Newjack

by Ted Conover

  Sportiello, head of the local, thought maybe he should have advertised the fact that the union meeting would have free food. The twelve of us that showed up had been able to put away only two or three feet of the pair of six-foot-long grinders wrapped in blue cellophane. The remainder just sat there, reminding everyone how far short we had fallen of the 10 percent of the membership—about seventy people—required for a quorum. There was talk of amending the constitution to take this apathy into account. There was fond remembrance of the meeting a few years back when hundreds had attended because the state was proposing to end COs’ traditional privilege of carrying concealed firearms off the job. (The state had backed down.)

  After an hour of two of endless-seeming discussions of how to elect delegates to the big state union meeting in Albany, of why the disability insurer had been changed, and of whether the local should support a Little League team, I began to see why no one came. Then, as though it had been planned, the door to the room swung open slowly and a young officer hobbled in. He had one arm in a cast, one leg bandaged and held off the floor, and bruises on his face, including a black eye. Discussion stopped and hands came together in applause. The wiry man in his late twenties was Harper, an evening-shift officer who had been injured by inmates in the yard during an incident the week before.

  Though few had seen it, the incident was well known to most officers at Sing Sing. It had led to the lockdown of B-block for three days, a small article in The New York Times, promises of change by the administration, and the rounds of recriminations and second-guessing that were so common in corrections when things went seriously wrong. Harper, who worked in the B-block yard, was the main victim by most accounts, but other versions of the incident made him out to be a hapless error-maker.

  It had started when Harper and other officers were doing random pat-frisks of inmates headed out the yard door. One inmate, in the middle of being frisked, took his hands off the wall and dashed out the door. Harper and the other officers took off after him.

  The B-block yard was as long as the block, with twelve-foot-high chain-link fence on two sides, B-block itself on a third, and the mess-hall building and storehouse on the fourth. Most of it was a sandy wasteland, but on its northern edge, along the mess-hall building, there were crumbling concrete terraces that inmates liked to sit on, a horseshoe pit, a boccie ball court, a couple of televisions under plywood roofs, an open-air toilet, and a bank of cold-water showers. It looked like a decrepit, overused park in someplace like Haiti. Into this area, which generally had the greatest concentration of inmates, ran the inmate fleeing the pat-frisk.

  At the time, I was told, there were some three hundred inmates in the yard and four officers. Worried about losing their man, Harper and the others pursued him to the area of the terraces and Harper tackled him. But their troubles were just beginning, because the yard is, in many ways, like the mess hall: a place where many inmates come together, and passions are easily inflamed. The rules for pursuing inmates there are not hard and fast, but the conventional wisdom says that it’s smarter to wait for the pursued to leave. Handcuffing the man who fled was not a straightforward matter, and apparently, as the officers worked to subdue him, inmates gathered around to complain that the officers were being too rough. Following the shouts came projectiles: rocks (of which there are many in the yard), horseshoes, and boccie balls. Harper was knocked out when a horseshoe hit him in the back of the head. Another cracked his elbow. The three other officers were wounded, too. Harper was carried out on a stretcher.

  As Harper no doubt knew, Sing Sing’s Monday morning quarterbacks had decided that he should never have pursued the inmate into the crowded yard. But when the union meeting’s agenda finally reached new business, he stood up and made it clear matters were a bit more complicated than they at first appeared. Why hadn’t the officer in Wallpost 17 stepped outside and fired a shot or two into the air? he wanted to know. Why, several days after the incident, hadn’t the administration removed the boccie balls and horseshoes from yards other than B-block’s? Why didn’t yard officers on his shift have more than one radio among them?

  The union leadership seemed nervous about getting too squarely behind Harper. For one thing, the wallpost matter was also complicated, and criticizing that officer was something they weren’t sure they wanted to do. The problem was that the incident took place probably 250 to 300 yards away from the post. This, again, was a quirk and shortcoming of Sing Sing. There was a second wallpost closer, but it was situated in such a way that the terrace area was in a blind spot. The Department authorized use of the AR-15 rifle only up to a distance of about a hundred yards, because accuracy deteriorated so much with the additional distance. At most other facilities these questions would never arise; the wall-posts would be situated where they would do the most good.

  It was even worse in the A-block yard, where certain areas were invisible to any tower. Construction of a new tower there had long ago been okayed, the union president explained, but no funds were available to build it. Harper bitterly asked why a new parking lot was being built up the hill if “no funds were available,” then again brought himself angrily to his feet, or foot.

  “There’s still stones out there bigger than my hand!” he protested. “The yard still has blind zones, like the one we were in. How many of us will have to get hit in the head with a horseshoe before this changes?”

  The council ground its wheels. A resolution was finally passed urging the administration to address the pressing security problems in the yards.

  I often drove between home and work with Officer Rob Saline. Visually, Saline and I were a study in contrasts. At more than three hundred pounds and well over six feet tall, he was easily twice my size, probably the largest person in B-block. Bronx-bred, he kept his head shaved and wore designer tortoiseshell glasses. He had played football for the Air Force and, briefly, for the New York Jets. His feet hurt a lot—I suppose because they carried such a massive burden.

  Saline and I had met on a transportation detail, escorting inmates to appearances at the Westchester County Courthouse in White Plains. Sergeant Holmes had sent us together, possibly as some sort of joke. The transportation sergeant had greeted Saline with delight: “Now, that’s a correction officer!” I recall him saying when Saline lumbered into the room. The sergeant ignored me completely. As Saline and I sat around the courthouse, we realized that his girlfriend lived and worked not too far from my home. He didn’t have a car, he told me, due to financial problems, and was spending a lot of time in my neck of the Bronx. Would I ever be willing to give him a lift?

  So Saline pitched in for gas, and at 6 A.M. many mornings and 3:15 P.M. many afternoons, he squeezed himself into the front seat of my Toyota. The car’s driving dynamics totally changed with Saline aboard. Aragon, in fact, complained that Saline had ruined his shocks in the days when they carpooled, but to me it was worth it for the window into the big man’s world.

  He was about my age and had daughters in “Carolina.” He moonlighted as a security guard for a jewelry company. Often after work I’d drop him off at an intersection near the Cross County Mall, where he’d visit his girlfriend at work in the Fashion Bug store. He was rather touchy, and rubbed many people the wrong way. A few guys, I knew, refused to give him a ride anymore. (Sergeant Wickersham was among those with whom he maintained an avoidance relationship.) He carried an alphanumeric beeper and consulted it often; his plans were subject to constant change. Our rendezvous might be set up at 11 P.M. the night before or 5:15 A.M. the morning of. Once, when I’d been away a few days on a vacation I hadn’t told him about, he left this message on my machine, like a rap: “Yo, Teddy Ted, this is Rob. I just calling ’cause I thought you was dyin’. I didn’t see you at the job so I hope you feelin’ better. Tell your lady and your kids I said hi, and I hope you feelin’ well, man. If you need me call me, man, you know, if you need me to do somethin’ for you. Ciao.”

  We talked mostly about the circumstances and person
alities at work—often I got gossip from Saline sooner than from anyone else. And one morning, late in September, he shared some breaking news, additional details of which were passed quietly around B-block for the next few days.

  Four B-block officers—Pitkin, De Los Santos, Garces, and Lopez—had gone out drinking. At a Queens strip joint called the Playhouse, Pitkin—a short, pugnacious, extroverted officer who some felt had a Napoleon complex—ran into an ex-con in the men’s room. The man had been a B-block inmate with, apparently, a long-standing grudge against Pitkin. He recognized the guard and, possibly as a prank, held a ballpoint pen to his neck. The two tussled, and the fight spilled out into the main room, where the three other officers joined in, not only subduing the man but, according to the stories, handcuffing and then continuing to “subdue” him, all in full view of the other customers. One officer, during this final phase, apparently drew his gun to keep other patrons at bay. The police were called and, upon arrival, arrested the officers on assault charges.

  All were released pending an investigation, but we learned the next day that Sing Sing had demanded their badges. They were suspended without pay until the matter was resolved. Soon, investigators from the Department’s Office of the Inspector General were interviewing them, and, not long after, we learned that the district attorney had decided to bring felony assault charges to a grand jury.

  All the information was passed around piecemeal, but this consistent story emerged and pieces of it were confirmed to me by superior officers; one lieutenant, while signing my logbook, told me, sotto voce, that he had been the one to accept their badges. Most jailhouse gossip quickly makes its way to the inmates, but officers were uniformly insistent about keeping them ignorant about the story of the Playhouse Four, as the group had come to be known. We’d whisper about it in stairways or around the OIC’s office.

  “You heard?” I asked one officer from Yonkers—Camacho—who had been away on vacation. We were standing alone by the yard door. I told him.

  “Payday” was his first reaction, and for the first time I realized that, yes, it had happened on one of the alternate Wednesdays when we were paid. Payday was party day. The story also seemed to reinforce one of Camacho’s most strongly held convictions: “Don’t ever hang out with COs!” he said vehemently. “When they’re together, they think they’re like—” He held his hands out as though to indicate an extremely big head. In other words, like the whole world is their cellblock.

  Feliciano, as we stood next to each other in lineup one day, murmured, “You know that inmate who attacked Pitkin? Turns out he’s the cousin of my friend’s girlfriend.” The lesson for him was: When you are from the big city, it’s a very small world.

  Another officer, Riordan, brought the matter up with me when we were near the center staircase during the morning count; no one could see or hear us. Any of the four would lose his job if convicted of a felony, he said. De Los Santos was especially vulnerable because, like me, he had worked less than a year as a guard and was still on probationary status—not afforded all the protections of union members, in other words.

  “What I don’t get is why they had to handcuff him first,” said Riordan. “Just beat him up without handcuffing him!”

  “I think it’s just lucky they didn’t shoot him, too,” I replied. Riordan took out his little two-inch knife, the maximum size we were allowed to have, and, seemingly on a whimsy, sliced up all the notices on the inmate bulletin board. One of them had to do with the upcoming inmate Jaycee rap contest. Riordan extemped his own rap: “I live in B-block, I’m in for life. / This big guy is Wally, he’s my wife.”

  I wasn’t exactly sympathetic to the Playhouse Four, but I did find myself hoping they didn’t make it into the news. Around this same time, tabloids and local TV news shows were full of revelations about the abuse of a Haitian immigrant, Abner Louima, by New York City police officers who had shoved a broomstick up his rectum. Any further incident of police brutality would be tinder for this media fire. But, maybe because the Playhouse incident involved minorities on both sides, it got no press.

  In late November, two months after the event, I arrived at work to find the following message written on a chalkboard: PLAYHOUSE 4—NO TRUE BILL—JUSTIFIABLE FORCE. In other words, the grand jury had decided not to indict the officers. I felt myself breathe out a little of the collective sigh of relief. The guys, as other officers had noted, were just doing what we’d been taught to do inside prison when one of us was threatened: respond en masse. The handcuffs, pistol, and continued beating were unfortunate but, hey, when you all shared the same difficult circumstance—prison work—you tended to give each other the benefit of the doubt.

  Still, the idea that there is a current of brutality in corrections work is hard to deny. Anyone who follows the news knows that you don’t have to look far to see correction officers at their worst. In New Jersey in 1995, jail guards processing inmates who had rioted at an immigration detention center ran them through a punching and kicking gauntlet, and later placed at least one of their heads in a flushing toilet and pulled out the pubic hairs of another with pliers. In Florida in 1999, nine guards armed with a stun gun conducted a putative cell extraction of an inmate that left him dead; they have refused to talk, and the state has classified it a homicide. (It seems relevant that the inmate was on Death Row for having killed a CO.) On Long Island in 1997, an inmate who annoyed his guards by calling out for methadone died of a ruptured spleen after two of them beat him in his cell. Before he died, it was alleged, they tried to get him to sign a statement saying that his injuries were accidental. (A joke I heard from a CO in a bar upstate: How many COs did it take to push the inmate down the stairs? None—he fell by himself.)

  Every single story about guards seems to reinforce the brutal stereotype. When I see accused officers on television or read the remarks of union reps in the papers, what disappoints me is the universal denial that the events ever took place as alleged, or any admission of the obvious, that among the many good officers there are also a few bad ones. Even as what journalists call background—remarks made without attribution—guards don’t dare admit that all of us at times feel like strangling an inmate, that inmates taunt us, strike us, humiliate us in ways civilians could never imagine, and that through it all the guard is supposed to do nothing but stand there and take it. This information wouldn’t excuse the crimes, but it might chip away at the stereotype by making a few of the incidents more understandable. Instead, guards adopt a siege mentality—a shutting up, a closing of ranks—that is law enforcement at its stupidest.

  Abusive guards are out there, no question. They were not, by and large, the newer officers at Sing Sing, the ones I worked with in B-block. I think the constant turnover worked against the news-making brutality: B-block officers lacked the solidarity, the shared experience and mind-set of an upstate prison that could allow bad things to happen and be successfully covered up. But I could sense the potential for abusiveness in a couple of officers from outside the block whom I’d come into contact with or heard stories about.

  In the early fall, I was working V-gallery, on the flats, just downstairs from W, when above me I heard a commotion. “House nigger!” an inmate shouted angrily. “Doing the white man’s work!”

  “Bitch!” an officer shot back, along with some other things I couldn’t hear.

  The action was taking place two floors up, on X-gallery. I stopped to watch, as did the officer working the yard door and another. We stood next to each other, and ascertained that the yelling officer, the one the inmate had called “house nigger,” was up there doing a cell search, probably as a result of a tip that the inmate had drugs or money or a weapon. He was a senior officer with a reputation for being tough; he sometimes came over to B-block on an assignment like this. Probably near fifty, he was built like a tank and always seemed to have his jaw clenched.

  The inmate whose cell was being searched was a tough-looking guy in dreadlocks. Typically during a cell search,
one officer did the searching while another stood with the inmate outside the cell. But in this case, there were two big officers assisting the search officer; they probably had expected some trouble.

  The officer was pissed off and in the guy’s face, repeatedly calling him a bitch. The two other officers, one of them from my class, held their hands off their sides as though they expected action any instant.

  “Fuck you, man, I’ll see you in New York!” said the inmate.

  “Is that a threat?” asked the officer, now very close.

  The inmate said something else, and the officer spit in his face. The inmate tried to retaliate but was brought down in an instant, crunched by the three big guys. As they subdued him, the inmate next door started screaming out, berating the tough officer.

  “You a low creature, man! I can’t believe you done that! You lower than dirt.” Inmates down below called up to ask what had happened.

  “He spit on the brother.”

  “Who did?”

  “That officer from the hospital, the same one that snuffed Mad Dog when he was in the Visit Room.”

  Then an inmate called out to us on the flats: “You all were witnesses!”

  It was true, though we all knew it meant nothing. We’d never act as witnesses for an inmate. We hadn’t seen a thing. Then an inmate yelled out: “Plummer, how would you feel if that was your little brother or cousin?”

  Plummer was one of the officers I was standing with. Like the tough officer upstairs, he was black. Plummer said nothing.

  I wondered how the paperwork was going to be handled on this one. The next day at lineup, I asked Officer Z, the one I knew from the Academy, who had been standing there, about that part of it.

  “Well, we all sat down in the sergeant’s office and talked about it,” he explained.

  “And what did you say about the spitting?”

  “Well, he didn’t spit at him. What happened was, he was yelling at the guy and some spit came out of his mouth—you know how it is when you’re yelling.” Ah. It was interesting to watch Officer Z maintain this story even though he knew that I knew it was made up. A time-honored law enforcement ritual, one of the few creative acts the job demanded: remembering an incident, revising it so that it happened as it should have, and then repeating that story until it sounded real.