One afternoon, she and I made the trip to the big mall in Santa Rosa, where she bought a machine saw for Bill’s birthday and helped me choose a couple of professional-looking suits I couldn’t afford for the hearing.
I took another day off with Ed to start a batch of cider, with apples from our trees and some expert help and the loan of an apple press from Vlad, who ran the brewpub down on the highway. We stashed the big bucket of fermenting juice in my garage, where it filled the space with the heady smell of apples, yeast, and alcohol.
I was just starting to feel settled in my old life when Mike called again.
“Want to make another prison visit?” he asked.
“Aw, really? How come nobody we need to see lives someplace nice, say, like San Francisco?”
Mike laughed. “Just our luck.”
“Where is this prison? Not Utah again, I hope.”
“No, much closer; Folsom.”
“Folsom,” I said. “Of course. Who’s there?”
“Keith Sunderland. Dan hasn’t been able to find him till now, but he just checked the prison inmate locator site again, and there he was. He must have been sentenced recently; we probably couldn’t get a good address for him earlier because he was in jail.”
“When do you want to go?”
“I’d like to see him before we have to go back to Wheaton. Are you free next week if I can get a visit?”
I sighed inwardly. “Yeah.”
25
Folsom Prison, made legend by Johnny Cash, is hidden behind what is now an upscale suburb of Sacramento, the state capital. The complex, down a country road out of town, is huge. From the building where visitors are processed in, Mike and I and a handful of lawyers and friends of prisoners rode in a gray-painted shuttle bus that threaded its way through a maze of gray, barrack-like concrete buildings, dropping visitors off at first one visiting area, then another. We were at the fourth stop.
Inside a vestibule, a guard in a booth examined our visitor badges; then an inner door of metal and glass slid open and let us into the building. Another guard showed us into the visiting room, an auditorium-like space with tables and chairs set up throughout it. A row of doors along one side marked the attorney visiting rooms. I am spending too much time in places like these, I thought, as I took it all in. The guard unlocked the door to one of them. “You’ll be in here,” he said. “You’re seeing Sunderland, right?”
Mike nodded.
“He’s on his way down, should be here soon.”
Sunderland was brought to us by a different guard. If his date of birth in the police reports was correct, he’d be in his mid-fifties, but he looked older. He was tall, but gaunt, his prison blue shirt and jeans hanging loose on his lanky frame. His thinning salt-and-pepper hair was neatly combed straight back from his lined, sallow face, and his dark eyes glinted with a mix of curiosity and suspicion.
Mike introduced us, and Sunderland shook his proffered hand and then mine. I offered to get food from the vending machines along the far wall. Mike asked for a coffee with sugar, and Sunderland said he’d have the same and a cinnamon roll if they had one.
When I returned, Mike and Sunderland were talking at the table in the attorney room. I distributed coffees and food and sat in a chair next to Mike.
“Keith just told me he and Scanlon are related,” Mike said.
“Yeah,” Sunderland said. “We’re first cousins. His mother and mine are sisters. We grew up together, more or less, though we weren’t really close because I was quite a bit older than he was. I guess that’s why he thought of my place when he was on the run. I was living between Wheaton and the Nevada border, and we were family.”
“You were living in El Dorado then,” Mike confirmed.
“Yes.”
“Did he call you before coming, or just show up?”
“He called, said he needed to get out of town until something cooled down.”
“Did he say what?” Mike asked.
“Not then. He was pretty cagey in the phone call. It wasn’t until after he got up here that he told me what was up.”
“What did he tell you?”
“He said he’d killed someone. He didn’t think he was suspected, but he figured he’d lie low for a while until he was sure he was in the clear.”
“Did he tell you anything else about it?”
“Yeah.” Sunderland thought for a few seconds. “Not all at once. Bits and pieces kind of came out as we spent time together. Steve is a talker, never could keep his mouth shut for long.”
“Do you remember what he said about it?”
“Some. I told my parole officer pretty much everything at the time. Then they asked me some of it at Steve’s trial.”
“What did he say?”
“Oh, God, let me think; it’s been a long time. I remember he said he’d done a hit for the Aryan Brotherhood because that was new to me. I had no idea he’d gotten in with those guys. But he’d been in prison most of the time since he turned eighteen, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. He never had good judgment, Steve.”
“Did he say who he’d killed?”
“No, I don’t think he said a name. But he did say someone else was in custody. I remember asking him if he was worried that guy might inform on him, and he said no, he didn’t know nothin’ about it. Just some crazy guy off the street. He figured the guy would only be in jail for a few days, till the police figured out it wasn’t him.”
“Did Steve ever mention getting a letter from an AB guy about the hit?”
“Yeah, he did. He seemed kind of proud about it, like it was some sort of recognition.”
“Did you ever see it?”
“No, I wasn’t interested. The whole thing kind of scared me. I’d been in prison, and I never wanted to get anywhere near those gangs. Besides, I’m part Cherokee, on my father’s side. I don’t want nothin’ to do with that white nation stuff. He said he had it in his car; it could stay there, as far as I was concerned.”
“How long did Steve stay with you?”
“Two days, and then he took off. Asked to borrow some money. I gave him fifty dollars, and he gave me a watch worth about half that.”
“And then you went to your parole officer and told him what Steve had said?”
“Yeah, I did, and I paid for it, too.”
“How is that?”
“My parole officer violated me for receiving stolen property and associating with criminals, and I spent another year in the joint.”
“Did you tell him about the letter?”
“I’m sure I did.”
“Were you ever interviewed by Detective Springer, from the Wheaton police?”
“Yeah. I guess my parole officer contacted the police there, and the guy came to see me in jail.”
“Do you remember what you told him?”
“Pretty much what I’d told my parole officer. It was all out by then anyway, no point in playing games.”
“Did you mention the letter?”
“Yeah. This detective seemed to want to prove Steve was lying about the AB connection. He kept asking me whether Steve talked about doing the crime with this guy Henley; and he seemed kind of ticked when I said he didn’t. I told him to look for the letter if he didn’t believe me.”
“Then you got called to testify.”
“Right. Twice. I really didn’t want to, because of Steve. I was kind of glad I didn’t have to the first time. But the district attorney subpoenaed me to Steve’s trial.”
“No one asked you about the letter, did they?” We’d read Sunderland’s testimony, and we already knew the answer.
“No. I figured it didn’t matter to them.”
Mike questioned Sunderland about his criminal record, which would surely be used to attack his credibility if he testified, and said he’d be getting a court order for Sunderland to testify at the hearing, though we didn’t know yet when he’d be scheduled.
“Okay,” Sunderland said. “You said Steve�
�s gonna be there, too?”
“I did,” Mike said.
“Glad to hear he’s trying to help your guy out. Steve isn’t a bad guy, at heart; sometimes he’ll do the right thing. Any chance we could be brought down at the same time? Haven’t seen him in years.”
Mike said the scheduling was up to the judge, so he doubted it, but he’d see what he could do.
When the guard came to get him, Sunderland shook our hands again.
“Thank you for seeing us,” Mike said.
“Any time,” Sunderland said. “I’m not going much of anywhere for a while.”
26
“Son of a bitch,” Mike said. “What a day!”
We were back in Wheaton, walking down the sidewalk from the courthouse to the parking lot. The air was weirdly warm, still and muggy, and the sky looked ready to rain on us at any moment. Earthquake weather, they call it here in California.
“Yeah,” I said. “I need a beer.”
“I need more than that,” Mike said.
Howard’s evidentiary hearing had escalated into a war. Sandra Blaine had advanced into the courtroom under full sail, alight with indignation that her integrity had been questioned by the legal team of a convicted murderer. That we’d expected. But Frank Willard had surprised us by bringing extra forces, in the form of a sandy-haired fireplug named Joe Laszlo. Joe was built like a wrestler and shone with the flame of righteousness and ambition; moreover, he fancied himself a legal scholar. So he spent the morning of the first day asking the judge to quash every subpoena we’d issued for prison records on the ground that we should have asked for the records in discovery. We won that round after telling the judge that we had, in fact, requested them from the attorney general, but they hadn’t been produced. Laszlo followed that up by arguing that the records were hearsay, and we spent half an hour arguing about technical hearsay exceptions. And so it went.
Blaine insisted on joining in the argument about expanding the scope of the hearing to include Howard’s claim that the prosecution had concealed exculpatory evidence. The gist of her contribution was that she didn’t conceal the letter because she had no idea it was in her file or how it came to be there. And it didn’t matter anyway because there was nothing in it that would have appeared exculpatory to a reasonable prosecutor. And it would have been irrelevant and hearsay at Howard’s trial because Scanlon didn’t testify to authenticate it.
The judge denied the motion to expand the hearing, but pointed out that the letter was already relevant to one of the questions before him, namely whether evidence existed at the time of Howard’s trial that might have led to a different result. “It doesn’t seem strong,” he said, “but I don’t know at this point what other evidence Mr. Henley’s attorneys are proposing to present.”
Better than nothing, I thought.
Ida Rader had flown down from Eureka to testify in the afternoon. I picked her up at the local airport, and we discussed her testimony over lunch at a Chinese buffet Mike had discovered not far from the courthouse. The food was acceptable, but more importantly, the restaurant was big enough that we could easily find an out-of-the-way table where we could talk in relative peace and quiet. Laszlo spent the afternoon objecting, it seemed, to every second question Mike asked Rader.
She recounted her background as a prison guard, first at Soledad, and then at Pelican Bay, and finally as a lieutenant in the Security Housing Unit there, which housed a number of gang members. After she detailed her training and experience in the Department of Corrections in learning and teaching the operations of prison gangs, Laszlo didn’t wait for Mike to ask that she be qualified as an expert before objecting. The judge allowed Mike to ask her how many times she had been involved in litigation and testified as an expert witness and then overruled Laszlo’s objection.
After losing that round, Laszlo objected again on relevancy grounds when Rader began to explain how the Aryan Brotherhood worked and its structure. The judge asked Mike why the history of the gang mattered to this case. Mike said it was needed to explain Scanlon’s position in the AB and the manner in which he received the order to kill Lindahl. “It supports his confession as to his true motive for the killing.” Grudgingly, with a comment that Mike appeared to be inserting unnecessary complexity into what should be a fairly simple hearing, the judge allowed her testimony.
Rader continued. Basically, she said, the gang’s origins could probably be traced back to around the 1960s or 1970s, to groups of white inmates that initially formed for their own protection. “What eventually happens is, you have a small gang that’s dedicated to some ideology, social change,” she said, “but they always evolve pretty quickly into a criminal organization. The AB did that in the 1970s. And then around 1980, the groups in the different prisons here in California organized into a structure, with a three-man commission at the top, a general council, and then the general membership. Below that are associates, men who aren’t full members, but maybe want to rise through the ranks and become members, or just stay loyal foot soldiers. And kind of at the fringes are people who are sort of hangers-on for the protection the gang gives them, or wannabes.” Laszlo moved to strike her description as hearsay and speculation; his objection was overruled.
“In recent years,” Rader went on, “the Aryan Brotherhood has been hurt by a series of federal racketeering prosecutions. Some of the gang leaders have ended up in federal supermax prisons, and others have taken deals to become witnesses for the government. It’s not what it used to be, but it’s still a threat.”
One of the ways the gang made money—“and they actually have quite a bit”—was by controlling drug sales in the prisons. “They’ve figured out ways of bringing drugs in, through visitors and even prison staff. They sell them themselves, but some come in through freelancers. Anyone selling drugs in the prison has to pay a tax to the AB on their sales: last I heard, it could be anywhere from 15 to 50 percent, depending on the prison.”
Another objection from Laszlo. And so it went.
The gang enforced its authority with violent retribution. “If you don’t do what they tell you, they will kill you. They will threaten to kill members of your family on the street, and sometimes do that, too.”
“Can one person in the AB give an order to have someone killed?”
“Yes, generally, if he is high enough in status. But I think some orders require more than one person.”
“An associate can’t give such an order?”
“In general, no.”
“If somebody was in a position of having to pay the Aryan Brotherhood money and couldn’t do it or didn’t do it, what would be the consequence?”
“He would be given a pretty short time limit and told if he doesn’t pay it, he’s going to get hit. He would be stabbed, strangled, beat, whatever. If they could kill him, they would.”
“What if the inmate paroled before that happened?”
Laszlo objected, but the judge allowed her to answer.
“Well, if they could get their hands on him, they’d kill him on the street. That would serve two purposes: it would punish the guy for cheating them and show the inmates in prison that the AB can get them wherever they are.”
“How would the gang do that?”
“They have associates and members that parole. They may send somebody else out to do it, like a brother, a cousin, a friend on the streets. One of them might do it for money, or just to help the Brotherhood.”
Another objection, on the ground of speculation. Mike reminded the judge that Rader was testifying as an expert.
“So someone might do it just because they were asked.”
“Oh, definitely. Or told to.”
Mike asked her to explain gang validation and debriefing.
Rader gathered her thoughts for a second. Validation was a sensitive subject, a sore point between the Corrections Department and advocates for prisoners’ rights; and Rader chose her words carefully. “Validation is the name the Corrections Department uses for the
process of identifying active gang members. If a prison makes an official finding that an inmate is an active member or associate of a gang, it can take measures, such as housing them in administrative segregation, for the security of the institution. It’s pretty regulated. The prison considers certain types of information—letters from gang members, group photos of the inmate with known gang members and associates, gang tattoos, their own admissions. A certain number—lately, it has been three—of pieces of firm evidence are required before an inmate can be validated as actively associated with a gang. An inmate who’s been validated goes before the classification committee in his prison, and if they find he’s hardcore or dangerous, he can be put in segregation or even what they call the security housing unit, or SHU, indefinitely.”
“What is the SHU like?”
“The SHU is extra high security. Some men are double-celled, two to a cell, but the most dangerous inmates are kept in solitary confinement, although that’s decreasing. The men there are in their cells for twenty-three hours a day, and their contacts with other people in the prison and things like family visits are highly restricted.”
“Can inmates in the SHU communicate with one another?”
“Yes. They can talk between cells, and they have ways of communicating in code through the plumbing pipes, passing kites in law books—I don’t know all of them. They pass messages from prison to prison through mail to their families, notes smuggled in by visitors; or sometimes inmates being transferred will memorize a message to be transmitted to someone where they’re going. Prisoners can be pretty ingenious.”
“So an AB member in administrative segregation could communicate an order, say to kill someone, even though he’s in relative isolation.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know of someone named Walter Bensinger?”
“Yes—his moniker was Corker. He was pretty high up in the AB. He may at one time have been a member of the general council, I’m not sure.”
“Scotty Maclendon?”
“He was another shot-caller.”
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