by James Keene
Wabash was not unlike Danville, the tired factory town that served as Vermilion’s county seat. Driving through Wabash, Miller passed streets packed tight with working-class bungalows that gave way to blocks with massive factories—many now shuttered with desolate, empty parking lots. The downtown sprawled up a little hill from the Wabash River. At the top was the beaux arts, brick-and-limestone county courthouse, easily the most prominent structure in city. The other buildings, mostly drab brick, rose no higher than a few stories.
Police headquarters were in a squat, dilapidated station house that would soon be vacated for more modern facilities. Sergeant Whitmer greeted Miller in the lobby, then introduced him to his partner, Phil Amones—the Hall family friend—who hovered protectively over Larry. At first, Miller didn’t know what to make of the stocky, little man, with his greasy hair and funny sideburns. Hall spoke in a meek, almost robotic voice, and Miller says, “The guy never wanted to look you in the eye.”
Miller expected to be ushered into an interrogation room for the interview, but instead Whitmer led them out of the police station and across the street to a conference room in City Hall, where they were joined by two more policemen—detectives from the Marion police department.
Miller was incredulous. He had wanted an intimate, little Q-and-A with Hall—usually the best way to elicit an admission that might later blossom into a confession. But now he had an audience of other detectives, and from the tense looks on their faces, they seemed as nervous as the suspect about what he would ask. As they all sat around the oversize conference table, Miller placed himself next to Hall at the head of the table.
Miller’s conduct during that first session with Hall would be much debated over the next few years, but in his mind he did nothing intimidating. “Any investigator worth his salt would have immediately picked up how timid Larry was,” he says. “He was not going to open up to me if I was aggressive.”
Miller asked first about the most recent stalking incident and says Hall calmly read the police report. While he admitted to driving the van that day, he added in his quiet, little voice, “I’ve never been in Georgetown, Illinois.”
Miller asked if he had ever traveled out of Indiana in his van, and Hall replied that he did drive to Civil War reenactments, although he couldn’t name all the places he had been. Miller pulled a road atlas from his briefcase and slid the map of Illinois in front of Hall, who stayed hunched down in his chair, his hands limp in his lap.
Miller put his finger on Georgetown. “Were you anywhere near here?”
Hall glanced briefly at the map and agreed that he could have been in the area looking for an old Dodge Charger. Now Miller pressed him for more details on where he did go; if he couldn’t remember names, Miller suggested, he could identify landmarks. Hall then recalled a small town with a traffic light and a Hardee’s hamburger stand and remembered stopping a few times to talk to girls, “just because I like to talk to people.” He said he would ask their names and ages and whether they wanted a ride in his van.
“But did you chase anyone?” Miller asked.
“No, sir, I did not,” Hall replied. “And if I did, it would just be in fun.”
Suddenly, one of the Marion detectives broke in. At first Miller was annoyed at the interruption because he felt that he was on a roll, but he was stunned when he heard the question.
“Larry,” the detective said, “why don’t you tell him about your dreams.”
After an eerie silence, Hall, his eyes still downcast, told Miller, “Sometimes I dream about killing women. But I think it’s just a dream.”
“Tell him where you are in those dreams.”
“I kind of leave my body and look down on myself.”
“Can you remember what you’re doing?” Miller asked.
“I can’t tell you exactly. I only remember that it’s something bad.”
Miller reached into his briefcase again, but this time pulled out a glossy photograph and laid it in front of Hall. It was a picture of Jessica Roach—with her radiant smile, doelike eyes, and long brown hair. As Miller later wrote in his notes, Hall “flinched” and looked away, holding up a hand as though to shield his eyes from a blinding light.
3.
Lost in the System
Prison may have been the last place where Big Jim wanted to see his son, but at least he passed on to Jimmy both his charm and physical aggressiveness—two somewhat countervailing assets—that helped Keene survive and sometimes thrive behind bars. Beating other convicts in fights was essential, but having the personal skills to avoid them would prove even more important.
Still, in the first few weeks of his incarceration, Jimmy wanted no part of diplomacy. Instead, his fearlessness mixed with his seething anger to make a combustible brew. It was shaken even further by the claustrophobic conditions of Chicago’s federal lockup, the Metropolitan Correctional Center, an architecturally distinctive skyscraper from the outside with sharp angles and narrow slotted windows, but a relentlessly dehumanizing birdcage on the inside with towering tiers of tightly packed two-man cells and dayrooms. It held both antsy convicts—stuck in a holding pattern until permanent placement could be found in federal facilities—and local flight risks waiting to be tried. Volatile gangbangers bumped up against much more passive illegal immigrants and white-collar criminals.
Few areas in the MCC incubated more tension than the tiny phone room, where prisoners stood in line waiting their turn to talk on the phones mounted to the wall. Jimmy’s daily chats with friends and family became his island of sanity in the sea of MCC chaos, and he clung tenaciously to conversations with any friend or relative who took his collect call. But one day as he was on the phone talking, three Mexican gangbangers clustered close around him. He remembers, “They were right next to me and speaking real loud to make me get off the line. Finally I had enough of it. I said to the guy closest to me, ‘You want the phone? You want the phone?’ and I took the receiver and busted him over the head with it.” Keene then punched out the other two Mexicans before the guards pulled him off and took him away.
Ordinarily he would have been charged him with an infraction. “But they were lenient,” Keene says, “because they could see I was a new fish. Everyone is a little high-strung and pissed off when they get to the MCC. If you’re a white guy and levelheaded, they will reason with you, but they told me, ‘If this shit happens again, you’re in big trouble.’ ”
But it almost happened again, this time in the bathroom near his cell. He had just brushed his teeth and spit into the sink. A black prisoner in his late fifties, who was called with strange formality Mr. Green by the younger gangbangers, waited in line behind him. He told Jimmy to rinse out the sink before he finished. In a fury, Keene shouted back at him, “Don’t you tell me what to do,” and immediately Keene was surrounded by what seemed to be dozens of black gangbangers. Mr. Green, he says, “could see I was ready to fight, but he held up his hand and waded through the crowd to calm me down.” His full name, as Jimmy later learned, was Charles Green, and he had been a founder of El Rukns, a black street gang from the South Side of Chicago with tentacles into many other U.S. cities.
When Green got Keene to sit down on the bunk in his cell, he asked, “What they got you in here for, boy?”
“Some bullshit conspiracy,” Jimmy replied.
“Well, I got sentenced to four life sentences, so I think I know what you’re going through.”
Green then gave Jimmy his first tutorial on prison survival skills. Being a hothead, he explained, would not get Keene any more respect from other inmates. It would only get him killed or, at the least, singled out by the guards. Instead, if he showed respect to the right people, he would get it in return.
Keene listened to the advice and started off by showing “Mr. Green respect.” Jimmy was soon invited to Green’s cell to share in the contraband food that the gang had smuggled into the MCC. Once, as they ate, Green laughed and said, “We belong together. You’re Keene and I’m G
reen.”
One of Green’s codefendants in his racketeering trial was then fifty-five-year-old Noah Robinson Jr., the younger half brother of the Reverend Jesse Jackson. After a few weeks, MCC authorities made him Keene’s cellmate. A lighter-skinned version of his brother, Robinson had been an MBA graduate of the Wharton School of Business and a successful operator of Wendy’s franchises, but he saw control of the South Side drug world as a bigger opportunity than fast food and enlisted El Rukns to be his muscle. Along the way, according to the government’s charges, he also had them try to kill a former business partner, so he, too, was sentenced to life. The disgrace Keene felt for himself and his family couldn’t compare to Robinson’s fall and the publicity it received in the national press. “He was very clean-cut and very sophisticated,” Keene says. “You would not expect him to be a hard-core killer. To hear him talk, you would have thought he was mayor of the South Side of Chicago.” He claimed to have personally bankrolled Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988. This came as no surprise to Keene. He knew many public figures had a darker side, from the shady backroom deals that went down for Big Jim’s friends in Kankakee, but also from the tales he heard from his grandmother about the influence that mobsters had had over Illinois politics.
Jimmy’s other roommate at the MCC was Malcolm Shade, another African-American from a middle-class background. A roly-poly computer whiz with thick glasses, he had been convicted of multiple counts of identity theft. Still, Keene says, “He was ready to do it again as soon as they released him. He always tried to teach me how to do it, too. That’s the one thing about prison: you can get the best education in the world at being a criminal.”
Still, after three months, Jimmy couldn’t wait to get out of the sweaty MCC and was grateful that he received placement at the Federal Correctional Institution in Milan, Michigan, forty-five miles south of Detroit and a four-hour drive from Kankakee. The prison’s low-rise buildings sprawl over several acres in a setting not much different from a college campus—absent the razor wire and wall. Inmates walk outdoors from their cellblock to the cafeteria. There’s also an elaborate gym building complete with basketball court, boxing ring, and a well-equipped weight room. For Keene, it was all a welcome contrast to his cooped-up, high-tension high-rise back in Chicago.
If his previous jail experience had been like a kindergarten education in working the system, Jimmy leaped to graduate school with Milan, quickly developing a life that could be as comfortable as possible within the confines of a federal correctional facility. An important contributor to his comfort level was his ability to avoid the drudgery of daily work in the prison factory. Because of his various allergies, he had received a letter from medical doctors that exempted him from exposure to the fumes and other substances of a manufacturing environment. He was instead assigned to a cushy chair in the law library, where he worked alongside Frank Cihak, who had another twenty years to serve for embezzling tens of millions from a Houston bank. Cihak’s large frame had become stooped and aged beyond his fifty-five years, and he had a fringe of white hair on the top of his head. With misty eyes, he remembered the days when he flew on private jets to fancy restaurants and fine resorts. Cihak used his library job and considerable intelligence to become an accomplished jailhouse lawyer. “He was one hundred percent convinced he was going to beat his case, and he was constantly filing appeals,” Jimmy remembers. “Guys just flocked to him for advice.”
Jimmy started his own library of sorts by getting friends and relatives to send him pornographic magazines. In exchange for a “date” with a title in his collection, he won all sorts of favors throughout the system. Probably most valuable to Keene were the fresh fruit and vegetables that the kitchen staff would help sneak into his cell—the gloppy prison food was one of his biggest beefs with institutional living. One connection took a special liking to a magazine and, in return for a weekend date, gave him a whole turkey. “Me and my buddies had it with rice and a side of vegetables,” Keene remembers. “Everything was mixed up in a way that would make no rhyme or reason in the regular world, but it was an absolute feast in prison.”
For his own sexual release, Keene had regular visits from his girlfriend, Tina, who would stay at a nearby hotel for a few days twice a month. Like the other women he was attracted to, she had a dark complexion and lithe body. He says, “There were times in the visiting room that she managed to slip her hand under my drawers when the guards weren’t looking. One day I said to her, ‘I just can’t wait to get out of here and look between those legs again.’ And she said, ‘Well, I’ll be right back. I have to go to the bathroom.’ When she came back, she hiked up her skirt and spread her legs, so I could see that she had cut a big section out of her panties. She let me look down there for the rest of the afternoon.”
After a few weeks, Keene settled into a fairly tolerable routine. He had to be up at five thirty with the other prisoners, but every morning, without fail, he would first call Big Jim. “We’d talk for a half hour or so,” Jimmy remembers. “Always he tried to be upbeat, telling me, ‘Don’t worry, Son. We’re still working for you out here. Your lawyer’s making a lot of progress.’ Finally, I had to cut him off before they closed the chow hall.” Jimmy had a kitchen friend slip him eight fresh pancakes for breakfast—usually his best meal of the day. Around his job at the law library, he could hit the gym at least twice a day, lifting weights and occasionally working out on the speed bag by the prison’s elaborate boxing ring. For a while, Jimmy even had a cell to himself, perched on the top tier of the residential building, but he soon learned the danger of that luxury.
One day, three black gangbangers stopped by the library while Keene was alone on duty. “These were big, giant weight-lifting guys with their hair in long braids and tattoos all over them,” Keene says, “and they were all arguing with each other already.” The three, who were always together, used letters of the alphabet as their names: B, C, and L. B had a stutter and took a while to ask his question—about the difference in weight between muscle and fat. Jimmy thought they were joking and first replied with a chuckle. But it was no joke, and looking back, Keene realizes that B thought Jimmy was laughing at his stutter. When Jimmy did answer the question, he appeared to side with C and L. Now these two started laughing at B. One of them said, “You don’t know shit, man.” Before he left, B gave Keene a hard stare, but he thought nothing of it.
A little later, after lunch, Jimmy returned to his empty cell. Having turned up his nose at the cafeteria’s Polish sausage, he decided to dine instead on a can of tuna he’d bought from the commissary. As he bent over his desk to crank a homemade opener, he felt a little gust of air as his door flew open. A fist followed, punching him squarely in the side of the head. Reflexively, Keene, with both hands, grabbed his assailant’s wrist and flipped him into the cell. It was B. Still wearing his heavy winter boots, Keene launched a karate kick that struck B in the face, then grabbed the pigtail braids on either side of his head and flung him into the corner of the bottom bunk bed. As he started to punch B, L burst into the room and jumped on Jimmy’s back. Keene reached back to grab his braids and flipped him into the bunk with B. “Because of my wrestling experience,” Keene says, “I could use my legs to lock them both down on the bed and pound their faces as fast and hard as I could until they were just a bloody mess.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he could see C in the doorway. He had probably been the lookout for the other two. When Keene sprang from the bunk, C ran away, but Jimmy was not finished with the alphabet. “I was so pissed at B,” he says, “I grabbed him by his pigtails and dragged him out of my cell and started stomping his head on the third-floor tier where everyone could see us.” Keene didn’t stop until someone pulled an alarm that went off throughout the whole prison. L had stumbled off on his own, so Keene closed the door to his cell and followed the rest of the prisoners to wait outside in the cold and snow. When the alarms stopped ringing, he stamped around a little longer before he went b
ack inside, but by the time he had reached his cell, the guards were waiting for him. They put him in handcuffs and marched him down to the Special Housing Unit, where they had the solitary-confinement cells. Once they had him in the interrogation room, the guards took off his handcuffs, and they were all joined by the lieutenant who supervised the cellblock. He assured Jimmy that they were on his side. B, C, and L had assaulted others. It was three against one, so clearly they attacked him in his cell, but Keene was not about to cooperate. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “Nothing happened.”
The lieutenant told him to hold up his hands, palms turned inward. His hands were chafed different shades of red, and his own blood still ran from his knuckles. “Okay,” the lieutenant said, “then tell me how you got those fresh cuts all over your hands?” Keene replied that he must have pinched his knuckles when he put the dumbbells back in the weight-room rack.
Even after the lieutenant threatened to throw him in the hole, Jimmy would still not talk. “So, you want to be a stand-up guy, you want to take this all on your own?” the lieutenant asked. “Well, guess what? You’re not going to get any special protection. See how you like that.”
When he got back to his cell, a young guard he called Surf popped in to see him. He enjoyed chatting with Keene, especially during those idle hours when other prisoners were at work in the factory. Surf said, “I heard about your problem, but don’t worry. I got your back. I’m going to make sure nobody comes around your cell who don’t belong here.”
But Keene couldn’t stay in his cell all day. He certainly didn’t want to stop going to the gym. Before long, word went out that a hit had been put out on Keene by the D.C. Blacks, a street gang from Washington, D.C., with members in prisons across America. He could tell as soon as he entered the weight room, which was practically a clubhouse for all the black gangs. “Everyone in there gave me the hard-guy stare.” At one point, when he went to pick up a barbell plate, one of the bigger weight lifters in the room screamed, “Don’t get in my way, white motherfucker.” Keene went nose to nose with him. “Yeah?” he yelled. “What are you going to do about it?” The weight lifter screamed back, “I want you to just hit me. That’s all I want you to do. Just hit me once, so I can tear you up.”