I say, “I want to kill him.” They all look at each other and start to laugh. Then they ask me, “Are you sure, youngster, this is what you want?” I got a little frustrated because I thought they were making fun of me.
Then Kilroy says, “Okay. Let us talk and we’ll call you in a minute.”
While they’re talking, I go over to where my San Diego homeboys are and I hear, “Oooh. Check out the little homeboy. I didn’t know you was so important.” They’re still busting my balls.
Finally, Juanon shows up and he says, “Come here, homie.” He gives me a hug and tells me, “I haven’t seen anyone from the barrio in almost ten years. I wish we could spend some time together, but I already know what’s going on.” He asks me, “You didn’t tell any of these fools anything, did you?”
I told him the only people I spoke to were Monstro, Chapo, Kilroy, and Alfie.
So he says, “Good. Look, I talked to the Big Homies and asked them if you could get off on the yard. They said no. They want it done on your tier. It’s not to leave your tier. Somebody is gonna bring you a piece tonight.” Then he asked me, “Can you do this, homie? Have you ever done a hit before?”
I looked at him and just said, “I got this.” He puts his arm around me and walks me over to Kilroy and another brother, I can’t remember his name, and says, “He’s ready.”
So Kilroy tells me, “Look, you do what you got to do. After this, I don’t want no more fighting with your cellie shit. It’s not right that he cut you like that, especially since you didn’t have a weapon. But I don’t care what differences you have with your cellie in the future. The next time you come to us, okay? Now, when you get done up there, you drop the piece off the tier, you got that? Drop it over the rail. Someone on the bottom tier will pick it up. Don’t forget. Have you ever done this before?” And I looked at Kilroy in the eye and lied to him. “Yeah, I’ve done this lots of times.”
That evening after dinner I’m sitting in my cell watching TV with my new cellie, a homeboy from the LA area that’s got three life sentences. He’s been down for seventeen years already and he says he’s got kids older than me.
A while later, this big, bald guy covered in tattoos comes to our cell and asks, “Who’s Nite Owl?” I told him I was him. Then he asks, “Where you from?” I say San Diego. He asks to see my face. I show him my cut and he pulls a manila envelope out of his pants that was tucked under his shirt. He says, “Give me the envelope back.”
I looked inside the envelope and there were a couple of porn magazines as well as a ten-inch-long steel shank that looked like it had a real nice point on it. I asked him if I can have the magazines as well, but he said they were already spoken for by someone else. “But maybe, after tomorrow. If you’re still here.” I can’t remember his name but he was from Toonerville, a neighborhood in Northeast Los Angeles. I was with a couple of his homies in YA. Then he tells me that the homeboy next door is “gonna help you. So when you come out in the morning, look for your neighbor and he’s going to help you, okay?” I tell him okay and he wishes me good luck. He takes off down the tier, pushing his broom.
Me and my cellie look at the piece and it feels huge. My cellie says, “You’re gonna have to put a handle on that.” So we tear one of my sheets into one-inch-wide strips and he shows me how to start at the end and work your way down, wrapping it real tight. Once I got the handle on it, I started practicing with it. It was actually too big for me, but I tell myself I’m gonna get this done and make my homeboys proud of me. I don’t get much sleep that night. I’m tossing and turning. I’ve never really done this before. I mean, I’ve had my share of fights. And on the streets I used sticks and bats and stuff. But I’ve never actually engaged in hand-to-hand combat to the death. Which was what this was going to be. Kill or be killed. I had never had to do this, but I didn’t want to be another young punk who was too scared to handle his business. I’ve been a survivor all my life, fending for myself ever since I was thirteen years old. So I can do this. Then I’ll have the respect of the homeboys and the brothers.
The next morning I’m groggy from lack of sleep, but I get up, wash up, and get ready. My cellie wishes me luck and then the cop says, “Fourth tier, prepare to step out for chow.” He racks the bar and I come out looking for my neighbor. I walk in front of his cell and he’s standing there. He asks me where Marciano is and I indicate that he’s down the tier. But I don’t see him. So we wait and the tier is starting to clear. So he says, “Go down there. Maybe you’ll catch him slipping and still in bed.” So I walk down to Marciano’s cell and there he is in his boxers, washing his face. I go in his cell and he doesn’t notice me. I pull out the knife and bring it down hard in the middle of his back. I hear him lose his breath. And then he turns around, so I raise the shank above my head and bring it down again. But he catches my arms by the wrists and we’re struggling face-to-face, locked in deadly battle.
We’re looking at each other eye to eye and then he gives and the knife comes down and catches him in the forehead. Blood squirts out and sprays me in the face and up my right arm. He breaks away from me and staggers out the cell. I go chase after him but he collapses in front of the cell next door. I remember what they told me to do with the piece and throw it off the tier. So I back into the cell and pitch the shank like a horseshoe. And wouldn’t you know it, with my buzzard luck it hits the top rail and bounces back on the tier with a loud clank. I go to reach for it so I can throw it over, but with all the commotion from Marciano and the loud clang from the piece, the gunner on the catwalk is on me! He sees me and fires a round from his Ruger Mini-14 into the ceiling. He yells, “Freeze, motherfucker. Don’t you touch that.” The catwalk is only about ten feet from the tier and I’m looking down the barrel of his rifle and I can see the dude is shaking. “Put your hands on the rail and don’t move, motherfucker.” So I don’t take my eyes off his hand on the trigger and place both hands on the rail. This dude is shaking like crazy. I don’t know if he’s hungover or crazy but I don’t want him accidentally pulling the trigger. So I tell him, “Relax, dude. I’m not going anywhere.” He just says, “Don’t move.” By this time I can hear keys running down the tier. I’m not taking my eyes off this gunner for shit. He tells the responding cops, “There’s a knife on the tier. I got him reaching for it.” So I take my eyes off him now that we have company (and other witnesses). I look down the tier and there’s about twenty cops heading my way. A sergeant pulls out a handkerchief and picks up the knife. I can see it has hair and blood on the tip.
The sergeant whistles and says, “That would get the job done, huh?” I see other cops putting Marciano on a stretcher and I got a cop putting cuffs on me. He looks at all the blood on my face and arms and asks me if I’m okay. I say, “Yeah, I’m good.”
I’ve got three cops and the sergeant escorting me and we go out and pass the chow hall. I see everyone on the grill and my homeboy Juanon is there. He gives me a thumbs-up and he says, “Stay down, little homie.” I’m taken to R&R and the cops take the cuffs off me and tell me to strip out. I get undressed and they’re checking me out, when the lieutenant asks, “What’s that?” I say, “What?” and he says, “Those cuts on your face, arm, and thigh. They’re a couple of days old but they’re still fresh. Did he do that?” I say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I was so caught up in the hit that I forgot all about my wounds. They take pictures of my injuries as well as my hands that were covered with Marciano’s blood. Then they take me to the nurse, who looks at my cuts and says that they should have been stitched up when I was first cut. But she said the cuts were healing and it was too late to stitch them. “Just keep them clean and you should be all right,” she said. They put me in a red jumpsuit and they cuffed me back up. They escorted me to 1 Building, which is where the SHU is located. I’m then processed and taken up to the fourth tier and put in cell 417.
The cell is small as they can get away with. There’s just a b
unk, a sink, and a toilet. I can reach out and touch both walls at the same time without having to fully extend my arms. My elbows were still slightly bent. The cell is exactly three paces from the front to the back.
I’m in there about thirty minutes when I hear a bang on the wall to the right. I say, “Hello,” and I hear someone say, “Hey, come to the bars.”
So I sit at the end of the bunk and ask, “What’s up?”
He says, “Here,” and a hand appears from the next cell, handing me a yellow piece of paper. I take it and read and it says, “My name is Johnny Haun. They call me Johnny Rotten. I’m a Wood from Oakland. What’s your name and who you run with?”
I whisper that I don’t have a pen or paper. So next thing I know, here comes his big mitt with a pen and a few sheets of paper. I write back and tell him my name and nickname and that I’m a Sureno from San Diego. Then he writes, “Good to meet you, Nite Owl. You got a couple of homeboys here from San Diego.” He yells out, “Hey, Willie.” Someone upstairs yells back, “What’s up?” Johnny says, “You got a homeboy that just got here.” The guy from upstairs says, “Okay, I’ll get at him later.” Then he says, “Hey, homie. Make a line.”
I say okay, but my voice cracks because I have cotton mouth from all the action that morning. Willie and Johnny both laugh. So I clear my throat and ask my neighbor, “Hey, Johnny, how do I make a line?”
He says to hold on. I go to the sink and drink some water to get some fluid back into my mouth. He bangs on the wall to get my attention and I see he’s holding a mirror about four inches by four inches in his hand. He’s looking at me with it and I can see him too. He’s got long hair and a beard and he says, “You ever make a fishline?” I said no, because I never had to make one. Not in Soledad. Not in YA. Nowhere. I always just waited to come out if I had something for someone. Anyhow, he’s looking at me and asks, “How old are you?” I tell him and he says, “Aw, this is your first time.” I say no it isn’t, but then we hear a cop walking down the tier so he says to hold on.
The cop comes to my cell. It’s a female corrections officer. She asks me, “Are you Corona?” I told her I was. Then she says, “I have a 115 write-up for you. Do you speak English?” I told her I did. “I have your initial 115. You’re receiving a write-up and being placed in Ad Seg [Administrative Segregation, solitary confinement] pending a hearing because you were involved in an assault on an inmate with a weapon. How do you plead?” I told her, “Not guilty.”
She says, “Okay, someone will be appointed as your investigative officer. He or she will help you with your defense.” I say okay and she gives me a copy of the write-up. I sit on the edge of the bunk and read it. It basically covers everything that went down that morning. It also mentions the cuts I have. But all that isn’t news to me. What stands out to me is the date. It says, “On 2/8/85 you were placed in Administrative Housing Unit Folsom.” It’s February 8. My birthday. With all the drama in my life the past couple of days, I forgot all about my birthday.
16
The Hole
I hit the wall and tell Johnny, “Hey, I’m not twenty anymore. I’m twenty-one. Today’s my birthday.” Then I show Johnny my write-up. Well, this is something like what the song says. “I turned twenty-one in Folsom doing a program in the hole.” Or something like that.
Johnny reads the 115 and gives it back; he also gives me a book and some magazines and says, “My show is about to come on. I’ll talk to you a little later.”
Me and Johnny eventually got to be good friends. In fact, he starts calling me mijo, which means “son” in Spanish. I eventually see him when he comes out to the yard and the dude is big. I mean, six feet seven inches, so who am I to argue about him calling me mijo.
I meet the tier tenders for our tier—Gus from Pomona and Mumbles from Oceano. There’s a couple of guys that I already knew—Jessie Maldonado (Spooky) from Hawaiian Gardens and Chente from Eighteenth Street East Side. I was in YA with both of them. Me, Spooky, and Baby Ray from San Fernando were road dogs in SCRC Norwalk. I got to meet my homeboys Willie Boy from Lomita 70s and Spider from Logan, who later became a brother in the EME. Things weren’t so bad in the hole once everyone found out who I was and why I was there. Although my first day in the yard I was pulled up by one of the Big Homies, Chuy from Varrio Nuevo Estrada. He told me to walk with him. He’s got this big handlebar mustache and is covered in tattoos.
He says, “Look, I know why you’re back here. And we don’t play that shit back here. I hear Marciano is gonna be back from the hospital and he’s gonna be on our yard, so you guys leave that shit alone, all right, or else you have to answer to me.” And then he says, “Marciano is a friend of mine. And I’m thinking if he had just killed you, he wouldn’t be back here again, he just got out the hole. Just so you know, I’m not taking sides. I just want that shit to stop.”
I say okay and I shake his hand. And wouldn’t you know it, they put him in our yard.
I’m not getting any mail or money from anyone. My parents are still in Hawaii and every now and then, my grandmother sends me five or ten dollars, bless her heart. But other than that, I’m hustling for whatever I need and to be honest, I don’t need much. The food was pretty good and my neighbor Johnny was a vegetarian, so he would shoot me chicken, fish, and, believe it or not, every once in a while some steak. This is prison steak so it’s not filet mignon or Kobe beef but it was beef.
I was the tier winemaker. I was holding three big shanks for Johnny that no one knew about. Johnny even showed me how to put them behind the toilet into the wax ring, then mold toilet paper and soap and put it in place of the caulking. I learned how to make real good fishlines out of nylon string from the elastic band on our boxers, so I was always making lines for everyone. Then one day our tier cop comes to my cell and he’s got a cart with him. I’ve been there about six months already and he says, “Your property is here.” And he starts handing me my sweats and thermals and all the stuff that Juanon had sent me the first day I got to Folsom. He also says, “When I go down the tier and rack the bar, you can come out and get this.” He shows me a thirteen-inch black-and-white TV set. Don’t laugh. It was 1985 and I don’t care how long color TV has been around but I was just grateful to get any kind of TV. Up until then, Johnny had made me a long earbud and I would sit at the edge of my bed and watch his TV through a mirror with my arm sticking out through the bars.
A couple of days later, Juanon shoots me a kite making sure I got everything, and saying how proud he was of me and that I should let him know if I needed anything else. (A kite is a note written on a piece of paper.)
Time goes by pretty good. I mean, I’m young and it’s a funny thing about us humans, but we learn how to adapt, so eventually it doesn’t even seem like I’m in the hole. I stay busy, go to the yard for one and a half hours twice a week, watch TV shows in the evening, get drunk once a week—everything seems all right. Then one day I’m awakened by a loud boom and the building is shaking. It had been raining the past couple of days with lightning and thunder, but as humid as it gets, it was a welcome relief. Anyhow, lightning hit the main power transformer and it’s a blackout in the whole prison. It’s not a big thing. We’ve had power outages before, but this one goes on and we’re getting sack lunches three times a day. After about a week, the National Guard brings in generators and we stay locked down in our cells for three weeks. Not just us in Ad Seg, but the whole prison. You could look out the front windows and see the yard on the mainline. It was kind of eerie to see people walking around in military uniforms. The guys start talking.
And there’s this old clause in the Inmates’ Rights Title 15 Handbook that states, “If ever an invasion by foreign or domestic enemies, inmates are to be exterminated to prevent treason or a coup.” At least that was one of the rumors. But then, as usual, things settled down and we’re back to our normal program. For the next few months, things are quiet. Then some words were exchanged one day
between one of the Nortenos and a brother named Indio from El Sereno, a gang in Northeast Los Angeles.
The story is that one day, a Norteno was going to the showers and he stopped in front of a homeboy’s cell. He tried to toss a handmade bomb into the cell but it didn’t light. The cops see him and bust him. These bombs were made from match heads. Back in those days, every week they would pass out supplies like soap, toilet paper, envelopes, writing paper, pens, and pencils, and also two packets of tobacco and two books of matches. Not everyone smoked but you could use the tobacco to bargain with. Hey, it wasn’t Turkish blend but it was free and if you smoked you couldn’t beat that deal. But as for the matches, you could use them for all kinds of stuff. You could even cook with them. Chente from Eighteenth Street was our resident chef and everyone would save something from our daily meals and Gus or Mumbles would take it to him. Then that evening, Chente would make firebombs from toilet paper.
The toilet paper Sterno is what we used to cook. Chente had scraped the paint off a section of his bunk and polished it with Ajax. He would light a couple of bombs underneath. Once it got hot, he would use butter he saved from breakfast and toss on whatever meat, beans, or rice we saved. They sold tortillas in the commissary and everyone who donated to the cause would receive one of those delicious hot burritos that evening as a late-night snack. You could smell the grill every evening and your stomach would growl. I miss those burritos as well as the comradery that went with them.
About this time, Gus and Mumbles came around collecting books of matches. So everyone gave them up. One morning during showers, we heard a big boom and the building shook. Right away, dudes were saying, “Not again,” thinking it was another transformer. But it was sunny outside and the lights didn’t go out. So I grab my mirror and I can see all the way to the end of the tier that the cops were wrestling with a guy from Harpys, a barrio in LA. And I could see pieces of mattress and other stuff smoldering on the tier and smoke coming out of a cell. Once the cops get the homie in cuffs, all the other cops who responded to the alarm open the cell and pull out this dude who’s screaming and has all kinds of cuts and burns on him. They put him on a stretcher and take him to the hospital. The guy made it but he had some bald spots. What happened was payback for that Norteno who tried to blow up the homie. I guess our bomb lit and worked.
Confessions of a Cartel Hit Man Page 14