The Unusual Suspect

by Ben Machell

  During the robbery, Stephen became angry. He cannot remember why. It could have been because the staff would not or could not open the door he wanted them to open. It could be that they were taking too long to bring him the cash-drawer money he had then demanded instead. It is also possible that he was simply trying to assert himself in the way he felt he’d failed to do the previous day in the Ledbury HSBC. Inside the Barclays, he took out his replica pistol and pointed it at the cashier. After Stephen left with the money, the cashier collapsed on the floor and had to be taken by ambulance to a hospital, where she was treated for severe shock. “I think I laid it on a bit too aggressively,” he says today. “I didn’t swear or anything. But I was speaking angrily. It didn’t feel good.”

  An hour later, he filed out of the lecture hall. There were no police officers swarming the campus.

  One thing was now absolutely clear in his mind. He needed a real gun if the mission was ever going to succeed. Forget scrabbling round inner-city Birmingham at night, getting ripped off by third-rate gangsters. He was going to go to where he knew he could find one.

  First, though, he had something he needed to clear up. A few weeks after the Barclays heist, Stephen was in his residence hall room. He had his cellphone in his hand and was pacing the three or so strides between his bed and his desk. His room was bare and functional: no posters, no pictures, just a calendar with various dates circled, the significance of which only Stephen knew, related to heists both past and planned. On the wall by his desk he had scratched the initials “RH.” He looked at the letters and took a long, slow breath. Then he dialed a number and put the phone to his ear. On the other end of the line, a police officer answered.

  “Hello,” said Stephen calmly. “My name is Stephen Jackley. I’m a geography and sociology student at the University of Worcester. I was wondering if you could help me.”

  Since returning from Holland, Stephen had been waiting for everything to collapse around him. The Dutch police had his name and fingerprints. They had allowed him to return to the UK for the time being, but expected him to travel back to the Netherlands to answer for his crime when summoned. It was inconceivable, therefore, that they had not alerted the British police to this fact. And when the Dutch police did send the British police their file on Stephen, his fingerprints were sure to match fingerprints associated with evidence recovered from the scenes of his crimes. And that would be that.

  Only, three months had now passed and there had been no midnight police raids on his room. He had not been collared coming out of a lecture and hauled in for questioning. As the weeks went by, Stephen’s curiosity gradually got the better of him. He felt a sharp, insistent need to know what was going to happen. Or at least, why nothing had happened yet. Logically, he reasoned, the best people to ask were the police. So from his university email account, he contacted the police and explained that he was an undergraduate and that, as part of a sociology module in his course, he was doing a study into criminality and law enforcement. If it was not too much trouble, he wrote, he was hoping to speak to somebody involved in police forensics. After some polite back-and-forth it was agreed that, yes, this would be fine. So one day in April 2008, he called the number he had been given and had a fifteen-minute conversation with a very helpful officer.

  “I spoke to a woman in the forensics department and said I was doing a study, blah blah blah,” says Stephen today. The one piece of information he was desperate to find out was whether police forces in different European Union countries automatically exchange the forensic information they hold on individuals. “I phrased it in a way so as not to raise any suspicion that I had done anything. I think I threw in a few extra sideline questions that had no relevance, stupid questions like ‘What happens when someone gets arrested?’—stuff like that.”

  Stephen couldn’t quite believe what he was told. “I was shocked to find out that there was no automatic database or exchange of forensic detail,” he says, frowning. “So someone can commit a crime in France and then in the UK, and the French might have previously arrested them and have their forensics, but the British police won’t.”

  In fact, it turns out that police forces in the European Union will share this kind of forensic information only if there has been a specific request to do so. Later that night, he summarized his findings in his diary.

  Learnt that there is no automatic exchange of criminal information between EU countries unless a country issues a ‘match/no match’ search.

  But rather than experiencing an intense rush of relief at this news, Stephen felt almost upset. It just made so little sense. Having maintained an innocuous, dispassionate tone on the phone with the forensics officer, he now couldn’t help sounding incredulous. Why wasn’t there an automatic exchange? There really should be. Think of the criminals who could be getting away with all sorts in one EU country while the police just across the border have all the forensic information needed to identify and capture him. “It dawned on me that there could be rapists or dangerous people committing offenses and getting away with it because they haven’t exchanged the details,” he says. “I remember writing to the police from prison in America saying, look, this is an issue. You need to sort it out. This is how I managed to continue. Because if these details were exchanged automatically, I would have been found out in Holland, and there would have been no further crimes after that.”

  * * *

  —

  Throughout the spring term of 2008, in between planning and executing his crimes, Stephen continued to read, study, and pass long days alone, wandering the countryside. In one extended journal entry from early March he describes a day that included a trip to check that some of his stolen money was still safely hidden in a tree.

  Today got up at 10:30 (went to bed at 2.15 with the usual sleep ‘wake up’)—took a cold shower and went cycling into town. Got a chicken roll + ‘steak bake’ (£2.75) before heading to ‘the tree on the hill’. Ate then walked the windy hills. Returned in time for SOC61006 lecture…interesting, but all the atrocities of the bourgeoisie were spoken in the past tense, when really they are still happening!!!

  * * *

  —

  In February 2018, it was announced that British computer hacker Lauri Love would not face extradition to the United States despite being wanted by the FBI. The thirty-two-year-old former engineering student was alleged to have breached the security networks of several federal agencies and stolen massive amounts of confidential data. In a successful High Court appeal, Love’s lawyers argued that their client’s Asperger’s syndrome would make life inside the Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn—the federal prison in which he was to be held—virtually impossible. They described the conditions at MDC Brooklyn as “unconscionable” and “medieval.” This is a facility that has housed everyone from Al-Qaeda operatives to Mafia killers. This is a prison where eleven guards were charged with abusing inmates, beating them with such ferocity that bloody pieces of scalp were later found on cell floors. Cameron Lindsay, the former warden of MDC Brooklyn, would later describe the prison as “one of the most, if not the most, troubled facilities in the Bureau of Prisons.” A young man with Asperger’s, Love’s lawyers stated, would simply not be able to survive in such a place.

  This was where Stephen was taken next. In late 2008, along with a dozen or so other manacled and shackled inmates, he was escorted from his cell at Strafford County, placed on a prisoner transport bus, and driven three hundred miles south to New York City. Guards with shotguns resting on their laps sat facing them throughout the journey, silent and impassive. As the bus crept into the city, snow began to fall. MDC Brooklyn is a solid, utilitarian, multistory building wedged between a raised expressway and commercial freight docks. From inside the cold bus, Stephen peered up and shivered. The prison seemed to rise up out of the ground like some vast igneous rock formation. He did not know if he had the strength to withstand any more time in soli
tary confinement. He thought back to his dying father, pleading with desperate eyes to just get him out of his small hospice room. Now he understood.

  Stephen was processed. He was given a baggy brown jumpsuit, taken to a small room, and asked a series of box-tick questions by two disinterested members of prison staff. He was asked if he’d ever felt suicidal. “Definitely not,” he responded emphatically. Had he ever attempted to escape prison? He shook his head. One of the two men looked at the paperwork in front of him, frowned, and then seemed to regard Stephen properly for the first time. “Says here that you tried to escape the U.S. Marshals after you were arrested,” he said cautiously. Stephen sighed. It was, he said, a simple misunderstanding. And besides, he had never been charged with attempted escape. The prison staff made a few final notes, and then Stephen was led away with a group of other new inmates. One of them deliberately barged into Stephen as they entered a large service elevator, then glowered at him and demanded he watch where he was going. Stephen did not know how to respond. He just opened his mouth and blinked a few times.

  Glancing around him as he and the other inmates were marched along corridors and into further elevators, Stephen tried to take in his surroundings. It was unusually cold. The air tasted foul—stale and almost greasy. There was, he would soon discover, no outside space whatsoever, just cagelike areas with metal grates to allow for some breeze. There were hardly any diversions for inmates and nothing that could be classed as rehabilitative. As he was led up and along, along and up, it began to dawn on Stephen that he was simply inside a vast human warehouse. Cell after cell stacked on floor after floor. He already knew enough about prison to understand what this would cause in inmates. Tedium. Resentment. Anger. Violence.

  But to his surprise and silent euphoria, he was not taken to a segregation unit. Instead, he was shoved into a cell that held a double bunk and a small, neat-looking middle-aged man with glasses. The man welcomed him with a smile, and once he learned that Stephen was British, proceeded to pepper him with the usual questions. Stephen, cold and weary, answered distractedly as he made up his top bunk before hauling himself up and in. His cellmate breezily explained that he’d arrived a few days earlier and said he was serving time for the unauthorized possession of biochemical compounds. What, he asked, was Stephen in for? Lying on his back with his eyes shut, he said that he robbed some banks in the UK. The small neat man on the bunk below chuckled and shook his head.

  “Then what are you doing here?”

  Stephen yawned. “It’s a long story,” he said, already drifting toward the oblivion of sleep.

  * * *

  —

  Stephen woke up feeling cold. From his cell’s narrow window, he could see fine snowflakes blowing past on the wind, dancing lightly over the expressway and the neat, rectangular residential blocks of Brooklyn. His cellmate explained that they were only in a holding wing. When they had been properly processed and undergone medicals, they would be moved. Of the two thousand or so inmates at MDC Brooklyn, many were awaiting trial or sentencing, which was one reason why such an atmosphere of tension and fear seemed to permeate.

  A few days later, Stephen was taken from the holding wing, marched back into a service elevator, and then deposited into the general population of a wing on the floor above. There was a cramped communal area where men sat at round tables screwed to the floor. The majority of them, it seemed to Stephen, were large and tattooed. Only a thin, bald inmate with a pale and sunken face turned to smile at Stephen. As he did so, he bared his teeth, which Stephen saw had been filed down into sharp points. It was only after he was deposited inside his new cell that he heard the sound of low conversation in the communal area start back up.

  Later, as the guards called for “lock up!” and the inmates drifted back to their cells for the night, Stephen discovered that his cellmate was now a morbidly obese African American. Tattooed and shaven-headed, he seemed constantly breathless. There was no physical possibility of him taking the top bunk, so Stephen climbed up, pulled the thin bedding over himself, and tried to sleep. But it was very quickly clear there was a problem. Every time the man below him moved to get comfortable in his bunk, the entire bed frame shook. For five minutes, Stephen was tossed about, unsure whether to say anything to the giant figure below him. Then, for a few moments, there was silence and stillness. Just as Stephen began to drift off, he was startled by a noise: a deep rumble followed by a long, shrill hiss. It happened a second time. With mounting horror, Stephen realized what it was. Snoring. The loudest snoring he had ever heard. When the cell doors were buzzed open come morning, Stephen dragged himself to the communal area, hollowed out and spent.

  He told a guard he wanted to move cells. The guard directed his attention to a large sign saying that on no account would there be any cell moves, so don’t bother asking. Later, as Stephen sat at a round metal table trying to read a Stephen King paperback, the skinny bald man with the devil teeth took a seat beside him. He whispered in Stephen’s ear. “If you really want to move cells, you need to get into a fight with your cellmate,” he said, nodding toward the huge, groggy figure across the room. His voice dropped even lower. “And if you can do him any lasting damage, you’d be doing me a favor.”

  He smiled and then drifted back to a group of inmates gathered around a table. Stephen rubbed his eyes. Less than twenty-four hours at MDC Brooklyn and he was already being pushed toward violence by other inmates. But he would sooner be strapped inside a blueberry suit than spend another night with his snoring cellmate. So he came up with a plan. He approached the same guard he spoke to earlier and told him that he needed to move cells because he felt threatened. When asked to elaborate—to provide the name of the inmate threatening him—Stephen shook his head and said he couldn’t. A circular conversation ensued until the guard, exasperated, manacled Stephen and led him from the wing.

  Finally, Stephen was taken to an office marked administration. He was placed in a chair facing a desk, behind which a debonair man with dark hair and a suit sat at a computer. Leaning on the desk was a middle-aged African American man in a senior prison officer’s uniform, replete with gold-braided epaulets. They both regarded Stephen evenly. Who, they asked, had been making threats against him?

  Hesitantly, he began to spin a story about how he had reason to believe that some of his former criminal associates from the UK wanted him silenced. Or at least, he was pretty sure that they did. As he talked, the man in the suit punched the computer keyboard and brought up Stephen’s file. The two men peered at the screen, then back at Stephen, in his baggy brown prison uniform, talking vaguely about underworld deals gone bad.

  “You’re wanted for armed robberies and firearms offenses in the UK?” the man in the suit said, cutting Stephen off mid-mumble.

  “That is correct, yes.”

  “And you’re a college student?”

  “Yes.”

  The prison officer with the epaulets leaned forward.

  “Then why did you get into crime?”

  The question caught Stephen off guard. Almost everyone he had met in prison over the past seven months had asked him how he’d ended up there. He was used to that, and he would sometimes take a deep breath and describe the actions that ultimately led him to jail. But why was a different question altogether.

  But how would he even begin to explain what he had actually wanted to achieve and what had driven him to achieve it? By talking about a small squinting boy, standing with his mother in the kitchen of a council house, listening to her desperate conversations with invisible strangers and not quite knowing what was real and what was not? Or by describing the Shoemaker-Levy comet impacting Jupiter before his very eyes, and the equal measures of fear and love for Earth that the sight instilled? Or of a night spent shivering in a Far Eastern jungle? Or of barefoot children rooting through dunes of rubbish? Of the need—the absolutely terrifying need—of capitalism to focus the minds o
f everyone on selfish, short-term gains while widening the gap between the wealthy and the destitute? Of the esoteric delusion that is money? Or of the time a wise old Buddhist monk once told him that it was right to take this money and return it to those whose lives and resources had been sacrificed so that it might exist?

  Stephen shifted in his hard plastic chair. He looked up at the two men, watching him from across the desk, waiting for an answer. If he told them, would they believe him? Would anybody? He shrugged. “I met the wrong people,” he said. “Made stupid mistakes. Wanted the fast route to riches.”

  The two men nodded. The prison guard was then instructed to take Stephen to a new unit. Stephen knew they did not believe a word of his story about his underworld connections wanting him dead. Eventually, they reached a new wing where he was placed in a new cell. Inside, a thin, deeply tanned Hispanic man with a bald head but a long gray ponytail and mustache stood up to greet him. His face was wrinkled, his eyes were dark and alert, and he moved with an unusual fluidity. Around his bunk Stephen could see small Roman Catholic icons as well as other, less familiar symbols and patterns: florid, stemlike lines intersected with crosses, hearts, stars, and tridents.

  The door buzzed shut behind them, and the two men looked at each other. They did their best to be polite. The man with the gray ponytail explained, in halting English, that he was a witch doctor from Haiti and that he could read fortunes. Stephen smiled and nodded, then explained that he was a geography and sociology student from Devon. The witch doctor nodded in return. Then they each climbed into their bunks. Later, Stephen would notice, with weary pleasure, that his new cellmate did not snore at all.