I hadn’t showered in days. Jail covered my orange scrubs like a sweetly rotten intimacy. I smelled like spoiled fruit. My skin had a sickly glaze. My reflection in the rearview mirror made me shudder. I looked like a negative partly developed, unnaturally white. I squinted at the harsh sun. Sharp pain pressed against my belly. Koz ordered my food at the drive-through. The young cashier with the paper cap recoiled at the sight of me. I snatched the bag from him and inhaled my burger. I probably could have swallowed ten, as the patty practically dropped into my stomach like a half-dollar coin.
After my quick lunch, Kiles pulled into a No Parking zone on a narrow street in downtown LA. Guards lined the perimeter of the Diamond stores, but none noticed me as I strolled down the street in my slip-on canvas shoes, dressed in my orange jail garb with SAN BERNARDINO COUNTY JAIL prominently displayed across my chest. I was a curiosity, a Thing. People couldn’t process me; visually I didn’t make sense with the backdrop. I suddenly understood why crime victims had trouble describing their assailant. The brain rejected what it could not understand. I took my time identifying the jewelry store. The fresh breeze, the street sounds, the smell of baked bread from the shop on the corner all amplified. Deprivation made me notice details, the shiny studs on a woman’s boots, a mohair purse, the flutter of a skirt.
* * *
The AUSA, a smartly dressed woman in her early fifties, smiled warmly at me, almost apologetic that she still had to prosecute me for old charges. She sat on the edge of her chair, pen in hand, legal pad propped on the three-inch ledge in the room reserved for confidential visits. Stress ravaged the soft skin beneath her pale blue eyes. She lifted her gaze slightly and asked me how I was doing. I stared at her, astonished. How am I doing? The question hit me hard. I wanted to laugh at its absurdity. I’m hungry. I sleep on concrete. My bones are bruised. I’ve lost track of time. The light burns my eyes. I will go mad if I stay.
But instead I politely answered her questions about Bernard. She owned me. She had the power to release me if she wanted. I was expendable, only as valuable to her as my testimony. My nerves shot, sleep deprived, so broken my legs actually shook, I wanted the interview to last hours. Starved for human contact, the prosecutor represented my only lifeline, my only assurance that my rescue was imminent. I think I surprised her with my recall. I knew the drug business, the language, the equipment used to manufacture large quantities of methamphetamine. In my former life I could have been Bernard’s equal. When the questioning ended, she stood, smoothed her crisp navy suit, and clicked her pen shut. Interview over.
Wait, I wanted to shout, feeling like a zoo animal housed in the wrong cage.
* * *
“Why am I here again?” I cradled the phone to my ear and struggled to keep my voice calm. White walls stretched the length of Solitary. My eyes played tricks on me. Shadows darted at the far end. Footsteps padded around me, belonging to no one. Voices faded in and out of earshot as if someone messed with the volume on a radio. Fear zipped up my spine. My breath came in short bursts.
“We couldn’t get you back in the general population.” Koz cleared his throat. His words crackled over the line. He sounded far away, gone already.
“How long this time?” I managed.
“Your preliminary hearing is only three days away. If you can make it until then…”
“Three days?” I felt sick. I couldn’t last another hour in Solitary. I didn’t have to continue. I could tell Koz this was the end of the road, and no one would fault me. The informant always had the final word. But it was risky for Koz to inform the DA’s office of my identity. Leaks could get me killed. At least in jail I had a chance. I could do this.
“I’m pretty sure they’ll drop the charges,” I said.
* * *
My heart beat faster in the hole, louder, irregular. Sometimes the sound thundered in my ears, and I scrambled to the corners of darkness to shut out the noise. I shivered from sweat. Shadow people crowded the one glass portal, scratching to enter. I could hear inmates in cells next to me. Bubba asked me about the rats. He had sores along his legs and arms. He said the rats feasted on his cuts. I had never seen any rats. Pain throbbed in my temple. I stopped pacing yesterday. My legs ached. My toes were numb. A draft blew from an unknown source, felt like fingers on my neck. I ate rice clumps with my hands. Some of the white pieces dropped to the floor. I worried the food might attract critters. I envisioned tiny legs scratching through my skin.
“They’re coming for my face,” Bubba hollered. “They’re chewing at my lips.”
I rocked in my corner, hands locked around my knees. A prickly sensation tingled up my legs, like hypothermia, the last feeling before the body shuts down. Fever coursed through me; I sweated and shivered intermittently, and in the few moments I slept I dreamed of cold water. I smelled rain. I ran, my heart beating so fast it nearly burst. Layers stripped away from me, costumes, one after the other, leaving lumps, like bodies, in the desert.
Day 4, my clothes fit looser. I hadn’t eaten for hours and the last food I swallowed came back up. We were lucky to have a communal shower. But I was sick, and sometimes Atkins took his time getting me out of my cell. Sometimes he didn’t come at all. And I wondered vaguely about the prison infirmary and whether inmates ever recovered from infection or illness. Whether it even mattered. Atkins mumbled something about my preliminary hearing and told me to “hurry the fuck up.”
“But I don’t have court today,” I protested mildly as he ushered me down a narrow hallway and hustled me into a dark holding cell.
“What time is it?” I managed.
“Time to shut the fuck up,” Atkins barked, and his face contorted like a banshee’s.
He slammed the cell door shut and left me huddled in the dark for what seemed an eternity. After a while, another deputy appeared, opened my cell, searched me, and shoved breakfast at me. “Hurry the fuck up,” he screamed as I shoveled runny oatmeal into my mouth. “You have the wrong day,” I insisted, and I recognized the deputy. Mexican Hitler stared blankly at me, his mustache twitching above his lip. He squared his shoulders, shook his head, barked “Orders are orders,” whisked my bowl away, and slammed the door shut. I waited in darkness again, shivering with fever. Lumps of oatmeal settled in my stomach and threatened to roll back up. I wished they would hurry the fuck up. Several minutes later, Atkins returned, ushered me quickly to my feet, down another skinny hallway to yet another cell where, this time chained to other inmates, I waited for the bus that would transport me from the San Bernardino jail to the Victorville courthouse. We shuffled outside, stood in our designated lines to board. Sun slanted through the dark sky and I realized it must be dawn.
Doors opened and three of us climbed inside the cramped space with bench seats designed for midgets.
“Sit the fuck down,” the deputy ordered as I hesitated.
“I can’t fit,” I protested, pointing to the wedge of cushions and my large knees. The scene replayed like a cartoon.
The deputy stared at me, preprogrammed with his response. “Sit the fuck down.”
“You don’t understand … I can’t fit.” I raised my voice as if sound were the problem.
He glared at me and looked like he might explode. He couldn’t care less that my body didn’t fold that small, that all of us would have to sit in each other’s laps to travel. He looked flustered. His face flushed. He barked the orders louder. “Sit the fuck down! Sit the fuck down!”
I was too ill to process his tantrum. I sat sideways, my knees bumping into the next inmate’s chest, my chained hands resting in his lap. We rode in silence for forty-five minutes, bumping through the dark, my nose running, my body shaking. Like being in a coffin two sizes too small. When we finally arrived, the deputy ordered us out. He adjusted our chains, pinning my right arm close to my hip just in case I planned to escape. We huddled into a holding cell in the Victorville jail looking like a group of amputees. Bunks lined the walls, and I rolled onto one and fell into a restle
ss sleep. As the hours ticked by, inmates complained, the chains cut into their wrists, their one pinned arm tingled with numbness. Mine felt like bread strapped to my back.
“I can’t even take a crap,” one inmate whined. “How am I supposed to wipe my ass with my left hand?” He had a point.
Finally, after what seemed several hours, I shuffled into the courtroom, feeling weak and nauseous.
“Can I have some water?” I noticed a paper cup and pitcher nearby. The deputy shrugged, and with shaking hands I poured water into a cup, spilling some on the ledge. I raised the paper to my lips but discovered that my chains didn’t extend that far. I contorted my body, folded myself in half, bent my head low all in an effort to take a sip. Meanwhile, my fever raged. Sweat slicked my face. I barely registered the courtroom, my whole focus now on the cup. The inmate next to me chuckled, then yanked on the chain so that I spilled the contents.
Before I could react, the judge barked, “What is Falco doing here?”
The deputy, flustered, rifled through his paperwork, looking for my name.
“Take him back. Take him to a doctor. His preliminary isn’t until tomorrow.”
Now I really felt sick. It would take at least all night to return me to Solitary, only to start the process all over the next morning. And I knew better than to think anyone would summon a doctor.
* * *
The next day in court, deputies, looking like rotten bananas in their brown uniforms, guarded the “chain” where most of us waited shackled together to hear our fate. Amid the buzz of attorneys, the occasional cough or sneeze, the musty smell of body odor and jail, the judge called my case. My preliminary hearing lasted five hours; the prosecutor displayed photos for the judge of members with shaved heads and graphic tattoos. One had inked GREEN NATION across his skull.
“They want you to fear them,” she spat. “They enjoy inflicting terror.” Her icy stare made me squirm. I wanted to shout out, “Not me, not me, I’m not one of them. I’m one of the good guys.” But of course I understood that the lines were blurred. The courtroom stirred as SWAT teams, poised for action, blocked the exits. Reporters clustered near the back and furiously scribbled notes. Witnesses—civilians, police officers—testified but none implicated me. I felt invisible. Everyone spoke about the fake me in third person, which only added another layer of invisibility. One bar patron visibly paled. A column of dark hair fell across his left cheek. His fingers mere stubs, the nails bitten off. He frowned when asked to identify me and said, “He didn’t do anything.”
“Are you sure?” The prosecutor looked troubled. Her face relaxed from its perpetual mean glare and settled into surprise.
“He just stood there.” Others who testified confirmed I had not participated.
Hope surged through me and then extinguished quickly as the judge read the formal charges against me: assault with a deadly weapon to cause great bodily harm and participating in a street gang. The State had enough probable cause to proceed to trial. The process could take months, maybe even a year, and with my bail still set at $500,000, I would remain in Solitary indefinitely. Worse, the investigation would stall.
“It’s your call,” Koz said. My obligation to the feds ended long ago with Twist’s confession to murder. I didn’t have to return to Solitary. But if I relented, if I gave up now, nothing would come of the Vagos infiltration, no indictments, no conclusion, no chill to their criminal activities. The ATF had no one else who could get inside. I swallowed, felt my world slip away as I stared down the long hallway in Solitary.
“Let me go to the prosecutor,” Koz insisted. “He can dismiss the charges…”
“He’ll have to dismiss them against others, too,” I said.
“He’ll have to know who you are.”
It was a risk to leak information about my identity to the DA. But what choice did I have? I couldn’t rot indefinitely in Solitary. Koz hung up, and I listened to the dial tone for several seconds, my only connection to the outside world. Atkins ushered me inside the hole; the automatic doors buzzed shut behind me. He became a disembodied voice, perhaps making it easier for him, for all of the guards, to dehumanize their subjects. If they couldn’t see me, huddled in the dark, they could justify their cruelty, their apathy. By necessity they became one of us, immersed in a windowless cave, no companionship, no sense of time passing, forced to listen to night terrors and relentless pounding on the walls.
I shut my eyes to the noise: I tried to control the nightmares, but like muscle memory, images returned distortions of reality. My lit cave suddenly so white my eyes burned, the corners of my mouth melted. My space transformed into a vault filled with money; the gun in my hand a plastic toy. Then dust blew around me, fine and odorless. It formed large piles in the center of my cave. I lay on my back and spread my arms wide. I flapped like an angel. But then the whiteness fogged my vision. I had trouble breathing. The whiteness choked me.
Was this what it felt like to lose one’s mind?
I lost the ability to distinguish between reality and illusion. I paced, screamed at the portal, at Atkins on the other side. This place housed the mentally ill or those on their way toward madness. I craved dialogue and sometimes I talked to myself, sometimes I answered Bubba. I smacked the damp walls, hoping he could hear me.
Then Atkins slid back the dead bolt. The sound made my heart flutter. I squinted at the sliver of weak light from the hallway.
“Move,” he said.
I crawled to my feet. My wrists were sore from handcuffs. Leg irons chafed my shins. I was considered violent and dangerous. Doors buzzed open. I stepped from one cell to the next, put my hands through cutouts in the wall and felt handcuffs slap my wrists. The courtroom unfolded like a vision, and part of me worried that the people I saw shuffling papers, mouthing words, visiting with inmates were unreal, that I saw what I wanted to see. A gorgeous prosecutor with hooded eyes and thin lips nodded in my direction and I knew she knew my secret. Later, Kiles disclosed that the DA was “pissed” she hadn’t been informed of my status, but it wasn’t Kiles’s job to reveal my work for the ATF; my current charges stemmed from State violations. The two jurisdictions had nothing to do with each other.
The judge took the bench, and he looked like a winged creature. He pounded his gavel. Attorneys flocked to him. They spoke in earnest; one cupped the microphone. This was my second bail reduction hearing. The prosecutor dismissed my charges. An audible gasp shuddered through the audience.
I was free. The thought paralyzed me; suddenly I was unsure what to do first, whom to contact, how to behave. I needn’t have worried. I returned to my cave.
“It’s going to take a few hours to do the paperwork,” Koz explained.
“Sure.” I could handle a few more hours.
I had no sense of time inside the hole, only a sense of slipping away. I had no obvious markers—breakfast, lunch, dinner, daylight, twilight, moon—to signal a beginning or end to my day. I had the stress of preparation, of waiting for an event to occur and wondering if it ever would. It was the same kind of anxiety I imagined old people faced day in and day out; to compensate for their anxiety they accomplished things earlier—ate, slept, awoke—just to get the activity behind them. There was satisfaction in completion, no matter how mundane the goal. Their lives focused on anticipation, waiting for the end when they no longer had to worry about time.
Midnight, twenty hours later, I stood outside the prison’s walls.
* * *
I barely remember being led out of my cave, escorted by Atkins to four different cells where eventually I recovered my clothes along with thirty other guys in a communal holding cell. My girlfriend met me on the curb. I caught my reflection in the car mirror and shuddered: gaunt face, sunken eyes, grizzled beard, unkempt hair, layers of dirt. Night air through the open window filled my lungs. No one spoke. And despite my nausea, I was hungry. Veterans returning from war probably felt similar: shell-shocked, disoriented, relieved. Fear tugged at my conscience. Bernar
d still loomed large. By now he surely knew I had been in jail. Maybe he had even tipped off the Vagos.
As I slid my key into the lock, my hand trembled. In the dark, noise amplified. My heart beat faster. A trash lid clattered to the street. Startled, I fixated on a rat’s tail inside a pizza box. Wind blew an empty cigarette carton across my boots. I glanced over my shoulder. The street was mostly empty. A homeless man pedaled a bicycle several sizes too small for his frame. No cars out of place. No rustling bushes. I opened the door and slid inside. I bent a blind and watched the dark street for sudden movement. Bernard was out there. And it was only a matter of time before he found me.
Eventually I fell into a restless sleep. Hercules curled at my feet.
I didn’t leave my girlfriend’s apartment for three days.
* * *
“You were right,” Koz confirmed. Propped on pillows, the television set tuned to old Road Runner cartoons, I cradled the phone to my ear and shoveled in spoonfuls of Lucky Charms.
“Bernard knows about you.”
I swallowed and slowly set the cereal bowl on the nightstand. Milk sloshed over my hand. My heart beat faster. Colored marshmallows dissolved in my throat.
“The DEA has an informant in the federal jail who knows about Bernard. The CI reports that Bernard knows your real name, cell, and unit. He commissioned the Mexican Mafia to do a hit.”
“Did he give them money?” My chest constricted. That would have solidified the contract.
“The informant says they discussed payment.”
“Discussed?”
“We don’t know if he ever gave them any money.” The unknown was worse. What if he did? What if he didn’t?
I tossed off my sheets. Sweat drenched my shirt. Nausea settled in my stomach.
“How did Bernard—”
But I realized it didn’t matter whether Bernard ever paid the Mexican Mafia to take me out; he simply had to leak my identity to the Vagos. I was screwed either way. (In the end, the government cut Bernard a good deal. As a three-time felon trafficking nearly four hundred pounds of methamphetamine, he received a fifteen-year sentence in federal prison.) When I finally ventured outside, I alternated my routes home, zigzagged between buildings, slowly pulled into my driveway and let the engine idle. But I knew that no amount of charade would save my life. The Vagos knew where I lived. And the Mexican Mafia could take me out in my driveway, one clean shot to the temple before I even opened my car door.
Vagos, Mongols, and Outlaws: My Infiltration of America's Deadliest Biker Gangs Page 9