13
The First Order of Business
I had to see my case manager for orientation. She asked me about what kind of work I wanted to do. I told her I wanted to work in the body shop. Then she mentioned school and I told her I wasn’t interested. Then she asked me if I had any family in the prison. I didn’t know how to answer her. If I said yes, would she have me transferred someplace else in the prison? So I just asked why she wanted to know. “Because I understand you have family here that want you to move to their unit. But I just wanted to make sure that this wasn’t someone setting you up and you find yourself with some problems.” That kind of stuff happened a lot in prison. So I told her that my cousin Manuel Zarate was here and I wanted to move close to him because we hadn’t seen each other in a long time. She nodded and took notes. In short order I was moved into F wing and put in cell 250 with my old homeboy from YA camp, Gallo. This was a real trip. It was like old homie week.
After I got settled in, I went to visit Manuel in his cell, who was putting a tattoo on Jessie Moreno’s chest. Manuel then slides me a key to his cell. Back in those days, you were allowed to have a key to your cell to keep your stuff from being burglarized while you were at work or out in the yard. Manuel is a very talented tattoo artist and there are hundreds of guys all over the place with his ink on them. He was putting a giant tattoo on Jessie’s chest. It was the last known picture of Emiliano Zapata taken before he died. It was coming out really nice. Then Manuel asked me if everything was going okay and I said it was. Then he told David (Gallo), “Take him to the yard so he can call home. And tell Grandma that I said hello.”
I can take a hint, so David and I leave them to their work and we catch the next “unlock” to the yard. In Soledad, it’s laid out in one long corridor with wings coming out on the sides. And every hour on the hour they have movement. When they unlock the access doors, people can then move from one cell to the other or to different wings. Inevitably, people do sneak into areas where they’re not supposed to be, either to kick it with their homeboys or sometimes to “put in work.” And the “work” is never pretty. It just means that someone is going to feel some pain or maybe worse.
Sometime after that, I saw the craziest thing I ever saw in all my time in the prison system. We were out in the yard sitting in the bleachers and just socializing. There was a crazy black dude walking around, talking to himself. We knew he wasn’t right in the head because he was always getting in trouble for doing the dumbest stuff. He was actually harmless. Just a little touched in the head. But this one day we noticed him carrying a blanket to the yard and walking toward the wire fence right under one of the gun towers. For some reason, the gun guard didn’t notice him approach and didn’t notice when the black guy threw the blanket over the razor wire at the top of the fence and started to climb over. We looked at each other. “Is this really happening?” We couldn’t believe the gun guard didn’t see this. He was probably asleep.
So the black guy goes over the fence and lands between the wire and the wall and he starts walking as casually as can be toward the other gun tower. The second gun guard sees him and apparently gets on the phone to call the first gun guard, because all of a sudden the first gun guard starts yelling at him over the bullhorn. We’re watching this getting more dangerous. The black guy keeps walking and yelling shit back up at the two guards. At one point he flips them both off. Finally, one of the guards fires a round from his Ruger Mini-14 into the ground near the black guy. It doesn’t work. The whole yard hits the dirt, of course, but this black inmate just keeps walking. Then the second guard lets go with a shotgun round into the ground. That doesn’t do any good either. And now we know it’s coming. The first guard hits the black guy and he goes down. But he rolls over, gets to his knees, stands up, and keeps walking. And then he starts jogging. The guards then start pouring fire into him until he goes down and doesn’t get up. A perimeter vehicle finally shows up and they cuff him up and put him inside. We eventually found out that he’d been hit five times and he died in the hospital while they were operating on him.
A few days after my interview with the case manager, I got a “ducat” (an “order”) to report to the auto body shop. The shop was located all the way at the other end of the long corridor in an area they just called Industries. To get to it, you had to go through two metal detectors and a full strip search.
When I got there, I realized right away that the instructor must have given up any hope of teaching years ago. There was nothing going on there at all. A couple of guys were working on a VW Bug. A few guys were playing cards, others were sleeping, and everyone else was just hanging around entertaining themselves in whatever way they wanted.
At the time, I had a homeboy named Boxer from Avenues. Avenues was one of the biggest gangs in Los Angeles. They’d been around since the end of WWII and their neighborhood included places like Highland Park, Cypress Park, Montecito Heights, and most of that area northeast of downtown LA. They were deep and they had a few of their guys that eventually became brothers in the EME. Many years later, in 1995, Avenues became the center of national attention when some of their street soldiers killed a three-year-old girl named Stephanie Kuhen. Late one night she was riding in the backseat of her parents’ car. They were coming back from a ball game or something and apparently they got lost on their way home. They turned into an alley on Isabel Street just where a bunch of Avenues gangsters were hanging out. The Avenues guys thought that they were being rolled up on by a bunch of enemies from Highland Park, another gang in that neighborhood. So they grabbed their weapons and started shooting into the car. Stephanie was killed.
When that story hit the papers the next morning, it started making news literally all over the world. They called it the Wrong Way Shooting. A few days later the world media was crawling all over Avenues territory looking for a story. The detectives at Northeast Division of the LAPD who were assigned the case were getting calls from as far away as China and Russia. It was a story that wouldn’t go away. In fact, a few days later, President Clinton mentioned the Kuhen homicide in a speech he made about guns, violence, and the gang problem. Clinton promised the country that things like the Kuhen murder would not happen again and he promised to provide enough federal money to put an additional 100,000 police officers on the streets of the nation. That one murder literally woke up LA and its citizens to the existence of the Mexican Mafia and its influence on the streets.
At any rate, Boxer and I had met when we were in B wing and we had gotten to be friendly. Not real close, but friendly enough that we spent eight hours a day in the body shop trying to find ways of amusing ourselves until the end of our shift. One day, Boxer comes in and says we got some work to do. He said we needed to make some “pieces” (prison knives, also known as shanks). Nobody needed to tell me that when the order for shanks comes in, it meant that the orders came from way up in the EME food chain. They were either expecting trouble or were about to start some trouble. We had to work fast because someone was going to come by later and pick them up. We had to be careful, of course, because making weapons could land you deep in the hole. We started looking around the shop and found a nice piece of steel about an inch wide, a quarter-inch thick, and about three feet long. We took the piece to the band saw and cut it down to pieces about seven inches long.
Boxer started working on the grinder, shaping the shanks into sharp knife points. He told me to keep an eye on the office where the instructor spent all his time and on the other inmates. They didn’t need to know this. Not that they’d rat us out, it just wasn’t any of their business. Of course, running a two-horsepower industrial grinder isn’t exactly quiet, and making a three-foot-long shower of sparks isn’t very easy to hide or camouflage. But Boxer was working fast and about a half hour after he started, he handed me a sharp shank and asked me if I wanted to make one for myself. I said, “Fuck, yeah.” So he takes point and I spend the next fifteen minutes grinding the hell out of the
steel until I got it looking like a knife, complete with a nice handle so it’ll fit right in your hands. I showed him the finished shank and he whistled. Nice job.
We clean up our mess and Boxer wraps three finished shanks in a shop towel and two pieces of unworked stock in another rag. I asked him why he didn’t finish the other two and he said they could store them in somebody’s cell until they were needed. If they didn’t have an edge, they weren’t considered shanks, just contraband that didn’t earn you any time in the hole.
After the shop rags, Boxer wraps them really tight in a plastic garbage bag. Just before lunch, another homie came in with the paint crew and Boxer gave him the shanks. Later on, Boxer explained to me how to smuggle contraband like that through the prison. What happens is that one of the inmates, on orders from a shot caller, places a work order to paint something in the building. The paint crews are given their paint cans, tools, and so on. When the piece needs to be transported, they drop it into one of the five-gallon paint cans and from there it gets delivered to whoever ordered the shank. This was prison education for me. These are the lessons that make you a valuable and efficient soldier behind bars. Getting stuff done on time and without fuckups gets you noticed. It’s really no different than a business or the military. The management is looking for self-starters and people who can think on their feet. The workers are looking for a pay raise, promotion, and a little more power. And while the EME wants and recruits hard guys who can take care of the physical and violent side of the business, they also want people to be smart enough to know when to back off from a violent confrontation if it means achieving a more important goal.
There was, for instance, the time I was actually checked and mildly punished for letting things get out of hand when I should have been smart enough to see the big picture and avoid trouble.
Part of our daily routine was working out in the yard, or playing ball, or anything physical to release tension and be able to sleep well at night. One Friday night I had plans to meet up with a bunch of guys my own age at the dugout of one of the two baseball diamonds Soledad had at the time. Every little faction in the prison had their own “space” somewhere in the yard and for the most part, people avoided entering other people’s spaces. One of our guys had gotten some Sherm (PCP) smuggled in a week earlier and our plan was to hang out and smoke it. The way it went was we’d dip a menthol cigarette into the liquid PCP and pass the cigarette. Dip again and then pass it around again.
After we finished smoking, somebody decided we should go for a stroll around the track field. Prison rules said that you couldn’t walk in a group of more than four inmates. That was considered a gang. There were a lot of us there that night, so we broke up into groups of three and four. It was all very casual and none of us were looking for trouble. Some of us would have visitors that weekend and they were looking forward to that.
As we went around for the fourth time, a group of Nortenos were playing ball and a hard hit on the ball sent it rolling our way. One of the Nortenos goes running after it and bumps into one of the guys in our group, Danny. Maybe because we were high or there might have been something else involved, but instead of just blowing it off, Danny gives the guy shit and says, “Watch where you’re going, punk.” The Norteno turns and tells Danny, “Go fuck yourself.” The Norteno had a red bandana sticking out of his pocket, so Danny grabs it away from him, pulls out his lighter, and tries to set the bandana on fire. As he’s doing this, he’s giving the Norteno shit and calling him a buster. That’s short for “sodbuster.” One of the ways of insulting Nortenos is to call them farmeros (farmers), wetbacks, or sodbusters because a lot of them were raised in the northern rural agricultural parts of California. For their part, the Nortenos call Surenos Surats, implying that Surenos are all snitches and rats.
When the other Nortenos on the baseball diamond see the bandana being burned and the shit going back and forth, it literally cleared the benches. They swarm out to us and we naturally wade into the fight. We fought for over two minutes, which is a hell of a long time. The gun towers naturally come to life, but because it’s dark and they can’t see very well, they hold their fire. When they finally hit their lights, everyone in the yard scattered like roaches when the lights come on. Because of the low light, none of the gun guards got a good look at who was fighting.
The administration naturally locked down the yard. But because they couldn’t identify anybody to do an investigation, they didn’t know if this was a minor beef between individuals that got out of hand or a major war that was about to start or the preamble to something even bigger. So out of an abundance of caution, they locked down the whole prison for the entire weekend until people cooled off. And that lockdown was what got me and some of my close homies in trouble with the older guys. Visiting days were suspended that weekend and that got everybody pissed off.
Visiting days are really important for a number of reasons. One is that this is where most of the dope is smuggled into the system. It comes in with wives, girlfriends, moms, little kids—you name it. And dope in prison means cash flow and influence and power. And there were the more humane reasons as well. Inmates want to see their family and sometimes the family has to make a lot of plans to, say, leave LA, drive up to Soledad, get a motel room, and spend money doing it. So yanking visiting day like that at the last minute disrupted a lot of inmates and their families. And, of course, there was the intelligence network that also needed a constant flow of information to function properly. Visitors meant fresh and relevant information from the outside world. If some wiseass in Pacoima or Logan or Lancaster wasn’t paying his taxes or obeying orders, the Big Homies in prison needed to know this and issue orders to “correct” the situation. And a lot of that information came through on visiting days.
Fortunately for me, my cousin Manuel had the “keys” to the yard at the time. That meant that he was representing the desires and the orders of the EME, even though he wasn’t officially an EME member, or a carnal. As the key holder, he had final say on the nature of the punishment we youngsters would be getting.
Believe it or not, Manuel had us go over to the Nortenos and apologize to them for starting the fight in the yard. While that might sound out of character for a couple of vicious prison gangs, it was actually sound foreign policy. In prison, the first order of business is “business.” That meant drugs and money. Long-standing beefs and occasional skirmishes could be dealt with eventually, and it was smart guys who knew how to hold their water and wait for a time and place when necessary violence disrupted the business as little as possible. In addition to a very hard lecture by Manuel, I also got a mild beating in my cell, but that beating had so little behind it that Manuel and I ended up laughing while he was in the middle of punching me. It wasn’t really my fault, but for a guy like me who was held in higher regard and respect than the other guys my age, it was my responsibility to have tried to calm matters on the spot as they happened. I was supposed to “know better,” but at the time I let the situation get out of hand.
Before I knew it, my eighteen months were up and I was paroled. When I got back to the barrio, I found that I’d acquired a whole new level of respect. I’d been to the big house and carried myself the way I was supposed to and proudly carried not only the Sureno flag but also my barrio’s flag, which lent a sheen of respect to all the homies in that area. I gave everybody in the barrio news on how Jessie was doing, what Manuel was up to, and all the gossip and information I picked up in Soledad. Manuel had life at the time and when I wrote this, he had spent thirty-five years in prison. He spent twenty-five of those years in the SHU (Security Housing Unit) in Pelican Bay, the ultimate supermax prison in the state of California. Frankly, I couldn’t understand how he didn’t go crazy from being in prison all that time. It was hard for guys like me to see these guys locked up for so long and not be able to do anything for them. But when you’re a fuckup like I was, what could I possibly do for them? If there is a God, I h
ope there’s a place in his heart for those dudes and he forgives them for whatever put them there. Maybe God will give them a tier-tending job in that big pinta in the sky.
14
Mainline
As I said, getting out of Soledad prison gave me a new status in the barrio. I represented the neighborhood and came home like a soldier returning from a tour of duty in a combat theater. It’s funny how things change. The homegirls want to give their pussies. The dope dealers want to reel you in by giving you that “first one” for free, knowing that once you’re strung out and pulling burglaries and robberies, you’ll be spending your money with them.
And the homeboys, of course, will give you “props,” a level of respect, because you’ve earned your place in the hierarchy. It’s crazy because this is all we lived for.
Anyhow, one thing I had a hard time with was making parole. I mean, I would rather just send my parole agent a pair of tennis shoes and a note saying “Catch me if you can” than show up to his office every week and give him an excuse to violate me; my pee was always dirty and I didn’t have a job. Dope was always in my life—either selling it, or shooting it up, smoking it, or moving it by the kilo.
So it wasn’t long before I found myself back in jail with a three-year sentence and on a bus to Folsom Prison. It was the mideighties and Folsom had an average of 350 stabbings and thirteen murders per year and some of the most violent criminals in the state of California. It was headquarters for the Mexican Mafia, the Aryan Brotherhood, Nuestra Familia, and the Black Guerilla Family. Just as I got there, the warring prison gangs had declared a “peace treaty,” so the mainline was open.
Confessions of a Cartel Hit Man Page 12