Kingpin

by Richard Stratton

  “Shut the fuck up!” the cop screams at him.

  The guard is a white man, couldn’t be more than twenty-five, crew-cut blond with a Nazi mustache. It occurs to me that all the hacks are white. The cop leaps over the table and whacks the laughing black guy hard across the back with his truncheon. Another guard approaches from the side and hits him again. They beat the man off his stool and onto the floor. They strike him again and again, a merciless beat-down—for laughing—and then they drag him from the mess hall. All the while, the guy keeps right on laughing.

  AT ONE POINT over the endless weekend the guards come, everyone in the tank is roused, and we are all herded out and made to assemble in the corridor while our tank is hosed down. We stand between rows of what look to be single-man units, individual fish bowls arranged like a freak gallery at a sideshow. Hermaphrodites, cretins, men wasting away with some mysterious new disease, transsexuals, predatory pederasts, and outrageous jailhouse queens—the dangerously infectious, the violently insane, and the brazenly homosexual roost on shelves behind thick glass walls. I see the prisoner the guards beat in the mess hall sprawled in one of the single-man tanks. Fascinated, I stare at these rejects. Compelled to identify their abnormalities, what separates them from us, I study them like exhibits in a chamber of horrors. One guy pulls open his jumpsuit and flashes a pair of girlish tits. Another prisoner leers at me and slowly strokes his semi-erect cock until a guard raps on the glass with his baton and yells at him to “Put the meat away!” Other prisoners appear so sick as to be near death.

  This can’t be happening, I tell myself, not here, not in America. Not to me. There must be some mistake.

  But then something deep inside of me moves. Looking at these poor wretches sequestered from even the dregs of the jailhouse population, I am ashamed at how good I had it in my life, and how much I squandered and abused and took for granted. I have the fleeting sense that every moment of my past, each event and every decision I made until now conspired to bring me here to this Glass House, into which everyone can look, and there are no secrets—even those secrets I would keep from myself. For to survive this experience and make it through whatever the government has in store for me with body and mind intact, I realize that I must finally come to terms with who I am and what I have done with my life.

  The other prisoners jeer at the freaks behind the glass. They seem happy, though they feign anger at the cruel attention. They wave good-bye gaily like children as the guards herd us back into our own freshly hosed-down tank.

  Chapter Two

  DIESEL THERAPY

  FCI Terminal Island, San Pedro, California

  MONDAY MORNING, THE hazy light of day filters over the blank fluorescent brilliance of the Glass House, and I am delivered. Two taciturn guards come for me. They dress me in shackles and chains, shiny steel bracelets, and take me down into a subterranean garage where a van waits to remove me with half a dozen other federal prisoners to the US courthouse in downtown Los Angeles. There we are made to wait for hours in a crowded, sweltering bullpen. A criminal defense attorney colleague of my lawyer Channing Godfried comes to see me, and we have a brief, hushed conference through the bars.

  “This doesn’t look good,” he tells me. “It’s a bail hearing on a pending extradition warrant. Apparently, you absconded from a federal indictment in the District of Maine. You were released on bond and failed to appear. Is that correct?”

  “That’s true, yes.”

  “There’s not much I can do,” he says with a frown. “Whatever bail they set this time, my guess is it will be prohibitively high. I’ll argue for reasonable bail, but since you jumped before and you were a fugitive when they arrested you, I don’t have a strong basis for my argument. They’re not going to want to take the chance that you’ll flee again.”

  I tell him not to worry, I understand the bond will be high and that I don’t expect to make bail or want to fight extradition. “I’m ready to go back and face the charges,” I tell him. “Just get me out of the LA City Jail.”

  “You don’t want to go to LA County either,” he says. “That’s even worse.”

  Agent Wolfshein and Deputy Sullivan are in the courtroom, seated at the prosecutor’s table when I enter. The Wolfman nods to me while conferring with the assistant United States attorney (AUSA) assigned to argue for the government. Sullivan gets up; he takes a position by the entrance with another deputy US marshal as if they expect I might make a break for the door. The prosecutor, an earnest, young, instantly forgettable federal type, addresses the magistrate. He calls Wolfshein, who is sworn in and identifies me as Richard Lowell Stratton.

  My attorney admits that is who I am.

  “Your honor,” the prosecutor states, “this defendant, Richard Stratton is a career criminal, a professional drug smuggler with a long history of violating the federal narcotics statutes.”

  “Excuse me, judge,” my attorney interrupts. “Mr. Stratton has never been convicted of any federal or state narcotics violations.”

  What narcotics? We’re talking about marijuana.

  “If I may continue, your Honor,” the assistant US attorney fires back.

  “Yes,” says the magistrate; then, to my lawyer, “You will have an opportunity to speak on behalf of the defendant.”

  “Agent Wolfshein, you have been investigating Mr. Stratton’s activities for the DEA, is that correct?” the AUSA queries the Wolf.

  “Yes,” Wolfshein says matter-of-factly. “That is correct.”

  “What can you tell the court about who the Drug Enforcement Administration believes this defendant to be?”

  My lawyer starts to object, but the magistrate cuts him off.

  “This is a bail hearing, not a trial,” he says.

  “Mr. Stratton is what is termed within the agency as a Class One violator,” Wolfshein addresses the court. “That is, someone who is capable of, and who regularly does, import large quantities of controlled substances—in this case mostly marijuana and hashish—from outside the United States into this country, and then distributes the drugs through a network of wholesalers and retailers all across the United States and Canada.”

  “Agent Wolfshein, you arrested Mr. Stratton on a previous complaint, correct?” asks the prosecutor.

  “I did, yes, in the District of Maine.”

  “When was that?”

  “A little over two years ago.”

  “What was the result of that proceeding?”

  “Several defendants pled guilty. Mr. Stratton failed to appear and was sought as a fugitive.”

  “And what, to your knowledge, was Mr. Stratton’s position relative to the other defendants?”

  “Mr. Stratton is the organizer, the manager of the conspiracy.”

  Manager, my ass. I was a stopgap. I was never meant to be there. Those were other people’s doomed trips that I was hired to rescue.

  “To your knowledge, what has the defendant been doing while avoiding prosecution in Maine?”

  “Our investigation of Mr. Stratton’s activities confirms that he has continued to import controlled substances while a fugitive.” Wolfshein shrugs and gives his trademark gesture, sliding his glasses back up his nose. “I would say it’s been business as usual. We have evidence that he and his organization recently imported a multiton shipment of hashish into the United States.”

  Shit, so they know about that one, too.

  “Thank you.”

  My lawyer wisely chooses not to question Agent Wolfshein.

  “You may step down,” says the magistrate.

  Wolfshein nods to me as he passes by and takes a seat in the rear of the court. I’m thinking how much I enjoy this mode of communication, this courtroom palaver, damaging as it may be. It’s so civilized and pointed. No small talk. No beating about the bush. And when someone speaks, people pay attention. There are real consequences to the dialogue. Freedom is at stake. I could sit here all day and listen to these guys talk about me. It’s interesting. Again, it’s t
hat feeling of being important. To these folks, I matter. They are on a mission to stop me from doing what I do.

  “Judge,” the prosecutor continues, “this defendant is known to carry several sets of false identification. He has passports in other people’s names. And the government believes he has large sums of money hidden in other countries. While he was a fugitive, he was living for much of that time in Lebanon, beyond the reach of US authorities. Under the circumstances,” he winds up his spiel, “the government requests a bond set in the amount of fifteen million dollars.”

  Wow, from $250K on the Maine beef now up to $15 mil here in LA. My value is skyrocketing.

  My stand-in lawyer references the presumption of innocence. He avers that the case against me in Maine involves a “conspiracy to distribute marijuana. There have been no allegations of importing vast amounts of controlled substances.”

  The judge checks me in my puke-stained suit; three-day stubble growth; hollow-eyed, sleep-deprived gaze.“The government has sent a clear message to the courts that they do not look dismissively on these kinds of defendants,” he expounds. “The importation of drugs from other countries to the United States has become a scourge upon our nation. Drug defendants with resources such as this defendant often flee to avoid prosecution, as this defendant has shown he is willing to do. Under the circumstances, I am inclined to accept the government’s request and set bond in the amount of fifteen million dollars.”

  Fine, I say to myself, consoled by the thought that it can only get better from here. Would you like that in cash or will a check do?

  THE FEDERAL PRISON at Terminal Island in San Pedro, California is like a spa, a semi-tropical resort after the shit-imbued confines of the House of Glass. It’s on a man-made island at the entrance to Los Angeles Harbor. It’s a real prison, complete with cellblocks, fences, and walls topped with concertina wire. The units are populated with convicts doing serious time. But the prison does strike me as a terminal, a place one comes to for a season, and then one moves on. Yet men spend years here waiting to return to the world.

  The hack who processes me in through Receiving and Discharge is a mid-level Bureau of Punishment type, not a lowly turnkey. He tells me he is a retired former investigator from the district attorney’s office in Manhattan. He’s a tall, graying Brooklynite who claims he knows of me, says he has heard of my case, even followed it, and that he has been prepped for my arrival. I suspect he may be trying to trick me into making some admission of guilt.

  “We don’t get too many pretrial detainees in here with a fifteen-million-dollar bail,” he says. He tells me I should have someone come down and claim my possessions, the watch and cash, before the government seizes them. “It’ll take them a couple of days,” he says, “but they will come. IRS or DEA. And you’ll never get it back.”

  I’m wondering if this is a setup, a plan to lure one of my co-conspirators in to pick up the money so they can lock them up. But something in this guy’s manner tells me he is sincere, that he has no real love for the bureaucracy he has served for so many years. He gives me a form to fill out releasing my property to—whom? A blank space. I fill in Val’s alias and call her in Maui, collect, at my first opportunity to use a phone. We are in post-arrest emergency mode. With me in custody, I have no choice but to alert Val and have her take over. There is still a lot of money out there that needs to be collected and dispersed, and she has proven herself adept at evading agents of the law.

  “Ah, baby. I’m so sorry,” Val laments when I tell her where I am. “Are you okay?” But I sense she is relieved that I am still alive.

  “Yeah. Listen, can you come by and pick up my stuff?”

  She says she’ll be over on the next available flight.

  Due to my high bail and the fact that I have not yet been convicted of any crime, and that I am being held in pretrial, holdover status awaiting extradition to Maine, I am afforded what amounts to deluxe accommodations. They assign me to a high-security unit populated with infamous bank robbers and gang leaders, drug kingpins, and the criminally insane, all either pretrial or brought in from other institutions to face new charges.

  My first cellie tells me he was arrested for stalking and threatening the TV Tonight Show host Johnny Carson. He’s a gentle soul, soft and chubby with thinning, sandy blond hair. He says he never meant to cause Johnny any harm, he just wanted an opportunity to get on his show and demonstrate to the late-night viewing audience what he can do, which, he tells me, is a kind of magic, also a calling. He can dematerialize, he claims, and he can conjure the dead. He says he once brought Marilyn Monroe back to life, and she told him she was murdered, her death was not a suicide. “I can prove all this,” he says. “And the Kennedy assassinations. I know who’s responsible, who did it.”

  “Who?”

  “I’ll tell you everything … in time. But when I do, when I reveal everything to you, they will take you away and you will never be able to get out. They don’t want any of what I know to be made known to the rest of the world.” He rushes his speech as if gladdened to finally have an audience, and concerned they may whisk him away before he can reveal his truth.

  “A triumvirate of highly evolved spiritual beings sent me here to save mankind,” he goes on. “It’s a mission … and a curse. You see, mankind does not want to be saved. We are the fallen, bent on self-destruction, like lemmings rushing to the edge of the precipice.”

  I believe him. It all sounds plausible to me, because I am one of those lemmings.

  He continues. “This place can’t hold me.” He claims the walls are an illusion of imprisoned consciousness. They only exist because we believe they exist. We are all as free as we want to be. “I need to be here, for my own good,” he says. “And for the good of the human,”—he pronounces it hu-MIN—“race. Every great man must spend some time in prison.” He rattles off the names of noted former prisoners: John the Baptist. Christ. Saint Paul. Dostoyevsky. O. Henry. Malcolm X. Wilhelm Reich, who died in prison. And the list goes on. “Even Hitler,” he adds.

  “You too will do great things,” he assures me as though this were prophecy. “This is a rite of passage.”

  THESE THOUGHTS COMFORT me. The guy may be crazy, but I feel better already. Early the next day, however, before breakfast and before my enlightened cellmate can reveal the author of the Kennedy murders, the guards come for him. When I inquire later, the unit manager confides that he was removed to the nut ward for psychiatric evaluation.

  My new cellie is a skinny, long-haired failed armored-car robber. He tells me he went to the mall with his girlfriend, and she carried a basket of wash into the Laundromat while he waited in the car.

  “I was bored,” he says. “The whole idea of it, doing the same boring crap every day—washing clothes, eating, sleeping, and then doing it all over—it depressed the shit out of me. I saw my whole life as one boring, depressing day after another equally fucking boring day. And I just couldn’t take it. The idea of it killed me inside.”

  He was an experienced bank robber who had already done close to a decade in prison. In the trunk of his girlfriend’s car he had a Mac 10, and he had a 9mm handgun in the glove box. An armored car pulled up in front of the supermarket. On the spur of the moment, “because I was bored,” he grabbed both guns and attempted to commandeer the armored truck. He took one of the guards hostage in the rear of the truck, “with all that money,” and ordered the other guard to drive off. But the truck was equipped with LoJack and some anti-theft device that cut the engine a few blocks away from the shopping mall. They were stranded. Cop cars and a SWAT team quickly surrounded the armored truck.

  “It was hot as a fuckin’ sauna in that truck, man. I couldn’t breathe. I had all that money, but nowhere to spend it.” He laughs.

  The cops brought in a hostage negotiator. News trucks and cameramen flocked to the scene. “I was all over the nightly news. It was like that movie, Dog Day Afternoon. I was famous—for a minute.”

  The heat in the t
ruck became unbearable, and the guard passed out. “I was afraid he had a heart attack. Or heat stroke. You know, he wasn’t too healthy, and I didn’t want the guy to die on me.”

  When his girlfriend was located and told him to, “Cut the stupid shit and give yourself up. This isn’t funny anymore, Donald,” over the bullhorn, several spectators laughed.

  “That was it,” he says. “I can’t stand it when she calls me Donald, like I’m fuckin’ Donald Duck. So I tossed my guns and came out with my hands on my head. They went nuts, screaming at me to get down on the ground. Ten cops with guns pointed at me going crazy like they’re Dirty Harry. Make my day! ” He laughs again. “Fuck them. This was my movie. It was the most fun I had in a long time.”

  Coming back to prison is no big deal, he tells me. It can be boring, of course. But it is expected to be boring. So any variation on the daily routine is a plus. It’s a kind of hibernation, a time to gear down and chill out. “I read a lot, mostly crime books. Books about famous criminals. I love crime. But I’m too lazy to be a good criminal, that’s my problem. Crime is like anything else—you gotta work hard to be good at it.”

  Outside, “in the world” one expects to be stimulated, he reasons. So it is a letdown when one day begins to feel exactly like the one before and the one before that and on and on until you die. “It sucks. This life is fucking boring—and meaningless. I should have been a warrior,” he concludes. “In prison, I have an excuse to say, ‘Fuck it,’ and be lazy. So I’m a failure, who gives a shit? It’s all bullshit anyway.”

  This too strikes me as vaguely comforting. I’ve been mulling over these same thoughts. For a man who needs constant, life-threatening risk to feel alive, the idea of prison as an alternative lifestyle—a life of routine and the concentrated introspection that comes with enforced boredom—this may be exactly what the narcissist in me craves.

  IT’S MEMORIAL DAY weekend, hot in Southern California. I spend my days on the weight pile, in the sun, doing chins and push-ups, dips and bench presses, getting tanned and cut-up, exercising with the tattooed, heavily muscled gangsters and gangbangers. I sleep, call it rest. I meditate. I read. The food is decent. They bring it to our unit in food carts and we eat in the common area like guests at a convention. The other prisoners have interesting stories. I become friendly with a quiet, ink-sleeve-tattooed convict named Ruben, a Chicano gang boss charged with running a criminal organization—gambling, extortion, narcotics trafficking—from inside a maximum-security federal pen. The new indictment includes allegations he ordered and/or carried out several contract hits in furtherance of the racketeering enterprise. He is facing life with no parole.