Law Man: My Story of Robbing Banks, Winning Supreme Court Cases, and Finding Redemption

by Hopwood, Shon

  She was quiet; she was crushed. I called her to apologize, but she wouldn’t take my call. Fine. I didn’t deserve her and I should let the clean break stand. Just the same, when I woke up the next day, my heart ached. I tried calling a few times again because I couldn’t stand it. She didn’t pick up.

  So I was going to be who I was, a jerk in prison. It occurred to me before the hooch wore off that I was about the only guy in there without tattoos. Being different had always been my way, but just the same you watch guys getting inked and you think, well, if I ever did get one, what would it be? That question rolls around in your head all the time for years until you finally know what it would be, and what it would look like, and sometimes you look down or around at your skin and are surprised the tattoo isn’t there, like somebody stole it. You have your phantom tattoo and it becomes a part of who you are. So I finally figured I would let the thing have its own dignity, its own place in the visible world, and I didn’t even have to ask who the best tattoo artist was. It was Reaper, the guy with the swastika on his forehead.

  “Stop staring at it, man,” he said when I went to sit down with him and talk about something for my back. “I mean, you got one, too, man.”

  I asked him what he meant.

  “I mean, every white person has one of these right here, whether or not they want to think about it or admit it. I just put mine out there so it’s honest. I bet you don’t want one, do you, Shon?”

  “Not a backward one like yours.”

  “Cut it out, man.”

  It was our longstanding joke. I had told him maybe a year earlier, when I learned he had tattooed his own forehead, that he had done it backward. He was irate. He had stormed into my cell when he heard that I was saying that around. I was giving him a hard time just because I didn’t much like the look of it.

  “How do you know, man?” I asked him. “How do you know you didn’t do it backward?”

  He fell into my trap. He jumped over to the mirror above the cell’s sink and he pointed to it. “Because I can see it, man!” he said.

  “But you’re looking in the mirror,” I reminded him. He stormed out. He didn’t have it backward, but it was fun to make him have to check with his friends.

  I had stopped torturing him months ago when I first started thinking maybe I would ask him for a tat.

  “I was thinking of another design, and on my back,” I now told him.

  I had brought him a candy bar and a pop, which are not inconsequential host gifts. He had about finished both in the first minute.

  “I was thinking of just a little Celtic cross and some words around it, like maybe ‘my cross to bear.’ ”

  “What the hell does that mean? And why would you want a cross?”

  I had been giving guys a hard time about religion. I had been using my legal logic to make mincemeat of their irrational beliefs. But maybe I was one of those people who protesteth too much, and was just covering my own insecurity about my beliefs. Anyway it was the tattoo I had come to see in phantom form, and it had a life of its own and wanted a place on my body. At least I wouldn’t have to look at it. If I were to get killed in prison and my body was sent home, maybe it would be a final message to my folks, that I had been listening and that maybe they would see me again. And, really, I was still dealing with a lot of guilt and maybe one way to get this behind me was to literally put it behind me. I think there were a lot of reasons.

  We set a date a few Saturdays away. He was a busy tattoo artist and he actually had an appointment book. He needed it not only because he was busy, but because he had been a meth addict and he was very slow to process things. You could say something to him and sometimes he would just stare at you for a while, letting the message move from his ears to his brain in the way that a lazy cat explores flower beds. Eventually his brain would receive the message and it would process it and then send the cat to his tongue. In addition to his delayed responses, most of his bones had been broken in motorcycle crashes.

  All that aside, Reaper was a truly nice guy if you happened to be white, and even if you were black and he liked you. I never understood how he could wear all those white supremacy tattoos and then be friends with black guys. He was a big, strong man whose arms were twenty inches around. He had long but balding hair.

  When the day arrived, I watched him clean his equipment as he laid things out on my bunk. That’s the thing you worry about, but he had a good reputation for not causing infections—you even have to worry about AIDS, of course. So I wanted to see the alcohol flow all over his homemade electrical tattoo pen. It did.

  His pen was like most of the ones you see in prison. You start with a small electrical motor. We used the one from the beard trimmers they sold at commissary. You have to find a wheel that goes around at about the right speed, then somehow attach a little arm to one edge of that wheel so the arm will go back and forth like a piston on a camshaft when the wheel turns.

  The needles were made at the prison metal factory and then smuggled out. They were really just sharpened wire that jabbed in and out when it was attached to that vibrating thing. You run the needle through the body of an old ballpoint pen with the ball removed. The body of the pen is secured with a bracket and often some tape to the motor. Now you have a pen that, when attached to power, has a tiny needle stabbing in and out where the ball of the ballpoint pen used to be. You have a supply of tattoo ink that you bought from a guard. Wait, did I say that out loud? I mean ink that you bought from an inmate. You have a few drops of that in a toothpaste cap, which the artist holds in his left hand if he is tattooing with his right. That’s how it works.

  Every few seconds you dip the pen in the ink and then go back to the skin. The needle being just a sharp wire, the whole thing hurts considerably more than tattoos received outside prison, but even pain can be a way to kill time.

  “When I get right over your backbone, this is going to hurt like hell,” he said. “But don’t flinch.”

  “I won’t.”

  We were in my cell, with me facing the door. I was to tell him if I saw a guard coming—my celly, Robbie, who had roomed with Reaper a few times, was watching, too. Tattooing is against the rules, and tattoo equipment is contraband, but many of the guards look the other way. Sometimes, when a friendly guard was on duty, Reaper would tell him he was going to be doing some work in a particular cell and would the guard please stay away, and the guard would agree to that.

  Then you hear the buzz of the contraption and you bend over the back of a chair. It’s not quite like the sound of a dentist’s drill, but I was put in mind of it. Prison is so noisy that it was just another sound, lost in all the clank and clatter and TV laughter and sports cheers and private sobbing.

  Maybe a criminal is someone whose good luck comes from someone else’s bad luck. If so, I was a criminal to Annie. Her difficulty with anorexia was probably the one thing that made her need a truly captive audience like me, someone safe, far away, who would just listen, and who wouldn’t impose expectations. That was good luck for me. But I hoped, in turn, that my situation had provided some good luck for her. The one good thing about being locked away is that it really did give me ample time to think about her in an exceptional way and know her as perhaps no one else could.

  That doesn’t mean I have ever understood anorexia. It is a mystery. You can try to interpret it, but the more you know the less you understand. You can see it sometimes in the animal kingdom, where animals deprived of food morph into a panic of overactivity that makes their situation worse. It’s like a short circuit of some kind. And, of course, there are cultural and psychological forces that contribute. But anything I might say about it would cause experts, armchair psychologists, and others who have witnessed it to say, no, that’s not it at all. It’s something else. That may be the answer: it’s a lot of things.

  I admired how she dealt with it head-on. She studied it relentlessly in an effort to hold mental power over it. Sometimes it would sneak back and grab her, but sh
e would struggle away from it again, sometimes just in the nick of time, before there was nothing left.

  Part of her just didn’t feel comfortable in this world, didn’t feel truly loved, no matter how much true love was given. Imagine being terribly hungry for food all the time but never being satisfied by what you receive. It’s like that, but the hunger is for love, and the brain is wrongly wired to think that the way to obtain it is to starve the body. We like to think we can just see or hear the truth and it will overrule the wrong ideas in our heads, but that is not the way it works, is it?

  It is very hard work to disable our self-destruct circuits, and particularly hard work for some kinds of faulty wiring. Mine was easier than hers: the wrong wires were showing themselves and I was clipping them and putting them right. It wasn’t that easy for Annie, and I was coming to understand that. You have no idea how much courage it takes some people to do things that to all outward appearances seem routine. You don’t admire the courage involved unless you’re able to see deeply inside the person. You see a man walk past a bar and don’t know that you might be seeing an act of courage and character to rival any decorated soldier’s brave acts. The more I knew Annie, the more I saw her bravery and the more I loved her great heart.

  There is a little veterinary clinic on the main road leading into David City. That was her dad’s clinic. He’d raised cattle, horses, greyhounds, sheep, and rabbits for a time, which fueled his interest in animal medicines and nutritional products. He started buying in bulk for his friends who were also raising greyhounds, and that was the beginning of his business. Over time, he started distributing more and more animal health supplies, and KV Vet Supply just grew with the catalog. It’s now 550 pages and takes a great many of David City’s wives to produce.

  The vet clinic is still there, and the family house next to it is where Annie mostly grew up. Her childhood home had a nice pasture in back and some farm buildings, some cattle and horses, and a small trailer park—it still does. Now her dad rents the house because, when Annie was a senior in high school, he built a nicer but more modest one next to it. He could have built a bigger one than he needed, but people in David City don’t do that.

  It was a long road to success for Annie’s dad. Early on, Annie and her mom and sisters sewed their own clothes, including some they entered in 4-H fairs. She said her dad was preoccupied by the business and easy to anger in those days. Over time he and Annie would become very close, perhaps because they were so alike; she said her dad demanded a lot of himself, too. But it had been rough when she was young.

  Growing up, she had competed for her father’s attention, partly because any kid wants it, and partly to make him happy so her mom would be happier. To become a source of family pride and happiness, she excelled at running, earned top grades, and became a star in dance recitals and musicals—she’s a terrific performer. She pushed herself to achieve an impossible perfection. The Catholic school in David City provided a great education, but it also reinforced this idea that she needed to be perfect, that she needed to work harder—and she needed to feel guilty about normal human desires and imperfections.

  By junior high, the reaction of other kids surprised her: they thought she had become remarkably beautiful, and she had. At first she didn’t agree, but then she accepted it, which just gave her a new avenue to strive for perfection.

  Her older sister, who received more of her father’s attention because she had grown up before the new business consumed him, developed an eating disorder. Annie assured her mother that such a strange thing would never happen to her. At age fourteen, however, it started. It began after a too-hot date at a high school party where she learned a hard lesson about life. Her Catholic upbringing brought shame crashing down on her. She wanted to get rid of her shameful body. She wanted it to be unattractive to boys. She wanted to be sick enough to be able to say no the next time. She believed she was trash in God’s eyes, and she wanted to be tiny and pure and worthy of love again, or to disappear.

  That’s when the endless running and constant dieting began. Her dad caught her exercising to aerobic videos at 3 A.M. and realized he had another daughter in trouble. By fifteen, she was in a hospital.

  Religion had been but another system of authority for me to reject when I was growing up. For Annie, it was a lake to drown in.

  I was rooting for her as she was rooting for me, but I was quite helpless to really help her. She needed, and I knew she needed, a lot more than my encouragement from afar. She needed constant love. That is why I had decided to chase her away—so she could find someone who could deliver. She needed someone better than me. Really. I was almost relieved when she didn’t pick up my calls. But it was killing me.

  I soon had a new job, and I tried to perform it well and not think about Annie or about ever getting out. I needed to be in robot mode. Bobbie would ask me if I was depressed. I would tell him I was not depressed. I just wanted to do my job and take my classes, and quit asking me that.

  My new position was administrative clerk, filling out time records and monthly paperwork for one of the upper-echelon guards, a guy named Vincent. His wife also worked at Pekin and was my counselor. The three of us were cordial. When I figured how to work efficiently for him, I had spare time to continue my college courses and to study the law, which had become both my addiction and my comfort.

  I had lucked out again with a good job. I did the robot work and otherwise made Vincent’s life easy. He was in charge of running the compound—the main outdoor areas—his compound, as he would say. He was supposed to be a tough guy, and he had a nasty reputation. He would stand like General Patton on the compound during the ten-minute moves. When he wasn’t making things even tougher on the inmates, his job involved overseeing the picking up of cigarette butts and other litter, and checking inmates for contraband, which guards at Pekin could do at any moment.

  His wife, Terri, was the counselor for our housing unit. A counselor is not exactly like a camp counselor, but more like a social worker, school nurse, and stern aunt. There were several women on staff at Pekin.

  Terri was nice—for a guard. Some of the guys stalked her and would stare at her through their cell doors and windows when she was on the move. She took it in stride. They watched her take it in stride.

  Terri was in her middle thirties, with sandy blonde hair. She knew I was on a different path than most, so she would sometimes ask how I was doing.

  There is always that line between staff and inmate that you can’t cross. If you look too chatty you can develop a reputation as a snitch. Even so, I always tried to talk to guards like equals. I used to tell them that we all had the same goal, which was to make it through our time as easily as possible. For the prisoners that meant years, and for the guards it meant an eight-hour shift. We were all humans and all more or less stuck there.

  But I couldn’t become too equal, and I was very careful to let the inmates know that I would never talk behind their backs.

  When 2002 was still fresh, Milan came running up the stairway to my cell.

  “Shon, you better get downstairs, because you got yourself another Cornhusker—like we don’t have enough.”

  It was welcome wagon time. I put down my book and gathered some saved-up gifts into my laundry bag: a bar of good soap, a new toothbrush in a plastic case, shower flip-flops to keep your feet a quarter inch above the urine and hair and who-knows-what of the shower floor, a magazine or part of one, and a few snacks.

  After the rough-and-tumble of county jails and transports, a little welcome basket, even in an old laundry bag, means a lot. The simple and unexpected kindness of it can make a man get teary-eyed, except there are no teary eyes in prison—just allergies or something in your eyes.

  So I welcomed John Fellers, who was a clean-cut, good-looking man who resembled a middle-aged stockbroker. Like a lot of people you meet in there, he didn’t look the part. I told him to let me know if he needed anything or had any questions.

  Easygoing Joh
n settled in. He was the kind of guy who would smile and stick out a handshake when he saw you coming—not everybody in prison is like that. You could always go to him for sensible advice or a little help. John had been a used car dealer in Lincoln with a good reputation. He worried about how his new wife was handling the business while he was gone.

  He was in for a drug rap. He had started using drugs for a short time when he was going through a divorce, and he stored some for his dealer for a short time. He was in prison for giving an honest answer to a couple of deputies who asked him about it.

  John started asking questions about the law because others told him I was the guy for that stuff. After his freshman time in a three-man cell, John moved in with Robert Jones, two cells away from me. Jones was rumored to have smuggled pot by the ton into the Midwest in the late eighties. Despite their different backgrounds they hit it off.

  As I was starting a new friendship with John, I received a second letter from Tom, who was out now and had just attended our ten-year high school reunion.

  Wood,

  I began talking to some people about how it works for you to use the phone in there. I also let them know how you don’t get paid squat and yet you still have to pay regular prices for food, hygiene, clothes, etc. The bottom line is bro, these people out here really just don’t understand how the system works. But that doesn’t mean they’ve forgotten about you or don’t want to help.

  For the next twelve months, we are going to send you a $50 money order every month. We decided it would be better for all of us to kick in a little each month and spread it out rather than have people just kick in a one-time big amount. We want this to be something you can depend on. Ultimately, my goal is to be able to do this for you each year until your release. The names may change, but I have no doubt in my heart that we’ll get this done for you. But for now, the following people have given you a one-year commitment. Everyone pretty much agreed we don’t want you to feel like you have to call or write any of us. We’re doing this for YOU. Call your family, buy yourself some good food, whatever.