Convicted

by Jameel Zookie McGee

  “I understand,” I said. Then I sat there for several moments, searching for the right place to begin my story. Other than Pastor Brian, I had not told anyone everything I had done, not even my wife. Overcome with shame, I couldn’t look Frank in the eye. Instead, I sat there staring at the floor, trying to force my mouth to form words.

  “So you’re guilty, then?” Frank simply said.

  Still staring at the floor, I nodded my head. That simple acknowledgment freed me to begin to speak. “Yes,” I said softly. Then the words began to flow, and I told him my entire story in great detail. Once I finished, I asked, “Would you be willing to represent me?”

  “Yes, of course,” Frank said. That settled it. I had found my attorney, my advocate. After discussing possible next steps, we shook hands and I drove home. Before I even arrived at home, he called to tell me he’d arranged a meeting for me with the lead prosecutor on my case.

  A few days later I was back in Frank’s office. That’s when I first heard the extent of the government’s case against me. “They’re ready to indict on at least six felony counts, including obstruction of justice, racketeering, possession of crack with intent to deliver, possession of marijuana with intent to distribute, possession of heroin with intent to distribute, and civil rights charges.”

  I swallowed hard in shock. “So what does all of that mean?”

  “If you are convicted on all six counts, the mandatory minimum sentence is somewhere around twenty years.” I ran the numbers in my head in relation to my daughter’s age. That’s when it hit me: I stood a good chance of missing all of her grade school, junior high, and high school years, as well as college.

  The mandatory minimum sentence…When I was a cop I used those words like a hammer to break suspects and get them to rat out their partners in crime. Now that I was on this side of the equation, everything looked different.

  “So what can we do?” I asked, desperate.

  “The prosecutor is a real black-and-white kind of guy. He told me if you are willing to work with him and cooperate with the investigation, they might be willing to work with us on the level of charges,” Frank said.

  “Anything,” I said. “I’ll do whatever I have to do.”

  Frank went on to explain that the US Attorney’s office had offered me a proffer agreement. This was not a plea agreement where I would do X and get Y. Instead, the prosecutors said they were willing to consider filing a 5K1 motion if I cooperated with their investigation. The motion gave the judge discretion to sentence me as he saw fit. The great part of a proffer agreement is that if at some point during the process I gave incriminating information about myself that the prosecutors didn’t already have, they could not use that information against me. “But since they’ve pretty much thrown every charge in the book at you already, I don’t think that’s going to be a problem,” Frank joked.

  I felt relieved by the proffer agreement. If it went through, I might be reunited with my daughter before she graduated from college after all. Even more important to me was the prospect of regaining some shred of integrity that I had thrown away over the previous few years. Telling the whole truth without shading my stories to shift blame to others felt like a good first step.

  My sense of relief was short lived. Frank went on to tell me that none other than the Honorable Judge Bell had my case. The mention of his name made me sick to the pit of my stomach. Judge Bell had a well-earned reputation for being hard nosed. I’d testified in his court against men he’d put away in prison for a long time. On many of those occasions, I had lied. When Judge Bell put those facts together, I didn’t expect much mercy from him.

  “Judge Bell? He can’t hear my case. I’ve testified in front of him too many times. That’s a conflict of interest!” I pleaded with Frank.

  “Well, maybe,” he said, “but there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  I had no choice but to trust his judgment.

  —

  My first proffer meeting came in early September at the FBI office in St. Joseph. I knew the office well. I’d been there many times as a cop. Rather than meet with one of the prosecutors, I was scheduled to sit down with FBI agents, and not just any agents. The lead detective, an agent named Al, was in charge of this interview. To say I was nervous was an understatement. Over the years I had become very familiar with his work. As a cop I appreciated how he made bad guys crumble. Now I wished I was meeting anyone but him.

  We took our seats and made some pleasant small talk. Al treated me like we were still old friends, until he asked his first question, which I thought was a joke: “Do you have any offshore bank accounts?”

  I gave a small chuckle, and then I saw the look on Al’s face. He was dead serious. The government obviously believed I’d run some sort of organization generating enough cash that it needed to be hidden away in a Swiss bank. “No,” I answered truthfully. “All the money I skimmed was spent long, long ago.”

  “I need to explain the rules of these meetings to you, Mr. Collins,” Al said. “You must be completely truthful. If we catch you in one lie, everything you’ve told us will be thrown out. Do you understand this?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Then why don’t we start from the beginning,” he said.

  “Okay. When I was eight years old, I stole a package of Life Savers from the store down the block from my house.” I meant this as a joke, as a way of lightening the mood. No one thought it was funny.

  “Let’s stay more specific to your wrongdoings as a member of the Benton Harbor Police Department,” Al replied in a serious tone. He was in no mood for levity.

  I let out a sigh and said, “All right.” I then told him how my partner, B, and I operated within the narcotics division. I started off with the story of the arrest where we took the video-game system and skimmed off money for ourselves by using the name of a fake informant.

  Al stopped me. “I find it very hard to believe your partner was involved in your activity,” he said.

  “You told me I had to tell the whole truth, and this is the whole truth. I started doing things before we became partners, but once we were put together, the two of us did these things together.”

  Al had a surprised look. “Your former partner has been a crucial part of the task force assembled to investigate you,” he said.

  I felt as though I’d been punched in the gut. Had B sold me out? Had he told them everything, except how we were partners in every sense of the word? I hoped that wasn’t the case.

  “I don’t know about that, but I can tell you what the two of us did on a regular basis.” I went on to describe in detail how we falsified search warrants off little or no information and how I used the drugs stashed in my office to justify them. I explained that if I stated in a warrant that I’d made a controlled buy of crack, I took the crack out of my stash and pocketed the money. “That’s what I did with the drugs found in my office. Once or twice we planted some on suspects, but that was rare.”

  “So you didn’t sell the drugs yourself?” Al asked.

  His question surprised me. “Excuse me?” I asked.

  “You did not take drugs from dealers and then turn around and sell them yourself?” he clarified.

  “No! No way. I never did anything like that.”

  “That’s a relief,” Al said with a slight smile.

  At the end of our first meeting, Al shook my hand and made a promise. “In light of all you’ve said, I’m going to work as hard to keep you out of prison as I’ve been working to put you behind bars these past six months,” he vowed.

  I thanked him, but I kept thinking about that last line. This mess I’d made for myself was much deeper than I had ever imagined.

  —

  Over the next three months I had multiple meetings with Al. I passed the polygraph, during which they asked me about B’s involvement. Later, Al had me wear a wire and talk to B myself to try to get him on tape admitting to the things we did together so the FBI could go after him. I felt very
uncomfortable doing this, and B did not trap himself.

  In the meeting after I passed the polygraph test, I walked in and discovered a stack of file folders on the table. “The county prosecutor’s office has a huge pile of complaints against you,” Al said. “They started rolling in as soon as the news broke the day you were caught. These are some of the files for cases on which you worked. Some, not all. We’ll get to them all eventually. For now you can help us clear up this mess by going through these with us one at a time and letting us know which cases were compromised.”

  I guess I had known this was coming, but I dreaded it. Thanks to my greed and lies, the very people I worked so hard to get off the streets were now going to go free. If I’d done my police work the way I knew I was supposed to, without cutting corners, these convictions would have all stood.

  FBI agents and I then went through the case files, one at a time. When I found ones in which I’d lied to obtain a search warrant or faked an informant or changed the police reports or lied to get a conviction, Al sent them to the prosecutor’s office. The charges against these defendants were then dropped or, if the defendants were already in prison, their convictions were overturned and they went free. Over the next few months, which is how long it took me to go through all the files, nearly sixty cases were dropped or convictions overturned.

  The Sunday night after Thanksgiving my phone rang. It was Al. He wanted me to come in the next day to take another polygraph test. I explained to him it was my daughter’s birthday and we had plans to take her to Chuck E. Cheese’s to celebrate. He assured me it wouldn’t take long, so I agreed to meet him the next morning.

  After I hung up the phone, I sat there for a long time, thinking. Krissy came over and asked what was going on. When I told her, she said something about how odd this seemed. Over the previous three months of meetings, Al had settled into a fairly regular routine. This didn’t fit it.

  The moment I walked into the FBI office the next morning I knew I was in trouble. There were no files stacked on the conference room table. The polygraph machine was not in its usual place, and the agent who administered the test was nowhere to be seen. There was only Al standing at one end of the room, waiting for me. As soon as he saw me, he said, “The indictment came down. You’re under arrest.”

  “But my daughter’s birthday…” I blurted out.

  “The indictment came down last week, but I didn’t want to arrest you before Thanksgiving,” he said. I didn’t believe him.

  Two other agents appeared and handcuffed me. I was led to a waiting car and we left for Grand Rapids, where I was to be booked. Thankfully the two agents allowed me to make a couple of phone calls during the hour-long drive. I first called my wife and told her what had happened. We cried together, less over my arrest, which we both knew was coming, but over the timing of it.

  After I hung up I wondered how many more birthdays I was going to miss.

  Jameel

  Two, maybe three days after my final appeal was denied, I received another letter informing me the federal prison system had decided to move me to Level I custody. The lower the level, the less risk you pose to the prison system. The letter offered me the chance to transfer from Milan, which was a Level IV prison, to the trustee camp that didn’t even have a real fence in Terre Haute, Indiana. I didn’t have to give the decision a moment’s thought. I was ready to get out of Milan. The place didn’t exactly hold a lot of fond memories for me.

  There are actually two federal prisons in Terre Haute. The camp was the smaller of the two, with a limited number of inmates. Right across the street sits the United States Penitentiary (USP), which is one bad place. Its level is off the charts. The Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, was housed and executed there.

  When I arrived in Terre Haute, I went through the usual routine: strip-searched and all of that. Then I was placed in a cell for the night. The next morning I awoke to bells clanging like an escape alarm had gone off. I had no idea what was going on. The guards came in and escorted me and another thirteen or so guys across the street to USP.

  Oh, God! What’s happening? I prayed with every step. I don’t think I’ve ever prayed as hard as I did when they led us through the gates of USP. When we got inside, they didn’t strip-search us. Instead, the officers took us straight to the kitchen. On the way I keep looking around. I felt as if I were looking straight into hell. Oh man, I hope they aren’t fixing to keep me in here.

  Once they had us in the kitchen, one of the officers told us what was going on. “The entire prison is on lockdown right now. Until that changes, you gentlemen will work the kitchen,” he said.

  I don’t remember if he told us or if I heard it from one of the other trustees, but apparently there’d been a stabbing. I was told in no uncertain terms to watch myself because this was a dangerous place. I never thought it possible to miss Milan, but I did that day. What have I gotten myself into? I wondered.

  The first group came in for breakfast. These guys had a look about them I didn’t see very often in Milan. To be honest, they probably had the same look I carried until God finally got me to let it go. Guards were everywhere, more than normal, but looking around, I realized if something went down, there wasn’t anything the guards could do about it. I didn’t have a beef with anyone here, but that didn’t make me safe. Desperate people who feel they have nothing to lose will sometimes go after people who do. I went back into survival mode, hardly speaking to anyone, keeping mainly to myself.

  After we had worked in the kitchen all day, the officers escorted my group back across the street to the camp. I’d never been so glad to see a prison facility in my life. The next morning, though, we were back in USP, and the next day and the next. They had us spend one night in USP, which I did not particularly enjoy. Security there was unlike anything I’d ever seen. Even the bathrooms were locked down.

  The days I spent working in the kitchen passed pretty easily until one afternoon. I was dishing out food behind the counter when I heard a noise in the dining area. An inmate suddenly took off running across the tabletops. He jumped one and then another, moving toward a guy who was sitting at a table, eating and minding his own business. The next thing I knew, the guy running across the tables stabbed the other dude in the neck. The guy never even knew what happened to him until it was too late. I looked over at one of the other trustees, and we both had a terrified look on our faces. Both of us knew that could have been us with the shiv in our necks. That night I prayed a lot. Even though I had gone into survival mode, I wasn’t about to go into it alone.

  Thankfully, the day after the stabbing in the USP dining room, they took us off kitchen duty. Instead, I started working with a landscaping crew. We worked the grounds of the camp and picked up trash along Interstate 70. The prison let us drive John Deere Gators around the unit to do our work. For the trash detail on the interstate, they let me drive a truck out to the highway and back, dropping people off and picking them up.

  The first few days I got to drive the truck, I felt like myself again. Everything in prison is designed to knock you down, to dehumanize you, to let you know how low you really are. Once I climbed behind the wheel of the truck without an officer sitting beside me, I felt like a man again. I had a sense of freedom I had not experienced since Andrew Collins had jumped in my face in Benton Harbor three years earlier. The sun came out and the weather warmed up for a couple of days, which made me feel even better.

  My little taste of freedom, however, began to feel like a tease, like the prison held real freedom just out of my reach. Even though I could drive around and do my work without supervision, I remained an inmate in the federal prison system. Some of my old thoughts came back about how I didn’t deserve to be here, how I was innocent. If not for Collins’s lies, I really would be free back home in Benton Harbor, spending time with my son and working my car wash.

  The more I thought like this, the more I began to see that the truck I drove presented an opportunity. Nothing could stop me
from driving right past the crew I was supposed to pick up on Interstate 70 and driving straight on home. At first, this fantasy was just a crazy thought that ran through my head. Before long, though, all I could think about was leaving. Who was going to stop me?

  When the thoughts of leaving got really bad, I went back to my room and opened up my Bible. I read the story of Joseph. Like me, he’d been put in prison because of someone’s lies. He hadn’t done anything wrong, but they locked him up and forgot about him. Then he had a little taste of freedom and the hope that he was going to go free soon. But his hope didn’t come true. Joseph nearly gave up, but God had him stay put, and that’s what I sensed he was telling me. Back in Milan he had told me to let it go, and now he was telling me to stay put. I opened up to him and prayed, God, I’m tired. Nothing I’ve done has worked. God, it’s your way. It’s your way, not mine.

  I stopped thinking about driving away.

  Even though I’d had a real breakthrough with God, I still had not become involved in chapel. I don’t know why. I guess I didn’t want to make a big show of my relationship with God or make promises I couldn’t keep. Instead, I just read my Bible and prayed and sought God.

  The chapel at the camp was different from most chapels in one big way. Ron Isley, the founding member of the Isley Brothers, was one of the leaders. He was an inmate because of tax problems. Music is my passion, but even knowing Ron Isley was there wasn’t enough to get me going. But then I got word that they needed someone to play bass and piano for the chapel band. Since I’d taught myself to play both during my time in Milan, I volunteered to play the bass. Before long they put me in charge of all the sound, the setup, recording the service, everything. Working in music again made it easier for me to stay put and be patient.

  The only real downside to the camp was the mandatory drug program in which every inmate was supposed to participate. Right after I arrived I met with the counselor who ran the program. He told me straight out that I had to be a part of this program to stay in the camp. I refused. “I’m not going through any drug program because I don’t have an issue with drugs.”