In the surreal seconds just standing there waiting for another punch to land on my face, I looked down at the spinning road. The snow was blowing through the beams of our headlights. I looked to see if Ann Marie was running. It was well after midnight in a blizzard, and I was drunk, in a fistfight, but that was my thought because this was the road where I had last seen her.
I bucked around and buried my head into Tom’s stomach. We worked along between the vehicles, punching away, slipping and then falling into the snow-banked ditch beside the road. Tom was getting the better of me. We struggled in the snow, swiping and falling and sometimes disappearing into the white.
“You’re an idiot,” he said. Somewhere above my eye I was bleeding. He was right, I was an idiot. Always joking, never serious about anything except basketball. It was always Tom who brought me back to where choices meet consequences. Hey, you going to actually take a book home? was the kind of thing he’d say in high school when I almost flunked out. We were a good match. I needed his dose of reality, and he needed somebody who could deal with his depressions. That was the contract of our friendship.
I aimed for his chin but my punch landed behind his ear.
Tom came from a good family. His dad, like many in David City, was a strict Catholic and a good lawyer. His mom was a teacher and attended the nondenominational church that my parents helped start. Because of that, Tom and I grew up almost like brothers, chasing and pounding each other when we were kids.
Tom had the brains to do anything he wanted. But he somehow couldn’t carry all his intensity back then—his bulb was too bright for his wiring.
“You know what? You’ve screwed up everything you’ve touched,” he said, sitting deep in the snow. He was right, dead so. His face was bleeding and so was mine.
“It’s cold,” I said. Blood was freezing on my face. We had become a couple of losers despite everything we had going for us—good families, good schools, great hometown.
“Well, maybe you’re my bad luck charm,” Tom said.
“Like it was my fault you flunked out of college?”
Now that you mention it, I was thinking. Yeah, he should have followed me to college to make sure I did my course work. So he had abandoned me long before I abandoned him.
I had attended a small college in Nebraska on a basketball scholarship but was kicked out a few weeks into the spring term. A coach, named Rich McGill, had taken a recruiting chance on me, and I returned the favor by attending every practice but cutting nearly every class. It must have been some form of academic suicide. I could see I wasn’t going to be the star of the team—I was just average—and that was a big surprise. Average was unacceptable.
In my first and last visit to the head office, the dean called me a jerk-off, and I returned the compliment. I think it was something similar to clinical depression—another small-town sports star forced to see he wasn’t so hot in the bigger world. It’s a common problem, but I didn’t digest it and move on like most do. I kept falling deeper into a self-pity that became the seed of self-destructiveness to come.
I called Tom, and he collected me and my stuff from the dorm and drove me back to David City. He was always the one I called, and he was always the one I listened to, because I knew he was smarter than I was. Instead of breaking the news to Mom and Dad, I went drinking with Tom, who toasted me with “It could be worse, brother.” Yes, it could.
I had a good family, same as Tom, so nobody could understand what my problem was, including me.
Tom didn’t want me to leave town for the Navy, but I had joined up out of necessity. I had been working as a riveter in a truck trailer factory, living in an apartment furnished with a cruddy couch, a wobbly kitchen table, a rusty stove, and a single bed. I ran out of money and Dad bailed me out, but insisted I sign up for military service. Since joining the Navy meant leaving David City, the idea seemed decent.
After boot camp and then Stinger missile school, I was sent to Manamah, Bahrain, an island just east of Saudi Arabia in the Persian Gulf.
Within three months I was promoted to a position of authority. I helped administer a group of men who protected U.S. warships in the Gulf with shoulder-mounted Stinger missiles. When my commander was away I was given some authority and handled it well. I was good at my job and was succeeding at something. But for some reason I needed to find a whole new way to fail. It’s funny, really, that I had spent all my growing up years rebelling against authority, and here I was deep inside the most powerful organization in the world, the U.S. military. So I guess I had to rebel against my own self.
Most days ended with me consuming over a dozen beers and half a bottle of Jose Cuervo, one shot at a time, with my buddies.
All of the Stinger detachment members lived in the same apartment complex. It was like a frat house. There was a guy named Ryan Thowson who was a lot like me. He came from a devout Christian family and was now enjoying his newfound freedom halfway around the world from them. Another guy, I partied with daily was Jude. His parents were hippies; they had named him after the Beatles song “Hey Jude.” He spent most of his time in Bahrain drinking, as a way to pay them back for the name. And there was another kid from somewhere in the hills of Kentucky who could drink whole bottles of liquor at a time and reminded me of the inbreeds from the movie Deliverance.
We were all under twenty-one and in a country where it was legal for us to drink, so we did. It almost killed me. “Acute pancreatitis” is what they called it. For three days it felt like I had swallowed hot coals.
On the third night I collapsed in front of my roommates and the girls they had invited over. They loaded me into a cab that dropped me off at a Bahraini hospital. The hospital hooked me up to three IVs, a catheter, and a stomach tube. I wasn’t that concerned until I learned that the hospital was not allowing my boss, the chief petty officer, to come visit me. Instead, the base chaplain came and started asking me about God. That made me nervous.
My family was advised by the Navy that I might not live, but after a week I started to recover. When I was well enough, the Navy sent me to Bethesda to finish out the remaining months of my two-year enlistment. While in D.C. I quit drinking but ran with Navy guys who introduced me to rave clubs and party drugs.
I should have re-enlisted, but the idea of being aboard a ship with no girls and no beer seemed like prison to me, which, as it turned out, was ironic. So I went home to Nebraska.
I lived with high school friends in Lincoln but ended up falling apart. Like I said before, I moved into my parents’ basement. I was arrested and charged with writing bad checks. Sometimes it was a result of poor bookkeeping; other times it was the result of desperation because I was out of money. Anyway, Dad bailed me out, but there was to be a trial down the road. I suddenly figured I should re-enlist in the Navy and earn a degree in something, or make a career in the military. That would move me out of the basement and out of the shadow of Dad’s anger. I would just start over. I drove to Omaha to re-enlist. Good idea.
Unfortunately, my pending charges were not what the Navy was looking for. They turned me down.
Right after that Tom and I fought in the snow. We fought slower and slower and the snow flocked us white as snowmen in the ditch as we got up and fell down. We should have died from hypothermia.
Tom’s frosted face looked beaten up, so I knew mine must be worse.
“I have been a better friend to you than you’ve been to me,” I said. This was the meanest thing I could think of to say; our friendship was the only solid thing either of us really cared about.
“That’s bull.” For a second I thought he would throw another punch, but we were finished. And he was right: it was bull. We always had our differences, and we’d had a few fist-fights, but he had been my best friend always. “It ain’t easy havin’ pals,” was a line we sometimes repeated from Young Guns, the movie about Billy the Kid and his friend Charley Bowdre.
We finally dragged ourselves out of the snow and drove back to town, his trunk
flapping up and down.
We didn’t talk for a week. When our bruises had turned from purple to a greenish yellow, he called, wanting to meet at Don’s Bar on the town square, down the street from the bar with the Vietnam vet bartender. He said he had an idea.
It was a chilly night, but spring was settling back in. Tom was already at the bar when I arrived. There were a few other customers sprinkled around, including an old man nursing a single shot of something at the far end. I bought a beer and took a swig. Tom clinked my bottle.
“Sorry about all that,” he said.
“Me too.”
“We’re not doing too good,” he continued.
“No, we’re not.” We sat and drank in silence.
I was working at the time for a farmer who had a blueberry-muffin gut that fluffed over his belt. He was an acquaintance of Dad’s, but he treated me like the cow dung he made me scoop. One day he said I was a moron—actually he said something way worse—for not knowing how to run a machine he hadn’t yet shown me how to operate. I walked away instead of punching him.
Dad was after me to find my own place, because he saw me going into a dark spiral and was worried I would drag my two younger brothers down with me. I couldn’t disagree.
Tom did have an idea. I could always tell when he was about to throw an idea on the table. He turned his beer bottle around in its sweat puddle as he built up steam to say it. He cleared his throat and glanced around behind us.
“So what do you think about us robbing a bank?” he said.
Most people would have laughed that off. But to me, the world was newly framed in that instant. Everything once bleak was now interesting and new. The beauty of the idea was that we would either go down like Butch and Sundance or we would have the money to really live. Either way, it would be a big improvement. Over the next few beers we began to make our plan. We decided we would drive north on a Saturday to look for a proper bank.
For the first time in a long time, we were excited about the future.
Joining gangs and other mutual protection societies in prison isn’t like joining a fraternity. Some guys arrive having been in prison a time or two before, possibly with longtime gang affiliations from the joint or from their old neighborhoods. For others, there is a gradual process of assimilation into different circles. But not all circles are gangs. Some, like me, eventually find maybe half a dozen friends who seem human—people who share something in the way of goals or attitude. Maybe they are the guys who can actually imagine getting out someday and not coming back, and who are trying to prepare themselves for that day. Maybe they can imagine each other having successful lives when released. They will be construction contractors or ministers or auto mechanics—not meth cooks or dealers. Years later, on the outside, they will recognize each other, even if they’ve never met, thanks to tattoos, a kind of respectful straight talk, and a sort of unflappable manner that comes from living in danger long enough that nothing really bothers you.
Some guys will cluster in prison because they share particular interests—something as general as music or as specific as a favorite sports team. Their little affinity group is called a “car.” A car can be any activity, and not necessarily related to gangs. For example, some men turn to religion and spend their free time studying and praying together; there are many monasteries, churches, synagogues, ashrams, and mosques in our prisons. Other men simply exercise together. The more gang-oriented men usually want to make some money in prison, usually by selling drugs so they can gamble on the televised games or so they can buy drugs and alcohol for themselves. Or maybe they are still running things on the outside. Gangs are accustomed to having some of their executives on involuntary loan to the state or federal government. And some guys are just thugs and don’t know how to be around anyone but thugs. You might belong to several cars for your several interests. Some cars might be mixed race, but that’s rare, except among the church guys.
My first car was the “iron pile.” Most guys in prison work out, but some of us took weight training very seriously, working out in sub-zero temperatures through the winter. Early on, Ryan invited me to join his workout car at 6:30 each morning. These guys were my first ring of protection.
There were also some other men who took me into their circle. These were men of reasonable, even friendly attitude, intelligent but unassuming—the type who weren’t looking to make trouble, guys you could absolutely trust. I usually ate with them. And there were the 047s. The last three digits of your prisoner number indicate your home state. The Nebraska boys were the 047s. It should have been 037, as Nebraska was the thirty-seventh state, but whatever. Together with some guys from the neighboring states of Iowa, Indiana, and Illinois, we generally watched out for each other.
Your car might be plugged in to a gang, or maybe not. If you’re plugged in, you’re part of Gangster Disciples, Latin Disciples, Latin Kings, Vice Lords, Bloods, Serenos, Dirty White Boys, Mafia, Aryan Brotherhood, or one of several others. Black guys from California might be Crips or Bloods. If they were in a California prison, the Crips and Bloods would be trying to kill each other, but exiled in faraway Pekin, Illinois, they hung together and didn’t fight—just as black ants and red ants floating on the same twig will be more interested in the water than in each other. The Chicago gangs also worked to keep the peace between all the gangs, but for a different reason: their families were close by, and any war between the gangs would result in either a transfer far from their people or lockdowns that would cost them visiting time.
If none of your cars are plugged in, you are unaffiliated. Whether your car is affiliated or not, the other guys in your car are the people who will have your back. When people know that you have representation, they are less likely to rob, steal, or sucker you. But membership also comes with a price: if your group has one idiot, one guy who runs his mouth, that guy can cause a train wreck for everyone. It happens a lot. But if there is going to be any protection for anybody, you have to seem very comfortable with the idea of fighting to protect a guy for the dumbest of reasons.
You can try to serve your time outside a circle of protection, but chances are you will be stolen from, beat on, and generally abused. You may survive on your own for a time, but eventually something will happen. Maybe your locker will be emptied while you’re on the yard. So you don’t really have a choice.
Some guys are just so far out of it that they can’t find comrades. Maybe they’re too angry or bizarre to deal with, or maybe they are chesters or snitches who live in constant fear. Maybe they are very introverted or have an actual antisocial disorder. Over time these loners become magnets for everyone’s anger and darker instincts.
I saw them walking alone and knew it might someday be me. Not one person in Pekin knew that my codefendants and I had cooperated with the government. At any moment someone could transfer into Pekin who knew it, and I would be viewed much differently. So I looked at each new guy coming in, just to see if he was someone who would know and who would tell. I knew it was bound to happen.
Tyler, off in another prison, was my main concern. He was the guy who had sold us dope and guns and stolen cars. Even though he had never robbed a bank himself, the feds had him as an accessory. Between the people who had already cooperated with the feds at the time of my arrest and some physical evidence they had gathered, there was more than enough proof establishing Tyler’s guilt.
I figured he would sign a plea agreement like Tom, Craig, and I had signed—Craig was my partner in robberies two, three, and four. But Tyler decided—maybe based on poor advice from his attorney or maybe just from stubbornness—that he should plead innocent and go to trial.
The three of us who signed were bound by our plea agreement, compelling us to testify to everything we knew. We hadn’t imagined anyone would be outside the plea, as the chances of serving a very long sentence or even life if you were found guilty were too high. With my plea I would serve twelve to fifteen years; without it, eighty-five to ninety. I had discusse
d the situation with my parents, and I knew the longer sentence—effectively a life sentence—would be as crushing to them as it would be to me. There was no reason to back away from my plea deal, because there was no way it would do Tyler any good.
Three days before his trial I talked to Tyler through a wall at the county jail and begged him to accept the deal. The day before trial I called his attorney and asked him to reconsider. He was playing Russian roulette, but with all the chambers loaded. It didn’t make sense.
Tyler walked past the holding cell with vengeance in his eyes. After my testimony, he changed his mind, or his attorney changed it for him, and he pled guilty and received a ten-year sentence. That was probably three years longer than it could have been.
He was somewhere in the federal prison system now, and it isn’t that big a world. I knew something would happen. Even though the majority of federal inmates have cooperated at some level, they won’t talk about it, and they’ll abuse anyone known to have cooperated. They talk endlessly about how the blankety-blank snitches should die. It’s hypocritical, but that’s the way it is.
I didn’t consider myself a snitch, given my circumstances. Nevertheless, my paranoia grew more intense the longer I was at Pekin. I felt something coming, my luck running out, or as if I was in a nightmare where you don’t have any clothes on, but no one has noticed yet.
I still thought Bee suspected. He sometimes talked about what they did to snitches in his old gang. He gave me a speech about snitches once, about why they were such a big issue.
“Shon, you know about Dante’s Inferno? Do you know what Dante said was the lowest circle of hell? The deepest region of hell, level nine, is reserved for the sin of betrayal. I mean, like, killing someone is only seven. Dishonesty is eight. But betrayal, in this world and the next, that’s the pit, bud. That’s it.” He would look at me like he knew everything about me.
What’s strange is that later when I learned more about the law, I realized that a person who had committed the crime he had, with his lengthy criminal history, could not possibly have received such a lenient sentence without some sort of additional help from the prosecution. Either that or his mama knew the judge.
Law Man: My Story of Robbing Banks, Winning Supreme Court Cases, and Finding Redemption Page 5