Convicted

by Jameel Zookie McGee

  I also worried about my marriage. My phone rang at all hours, day and night, mainly calls from B. He would call saying he’d just received a hot tip about a dealer, and out the door I’d run. Both our wives thought the two of us were covering affairs for one another. I didn’t have a mistress, but I was still unfaithful to my wife with my job. It had become my all in all.

  Sitting in my car, tears running down my face, I thought of all the ways I had let my wife down. I hated what I had done to her. I hated what I had done to B. I hated the thought of what might happen if I was found out. Deep down I knew I needed to make a change. I couldn’t keep going like this.

  But I did.

  The next morning the shock over the dead fifteen-year-old had worn off. I got up, went to work, and kept right on doing exactly what I always did. By this point I believed I was in too deep to turn things around. I’d lied hundreds of times to my chief, to my captains, to judges, to juries, and to prosecutors in both state and federal cases. I realized I had also become financially dependent on the perks B and I created for ourselves. The pangs of conscience died down while I became even more aggressive both in trying to get drug dealers off the street and in profiting from them.

  God fired one more warning shot across my bow that should have been enough. A few weeks before one of my arrests was scheduled to go to trial in a federal court, the US attorney on the case came to our department to go over the evidence and discuss our recollection of the incident. Everything sailed along fine until she said, “I need to talk to your informant myself. He may need to testify at the trial.”

  I tried to play it cool, but panic bells began to sound in my head. The informant listed had no idea he was associated with this case. He hadn’t given us any information. I had simply used his name and a lot of false information to get a search warrant.

  “That’s not possible,” I replied, hoping my voice didn’t crack. “Standard procedure around here is to assure our CPIs [confidential paid informants] that they will never have to testify or go public. If one of them ever did, he’d be as good as dead, and we’d never get anyone else to talk to us again.”

  “Neither I nor the United States Attorney’s Office cares what you promised him. I need your informant, and I need him by the end of the day today,” she said. I could hear my heart beating in my ears. She must have heard it as well because she added, “And if you do not cooperate, Officer Collins, I will personally hunt him down and hand deliver him a subpoena to appear in federal court. Have I made myself clear?”

  “Yes, very clear,” I answered. “All right, well, if you’ll excuse me, I need to contact my informant,” I said as I got out of the room as quickly as possible. Before I got to my office, I had already hatched a plan. I decided to call a second informant who owed me big-time. A few months earlier I’d lied to the FBI about him and kept him from being indicted on federal charges. Instead, he did a couple of months in the county jail. Yep, this guy owed me, and now was the time to collect. I decided to tell the informant to claim to this nosy US attorney that he was the informant named on my search warrant. Before he met with her, I planned to tell him exactly what to say and how to say it, both to her and in court if he had to testify.

  Before I could locate the guy’s number, I realized that trusting a man like this to cover for me was both dangerous and stupid. I still called him, but instead of instructing him to come in and lie for me, I told him to find the person I had listed on the warrant and tell him to disappear for a few weeks because the FBI was after him. There is a legal term for what I did: obstruction of justice.

  After making that call, I went back to the US attorney and told her I could not reach my informant but I had some people on the street looking for him. I don’t know if she could see through my lies or not, but at this point my panic had given way to the adrenaline rush of living on the edge.

  Once she left the office, I went into full-on cover-my-own-butt mode. B and I went to our captain and pushed him to make her back off. “You’ve been on the streets. You know what will happen if we lose our CPIs,” we argued. He listened and went to bat for us. In the end, the US attorney backed off, but the experience scared me.

  For the next few weeks I played it as straight as straight could be. I made sure the informants I listed on my search warrants had actually given me the information I claimed to have. But old habits die hard, and before I knew it, I was right back where I had been before. That’s not entirely correct. I did not go back to where I was before. I went even further. The end, it seemed, was inevitable.

  * * *

  * To protect my former partner’s privacy, I will not use his first or last name.

  Jameel

  The moment my trial ended, my lawyer turned to me and said, “This is just jacked up. We have strong grounds for an appeal based on the chain of events that took place today. I’m going to file immediately.”

  “All right, all right. Cool,” I said. If he hadn’t given me that hope, I might have popped right then and there.

  Either that day or the next, John filed a motion for a judgment of acquittal. Since Judge Bell was the judge who presided over my case, he was the one who made the decision on the motion. Exactly two weeks after he pronounced me guilty, he rejected the motion. He said we had not satisfied the burden of proof for the motion to be accepted. Once again I was guilty until I could prove myself innocent. The burden of proof was on me just like it had been since the moment Collins met me at the door of the store and whipped out his badge.

  The day Judge Bell pronounced me guilty, I became the angriest man in the world. When word reached me that the motion had been denied, the anger boiling inside me hit another level. Then came the sentencing hearing, which took maybe five minutes. Once again, Judge Bell was in charge. He lectured me about what a horrible person I was. He said something like, “Your family members are all hardworking citizens, but not you. You chose to live like the scum on the street, taking the easy way out by dealing drugs. Why couldn’t you be like them?”

  My jaw dropped. He couldn’t be talking to me. I’d worked my entire life, going back to when my twin brother and I worked in the blueberry fields when we were just kids. Work? Was he kidding me? My son’s mother left me because she said I worked too many hours. Now this judge was lecturing me about how I chose the easy path? My life was anything but easy. My brother and I ended up in some of the worst foster-care families in the world because my home life was so bad growing up. There were days we ran away and slept on the streets to get away from the beatings we endured. I never had the easy way, and I certainly never turned to drugs. Most of the misery I lived through as a little kid came from my parents’ addictions. I hated drugs. And I loved to work.

  Listening to the judge’s lecture, I felt like a volcano about to explode. This judge was talking down to me, saying all this stuff about me when he had no idea who I was. To him, I was just another drug dealer. I was pretty sure he was mad at me because I had the nerve to claim I was innocent and force this whole thing to go to trial. To him, I should have cut a deal because I was guilty before the jury was even seated. He didn’t care that I had nothing to do with any of this. The prosecutor didn’t care. The jury didn’t care. And Collins, well, he sure didn’t care. He knew the truth. He knew I had nothing to do with the crack he found in Will’s car, but he came after me anyway and made up this whole story that put me right here, standing before some judge who had the nerve to lecture me about hard work when all I had ever done was work hard my entire life.

  “And for that,” Judge Bell continued, “you will receive the maximum sentence for your crime: ten years to be served in a federal prison.”

  Ten years! Ten years! For what? I hadn’t done anything wrong.

  John was standing next to me and could see I was about to explode. He put his hands on my shoulders and whispered, “Man, just be cool. You don’t want to make this worse. Be cool.”

  Behind me, my family members who had come up for the hearing start
ed crying. I turned to them and a calm came over me. “It’s okay,” I said to them. “At least I don’t have life. I’ll be home eventually. It’s all right.”

  Judge Bell did give me a chance to make a final statement. I guess this was where I was supposed to express my regret for the mess I’d made of my life and the trouble I’d caused the world. Instead, I said, “I didn’t know you could get in so much trouble for letting someone use your cell phone.” With that, the officers in charge came over and took me away.

  I went straight from the courtroom to a holding cell, where I sat for a couple of hours. Finally, some federal marshals came in, shackled me, and led me to a van that drove me to the federal prison processing center in Milan, Michigan. The drive took a couple of hours. As soon as they unloaded me in Milan, I was strip-searched, then placed in a dorm-type cell with around twenty other guys. The dorm had four sets of bunk beds, which meant the room was supposed to hold eight guys, not twenty. Every person in the room was there on drug-related charges.

  From the moment I stepped out of the courtroom and into the holding cell, I made up my mind I didn’t want nothing to do with nobody. I planned to just keep to myself and do the time. I didn’t know if I could make it ten years. My mind got really dark. For the first time ever, I thought about ending my own life. I had no real hope and no reason to trust that the future was going to be any better than the past. The way I saw it, I might as well give up and check out. What was the point of going on? Eventually I got over these suicidal thoughts, but I still gave up on life. Based on everything I’d seen and experienced, life had already given up on me.

  The dorm cell was crowded, but I found a spot to put my things and sat down. Everyone in the room was talking about their case, and all of them were angry about getting caught. I didn’t say anything. I sure didn’t speak up and tell how I’d been railroaded by some cop and given ten years for something I didn’t do. No one wanted to hear that, and getting all high and mighty about being innocent wasn’t going to do me any good in here. Instead, I just kept my mouth shut and listened, which was not good for my state of mind.

  A lot of the guys had been busted with kilos of drugs. Kilos, not grams, like I had been accused of. That wasn’t a big deal to me. That was their situation, not mine. But then I heard them talk about their sentences. These guys were looking at less time than me. A lot less. I sat there boiling inside, wondering how I got ten years for twenty-eight grams I didn’t even have and these guys got four or five years for kilos they admitted were theirs? That told me how jacked up the whole system really is. Dark thoughts came back to me. I hoped that when I laid down and went to sleep I wouldn’t wake up.

  I remained in the processing center for a few weeks. I can’t remember exactly how long because everything sort of runs together now. Like I said, my mind wasn’t in a good place then. I bounced back and forth between anger and depression. The only thing that kept me going was the hope that my appeal would go through and I’d get out of this place. Since an appellate court, not Judge Bell, would make the decision on my appeal, I thought maybe I had a chance.

  One day while still in the processing center, I went down to the television room and took a seat at a table to watch some TV. There was a Koran on the table, which didn’t mean much to me and didn’t bother me. I have some Muslim family members, so I knew a few things about Islam. I am a Christian, but I figured live and let live. If someone wanted to read the Koran, that was cool. That didn’t have anything to do with me. Then a guy came over and sat down next to me. I didn’t want to get into any deep conversations, so I sort of acknowledged he was there and went back to watching TV. The guy pointed to the Koran and told me he was Muslim.

  “Okay, cool,” I said.

  He then started in on the differences between the Bible and the Koran. I tried to downplay it and said something like, “Yeah, I got some family that’s Muslim, but I’m Christian, so, yeah, you know, cool.” I really wanted to just watch television, but this guy wanted to take the conversation deeper. He started to get really worked up, like he was trying to convince me that Islam was the only way.

  Finally, I said to him, “You know, man, I don’t really want to hear any more of this, all right? I’m cool with whatever you believe, you know. Now, if it’s okay with you, I just want to watch some television.”

  The guy made it very clear very fast that it wasn’t okay with him. He stood up and started telling me what he planned to do to me. “I’m going to beat your face in,” he yelled at me.

  He should have just left me alone. I’m not a big guy, but I know how to take care of myself. Growing up in Benton Harbor and spending as much time on the streets as I did, you had to know how to fight to survive. And I knew how to fight. My brother and I boxed when we were kids, as in actually getting into a boxing ring with gloves and protective headgear and the whole thing.

  I leaned back and looked at this guy and was like, “Whoa. Really? You want to fight me?”

  “That’s right,” the guy said in a way that showed he meant business.

  The other guys in the room saw what was going down and started making room. A few of them were people I knew from Benton Harbor.

  “Wow. Okay,” I said. “You want to do it right here?” At this point I didn’t care about anything. I didn’t get all loud and up in his face, but inside…inside, man, I was out of control.

  The guy looked around the television room and said something about not fighting there because we’d get caught. There was an open room right next door, so I invited him to follow me in there. He did.

  The first time I hit the guy, it was to defend myself. The punch put him on the ground. But I didn’t stop with one punch. I fell on top of him and started swinging. I wasn’t hitting an inmate who started an argument with me in the television room. Every time I threw a punch, I was hitting Officer Andrew Collins who had put me here. And I was hitting Officer Lange, the other cop who testified against me. And I was hitting Judge Bell and the jury and everyone else who had put me in this prison. But mostly I was hitting Andrew Collins over and over again.

  Next thing I knew, my homeboys from Benton Harbor were dragging me off the guy and out of the room. If they hadn’t, I’m afraid I might have killed him. I didn’t want to kill him. I didn’t want to hurt him. But I did want to kill Andrew Collins.

  For the next three years I thought about little else. And I knew how I wanted to do it. I didn’t plan on using a gun or a knife. Those are too quick and easy. No, I planned on beating Collins to death, punching him over and over and over again until I couldn’t lift my arms. I am not nor have I ever really been a violent man. I had never wanted to hurt or kill anyone until this point. The longer I was in prison, though, the more I wanted to exact my revenge one punch at a time on the man who put me there.

  To my great surprise, I did not get into trouble over the fight. I expected to face some kind of disciplinary action, but none came. The day after the fight, I went and found the guy I’d beaten up so I could apologize to him. I walked into his cell and said, “Hey, what’s up, man?”

  “Yeah man, what’s up?” he replied. Then before I could say a word, he said, “I want to say I’m sorry.”

  “Nah man, that’s why I came down here to find ya,” I said. “I shouldn’t have taken it as far as I did. I had a lot of stuff done to me, which is why I ended up in here. I took all my frustration out on you. I’m sorry. I ain’t that type of guy. Man, if you’d just left me alone, we’d been cool, but when you didn’t, I took everything I was feeling inside out on you.”

  “I’m sorry, man,” he said, “and I want you to know I don’t have no beef with you. I’m not gonna be trying to come back and sneak up on you, none of that. I’m gonna be straight up front with you from now on.”

  “All right. I ain’t worried about it. You just be you around me and we’ll be fine. Hopefully we can get past this,” I said.

  A couple of days later the guards came and told me to gather my things because I was
being transferred. The Milan processing center is directly across from a federal prison. Not everyone who goes through the processing center ends up at the Milan prison—a lot of them are sent to other places around the country. Me, I just had to pick up my stuff and walk through some gates to the prison next door. Of course they strip-searched me when I arrived, even though I was coming from a federal holding center.

  The guy with whom I’d gotten into the fight was transferred at the same time. He ended up in a cell a couple of doors down from me. I learned his last name was Hernandez. I never knew his first name. We never got into another fight. The two of us started talking and became pretty good friends. He was one of the few guys I talked to in prison. Hernandez was a good artist, so a few months later I went to him with a request. Since I’d boxed growing up, I decided I’d like boxing gloves tattooed on my arm. He did it for me. Over the next few years the two of us got tight.

  While I was in Milan, I also met a cousin I didn’t know I had. I’d seen this guy around the prison and he seemed okay. One day I heard him mention one of my cousins as his cousin. When I heard that I was like, “Whoa, what are you talking about? That’s my cousin.” The two of us started talking and found out we were related. (I have a really big family.) After that we looked out for each other.

  My only other real friend in Milan was a guy named James, but everyone called him Jimmy. It turned out his case was exactly like mine, except he admitted to me he was guilty. He was mad, but mad that he’d been caught. Not only was he arrested with the exact same amount of crack I’d been charged with, but by coincidence he had the same name as the confidential informer Collins had used against me. The only difference between him and the informant was one had dark skin and one had light. When I heard his name, I was like, Oh my gosh, that can’t be true. But it was.