Six inches of vodka ago, when Mike was capable of rational speech, he promised to reveal the secrets of the FTRA (Freight Train Riders of America), a shadowy gang of rail-riding transients characterized by elements of the press as the hobo mob. In return, he extracted my promise not to use his real name—if I did, he said, he would be subject to reprisals from his gang brothers. But no secrets have been forthcoming. Instead, he has engaged in a lengthy bout of chest beating, threatening other FTRA members who have wronged him and his friends. Now he’s moved on to camp thieves.
“They know Ol’ Double M’s got something for ’em.” He grabs the ax handle he keeps by his side, and takes a feeble swipe at the air to emphasize his displeasure. “Cocksuckers!”
It occurs to me that I’ve talked to a lot of drunks recently, both FTRA members and those who pretend to be FTRA. Articles and TV pieces about the gang have generated a degree of heat on the rails, causing security to tighten in and around the switchyards, and, to avoid police attention, many FTRA members have put aside their colors: bandanas ritually urinated upon by the participants in their individual initiations. However, a number of unaffiliated hobos, seeking a dubious celebrity, have taken to wearing them. Mike has earned a degree of credence with me by keeping his colors in his pack.
We’re in a hobo jungle outside the enormous Union Pacific switchyard at Roseville, California, a place where hobos camp for a day or two until they can hop a freight—a longer stay may attract the interest of the railroad bulls. The darkness is picked out by fires tended by silhouetted figures. Shouts and laughter punctuate the sizzling of crickets, and every so often the moan of a freight train achieves a ghostly dominance. By day, the jungle had the appearance of a seedy campground, lean-tos and sleeping bag nests scattered in among dry-leaved shrubs; but now, colored by my paranoia, it looks like the bottom of the world, a smoky, reeking, Dantean place inhabited by people who have allowed addiction or financial failure or war-related trauma to turn them away from society, men and women whose identities have become blurred by years of telling tall tales, by lying and showing false IDs, in the process creating a new legend for themselves out of the mean fabric of their existence.
A gangly hobo, much younger than Mike, comes over to bum a cigarette. He peers at Mike and says, “Hey, man! You fucked up?”
Mike sits up, unsteady, managing to maintain a sort of tilted half-lotus, but he says nothing.
“You the guy’s been askin’ ’bout the FTRA?” The gangly hobo asks this of me and stoops to light his cigarette from an ember.
“Yeah,” I say. “You FTRA?”
“Hell, no! Couple those motherfuckers lookin’ to kill my ass.”
“Oh, yeah? FTRA guys? What happened?”
The gangly hobo eyes me with suspicion. “Nothin’ happened. Just these pitiful fuckers decided they’s goin’ to kill me for somethin’ they thought I done. They been goin’ round three months sayin’ I better keep the hell off the rails. But—” he spreads his arms, offering a target “—here I am. You know? Here I fuckin’ am.”
I try to question him further, but he’s stalks off back to his camp. Mike’s eyes are half-closed, his head begins to droop. Then a long plaintive blast of train sadness issues from the switchyard, and he stiffens, his eyes snap open. I get the idea he’s listening to a signal from the back of beyond, a sound only he can interpret. His features are gathered in harsh, attentive lines, and with his ax handle held scepter-style, his beard decorated with bits of vegetation, in the instant before he loses consciousness, he looks dressed in a kind of pagan dignity, the image of a mad, primitive king.
The immense neighborhood of the rails, 170,000 miles of track, supports a population no larger than that of a small town; yet this population is widely variegated. Yuppie riders, prosperous souls for whom freight-hopping is a hobby. Eco-activist riders, most of them young, who view riding as a means of using the system against itself. Crusty punks, drunk punks, gutter punks: the order and suborders of the next generation of hobos. Pierced; tattooed; homeless; they travel from squat to squat on the trains. Then there are the hardcore hobos, those who spend their lives moving along the rails. Included in their number are the FTRA, who distinguish between their membership and the general run of hobos by calling themselves “tramps” (or “train tramps”) and “trampettes.”
This attenuated neighborhood and its citizenry constitute a grapevine that stretches coast to coast, conveying information such as how to get the best dumpster pizza in Denver, and where to find water near the Rio Grande yard in Pueblo. It also serves to carry horrific tales concerning the FTRA: a woman raped under a railroad bridge; a man left tied up and sodomized in a freight car, lying in his own blood and feces; two gutter punks and their dogs slaughtered by the gang in a boxcar, their girlfriends raped and then thrown from the train. Such stories are seconded by the majority of media reports. A week-long series on Portland’s KOIN-TV identifies the FTRA as Freight Train Killers, and features an interview with a yuppie rider named K-Line who says she flung herself from a moving train to avoid rape by a group of gang members. A Los Angeles Times article speaks of a “mysterious brotherhood” and states that the gang has “set up rail lines out of Texas as drug-running corridors.” The Spokane Spokesman-Review, under the heading “Killers Ride The Rails,” says that “a racist gang of hobos may be responsible for 300 transient murders…” Internet websites show pictures of hideously damaged corpses and print stories about FTRA atrocities. These and other print and electronic sources, inspired to a great extent by the exploits of hobo serial killer and alleged FTRA member Robert Silveria, paint a picture of a murderous criminal organization that holds barbarous initiation ceremonies involving rape and beating, along with ritual urination. Hardcore felons armed with weighted ax handles called Goon Sticks, who prey upon other transients, create an atmosphere of terror in switchyards and hobo jungles across the nation.
Estimates regarding the size of the FTRA’s membership range from seven or eight hundred to upwards of two thousand—most riders would subscribe to the lower figure. Several police officers have put forward the idea that on occasion FTRA members serve as mules for biker gangs, bringing in heroin from Mexico; but none have gone so far as to say that this is endemic. The crimes with which FTRA hobos are most frequently charged are trespassing, disorderly conduct, and petty thievery, and these incidents are handled by railroad bulls, who usually let the offenders off with a ticket. Local cops don’t spend much time in the rail yards, and, according to one detective, the average hobo’s hygiene is so bad that most officers don’t want them in their patrol cars.
There’s little consensus on any subject among FTRA members themselves, not even concerning the origin of the group. The most believable story has it that a group of 12 hobos, Vietnam vets all, were partying beneath a bridge in Whitefish, Montana (or a bar in Libby, if you’re to credit a variant version) in 1985, watching a freight train roll past. When an X-TRA container came into view, a hobo named Daniel Boone said jokingly, “We oughta call ourselves the FTRA—Fuck The Reagan Administration.” Thus Daniel Boone is acknowledged to be the founder of the gang, an honor he reportedly now considers an embarrassment (he’s given up life on the rails and become an itinerant preacher in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana, living out of a camper van). But Mississippi Bones (aka Marvin Moore, a gang member currently serving a sentence for first degree murder) claims the organization was founded in the 1940s by a black hobo named Coal Train, who died some thirty years later in a lean-to next to an abandoned Texaco station in Desert Center, California. Bones says he “carried the old man some wine” and sat with him a while, and has no doubt that he was the actual founding father.
The chief source for almost every news story concerning the FTRA is Officer Robert Grandinetti, a heavyset, affable man closing in on retirement age, who works out of the Office of Special Police Problems in Spokane, Washington. He has made the gang his special project, not only pursuing and arresting them, but also dev
oting considerable time to raising the national consciousness as regards their particular menace. He’s appeared on America’s Most Wanted and makes presentations on the subject to federal commissions and law enforcement groups. Days, he patrols beneath the city’s railroad bridges, areas where riders gather to “catch out” (the hobo term for hopping a freight). He carries a Polaroid camera with which he takes the picture of anyone he suspects of associating with or belonging to the FTRA, and these pictures are then mounted in hefty scrapbooks, along with mug shots and photographs of FTRA graffiti. He’s compiled an extensive database on the gang’s membership, and has a collection of FTRA artifacts, the most impressive being a Goon Stick (he calls it a Goonie Stick), an ax handle to one end of which has been welded a softball-sized lump of lead. He speaks with relish about the subject, expressing what seems a gruff fondness for certain gang members.
As we sit in his office, a fluorescent-lit cube with several desks and a prominently displayed employee award, Grandinetti utilizes visual aids—photographs, FTRA bandanas, and so forth—with the facile air of someone who has given the same show many times before (this due in part, I assume, to the fact that over the years he has lectured on police matters in the Spokane school system). His awareness of the FTRA derives from a series of unsolved murders in the early ’90s, bodies found near the tracks along the Highline route from Cheney, Washington, to Sandpoint, Idaho, all with their jackets and shirts pulled over their heads, and their trousers pulled down. “If there’d just been a couple, I could buy them as accidents,” he says. “But after six of them, the accident theory didn’t fly.” He goes on to say that there were over 450 trespass deaths on railroad property during the past year, and he believes a significant percentage of these were homicides perpetrated by the FTRA. To support this assumption, he cites cases in which the victim was struck by a train in a switchyard, yet there was little blood at the scene, suggesting that the victim was killed elsewhere, and the body placed on the tracks so the impact of the train would cover up the actual cause of death: blunt force trauma. But Grandinetti admits that in most of these cases it’s impossible to determine whether the crimes were committed by the FTRA or independent hobos…or by anyone else, for that matter. Switchyards are generally situated in or near dangerous neighborhoods, and the idea that an indigent may have murdered a hobo is hardly unthinkable.
Over the course of an hour, Grandinetti sketches his vision of the gang. He talks about the various subgroups within the gang—the Goon Squad, the Wrecking Crew, STP (Start The Party). He explains “double-clutching”—the practice of obtaining emergency food stamps in one town, hopping a freight to the next, obtaining more food stamps there, and continuing the process until a hobo accumulated six or seven hundred dollars worth, which are then sold to a grocery store for 50 cents on the dollar. He describes how FTRA tramps will “hustle junk” (pick up scrap metal) and steal wire from freight yards, strip the copper and sell it in bulk to recycling businesses. Otherwise, he says, they “work the sign” (Will Work For Food) in order to get cash for their drugs and alcohol. He talks about the “home guard,” homeless people who serve as procurers of drugs for gang members. But most of these practices are engaged in by hobos of every stripe, not just the FTRA, and little of what he says would be denied by the FTRA; though several members told me they would never steal from the railroads—you don’t shit where you live.
To accept that the FTRA is a menace of the proportions Grandinetti claims—an organization that runs safe houses and has locked down switchyards all over the country—it seems necessary to believe further that there is some order to the gang’s apparent disorder: Officers charged with obtaining revenue and determining goals. Chapters that communicate one with the other. Some sort of structure. Grandinetti tells me that from gang snitches he’s learned of a group within the FTRA called “the Death Squad,” whose function is to carry out hits. He claims that this group is led by their self-exiled founder, Daniel Boone. It’s at this juncture that Grandinetti begins to preface his statements with the phrase “I can’t prove it but…” and he says his informants have told him that two gang members were hired by right-wingers to derail an Amtrak train in Arizona a few years back. He’s also heard a rumor that a white power group is attempting to organize the FTRA into a hobo army.
Under pewter skies, we drive out into the industrial wastes of the Spokane Valley and stop by the railroad tracks beneath the Freya Street bridge, its cement pillars and abutments spangled with FTRA graffiti—cartoon train tracks, swastikas, lightning bolts, along with messages and dates and train names. Among them is a section of wall devoted to a memorial for Horizontal John, an FTRA member who died of liver failure underneath the bridge the previous summer. Two hobos are camped here today, warming themselves by a small fire. Sheets of cardboard lie on the packed dirt nearby, and there are signs of past encampments: a worn-out shoe; a wadded pink cloth that might be a piece of blanket; empty cans; soggy newspapers. Neither of the two men are FTRA, but Grandinetti takes their pictures and checks them for warrants. One has a minor charge outstanding against him. Grandinetti’s associate applies handcuffs and calls for a patrol car to take him to jail. Once this has been handled, Grandinetti strolls about, commenting on the graffiti. He’s amused by one that warns AVOID JABBERJAW. Jabberjaw is a transient hooker rumored to have contracted AIDS, and Grandinetti says that this might be the ultimate cure for the FTRA.
I come across a series of messages left by a rider named Big Ed that insult and taunt the gang, and I make the comment that Big Ed must be pretty damn big to risk FTRA retribution. Grandinetti doesn’t appear to have heard me, and I’m starting to think there’s a lot more relating to the gang he’s not hearing, that he’s disposed to hear only what paints them in the most baleful light. I recall during our initial phone conversation, I mentioned that someone had told me he thought the FTRA was no more than an urban legend. Grandinetti became angry and said he didn’t want to talk to anyone who held that view. It’s important to him, I realize, that the FTRA poses a menace worthy of national attention, more of a menace than it perhaps is. I doubt he’s trying to sell me anything—not consciously, anyway. He’s a true believer, an evangel of the cause, and this work will comprise his legacy, his mark. I ask if he’s going to miss all this when he retires, or if he’s looking forward to going fishing. He looks offended, and tells me he’s going to be kept very busy, thank you, traveling and lecturing about the FTRA.
After Grandinetti drives away, I wander about for a few minutes. These open spaces, under modern bridges enclosed by sweeping arches and pillars, have something of the feel of a church, as if they’re cathedrals upon which construction was suddenly halted, now standing unused except by those who deface them, who have adapted them to some less grandiose form of worship. This one, with its memorial wall and solitary pilgrim, the remaining hobo sitting head down and silent by his guttering fire, a slight bearded man in a shabby brown coat…it has that atmosphere more than most. The hobo turns his head to me, and it seems he’s about to speak. But maybe there’s too much authority in the air, too much of a police vibe. Without a word, he picks up the cloth sack containing his possessions and hurries off along the tracks.
The maximum security unit of the U.S. Penitentiary at Florence, Colorado, a red brick-and-glass chunk of modern penology that sits atop a subterranean high-tech Kafkaville of sanitized tile and electronic gates…it seems way too much prison for Mississippi Bones. He’s a diminutive, frail-looking man of late middle age with a lined face, dressed in chinos and walking this day with a cane due to an injured foot. I meet him in a midsize auditorium ranged by rows of black vinyl-covered chairs, all bolted to the floor, where visitors and inmates can mingle under the watchful eyes of guards. This morning, except for a guard and a prison official who converse at a distance beside a desk, we’re the only two people in the room. Every surface glistens. Dust is not permitted. I imagine there are secret angles involved in the room’s design that will convey our sligh
test whisper to the area of the desk. Bones sits on the edge of his chair, hands on the head of his cane, and nods at the two men watching us. “I hate those sons of bitches,” he says. “They’re trying to listen to us, so we got to keep it down.”
Bones is serving a 25-year-stretch for killing a fellow FTRA member named F-Trooper, a crime for which he does not apologize; he claims that if he hadn’t done the deed, F-Trooper would have killed him—he had already tried it once, going after Bones when he was camped by the Rattlesnake Creek in Missoula, Montana, attacking him with a skinning knife, twisting it in his side until he had more-or-less removed three of Bones’s ribs. The attack was provoked, Bones says, by F-Trooper’s lust for his wife Jane.
It took Bones nearly a year to recover from his injuries. He underwent five operations, was stricken by a lung infection, and his weight dropped below 100 pounds. He was living on Percodans, and he expected to die. When he got back on his feet and went out again onto the rails, he ran into F-Trooper in the railyard in Missoula. F-Trooper, Bones says, had been planning on going to Helena to get his food stamps, but he changed his plans and decided to ride to Portland with Bones and his wife. Bones realized then that he was in danger from the man, and he says that he acted in self-defense.
At this juncture, Bones gets to his feet and demonstrates how he shot F-Trooper. He makes his right fist into a gun, places his forefinger against the top of my head, and pretends to fire down through my skull. It’s an interesting moment. He no longer seems quite so frail.
“If I hadn’t been drunk,” Bones continues, “I’d a’never been charged. See, the boxcar we was in had a big red X marked on the side. That means they was goin’ to break the car off and send it to the repair yard. But I was so drunk I didn’t notice the mark. I figured F-Trooper would just go on off to Portland with the rest of the train.”
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