Kingpin

by Richard Stratton

  “It don’t matter, I’m already doing a life bid,” he says, “so what the fuck?”

  Ruben gives me pot; he offers me heroin, cocaine. “I can get you whatever you want,” he says. “Don’t let these cops fool you. We run these joints.”

  I take a couple of joints from him, and we trade books. He is remarkably well-read for a guy who quit school in the sixth grade and embarked on a life of crime. Most of his adult life has been spent in prison.

  This is my life now.

  VAL COMES TO visit. I tell her she is authorized to collect my watch and the money I had on me when I was arrested.

  “You look good, honey,” Val tells me. “Sexy.”

  I could get off just looking at her.

  We are in a visiting room filled with prisoners and their families, sad-eyed kids, wives, and girlfriends. Guards and video cameras. Val huddles close and says, “Do you think this place is wired?”

  “I doubt it. Too much noise.”

  She nods. “Your friend Nasif got popped in New York.”

  I pause while this sinks in. Nasif is the son of Mohammed, my heavy Lebanese connection, the former chief of customs in Beirut, and my partner in the massive seven-and-a-half-ton load of hashish we imported at the Port of Newark, New Jersey, that now appears to have become the subject of an ongoing grand jury investigation. Nasif is also related to the Captain, Ayla Schbley. With Nasif in custody, the government has all they need to indict me.

  “Nasif was in New York?”

  “Yeah,” she says when I give her a baffled look. “Your friend Sammy called me.” She refers to Sammy Silver, my other partner in the hash trip. “He’s lamming it, took his old lady and is in the wind. Nasif and that other Lebanese dude, the taxi driver Hammoud, they got popped trying to sell ten kis of junk to an undercover DEA agent. They both immediately flipped.”

  The news nearly takes the wind out of me. I sigh. Heroin. Of course. You get in business with people who also deal junk, this is what happens. My karma continues to catch up with me. So this is how Wolfshein knows of the massive hashish smuggle—the fucking Lebs rolled over and are now spilling their guts to the DEA and US attorney’s office.

  “Does Biff know?” I ask, speaking of Mailer’s friend who came to work for us as a money courier.

  “I tried to call him,” Val tells me. “But I couldn’t get through, and I don’t want to leave any numbers.”

  “Sammy didn’t reach out for him?”

  “Sammy hates Biff. You know that. He never forgave him for wimping out when the load came in.”

  “You should keep trying to reach him. He’s probably at his place on Long Island. He needs to know. He’s in touch with those people—the Arabs. That could be a problem.”

  “Okay.” She looks around impatiently. I feel she is ready to leave.

  The shit just keeps getting deeper. Mohammed, that greedy, fat prick. Those fucking Lebs, they can’t leave well enough alone. We were making millions importing hash, but Mohammed was determined to get into the junk business. And bring us all down.

  “This is not good.” I don’t know what else to say.

  “Tell me about it. They let the taxi driver guy go. He reached out for Sammy like everything was cool. Tried to set him up.” She holds my hand and looks up at me with those big, almond-shaped sloe eyes, gives me her pitiful puppy dog look. “I’m so sorry, baby.”

  “For what?” I want to be hard. I don’t want anything to get to me. In this place, at this time, sentiment is my undoing. “It’s not your fault.”

  “Yes, it is. I let you down. I … if I hadn’t … fucked up, you never would have—you know—you never would have left Maui. We’d still be together. They never would have busted you.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I assure her. “I was tired of running. Just take care of yourself.”

  “I miss you.”

  I think I’ll say, We’ll get through this, but decide to say, “I’ll get through this.” I must do this alone. And I go on. “Be careful. I’m sure Nasif told them whatever he knows about you.” It’s the only advice I can give her. “Try to keep the damage to a minimum.”

  We embrace. I give her a loveless kiss. And I know it is the last time we will ever see each other.

  WEEKS PASS IN relative bliss. The days are hot, the nights are cool. The air coming in off the Pacific through the barred and ventilated window of my ground-level cell is soft and smells of the sea. I work out in the afternoon and get high in the evening. I read in the morning and sleep peacefully at night. There is nowhere to go. There are no appointments to keep, no panic attacks. For the first time in over a decade, I’m not worried about getting arrested. For the compulsive wanderer I am, this life of compelled confinement brings sustained self-absorption. I turn my travels inward. The outside world fades into memory as memory takes precedence. Survival becomes my new dwelling place in a land of character that I explore minute to minute. It is as though I am walking around always in two minds—one here and now, the other fixed on the past and how I came to be here.

  BUT NOW MY little hiatus in the California sun has come to an end. It is time to go back and face the music. I’m hearing the rumblings of grand jury investigations like a distant kettledrum roll emanating from the Southern District of New York. When I reach my attorney, Godfried, he confirms the Lebanese are singing arias. He says he forwarded this information to Biff. He tells me government agents descended on the ranch in Texas and seized everything: horses, dogs, tractors, cars, and furniture. I tell myself that it was never really mine anyway. All I possess is my consciousness, my experience.

  One morning before dawn I am trussed up like a stuffed turkey, clamped in leg irons, dressed in shackles and handcuffs and the black box—a hard, molded plastic fitting that immobilizes my wrists. The cuffs are attached to a belly chain looped around my waist. I waddle out of Receiving and Discharge at Terminal Island wearing enough hardware to sink Houdini. I’m outfitted in an army-green jumpsuit and a pair of soft, green canvas slippers the convicts call Peter Pans.

  “Name and number,” a deputy US marshal barks.

  “Stratton. Zero two zero seven zero. Zero three six.”

  A faded blue Bureau of Punishment bus with tinted, barred windows waits in the sally port. Deputy marshals and BOP guards with shotguns sit in cages, one in front and one in the rear of the bus. Getting up and down the steps, getting in and out of the bus, wearing all that hardware is a challenge. Harder still is to take a leak in the open piss pot at the rear of the bus with hands cuffed and chained to my waist, trying to unsnap the jumpsuit, get the limp lizard out and aim him in the shithole without wetting myself, as the bus lurches, pitches, and sways—this is no simple task. Forget about taking a crap.

  We are fed baloney and cheese sandwiches and apples or oranges three times a day. Still maintaining my vegetarian diet, I trade my baloney for fruit. I have a dull, throbbing headache from caffeine withdrawal. I feel like the Tin Man before service with the oilcan. I am bone-weary, my joints ache from lack of movement. At every stop it’s the same routine: name and number. A long wait while the restraints are removed. Yet another butthole inspection as new guards gaze up the old Hershey Highway. Lift the nut sack. Check the armpits. Grab a paper bag with a baloney and cheese sandwich and an apple. Lock down for the night in one hole or another.

  I think of other bus rides I’ve taken over the years: as a child to and from school, kids laughing and yelling; as an athlete to and from events, wrestlers sweating it out, butterflies in the gut; as a drug smuggler and fugitive in Mexico, a gringo among the campesinos and livestock. This is a whole new experience. We are shipped like cattle from federal joint to county jail to US penitentiary, all across the nation. It’s a meandering coast-to-coast zigzag. There appears to be no thought given to arriving at a final destination. We go up along the West Coast from Terminal Island to the federal penitentiary at Lompoc, California. After a night in the Hole, we are taken with a whole new batch of prisoners to
a nearby Air Force base, where a Bureau of Punishment passenger jet awaits. Marshals armed with shotguns surround the plane. I’m seated in the front, directly across from an attractive, butch, young blond female marshal.

  “You work out?” she asks.

  “When I can,” I say.

  Is she flirting with me? Is there life after incarceration? Could I take her, on the floor, in chains and shackles? These are the senseless thoughts that meander through my head.

  From Lompoc they fly us to El Reno, Oklahoma. A short bus ride to another federal prison where I spend the night sleeping on the floor of a narrow one-man cell with two other holdover prisoners. Then a long haul with several stops along the way to the United States penitentiary at Atlanta, Georgia.

  This is it, the Big House. One of the oldest pens in the nation, built in 1902, home to such famous criminals as Al Capone and James “Whitey” Bulger, who did a stretch here before being shipped out to Alcatraz. Yes, Whitey, my savior; after a jam I got into while smuggling hash in through Logan Airport in Boston, Whitey got a mob contract lifted off my sorry ass. I have arrived. One of the big boys now. From Boston’s Thompson Island school for wayward boys as a thirteen-year-old juvenile delinquent to the penitentiary, following in Whitey’s infamous footsteps.

  We are kept in the Hole for several days before another long bus ride, first to Talladega, Alabama, then up the East Coast with stops at prisons along the way in Butner, North Carolina, and Petersburg, Virginia. I am seated on the bus beside a man who tells me he has been doing this for a little more than six months. He has been on the bus, moving from prison to prison, Hole to Hole, more or less continuously since just after the New Year. Marcus is his name, the law is his game. He says he’s a “writ writer,” known as a jailhouse lawyer who has successfully sued the Bureau of Punishment, and so they retaliate by keeping him on the bus, moving him constantly, never allowing him to land in one place long enough for his property to catch up with him—his books and legal papers, the proceeds of his lawsuit—as a way of keeping him from realizing any benefit from his legal work and holding him incommunicado so he cannot make phone calls or continue to bring new writs in other jurisdictions.

  “Diesel therapy, they call it,” he says. “There are hundreds, maybe thousands of prisoners on the move on any given day. Men the bureau considers troublemakers, like myself. Pretrial detainees like you who they want to soften up, marinate you with diesel fumes so that by the time you get to where you’re going, you’re ready to get down on your knees and plead guilty just to get it over with. Then there’s the overflow from all the Fed joints, convicts they don’t have cells for, so they just keep moving people around while they build new prisons.”

  Marcus looks like a lawyer. He’s bookish, wears thick glasses, has a round, soft body and curly dark hair. Chubby hands swollen at the wrists from the handcuffs. He was convicted of bank fraud in Florida and has been locked up for five years. He wasn’t a lawyer on the street; he was a businessman. But he very quickly realized after getting locked up that no one would work as hard on his case as he would.

  “The law,” he tells me, “is not an exact science. It is more like literature, subject to interpretation, and as malleable as clay. It is a living organism, constantly evolving. Language is the key.”

  “Language?”

  “Yes, exactly,” Marcus avers. “They say you broke the law, right?”

  “Several laws, apparently.”

  “Have you read the indictment?”

  I shake my head.

  Marcus speaks like a lawyer, with nuanced accenting on his key pronouncements. “The laws they say you broke, those are statues codified in language. Written out in words. Read everything. Study your case. The government alleges you did certain things they have declared illegal—this is all done with words. So you counter by saying, ‘No, I did not do that. I did something else.’ It is called a theory of defense. They present their case; you counter with your defense. It all comes down to words. Most of the so-called evidence is testimony—more words. And then there are words used by the lawyers to enhance or undercut the testimony. That’s why it’s called testimony, cross-examination, and argument. Most criminal defense lawyers are useless. They just take your money and try to confuse you with a lot of gibberish. Okay? You seem like an intelligent man. So you must read the indictment, study it, and come up with a contrary argument, a theory of defense to present to the jury.”

  This is fascinating to me. It’s beautiful. I never thought of it this way. Words got me locked up, words can set me free. It’s like plumbing—you need a license to fix pipes—and even medicine. I know when something’s wrong with my body, but the experts want to obfuscate their trade because they don’t want us to know how to fix it for ourselves. I recall what the DEA agent told me when they busted my man JD and me in Upstate New York with the empty truck back in ’78: “We’re gonna get up there and tell our lies,” he said. “Then you’ll get up there and tell your lies. It’s just a question of whose lies the jury believes.”

  Lies. Statutes. Testimony. Cross-examination. Argument. A theory of defense. Verdict: guilty or not guilty, it’s all words. And it makes splendid sense. God created the world using words. He spoke it into existence. I can re-create my fate with words. Marcus reminds me that I have a constitutional right to defend myself. That means the courts have ruled that as a prisoner I must be allowed access to a law library to study my case and learn the language of the law.

  I am excited and intrigued with this notion, and I want to hear more, but our conversation is drowned out by the angry laments of a black prisoner riding near the rear of the bus.

  “Fuck this shit, man!” he screams when they hand him yet another brown paper bag with yet another baloney and cheese sandwich and apple inside. “Gimme some real food! I’m hungry. Lemme off this fuckin’ bus and gimme some damn food!”

  “Shut the fuck up!” the lieutenant riding at the front of the bus yells back at him. He’s pissed, the lieutenant. This has not been a good day for him, either. We were turned away from one jail because it was already overcrowded, and he had to get on the radio to command headquarters and make new arrangements.

  “I’ll shut up when you gimme some damn food! A man’s gotta eat,” the convict bellows. “You can’t treat a person like this. It ain’t right. I been on this bus for days. I want some damn food! ”

  It goes on, yelling back and forth, disrupting the run-down mood on the bus, and winding us up with new tension. No one wants to hear this. No one wants to be part of whatever might jump off. We all feel the same: tired; hungry; longing for a bed, a shower, an end to this interminable bus ride to nowhere; craving real food. But there is an unspoken understanding that the only way through it is to submit. Yelling and pissing these people off will only make it worse.

  The angry black convict is beyond thinking this through. In disgust, he throws his lunch bag toward the front of the bus. It hits the back of a seat near the lieutenant and spills out onto the floor—soggy white bread, artificially colored yellow cheese, pale gray mystery meat, and a red apple.

  The lieutenant stands. He looms at the front of the bus—a big man, red-faced, sweating rage. “I told you to shut up!” He has a roll of what looks like dull silver duct tape in his hand.

  “Hell, no!” the hungry convict yells back at him. “I’ll keep hollerin’ till you see fit to feed me some real damn food!”

  The other prisoners studiously ignore the beef. The bus trundles along a secondary highway in Pennsylvania where a sign reads AMERICA BEGINS HERE. The lieutenant speaks to the driver, who pulls the bus over into the breakdown lane, and we come to a stop.

  Marcus tenses beside me. “Don’t watch,” he warns me. “You don’t want to be called as a witness. They’ll never let you off the bus.”

  “You’re gonna shut up or I’m gonna shut you up,” says the lieutenant, and he lurches along the aisle to the rear of the bus.

  “Hell, no I ain’t! I ain’t gonna s
hut up until you people feed me! You can’t treat a man like this!”

  “Shut up!”

  “No! Feed me! ”

  No one wants to look. I see it go down in the rearview mirror. The armed marshal in the rear cage comes out and stands behind the black man.

  “You gonna shut up?” the lieutenant asks.

  “You gonna feed me?” the convict replies.

  The lieutenant nods to the marshal, who grabs the guy by his nappy hair and yanks his head back. The lieutenant takes the roll of duct tape and covers the man’s mouth. Now the convict’s screams are muffled but still audible. Then the lieutenant wraps the black guy’s whole head and sparsely bearded face with duct tape until he resembles a mummy from the neck up. The man struggles fiercely, he screams, but the sounds are muted. Wrapped in chains and with his hands cuffed, there is nothing he can do. There is nothing we can do. The lieutenant keeps wrapping his head in duct tape until his screaming is a sucking gasp. The tape over his mouth and nose sucks in and blows out as he labors to breathe.

  The lieutenant lumbers to his seat at the front of the bus, and we drive on.

  “Now, where was I?” Marcus says.

  “Language is the key.”

  “That’s right. Dialectic. Reasoned argument.” He shakes his head. “Shouting and screaming will get you nowhere with the government and their functionaries. You have to look to unravel their reasoning, which is perverse and therefore susceptible to challenge. Do you understand?”