I nod. We have the example of the black prisoner with his head wrapped in duct tape. He no longer complains. He’s quiet now, slumped in his seat. When we arrive at our next destination, the US penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, the mummified black man doesn’t move. Even when they tear the tape off his face, as wisps of his sparse beard are ripped from his hollow cheeks, he doesn’t complain or holler for food. The rest of us are hustled inside.
THIS PLACE LOOKS like Dracula’s castle set in the middle of the gentle green rolling hills of rural Pennsylvania. The prison is a Gothic, terra-cotta brick structure with elegant arches and ornamental corbels all surrounded by thick concrete walls thirty feet high. Modern-looking, glassed-in gun towers manned by armed guards stand at each juncture in the wall. A tall, elegant spire like a minaret ascends from the center of the compound. The prison was built as part of the WPA project back in the thirties when no brick or laborer’s handwork was spared. Al Capone did time here, Jimmy Hoffa, and Whitey Bulger was released from here. Wilhelm Reich, the radical psychiatrist, died in this prison. They found him in his cell at seven in the morning, fully clothed but for his shoes, supposedly dead from a heart attack in the night, just days before he was scheduled to have a parole hearing.
I have come to understand: you don’t want to complain; it does no good. You don’t want to get sick or let your heart weaken in these places. There is no relief. Steel your emotions. This is a world where there is absolutely no compassion, no empathy. And why should there be? We are the condemned.
I am housed in K Dorm, the holdover unit. It’s a long, narrow basement room lined with bunk beds and teeming with prisoners in transit. A gang shower is attached to the end of the block. We are issued a towel and a toothbrush. I take my first shower in weeks. We eat real food in a cavernous, ornate mess hall with a salad bar. I gorge on fresh vegetables. Drink brewed coffee. We get to walk around in a walled-in courtyard open to the sky. Sunshine alights on our flesh. Fresh country air fills our lungs. I sleep on a bed.
This place is a species of paradise after the meandering passage from Terminal Island. Many of the men in this penitentiary are serving life sentences. It is a place long-term convicts come to die, and for that reason the guards treat them with a modicum of respect. The general population dwells around us transients like spirits of the dead. They are of the world but not in it. They are hard-core criminals, East Coast gangster royalty, committed professionals like Jimmy Burke, the alleged mastermind of the six million dollars in cash and jewels hijacked from the Lufthansa Airlines cargo terminal at JFK airport in ’78. Jimmy works the yard detail picking up trash, notes, and contraband tossed from the windows of the cellblocks. Herbie Sperling is here as well, another legendary tough guy, one of the first men sentenced to life without parole for drug trafficking under the kingpin statute. Herbie squats beside the window on his way to the yard and tells a friend he was set up and ratted out in a new case by Mr. Untouchable himself, Nicky Barnes, the infamous Harlem heroin merchant who became a government witness. “Nicky Barnes is a goil,” is how Herbie pronounces girl, like oil with a g. The prison grapevine immediately transmits this information. People get murdered in here, but never for too little.
I lose Marcus in the shuffle at Receiving and Discharge. He’s shipped out immediately, continues on his journey to nowhere on the next bus. But his advice has penetrated and set up camp in my mind. The troops are assembling to marshal my defense. Ideas are building the battlements. Once I get to wherever I am going, I am determined to study my case. I will understand this language they call the Law. This has given new purpose to my life.
Each day the bus arrives and disgorges a gaggle of fresh convicts. Most are sentenced prisoners on their way to one of the many federal institutions scattered across the land where they will serve their time. I walk in the courtyard. I do push-ups and crunches on the concrete slab. In the shower room I do chin-ups hanging from a pipe. This is a tense, hectic four-day respite, like living in a busy bus station, so much coming and going, an incarcerated population on the move.
Then, early one day before dawn, guards come for me. I am shackled and chained, hands immobilized by the black box, and then loaded back on the Bureau of Punishment stagecoach. Next stop, New York City, the Big Apple, the Metropolitan Correctional Center—MCC, baby—in Manhattan, just like I remember it from my brief stay here with Jimmy D on the hash importation case that never was back in ’78. This time I am just passing through. After a leisurely ride through the hills and back roads of rural Pennsylvania and Upstate New York, with my eyes glued to the outside world as it passes by, the bus comes to a stop in a garage at the base of the high-rise federal jail. We are all removed and locked in a bullpen. Prisoners come and go as their names and numbers are called. Hours later, I am herded back on the bus with several new convicts, and we hit the road again, this time for Connecticut.
The scuttlebutt among the prisoners is that someone died on the bus. There is talk of it in the bullpen and again on the bus. Rumor circulates among the convicts. The guards and marshals are mum. There is a nebulous fear above and beyond the usual dread, some sense that things have reached a point of no return. I hear enough to know that the rumors are all about the black man who had his head wrapped with duct tape. They say he suffocated. I feel like we knew it even as we got off the bus in Lewisburg. The angry black man was angry no more, for he was dead. But we kept our mouths shut. And I keep my mouth shut, remembering Marcus’s words, not wanting to be singled out as a witness to an official murder. Hear nothing. See nothing. Say nothing. You are not really here in this place and time. Just passing through.
Yet this fear of speaking out and bearing witness makes me feel cowardly. Despicable. Trying to slip through this experience with the least amount of involvement of conscience, looking out only for myself, concerned only for my own survival. What kind of a man does that make me? A nowhere man. A nothing man. Someone who only cares about his own well-being, his own survival … a cockroach.
But this is serious shit. These Punishment people don’t play. I could end up on the bus forever. Who would know? My parents? How would I tell them? No one knows where I am. As it is, I have been unable to speak to anyone in the world for weeks. Who would believe me? It is hard to understand that shit like this goes down in America. But I have seen a crazy black man bludgeoned with truncheons in the Glass House. And now I have witnessed an angry black man gagged and mummified on the Bureau of Punishment special. I just want to keep my fucking mealy white mouth shut and get wherever I’m going with the least amount of hassle—lowly cocksucker that I am. I might as well bend over and let the Punishment specialists shove their version of the land of the free up my tight white ass. But then, just maybe I will make it through and live long enough to write about it. That is my secret desire, my solitary plan.
THE FEDERAL BUREAU of Punishment institution at Danbury, Connecticut, is my next stop. After a long and tedious booking-in at Receiving and Discharge, being fingerprinted, mug-shot, asshole-inspected, and degraded for the umpteenth time, I am taken straight to the Hole. My high bail and former fugitive status has them on edge. One of the hacks checking me in looks up and asks, “What the fuck did you do? It says, ‘Conspiracy to distribute marijuana’? That must have been a hell of a lot of pot.”
Now all of a sudden I am a VIP—Very Important Prisoner. I’m not allowed to mingle with the other convicts. I’m wondering if this is because they know I witnessed the mummification of the black man and are trying to keep me from telling others what I saw, or if they are in fact concerned about my security level. It’s impossible to tell with these people. These Bureau of Punishment types are deadpan. They check their empathy at the prison gates. I am reminded of a book I read, Will by G. Gordon Liddy. Liddy did time in this joint for refusing to cooperate over his involvement in the Watergate break-in. No rat G. Gordon.
I am locked in a single-man cell, fed three times a day with a tray shoved through a slot in the cell door. The
y take me out once after two days for a shower. No phone calls. Then, very early one morning before sun-up, deputy US marshals come for me. I’m dressed out in khakis, cuffed behind my back, with chains and shackles at the ankles, loaded into the rear of a plain dark sedan and, lo and behold, who slips in behind the wheel? It’s Sullivan, my old pal Boston Sully who arrested me in LA, fresh-faced and grinning, happy to see me.
“Richie boy, how you been?” he says.
“Great, Sullivan. And you?”
“Oh, you know, doin’ my thing…. Listen, I got a treat for you, one Boston guy to another. You behave yourself and, around lunchtime, we’ll stop at McDonald’s. How’s that grab ya’?”
“Wonderful,” I say, though I couldn’t care less.
Ah, yes, incrementally, life is getting better even as I get worse.
Chapter Three
GOOD JAIL
Cumberland County Jail, October 1982
AFTER SO MANY nights in jails and prisons, and the endless days riding in the Bureau of Punishment prison on wheels, finally to arrive at the Cumberland County Jail in downtown Portland, Maine is like coming home. There is the comfort of familiar surroundings. No longer a stranger in America’s vast prison gulag, I can drop the shield of anonymity and be me. I’m a minor celebrity in this joint. My keepers all but roll out the red carpet. Not so much because of who I am, but due to my notorious connection with the famous novelist, Norman Mailer; and, though only alluded to, for all the cash money I once spread around Vacationland, as the great state of Maine is known.
Mailer’s name and picture have been all over the newspapers and local evening news as co-owner of the horse farm I put up as collateral for the bail that got this alleged drug kingpin out of jail—and which I promptly jumped, leaving the government embarrassed, for they had neglected to get Mailer’s signature on the bond. I believe this pisses them off more than anything else I may have done. They hate it when you make them look stupid. True, it was their oversight. I never hid the fact that Mailer’s name is on the deed as co-owner of the property. It was plain on the face of the document, and the magistrate simply overlooked it. I’m not about to do their job for them.
So Mailer’s fame attached to what is being trumpeted as the biggest drug bust in the history of the state of Maine is rich fodder for local media. There are TV cameramen and reporters camped outside the jail when we pull up in the marshal’s sedan. I am whisked past the reporters and hustled inside. After a brief, painless pro forma booking-in with no cavity search, the sheriff I know as Gilmore from my previous visit asks me if there is anything I need.
“Not that I can think of at the moment,” I say and thank him. “Maybe … a shower?”
He locks me up in the same cell I spent the night in when Special Agent Bernie Wolfshein delivered me here on that fateful snowy April eve. To think, it all began when I stopped to help a stranded motorist whose car slid off the road, and who turned out to be a DEA agent. How ironic! I lie in my cell and ponder this sublime paradox: no good deed goes unpunished.
My new dwelling is a single cell in what is known in the jail as bound-over yardside, meaning the cells that are reserved for federal prisoners and prisoners bound over for trial. The cells are located on a tier like a balcony overlooking the enclosed recreation area, therefore yardside. There is a steel slab bunk, a mattress, a pillow, of all things, and a small, shelf-like desk welded to the bars at the front of the cell. The open metal combination sink and toilet, as well as the whole interior space, is painted dark shit brown.
This jail is old and dirty but comfortable; it’s like a country inn that has seen better days. No bright lights. No shiny steel surfaces. No Plexiglas walls. It’s not noisy as jails go. And just the thought that I will not be roused early in the morning to be strip-searched, made to bend over and spread my cheeks, chained and shackled and constrained by the black box, herded onto the bus to be driven for hours to some other jail, fed baloney and cheese sandwiches, and then locked up for the night only to have the whole process repeated again the next day—that is soothing enough. But to have my own cell all to myself—what luxury! To be marched down the tier to take a hot shower; to be able to hang a towel like a curtain from the bars at the front of the cell for a measure of privacy: these small pleasures are treasures in the life of the prisoner. So that when, on my first evening in my new digs, as I perceive the unmistakable odor of my favorite herb burning, the smell wafting over from the cells on bound-over streetside, I know that I am exactly where I am supposed to be, at least for the foreseeable future.
One of the cardinal principles of doing time is to do it one day at a time. As simple as that sounds, it is profound, and, as I am reminded daily, profoundly difficult to achieve. But the alternative, as I soon realize—to obsess on what the future may bring or agonize and beat yourself up with regret over the stupid mistakes and selfish actions of the past that got you locked up in the first place—that becomes intolerable, for there is no escaping yourself, no way out of your inside, and no getting away from the fact that you now have very little control over what will happen to you at any given moment. I have only been locked up for what—a few months? But I have come to understand, and will appreciate again and again at new levels of understanding, that there is only madness or despair in the life of the prisoner unless you are able to refocus your thoughts and recompose your attitude, for it is all about the attitude you bring to the experience. This can be seen as incredibly liberating. You are free to understand that you control nothing but who you are minute to minute, day to day, until this life plays out. God alone has the key. But to hold on to this thought, to capture this attitude and keep it present in your mind, that is the true challenge of the prisoner’s life.
Pacing in my cell, I ponder these thoughts. I think of the black prisoner on the bus who had his head wrapped in duct tape and suffocated because he refused to adapt his attitude to the routine. Or the laughing man who got beat down in the mess hall of the Glass House. Submit, I tell myself. Outwardly conform. This is my jailors’ world. I am just passing through. I will hold firmly to the one thing they can never take and never control—my attitude.
The realization of what it means to be a prisoner seeps into my consciousness slowly, in dribs and drabs, and then it fades and dematerializes as, inevitably, I focus on the impending trial. Marcus the writ writer’s words are embedded in my thought processes. One must devise a defense. Find the right words. Conceive of an argument. It is not enough to sit there in the courtroom and let the prosecution proclaim you a criminal and hope that their proof is not convincing beyond a reasonable doubt to twelve supposedly unbiased jurors. One must present a proactive defense, an alternative scenario that somehow undermines the prosecution’s theory and casts doubt in the jurors’ minds.
The very idea of this energizes me. Yes, it is a species of theater. I have seen it play out in courtrooms before, with my arrest for carrying a concealed weapon in Boston and my previous bust for conspiracy to import hashish in New York. I watched my good friend and attorney Hef cajole judges into setting me free with little or no repercussions, simply because he is convincing at speaking his lines, lines he himself composes. I must create a fiction, a good story, something to befuddle, entertain, and dazzle the jurors.
An incipient narrative begins to take hold of my imagination. Lawyers come calling. My first choice is Hef, but he is unavailable, going through some professional and matrimonial difficulties of his own. Hef refers me to Joe Oteri, a legendary Boston criminal defense attorney who has represented any number of men in the marijuana business and who fights cannabis cases with the zeal of a true believer in the fundamental error of the laws against the plant. Oteri and I conference on the phone. He recommends a local attorney, Marshall Stern of Bangor, Maine, who Oteri says has a good rapport with the US attorney’s office here in Portland.
“Let Marshall come in and get a sense of the lay of the land,” Oteri advises me. “You don’t want to come on with out-of-town
lawyers at this stage of the game.”
The game. Of course, he understands: it is all a game.
Stern arrives at the jail the next day. He’s a dapper, plump, short man with big eyewear. “Your reputation precedes you,” the lawyer says when we meet in the attorney visiting cubicle. “This case has been the talk of the state for months.”
Marshall Stern rose to the top of the criminal bar in the federal District of Maine arena representing a growing number of seafaring pot smugglers attracted to the long, irregular, deep-water coastline and to the relative lack of federal law enforcement presence until recently. That has changed dramatically in the time I was on the lam, Stern advises me. As Maine became a hotbed of smuggling activity, the DEA presence was beefed up commensurately. As we speak, there are two other major pot smuggling cases pending in the district court.
“And you paved the way,” the lawyer says. I see him eyeing my gold Rolex Presidential watch that Val neglected to retrieve from my possessions at Terminal Island, though she did collect the cash. Miraculously, the watch survived my odyssey across the incarcerated nation in my property and was returned to me upon my arrival here. “Nice watch,” Stern says.
I unclasp the wristband and hand it to him. “Consider yourself retained.”
Stern says he has a meeting set with the US attorney for the district, a man named Richard Cohen, to get a copy of the indictment and some sense of what the government hopes to accomplish with this case. “Your codefendants all pled out,” he says. “Do you know this guy—?” Stern mentions the man I call Fred Barnswallow by his government name.
“Yeah, I know him.”
“And do you know ——? He’s cooperating with the government.”
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