I picked up a couple of write-ups for winemaking, so my SHU term keeps getting extended. It’s a trip, but after a while you don’t even think about the mainline because you have developed a program. I know guys who have spent twenty to thirty years in the hole. It’s all they know. I recently heard they’re letting a bunch of dudes out because it’s considered cruel and inhumane treatment. What I did see with my own eyes was a homeboy named Cornfed from the Aryan Brotherhood who spent twenty-seven years in the SHU. He dropped out of the Brand (the Aryan Brotherhood) and he was sent to Minnesota, which is beautiful country. Sure it’s cold in the winter, but summer and fall are beautiful. Well, Cornfed gets there after spending all that time in the SHU and it was kind of heartbreaking just watching him get reacclimated to the outside world. I mean the guy went to the yard and just fell to his knees in the lush green grass. He took his shoes and socks off and just stretched out. He laid out there for a couple of hours enjoying the warmth of the sun and the sounds of nature. And that was just going from the SHU to mainline. He’s got a couple of life sentences to serve, but I hope one day he will get to see the real outside. It’s a shame because he’s got so much talent with oil paints and pastels. I’ve got some of his artwork and you would think they’re so nice they belong in a museum.
One day we go to the yard for our twenty-five laps around the yard. That wasn’t a prison rule. That was an EME rule. Everyone had to do twenty-five laps. So after our laps, my homeboy Eugene “Spider” Lopez from Logan wants to stroll around and chop it up (tell war stories). So we’re walking back and forth talking. You got some homies playing cards, some on the pull-up and dip bars, and some doing just like us—enjoying the company.
Then all of a sudden the homeboy Crow from Varrio Nuevo Estrada (VNE, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Los Angeles) jumps up from the card table, holding his neck, and Marciano (yeah, the same guy I had the beef with) is walking away real fast. Spider grabs me real quick and pulls me out of Marciano’s path. He says, “Watch it, homie. He’s got a razor blade.” All the fellas on the yard are on alert. The brothers Danny Boy from Hazard (a gang near downtown Los Angeles) and Sleepy from Wilmas (a gang located in Wilmington, California) are on the yard with us. They go to the fence to talk to Chuy, Angel Stump, and Indio, who are on the yard next to us. After discovering that no one has a shank on the yard, they tell Tomas from Placentia and Feo from Venice to take off on him. So they do. And after about five minutes of beating him down, they leave him on the ground. The brothers are still huddled by the fence and Spider is with them. Then I see Sleepy from Wilmas go talk to Gato Marquez (who would later become a brother and end up being killed down in Mexico).
Anyhow, Spider comes to me and says, “You and Gato are going to take off on him, okay. That’s the punk who took it upon himself to cut you with a blade and now he did it again.”
What happened was each tier back there was run like its own little village. Each had its cook, winemaker, transporters (guys who ran fishlines), and so on. Well, just like the burritos, when it came to the wine, everyone who donated to the cause got an issue. Well, it just so happened that Marciano had purchased a box of sugar from the commissary to throw into the tier’s batch. He was on the third tier, the tier that Crow was tier tender on. And it just so happens that the same evening that the wine was ready and they were going to pass it out, the brother Rene “Boxer” Enriquez came to the hole. So Crow and Bobby Montenegro from Hoyo Maravilla (East Los Angeles), who was the other tier tender, gave Boxer Marciano’s issue. That’s because a Big Homie like Boxer at the time always took priority over rank-and-file inmates like us.
So, of course, Bobby and Crow tell Marciano that he’ll be on the next issue of wine. But he doesn’t want to hear that. He takes it upon himself to take revenge. So here we are.
Now, Gato also has a history. He was once my cellie in Soledad for a short time, but the guy was a pro boxer. He was rumored to have fought Roberto Duran back in the early days. Anyhow, Gato tells me to distract Marciano but to be careful because he still has the razor blade. So I walk toward Marciano and I’m talking shit to him. “You coward. You had to do it again. Why can’t you fight clean?” And so on. Gato creeps up on his blind side and hits him solid on the chin. I’m standing right there and I see Marciano’s lights go out. As he’s going down, me and Gato are just keeping him up with our blows. Finally he goes down and the gun tower wakes up: “Everybody down.” Oh, yeah, another EME rule was that you couldn’t lay down until they fired the Mini-14. There were two weapons in the towers—a Ruger Mini-14 and a shotgun. There’s a lot of homies running around with birdshot from back in the day because the gunner always fired the shotgun first.
That day was our lucky day. The gunner fired a round from his Mini-14 at the wall. But me and Gato continue to kick Marciano, so they fire a round by Gato and he lays down. Then they fire one by my foot and I lay down. There’s about twenty cops at the gate who responded but they don’t want to come onto the yard, so they tell us to carry Marciano to the gate. But neither of us is moving. So they start yelling at Marciano, “Hey, get up. Come to the gate.” This goes on for about five minutes and Marciano starts to come out of it and he looks like a baby deer trying to stand up. He just can’t quite get his legs under him. After a couple of tries, he finally makes it to the gate and they put him on a stretcher and cart him off.
They call Gato and he goes to the gate and gets cuffed up. I’m called next and Spider yells, “Stay down, little homie.” So I smile at him. I’m still smiling as they cuff me up and pull me off the yard. On the next yard over, I see Angel Stump, who nods his head, and I see Indio, who smiles at me. Then I see Chuy, who looks at me and puts his head down. That was his homeboy who just got sliced by the same guy who had done me. After this event, Marciano checked in (requested protective custody).
So I never did kill him myself.
Not long after all that, the SHU was closing in Old Folsom so they sent a bunch of us to San Quentin. I drove up about November of 1986. I’m put in Northblock, AC side, fourth tier. San Quentin is another place that there is no mistaking that it’s a prison. High walls, catwalks everywhere. There’s a lower yard and an upper yard, which is where the SHU housing units were—Badger, Northblock, Alpine, Donner, and Carson and the Adjustment Center. I got to reside in three of these fine establishments. Death Row was housed in Northblock, but that’s just on the top floor. The five tiers below that were all SHU and, man, if Folsom was like a village, San Quentin was like a jungle. It’s loud and you can feel the energy. There’s no tier tenders here. The cops do all the work. I’m there about ten minutes when a fishline parks right in front of my cell. Like a suitor picking up a date, there’s a kite tied to it. So I take it off and read it. It’s from Ernie Lopez from Hoyo Maravilla. He’s asking the usual—who are you, where you coming from? So I yell out, “I don’t have a pen.” He tugs the line twice and I pull it. There’s a pen and paper attached, so I give him the scoop and he gets back with yard times, shower days, which brothers are on the tier. He wrote that Tati Torres from Wilmas was there, as well as Tablas from Florencia 13. And that’s pretty much all it takes to settle in.
Over the next couple of days we go to classification and get cleared for the yard. Northblock’s yard is under the pavilion on the upper yard. It’s fenced in and split down the middle, so you have one side of the building on one yard, and the other side of the building on the other.
I go out and meet Ernie in person and a whole cast of characters. There’s Joker from Varrio Nuevo Estrada near downtown LA, Caveman from Ontario Black Angels in Riverside County, Perico from Primera Flats. There’s also Aryan Brotherhood and woods (peckerwoods who are white inmates who associate and are allies with the Mexican Mafia). Their homies on the yard were Fat Chili, Big Frank, Billy “Hoss” Frisbee from Sacramento, and Buzzard. The really senior-ranking EME brothers there were Tablas Castellanos, Tati Torres, Spider from Hoyo, Tio Pio (Ben Topo Peters),
Arty Guzman from King Kobras, as well as Carlos Dias and George Ruiz. And like always, I’ve got a big homeboy there as well. This time it’s Jessie Moreno. The last time I saw him was in Soledad. The homeboys from San Diego pull me up and tell me that they’ll get at me and shoot me a couple of things until I get my property.
One evening just before Christmas in 1986, I hear music . . . it’s a Christmas carol. Then all of a sudden I hear singing. I know it’s not the fellas singing from their cells. Someone yells out, “It’s the carolers.” And all hell breaks loose. People start cussing at them, flooding the tier, lighting toilet paper rolls and throwing them at the carolers. It was crazy. I mean, I’m no saint but I felt really bad. I had not spent a Christmas at home with my family for eight years. And I’m not gonna lie. Some of those Christmas shows would choke me up.
When I asked my neighbor Tablas why they were doing that, he just said, “To cover the pain, little homie.”
17
Plastic Knives
Well, after the holidays were over, I went to Unit Committee and was told that my SHU term was almost up and that I’d be sent to Max B. This was a brainstorm that the Department of Corrections came up with back in those days. This was 1987, right after the year of all those gang wars. Even though there were “peace treaties” being worked out, you still had a lot of hot spots—Tracy (Deuel Vocational Training Center, also known as the Gladiator School), Tehachapi, and San Quentin. The worst of the fighting may have been over but there was still a lot of bad blood. It wasn’t like playing Army in the backyard. You were risking your life and people were losing friends.
The California Department of Corrections thought that if they take those players who were involved in the violence and are just finishing their SHU terms, they can put them all on the same yard and see if they will behave. That’s where they were sending me—Max B.
“Get yours or get got”; that was the common attitude. When I go back to T Yard, I tell my homeboys, “I’m going to Max B.” So they tell me that when I get there in East Block, I should look for Macky from Florencia. He’s on the third tier, Bayside, and made a fishline and he’d get at me. They told me, “Be ready. It’s mandatory you get off on them before they get off on you. Macky will tell you who to hit.”
When we get up to the second tier, there’s a gate at the end of all the tiers. So when a cop pulls out his keys to open the gate, someone hollers “Radio,” meaning cops are coming down the tier. So that warning is passed down the tier just in case you’re doing something in your cell that you’re not supposed to be doing.
There’s like fifty cells on each tier; half are on the front bar and half are on the back bar. These are the bars that the cops slide open by handle to unlock the doors. You have the locks on your cell door, then the bar on top has a notch that holds your door closed as well. Anyhow, they take me to my cell. One cop unlocks my cell and the other slides the bar and I walk in. After I hear them leave, I wait a couple of minutes and holler out, “Macky.”
Someone calls back, “Yeah, who’s that?” So I tell him and what cell I’m in.
He says, “Okay. Make a line.”
In a few minutes a line pulls up in front of my door. I grab it and the guy on the other end tugs it twice and I pull it. There’s a kite on it, so I take it off and read it. “What’s up, Nite Owl. My name is Chino for Pacoima [a neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley]. I’m a couple of cells down, so when we fish, pull the line quick. We have a couple of busters between us and they’re snagging lines, okay?” At least this guy has the forethought to send a pen. So I write back, “Mucho gusto. I was told to get at Macky. Is he nearby?” After he reads it he says, “Let me go. I’ll get back to you.” When you send a kite on a fishline, you’re “flying a kite.” If Nortenos saw something that looked like a weapon, they would try to snag the line. They knew a weapon would probably be used against them.
Eastblock has their Seg Yard on the Bayside—that’s the San Francisco Bay. It’s got a huge wall all the way around it made of concrete blocks. There’s a gun tower outside the wall and a catwalk (gun rail) all along the front of the building about twenty-five to thirty feet high. Inside this cement fishbowl, there are six yards all separated by cyclone fences twenty feet high with razor wire along the top. Two of the yards are Max B. One yard is just for the Nortenos and the black inmates, and the other three are for Surenos and white inmates.
When I get to the yard, the cops take off my cuffs and there are two Mexicans and two blacks on my yard. One Mexican comes up to me and asks, “Are you Nite Owl?”
I’m a little cautious and get ready for anything before I answer, “I’m Nite Owl.”
“Cool, homie,” he says. “I’m Chino and this is another Nite Owl, from Artesia” (a Los Angeles gang neighborhood). After they ask when my property is arriving and whether I need anything, they explain to me that the homies upstairs are making pieces for us.
Just to get myself familiar with the enemy, we walk the whole yard and they point out some people—Manos and Babo, both of them Nuestra Familia, and a guy named Chief from the Black Guerilla Family. They tell me to be especially careful of these three guys.
That evening, the homie Chino yells out, “Nite Owl, I’m coming at you,” and shoots me a line. I grab it and he says, “I’m shooting you some coffee and tobacco as well as hair grease and lotion and a couple of soups.”
It’s all wrapped up in a tube about an inch wide. Unlike Folsom, which just has bars, San Quentin has mesh on its bars, so fishing was a little different. There was about a half-inch gap at the bottom of the door and you could slide magazines and newspapers under that. To get stuff under the door, the procedure was to roll it up into a tube. If it was anything bigger, we used what we called the “mouse hole.” This was a roughly two-inch-by-two-inch gap at the edge of the door. I untie everything and tell him “Gracias,” and he pulls his line back. I sit down and start opening the packages. One tube had a few shots of coffee. Another had tobacco, rolling paper, and matches. Two others were about six inches long containing crushed-up Top Ramen soup and seasoning packets.
The last tube was about eight inches long and contained hair grease, a note, and a six-inch shank. The note said, “Welcome aboard, little homie. I’m Macky from Florencia. Here’s a few things to make you comfortable as well as your piece. I hope it brings you honor. The next yard, Chino and Nite Owl are gonna get off on the blacks on your yard. You are to wait for your target. There are some more homies coming, so hang tight, okay. When you get the word, just hoop the piece and handle your business. All right, then, homie, have a good evening and let me know if you need anything else. With respect—Macky.” Thoughtful.
But “hoop” the piece? I’ve never hooped, or kiestered, anything in my life. But now I’ve got to stick this six-inch plastic knife up my ass? I’m looking at it and I’m kind of laughing. So I say fuck it. I’ve got plastic to wrap it with. I melt it shut, grease the end, go to the toilet, bend over at the waist, and push. Motherfucker. This shit hurts. This is killing me. Fuck this. So I shoot Chino a kite and tell him, “It don’t fit.”
He gets back and asks, “Is this your first time?” He tells me, “Lay on your bed sideways and just relax. Push a little at a time and it will go.” I try. Now I’m starting to think these dudes are fucking with me.
Well, the next day is yard, so I hide the piece in my mattress and go to the yard. Nite Owl and Chino are there as well as the two blacks. Now, each yard has a toilet, a urinal, and a shower with a small wall around it about three feet high for privacy. Chino tells me to keep point, so I’m watching the cop on the gun rail as well as the blacks. Chino goes first and squats down by the wall and poops out his piece. Next goes Nite Owl and, damn, they made it look easy.
I asked them, “Didn’t that hurt?”
“No. You have to practice. Didn’t you bring yours?”
I told them I hid it in my mattress. They said
never to do that again. “If the cops go in your cell and find it, that’s your ass.” So I say okay.
Back to the matter at hand, the blacks on our yard are all the way on the far side of the yard. They see Chino and the other Nite Owl too, and since it’s just the homies and me and the two of them, guess who is in the crosshairs. So they’re keeping their distance. We spend the whole yard time walking laps and when it’s close to yard recall, one of the blacks ducks in to use the bathroom and the other one keeps walking. Nite Owl follows one. When the other gets done and comes out of the bathroom, me and Chino get him. I’m holding the guy and Chino is sticking him. Nite Owl is on the other one. When the gunner sees all the commotion, he starts shooting. Me and Chino lay down and the black guy by us runs to the gate. But Nite Owl still has the other one and is putting in work.
The gunner fires two shots and then one more. The third round hits the wall by Nite Owl’s face, missing him by a frog hair. The bullet ricochets off the wall and shrapnel catches Nite Owl and the other guy on the side of their heads and faces. Finally everyone is down and taken off the yard. The next time I’d see Nite Owl, it would be in Pelican Bay. By then, he’d become a brother in the EME. I never saw Chino again.
But now I’m up at bat. That evening I try to hoop the damned piece and it’s not getting easier. It was, and still is, a part of prison life. But it’s not going and I’m getting frustrated. So eventually I just say fuck it and I take the piece and cut off about two inches. It still hurt but at least it was in.
Confessions of a Cartel Hit Man Page 15