be if you get locked up in the federal prison system at any of these higher-level institutions: a rat or a pedophile; Epstein was both. Maybe not an active rat, but a rat in the making—a potential rat with some major players on his snitch list. Perhaps he was already cooperating. Clearly, the guy had to go.
Again, fuck him. He got what he deserved—but not what we deserve. We deserve better: we deserve to know the truth of what goes on in our prisons and in our criminal justice system. We are told Epstein killed himself; that he somehow managed to strangle himself when he was on suicide watch. Oh, but wait; no, we’re told he had been taken off suicide watch. Of course—but, why? Who made that decision, and what was the basis of their reasoning? Was he no longer considered a threat to himself? Perhaps not. The man was a narcissist, after all. People like Epstein don’t usually kill themselves; they are convinced they are special and can get out of whatever unhappy situations they find themselves in. Hadn’t he managed to weasel his way out of previous sex charges? His lawyer claims Epstein was convinced he would beat this case as well. And, even if he had been taken off suicide watch, why was he provided with whatever means he supposedly used to choke himself to death?
Again, none of this adds up to anything except a well-coordinated BOP-sanctioned and -executed hit. I spent over two years in that facility, the MCC in Manhattan, as recounted in my previous book, Kingpin: Prisoner of the War on Drugs. I was housed on the same maximum-security floor as Epstein. It’s not easy to kill yourself in that place, especially when you’re as important a prisoner as was Epstein. There is nearly constant monitoring of prisoners such as Epstein or El Chapo or World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef. You don’t really have the opportunity or the uninterrupted time and privacy it takes to manage to hang yourself or choke yourself to death without a little assistance from either staff or a prisoner given the means and opportunity to help you die.
The truth is, we will never know the truth; we will never know what really happened to either Bulger or Epstein. The Bureau of Prisons may be the most impenetrable of government bureaucracies; they answer to no one outside the system. And for good reason: the bureau has responsibility for ho
using and containing some of the most sophisticated, richest, violent, and dangerous men and women criminals in the world. The bureau masters may claim with a reasonable degree of credibility that they need to keep their procedures and systems secret for security purposes.
They may issue some sanitized version of the events; they may even claim to be charging individuals involved in the incidents—transferring the warden at MCC for instance, which actually means giving him a promotion and a better position at a prison outside the city; or suspending a couple of guards, giving them a paid vacation. But neither investigation will expose any of what actually happened. There will never be any real consequences for the people who allowed and facilitated these killings. BOP officials may squawk that they are understaffed, and so they can’t monitor and control everything that goes on in their prisons, but that’s nonsense. The federal prison system is an extremely efficiently run gulag archipelago of more than one hundred prisons of varying degrees of security, ranging from low-level work camps to maximum security penitentiaries and even supermaxes and super-max Security Housing Units (SHUs) in several multilevel prison compounds. Rarely if ever do any of the one hundred thousand or so prisoners under their control escape from the medium or maximum security prisons, and there are few disturbances, riots, work stoppages, or hunger strikes—at least that we know of, because, as I say, we don’t really know what goes on in there. If, as Dostoyevsky wrote, “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons,” our prison system is proof we have entered into an Orwellian era of total government control, secrecy, and mendacity.
What I do know is that I made it out, I am free, and I am now more convinced than ever that no matter how tough it gets out here in the world at times, it beats the hell out of being locked up in the federal or state prison system. I am assured that to be a good citizen, a good American, means to be aware of what those in power are doing, whether it be waging foreign or domestic wars, building border walls, or separating families by locking up innocent people in government containment and concentration camps. It means to be ever vigilant that our leaders are never allowed to let the degree of civilization in the United States come to resemble anything like what goes on in our prisons. Or are we already there?
In the World Page 31