“So we knew we had to stand together, or we’d all be plucking our eyebrows, putting on lipstick, and cutting the back pockets off our jeans. We had to consolidate, because there weren’t enough of us to split into separate crews, like the niggers had. So we needed something else. Something the niggers had. And the spics, too. Brotherhood. We had to be the same. Shared blood. Heritage.
“That’s where this started. And now it’s full-circle. We were a gang, threatened by bigger ones, so we all came together for protection. Way it always happens, you think about it. Then we got this…ideology. The key word in AB isn’t ‘Aryan,’ it’s ‘Brotherhood.’ And we still use it, for the same reasons. We use it to recruit, to hold us together. But the last part of the circle is where we are now. All of us. We all know it’s a lie.
“You listen to some of us, you listen to Elijah’s boys—I guess they’re Foghorn’s now—you’d hear the exact same thing: It’s the fucking Jews. They’re the ones who cause all the misery we suffer. They’re the reason we’re in the joint to begin with: Jew laws, Jew lawyers, Jew judges.
“But’s that a mountain of bullshit. And when you’re serious about your work, bullshit gets in the way. We got some dumbass ‘Aryans’ who can tell you all about the Vikings. Odin. Valhalla. All that crap. Always reading. Big students of history. Assholes are as lame as the Christers who they used to send around from outside. The only history a good thief should care about is history he can use.” He laughed, sweet as cyanide.
He lit another smoke, asked: “Did you know that Al Capone only committed one murder himself in his whole life? I mean, he must have ordered a couple of hundred hits, but he only did one himself. You know who he whacked?”
“Some punk who beat up his best friend,” I said.
He gave me a look, said nothing.
“Guy named Jake Guzik,” I went on, making it clear I could go on a lot longer if he wanted.
“Yeah,” he said, slowly, shifting his tone, not his posture, but it was enough of a tell that I’d surprised him. “And when he did that Valentine’s Day Massacre, it was the Purple Gang he called in for the work. Kikes, every one of them.”
“Dumb ones, too,” I said.
This time, his laugh was chestier. “Yeah, there goes another rumor down the toilet. But that boat still floats. You got Italian guys saying they’re ‘Aryans.’ You got skinners thinking they’re part of the ‘Master Race.’ They go around quoting Nietzsche, got their spiderweb tattoos, all that crap. But here’s the joke: any real con with half a brain knows it’s all a hose job. Just like those Black Muslim bosses—you think they really believe some mad scientist on a secret island created the whole white race in a test tube? Sure.
“What we are now is a gang. Same as the bikers. May have started out different, but now we’re about money. Most of the race stuff, it never makes it to the streets. Look at the white kids we should be recruiting. But what do you find in the trailer parks, now? Dumb-fuck skinheads who just want to get wasted and go out and whack somebody with a baseball bat. Or punk-ass ‘Nazis’ who have to hide behind the goddamn police when they go on one of their little marches. And white kids are turning into stone whiggahs—they want to be fucking ‘rappers’ or play in the NBA.
“Look, this is about business, okay? There’s even…You ever hear of the Nazi Lowriders?”
“No,” I lied. More to keep in practice than for any other reason.
“They started out like an…auxiliary, I guess you’d call them. We were in; they were out. So they got things done for us, specially the drug stuff. Worked out good for everyone. Only thing, some of them are spics. I don’t mean no half-and-halves, either.”
“Nazis, huh?”
“Yeah,” he said, dry-laughing. “Heil fucking Hitler.”
“I get it,” I said. Not lying, then.
“As long as you have prisons, you’ll have gangs,” he went on, like I hadn’t spoken. “They got them in Australia, they got them in Thailand, they got them in Russia. And when members get out—and most do—they just keep on trucking. Back to business. It works for us, and it works for them, too.”
“Them?” I asked, keeping anything resembling a challenge out of my voice.
“You think, if all the gangs Inside got together, the guards could hold the joints against us? Not for a minute. Long as they can keep us killing each other, they’re pretty safe. Sure, every blue moon, they put an ultra-hard-core like Tom Silverstein in a unit with a guard that just has to fuck with him, and then…But most of the time, the cops Inside just stay out of the way, let us do what we need to do, so long as we don’t do it to them.”
He fired another cigarette. “Ever notice how often you hear ‘blood’ in this? Niggers call each other ‘blood’—even named one of their gangs that way—the one that kills another nigger gang on sight. It’s all a trick, and we all get played.
“Now, listen for another minute, ’cause I’m coming to what really counts. You know what every AB man Inside fears most today?”
“The same thing they experiment on in labs.”
“Huh?”
“White rats.”
“That’s it,” he said, grimly. “There’s dozens of our men looking at the Death House right now because they got snitched off. Not infiltrated—those movies where they put undercovers in prison, never happen. Couldn’t happen—we’ve got that acid test for new members. Cops kill people all the time—blow away a bunch of dealers, keep their stash, and get medals for it. Fuck, some of them hire out as killers. But there’s no way their bosses give them permission to take someone out just so they could work undercover. That kind of thing, there has to be a record of it. I met some dumb motherfuckers who carry a badge, but never one that pure-grade stupid.
“No, it’s always one of our own that turns. Some pure white Aryan warrior, one hundred percent man, ready for Valhalla when his time comes, that’s who gets on the stand and fingers us.
“That’s why all the Brand bosses got their California life sentences commuted by the governor a while back—so they could start on their federal time. That was supposed to be to spread out the leadership, but it was really about setting us up for one big take-down.
“And it worked. By now, there’s so much paranoia running wild that you got guys checking in because they think they’re about to be put on knock-off, see? If you’re going to be iced for ratting when you’re innocent, why not make yourself guilty, and score all the rewards that go along with it?”
I shrugged at the perfect cross he was describing. It was true enough—every gang put out hits on suspected rats, so it had to happen. You start suspecting you’ve been suspected, and…
He dragged deep enough on his cigarette to reduce it by half—guy had lungs like bellows. “Few years ago, there’s this guy—Felton, I think his name was. Anyway, he’s East Coast, big player in one of the max joints in Jersey. Second-in-command. He gets out, ready to kick it off. ‘Rahowa’—know what that is?”
“Racial Holy War.”
“Yeah. This guy, he’s not going out to work, he’s going to start blowing things up, bring on the revolution. Naturally, being an amateur, he screws up. All that time Inside, he never learns anything about crime? Fucking amazing. Anyway, he gets caught passing some funny money—I mean, real silly shit that he made on a Xerox machine or something.
“So back Inside he goes. And that’s when it hits the fan. This guy, he’s half mud. And his mother, the white half, she’s a dyke. Probably got some Jew in her, too. So, naturally, the real white guys put him on the KOS list.
“But he never turned rat!” the AB man said, pride overruling everything else in his voice. “He never rolled, and he could have given them a lot. So who’s more old-school? Who’s more real? Who’s more loyal? A nigger passing for white, or a white passing for a man?”
“That’s not a question.”
“Right. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know. But I had to say it, because otherwise nothing I’m goi
ng to say now is going to make sense, all right?”
“You’re still talking.”
He stubbed out his cigarette. Reached toward his shirt pocket, then stopped, as if he was trying to prove something to himself.
“You’re at the bottom of a long steep hill. There’s an enemy waiting for you at the top. He holds the high ground, and he’s comfortable up there. If you stay where you are, you starve to death. But you can’t rush him. You can’t charge up that hill. You’ll be out of breath, your muscles will lock up on you. Even if you make it to the top, you’re easy pickings. So what do you do?”
“Depends on what you’ve got,” I said. Emotionless as a mathematician reciting a theorem.
“Give me some examples.”
“Trick him into coming down off that hill. Blow the whole thing up. Get a sniper to pick him off.”
“No,” he said. Not disrespectfully, just giving me more facts.
“Sneak up the hill, then. Take your time—more important that he doesn’t see you coming,” I said, reciting my ghost brother’s mantra. “So, when you make your move, you’re as close to ready as you can be.”
I didn’t bother to say, “Don’t fight fair.” In the world we share, that’s the air we breathe.
“That’s right. That’s the only way. And you know what gets me up that hill? What gets me close enough to make a fight of it?”
“Money.”
He nodded.
“And you know where there’s a lot of that, but you can’t put your hands on it yourself,” I said.
“You’re asking, or telling?”
“Guessing.”
“I went to Silver for a reason. I’m not going anywhere near a Brand for this one—not one on the street, I mean. You never know who’ll turn. Not anymore. Silver, he knows this, too. So—remember what I said about ‘references’? There’s only one I care about: can you be trusted? You know what Silver told me about that. But he told me something else, too. He told me you were the smartest guy he ever met.”
I didn’t react.
“I’m dying,” he said. “Doctors told me I got a year, maybe a year and a half.”
I watched him, waiting.
“I’m not just rolling over for it. I spent what I had, used up a lot of favors. There’s a place over in Switzerland where they’re supposed to have been doing stuff with stem cells for a long time. Years and years before that asshole we got running this country said it was illegal. Anyway, supposedly, supposedly, they’ve got a way to beat this…thing I got.”
“For money.”
“I need a million and a half, cash,” he said. “That’s for everything. Getting over there—I got no passport—getting fixed, few months in their clinic, then coming home.”
I kept my face expressionless. All this for another ex-con with some dream heist he conjured up in the darkness of his cell. Now all he needs is for someone to put the right string together, take all the risks, and, if it actually works, give him his piece. If the poor bastard was looking at me for it, he was rolling a pair of one-dot dice.
“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. And he probably did.
He tapped another smoke out of his pack, lit up. “It’s not that. This is as real as steel. Got enough patience left to hear the rest?”
“Ask Silver.”
“When we started, the Brotherhood was…rotating. We’d have guys Inside, guys on the bricks, guys making the return trip. Outside, race war was just yak-yak. But Inside, once it moved from the occasional flare-up to…to the way we lived all the time…we had to change the rules. The rules about getting in, I mean. It wasn’t enough to say you’d die for the race—that was something you could do, not something you did do. Acid test, like I said before.”
“Blood in, blood out.”
“Yeah. No more ‘get in the car.’ The car was too big. More like a bus; even a convoy of buses. Only one driver, just a few in the front seats. The rest were passengers. And passengers, they have to buy tickets. If you came to us for protection, you paid for it. If you came to us to be us, you had to pass the test.
“What that meant—sooner or later, what it had to mean—is that we had some guys who were never going to rotate. Killing a man Inside, it used to be you got some A.C. time. But the worse it got, the harder they came down. Turned cases over to prosecutors out in the World, not the kangaroo court they run behind the Walls.
“So, instead of just losing some good time, you got actual charges. Which means, all of a sudden, the Man was holding a lot more cards. You with me?”
“Sure. Anyone with the power to add to one sentence has the power to cut another one.”
“Right. So some of us ended up with a string of Life-Withouts on top of what they were already doing. The shot-callers now are the guys who’re never going home, see?”
He got a nod out of me, nothing more.
“Mercy is always a symptom of weakness,” the dying man said. “It’s just another form of fear—you’re secretly afraid that if you don’t spare your enemy, someday your enemy might not spare you.”
His eyes, so light a brown they were almost colorless, held all the empathy of an alligator waiting in shallow water for something—anything—to walk too close to the riverbank.
“I was one of those on rotation. Got out before it went crazy. By the time I came back, I was already one of the Originals—nobody thought to even ask me to prove in. I kept going…in and out…always affiliated, though.
“I met Silver when the feds had us both—him short, me a little longer. He went on—you know his story—and now he’s got two life sentences. He owes one to the State, and one to us.”
He took a deep drag of his cigarette, giving me a chance to ask him a question without interrupting. I signaled him to keep talking.
“No matter what we called ourselves in the World, Inside we went back to being together. It was when the feds had me that I met this guy—the one who’s the key to everything. He was in for business stuff. Not the kind of stuff you’d expect to see a Level Six joint for. So, the way I saw it at first, he must have been a stand-up guy, because they always offer those business boys some soft ride if they give people up.
“He needed us. No chance he was going to prove in—that wasn’t him. And he could pay for protection. So we did business. Nothing special. We did it for a lot of guys, even Mafia bosses.
“One day, out of nowhere, this guy, he gets me alone on the yard. And he tells me why he kept his mouth shut when the feds dropped him. He had something to trade, all right. Something so big he probably could have walked away with probation—maybe even immunity and relocation. But he didn’t want that. He wanted the money. The money these other guys—three other guys—owed him. At least the way he saw it they owed him. He’d been waiting years—I mean, a lot of years—to collect what he thought was coming to him. But he knew it had to be done just right, and he wasn’t man enough for the job.”
“So he came to prison to find the right guys?”
“No,” he said, giving me a look I couldn’t interpret. “What he did was, he fucked up his life. Tapped these other guys for ‘loans,’ started businesses, went belly-up every time. So he started stealing. Cooking the books, skimming, that kind of bullshit. The tax guys nailed him first, then the locals piled on.
“That’s when he realized the truth. He was born to fail at anything he ever tried. That was his destiny. It didn’t matter how many chances he got, he’d mess them all up. What he needed was one T-rex score, so he could live in the Philippines—he never explained that one to me—for the rest of his life, live like a god.”
I shrugged my shoulders. We’d both heard this one before. Hell, I thought I’d been about to hear it again a few minutes earlier.
“What he had was some information. Three guys—three rich guys, from the best families—had committed a real ugly murder. Gang rape, torture, you name it. Then they killed the girl—and I mean a girl; she was, like, twelve, thirteen years old. When they d
id it, two of them were fifteen, the other was sixteen. This was in 1975. Today, they’d be in their forties.”
“He wanted you to get them to buy the proof he was holding?”
“Yeah. He knew he couldn’t pull it off himself. You need a whole crew for something that complicated. Besides, he was scared of them. Or at least of the muscle their kind of money can buy.”
“But you never did it?”
“No. One, it isn’t the kind of job you farm out; you’ve got to be in control yourself. Two, even if it worked, the money would get whacked up so many ways before I saw any myself, it wasn’t worth the risk.”
“So?”
“So he never tried it, either.”
“How do you know?”
“This guy, he found me. Just a couple of months ago. He’s been out for years. Now he’s just a pathetic little piece of shit, owns some kind of two-bit strip club, kicks back to everyone who says ‘Boo!’ to him, drives an old Caddy, wears cheap jewelry, gets a free blow job whenever he wants one.”
“Not the paradise in the Philippines, huh?”
“No. I guess whatever scheme he had didn’t play out. But he still wants it to happen. That whole life, I mean. Says he can do it on a half-mil. I collect that, whatever’s left is mine.”
“So you want me to get it done, and I get to keep whatever’s over two million?”
If he thought I was being sarcastic, he let it slide. “These guys—check them out for yourself first, be as sure as you need to be; I got the names—could come up with a couple of mil apiece. Wouldn’t even make a dent.”
“That’s if this guy—the one who came to you—is for real.”
“What’s he get out of making it up? He’s pretty sure I can get the job done on these three guys, but he knows I can get it done on him, this easy,” he said, snapping his fingers. “Plus, he’ll show the proof…provided I say I’m ready to make the move.”
“So how’s he know you won’t just move in, get the other three to pay you, and walk away with it all? Leave him with nothing?”
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