We had a standard for selecting a bank. The town had to be big enough for the bank to contain more money than an ATM, yet small enough not to have a local police station. It couldn’t be a county seat or it would have a sheriff’s office. And we needed to see the FDIC decal on the door, because we had no clue that all banks are insured. We wanted to know that we were robbing the government, not the farmers, who are robbed enough. Besides, we would rather have cops coming after us with pistols than farmers with shotguns and rifles.
We drove through every little village in northeastern Nebraska. That’s what bank robbers had to do before Google Earth and all that—you had to do it analog.
After a long day we reached the town of Petersburg. The bank met our specs. It was on the main downtown street but only two blocks from the highway, our escape route. Although it was a town of only a few thousand people, it looked quite prosperous.
We should have stopped there while still in the planning stage. We felt bad about it already, and we hadn’t done anything yet. But somehow, together, the sum of our combined resolve pushed us forward, contrary to our common sense and moral upbringing. As Homer said, “There is a strength in the union even of very sorry men.” There is strength especially in the union of sorry men.
I heard Bee Dog stirring. I heard the stream of urine landing in the toilet and the trickle of water in the sink. He brushed his teeth, gurgled a time or two, washed his face, and left the cell. When it’s early in the morning and your cell is only a few feet by a few feet, you can hear everything, from a yawn to the sound of cracking ankle bones taking the day’s first steps.
A controlled move was under way—when you’re allowed to go outside the housing unit to get some air or head to an activity or to your prison job. I went to see the outdoor recreation area, where rusted free weights were stacked. Near that, just inside, were a few dilapidated stationary bikes and a pull-up bar. I jumped on an exercise bike, and it felt great. A black guy was executing pull-up after pull-up. We exchanged nods.
It felt exhilarating to be in motion, since I had been living in matchboxes for ten months. My leg muscles began to warm and ache but in a good way. I breathed deeply and closed my eyes and cranked my legs faster. I could be riding anywhere, going wherever I wanted.
Two black men stepped into the building and ripped the guy from the pull-up bar. I kept cycling.
They punched him until he hit the ground, then kicked and stomped him with their steel-toe boots.
The prison factory that employs several hundred in Pekin is a metal fabrication plant. That means most cons wear steel-toe safety boots and smuggle a variety of metal pieces out from the factory to their cells. The metal is fashioned into a number of weapons. For large, imminent problems, two-foot swordlike knives are made. For smaller worries, easily concealed shivs are tucked up shirtsleeves.
I don’t claim to be a genius, but a metal fabrication factory seemed like a poor choice for a prison industry; only a gun or explosives factory would have topped it.
Pieces of the poor guy’s scalp were starting to come loose; I watched pink chunks of hairy flesh splatter and stick against the wall as they kicked him. The wall was becoming more saturated with blood with every kick. I kept cycling, watching it like I saw that sort of thing twice a day. When they were about done, one of the guys gave him a good-bye stomp, bringing his boot straight down on the man’s head.
“Man, don’t mess with us no more.”
The downed man mumbled, “My bad.” In the blood around him were pieces of broken teeth.
“You got that right. Next bad be your last.”
After they left I helped him to his knees. He asked me to find a guard to help take him to medical, which I did.
That evening Bee Dog listened to the story of my first day.
“Crips,” he said. “I heard about it in the unit. Probably the guy stiffed them in a drug deal, or he told a guard too much.” He then began a prison life primer. He was in a sort of lotus position on his bunk, with his arms moving around as he spoke—an urban Buddha. He told me how each day is a game of red light, green light, using his hands to flash the imaginary traffic lights overhead. I was in my upper bunk, but I could watch his animated shadow cast from his reading light.
There are set times throughout the day, he explained, when you can make your move from one activity to the other. You have ten minutes. The controlled moves are announced on the PA system like class changes in high school.
“Then, bam, red light. You gotta be where you’re going.”
I had already learned much of that, but he gave me the finer points of what you can and cannot get away with.
There are set times for counts, he explained, when they come through to make sure you haven’t gone home without saying good-bye. The counts are at midnight, 3 A.M., 5 A.M., 4 P.M., which is a stand-up count so they can see you and not some dummy in bed, and 10 P.M., which is lights-out. More guards come through late at night and usually just look in your cell.
“But the sadistic ones, like that punk Israel, will bang on the window with their flashlights until you wake up,” he said.
“Why do they do that?”
“Because they can.”
I learned that you wash your own clothes, and you buy overpriced soap for that. Beds must be made and wrinkle-free by 7:30 A.M. You are to keep yourself clean and your shirt tucked in and your hair decent. That I knew.
“Things are looser on the weekends,” he said.
I annotated the inmate handbook in my mind. I wanted to know about etiquette in the chow line, in the workout room, and how to avoid an ambush in the shower. He said it was all about friends and alliances.
“In the morning you don’t just sit down in the chow hall anywhere you want. You sit where you’re invited. Maybe your Nebraska homeboys will invite you; there’s a group of them. Maybe I will invite you to our table, but maybe not, depending on whether the other guys think you look like a douche. Otherwise just ask first before you sit down somewhere. Doing this wrong is the first big mistake you can make—”
“But, won’t everyone think—” I was worried that I would look weak.
“There are no buts,” he said. “Respect is the only thing these guys got left to steal, and the place where you give it up to these dummies is mainly in the chow hall.”
“What about when I’m working out?”
“I’ll get to that. When you get to the yard, you ask before you pick up weights, and you ask if this machine is okay for you to use. People will tell you if it’s reserved for someone else or for some other group. So you ask if you don’t know. You shouldn’t have problems unless you go looking for problems. Don’t ask like you’re scared; ask like you don’t want to touch it if it’s someone else’s.”
“Anything else?”
“Always watch where you’re going and don’t bump into nobody or step on their feet. Stick close with your friends until you have a chance to prove you’re not to be messed with. It’s like animal training in the circus. The animals got to know you are not to be messed with.” He held up an imaginary whip and chair; I saw it in shadows because he was on the bunk below me.
I thought about Bee Dog after things got quiet. I could imagine him headed back to the West Coast after all this, finding a good woman he had probably known before, taking care of her and being taken care of. He would drink Coronas and eat fish tacos with his old gang friends, all mellowed and nearly harmless now. Maybe he would work a job as a mechanic in a motorcycle shop or work behind the counter at a biker bar. Maybe he would have a daughter from somewhere who would come back into his life, and they would become great friends. He surely had a streak of kindness in him, I could see that.
At breakfast he invited me to sit at his table as his guest. He introduced me to some other Nebraska guys as they passed. Everyone I met was white, though most at Pekin are black.
There is just no way around the fact that if you’re white in prison most of your friends will be white. If
you’re black or Hispanic, you are going to be in those groups. Outside prison I had black friends, but inside those towered fences everything had an edge to it. The worst characteristics of every racial group, including whites, become exaggerated—almost like a parody skit, but with weapons.
That evening I had more questions for Bee Dog.
“So how many guys are carrying knives in here? Do I need something?”
“Hold on.” He left the cell and came back a moment later.
“Like this?” He pulled from his sleeve a long steel rod with a wooden handle. The rod was needle-sharp. He had borrowed it from next door like a cup of sugar.
“You don’t see knives so much as pokers like these,” he said. “These are better than knives because you can run it straight through a man’s liver. But what’s better than one of these is a lot of friends. Don’t get in trouble right off. If, later on, you need to take somebody down, you can get something like this easy enough, like I just did. Really, man, you can kill someone with a toothbrush if you sharpen the end and stick it in his jugular.”
Bee was making stabbing motions with a crazy Heath Ledger, Joker-type grin, and I was hoping I’d never see the day when I’d seriously need a weapon.
“My best advice is just don’t take insults from anybody. Don’t let things fester. Somebody messes with you, you go postal right then before anybody has any big weapons. If you get a reputation for allowing people to call you a punk, soon they’re calling you something else. And next they’re stealing from you or worse. It’s best to take your lumps, even against someone twice your size.”
This was all very good advice. I could sense that.
“In any prison, man, no matter how bad, you don’t go poking people unless you are told to.” He said that as he wagged the sharp rod. “And if that happens, man, you’ll be given the weapon you need. Otherwise the peace is kept by deterrence, by mutually assured destruction, like the Cold War. Having friends in prison is the surest way to stay safe. And if everybody knows you will do what it takes, they will do the same for you, and nobody is going to mess with you because you got a big force shield around you.” He was still standing up with the poker and made a sci-fi buzzing sound as he waved it over me and my bunk. “Nobody keel you ’cause we here to shee-ld you.”
That was maybe rap number twenty already. Bee Dog was always rapping and rhyming. He was going to be a rap star someday. About 80 percent of the guys in prison have that as a business plan.
Every afternoon during the weekdays, a few minutes after the stand-up inspection at 4 P.M., a guard lugs a big plastic crate of mail into the dayroom and starts calling names. Most of the men hover around him, hoping and sometimes silently praying—their lips move—to hear their names called. Some hang out on the balcony, and some stay in their unlocked cells so they don’t look stupid if their names aren’t called. Some never get mail. Some subscribe to magazines and catalog mailing lists so they won’t always walk back to their cells empty-handed.
There was nothing for me at first, but then I received a letter from an elderly doctor in David City. Dr. Jack Kaufman was a friend of the family, a friend of most families there. It was just a few scribbled lines to say that I was missed in town and that he was praying for me. It seemed strange that someone would take the time and trouble to do that—write or pray—for someone he barely knew.
Growing up, I had seen him walking all over town making his rounds. He walked with some difficulty, his head slightly more bowed as the years passed. I didn’t know him well, so his note was unexpected. I looked at it as if it were some artifact from a distant world I once knew. I appreciated the kindness. When his second letter arrived, I realized he was set on becoming a part of my prison experience; he understood that prison, over many years, wears away a big part of you, and whether it wears away the good part or the bad part is the question.
There were competing truths battling within me. The first was “You are from a good family, from a good town, and though you screwed up royally, you will recover, make things as right as you can, and have a good life.” The second truth was “You’re a thug who robbed banks and will always be a thug. You’ll probably spend your life shuffling between prison terms and crappy jobs.” The letters from the doctor and others helped to keep the brighter possibility alive.
I was not a religious man, but it did strike me that, if there were some real Christians in the world, meaning people who actually acted a bit like Jesus might, then the old doctor was surely one of them.
I saved the letters from him and from my family, and some evenings in an effort to feel not so alone I reread them, sequentially, under my breath, one right after another in the same way a monk repeats a mantra. It was as close as I could come to praying.
Mom wrote often, usually including a reminder that God was at work in our lives, and I had better think about that. More than once she told me my plight was small potatoes compared to the burdens of others, such as Job in the Old Testament, who kept his faith in spite of everything thrown at him. Her letters were full of love for me, and full of news about the family and her new job at KV Vet Supply, the company at the edge of town owned by Raymond Metzner, Ann Marie’s father. I thought about the fact that Mom saw Ann Marie there.
Ann Marie was the girl who was always running. In high school, when she was a cheerleader for the Catholic school, and when our school was playing against their team during the holiday basketball tournament, the sight of her would make me lose concentration.
After high school she ran cross-country at Creighton and in the Boston Marathon. I would see her out running, and I would wonder what it would be like to talk to her. The few times I did talk to her back in high school she seemed kind of shy.
In a town of pretty girls she was, to me, the prettiest, especially when she ran by in a T-shirt and shorts. She had emerald green eyes, long dark hair, and a beautiful smile that would creep out from under her ball cap. She was not sort of, or kind of, she was, in fact, my fantasy, and it seemed odd that my mother was seeing her in an office, just doing the kind of work that regular mortals do.
Dad would sometimes write his own letter or add a note to Mom’s. He would mostly tell me about things happening at Grass Valley, the farm where he worked and where I basically grew up. My arrest had taken a toll on him, and I was not his only big problem, since my brother Brett was serving time, too, thanks to me. I hadn’t wanted Brett anywhere near the bank jobs, but he knew what I was doing because there are no secrets between brothers.
Brett witnessed me living the fast and easy life and said he would rob a bank with his friends if I didn’t let him in on a job. I finally gave in, kind of. I told him there was no way he could come inside a bank or touch a gun, but if he would provide a getaway car, I would give him a taste of the loot. I thought that would be enough to provide a thrill; then I could chase him away. But that was the bank job where it all came down, and he was an accomplice. Of my many sins, this was the worst, and the hardest for me to forgive myself for. Brett received a short sentence, being a juvenile. But it’s hard for me to know how deeply my father must have hated that I did that.
On the road into David City from the state highway, a billboard promotes our town. One evening in June 1999, as Brett and I were settling into different prisons, someone spray-painted over it. My brother Brook told me about it when I called home that Friday.
“What’s it say?”
“You don’t want to know,” he said.
“Yes, I do.”
“It says, right under the ‘Welcome to David City’ line, something like ‘Home of the Hopwood crime family.’ ”
“Did Mom and Dad see it?”
“I think everyone has seen it.”
We were both quiet on the phone.
After the call I sprinted up to my cell where I slept all day long and most of the next day and the next. I emerged only for a week of obsessive exercise.
Someone in David City had mercy and replaced the billboard.
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My younger sisters, Samantha and Kristin, were taking abuse, too. The kids at school would taunt them until they cried. Nobody in school wants to be different in a bad way. They never complained to me; they just took it, mainly because Mom kept them focused on their own lives, not mine. She had to be brave for the girls, for Brook, for Dad, and for herself. That was a lot. She worried mostly about Dad, whose health seemed off.
After those days of horror, Dad carried a few more wrinkles and a little less enthusiasm for life. He was a dedicated worker, the only way he knew to be, but he may have been on automatic pilot. He was not one of those fat, rosy-cheeked farmers, poured into their overalls each morning; he more resembled, except for the John Deere cap, a Wyatt Earp with his mustache and Levi denims.
His father was tough, too—strong-willed with a temper. Dad must have fought against him all the way. As a young man and a young father, Dad had drunk and gambled too much. When my brother Brook and I were toddlers, before the other kids were born, our family moved farther west to Kearney, Nebraska, so he and Mom could start over.
I was the only kid old enough to remember when Miller Lite beer cans and empty bags of Red Man chew littered my dad’s pickup. But living out there on the horizon, he was transformed. One day he just believed in God and became a Christian. I don’t know if it was Mom’s patience and love or God’s that got him there, but something did. From then on he was a responsible father and husband.
We moved back to the circle of family in David City, and Dad became well respected around town. He organized the community basketball program for elementary and junior high kids, just because he enjoyed coaching them. “I like yelling at other people’s kids” is the way he put it. By the time we boys had moved out of the house, he had become an assistant coach for the high school team, I think because he missed the camaraderie of his own boys.
Law Man: My Story of Robbing Banks, Winning Supreme Court Cases, and Finding Redemption Page 3