“I’M SORRY, RICHARD,” Mild Bill apologizes as he takes the witness stand against me.
Yes, it’s him, the man with the Abraham Lincoln looks. The finish carpenter who worked in my home, the farm I owned with Mailer, and whose old lady pleaded with my wife to give him extra work unloading airplanes full of pot so they could save his home from foreclosure. And I did hire him, against my better judgment. Mild Bill is their surprise witness. Now he is on the witness stand to testify against me.
My lawyers have argued strenuously that Bill should not be allowed to appear, as his evidence is not relevant to the current charges. The judge has heard argument from the government that, although Bill cannot give evidence about anything within the purview of the conspiracy as charged in the instant indictment, his testimony should be allowed as proof of “like prior bad acts” under the federal rules of evidence.
Judge Gignoux seems relieved that he will not have to dismiss the case. He rules to allow Bill’s evidence in. Berlin objects once again. The objection is noted for the record.
Mild Bill is sworn in and identifies me as the man who employed him some years before to work on my farm as a cabinetmaker. Again, he apologizes to me and tells the jury that I was always good to him, a fair and generous employer. And my wife couldn’t do enough to help him and his family through their hard times. But, yes, he was there on the early spring morning when a huge plane, a DC-6, crash-landed on an airstrip in Phillips, Maine, property that Bill believes I own. Under my direction, he helped unload approximately five tons of marijuana from the airplane. He knew me to be the boss of the operation. I was known in the area as a big-time pot smuggler.
This admission gets a sustained objection from Berlin, but the jury has heard it. Bill goes on to tell the jury that he was paid thirty thousand dollars in cash by a man who works for me, and that he used the money to pay off his mortgage and to support his family for months, even years, after I disappeared from the area. Soon after the plane crash, and once Bill had no more work on the Stratton properties, he was no longer in contact with me. Groff enters photographs of the hulk of the crashed DC-6 to bolster Bill’s testimony. The government admits they recovered none of the alleged illegal weed from the planeload. Berlin makes the point that the jury has only Bill’s word that there was a load of pot on the plane. But, of course, the jury will reason, why else would someone crash a big plane in the wilds of Maine and then abandon it?
Bill comes off exactly as he looks—like Abraham Lincoln. His bearded face is the picture of veracity. Honest Abe would never tell a lie. Nor would Mild Bill. On cross-examination, my lawyers are able to establish for the jury that Bill has only agreed to testify against me because government agents threatened to arrest him and seize his property if he refused. This does nothing to detract from the facts of his evidence. Bill’s testimony is crushing to my defense. Did he file tax returns for the thirty grand Mr. Stratton paid him? No. Big deal. Who pays taxes on cash they earn unloading airplanes full of pot? Will he be prosecuted for his failure to pay taxes or for his participation in the smuggling venture? Bill does not know, no promises have been made, but he expects his testimony will protect him from being charged with any crimes.
The truth is out. The defendant, Richard Lowell Stratton, is a lying sack of shit; he has been revealed for exactly what he is: a longtime successful drug smuggler who finally got caught and is now looking to stick it up the government’s ass by mounting this cockamamie bullshit writer’s-freedom-of-the-press defense. In fact, worse. He has defamed the noble notion of journalistic objectivity, the protection writers who investigate illegal activity enjoy, not only by straying over the line but by refusing to acknowledge that any such line even exists.
Writer—what unmitigated horseshit! I can see it in the jurors’ eyes as they leave the courtroom for the day: You lied to us.
Not even the erudite, articulate, amusing, and entertaining testimony by one of America’s most respected authors can make up for the damage done by Mild Bill. Mailer is essentially a character witness, attesting to my merit as a friend.
“Rick is a stand-up guy,” Mailer tells the packed courtroom, which doesn’t really help as my character has already been revealed as that of a man who would fabricate a defense to criminal charges and then have the temerity to lie to the federal government and create an elaborate perversion of a time-honored privilege only to try to bamboozle honest citizens into acquitting me of serious crimes I obviously committed.
Cohen is unable to trip Mailer up. He does no better with Godfried’s wife. But it is a long way back from the revelatory abyss I have been cast into by Honest Abe’s testimony. I am wandering in a valley filled with the dried and bleached bones of my defense. My mendacity now lives on me like a scarlet letter—a curse. I have been undressed and made to stand naked, exposed as a fraud.
Cohen and Groff are smug in their seeming reversal of the tide. They inform Stern and Berlin that if I choose to take the stand, they will have grounds to admit the Canadian tapes, as well as a basis upon which to call the Canadian drug agents to give evidence about my extensive illegal activities north of the border. And that’s just the beginning, they warn us. They will call a host of agents from around the country who will testify that the Drug Enforcement Administration has long been aware of and investigating my managerial role in the dope trade as a boss in the so-called hippie mafia. Berlin and Stern both tell me that by taking the stand, I will give the prosecution grounds to ask questions about men named Capuana and Bulger, Chagra, Uncle George, even my partner Sammy Silver.
I decline to testify.
I am fucked.
The defense rests. Closing arguments pound home the utter lack of merit to my defense. Fearless Fred, Wolfshein, Mailer—none of that matters. Only Mild Bill’s surprise appearance, his insistence that I forgive him for what he was about to do—and did—his sincere, pained confession, only this lives in the jurors’ minds as they listen to the lawyers sum up what has been an entertaining farce. Yes, that’s exactly what it is, Cohen even names it such: a farce, he says, a comic play, a sham, but not funny, not at all, more a huge waste of taxpayers’ money and the good jurors’ time, let alone an insult to their intelligence.
Gignoux appears satisfied as he gives the case to the jury. After a three-week trial, they are out deliberating for six hours before asking for further instruction from the court. The jury requests that Judge Gignoux elucidate that section of the charge wherein he explained the nature of a conspiracy.
This is a hopeful sign. The jury is obviously wrestling with a central question: the nebulous nature of this case, the very nature of conspiracy. How can one be guilty of a crime when the illegal activity exists only in theory based on testimony with no physical evidence to connect the defendant to the crime? Gignoux’s explanation, though legally correct, is so broad that anyone who has ever agreed to try a hit of pot could be considered guilty of having conspired to violate federal narcotics laws. The crime of conspiracy, he instructs, is made up of an agreement to commit an illegal act, whether that act actually takes place or not. As long as there has been at least one overt act—a telephone call, a meeting, a drive on a snowy day in a pickup truck to set up stash houses, whatever—the conspiracy is complete.
No one is smiling as the jury files back into the courtroom after considering the expanded explanation of the charge. The foreman hands Judge Gignoux the verdict. He reads it to himself. Nods. Thanks them. Hands it back to the jury foreman, who reads the verdict.
As to all counts, “We find the defendant, Richard Lowell Stratton, guilty as charged.”
OH, WELL. TO be sure, it was a long shot. For a while there before they trotted out Honest Abe, it looked like I might walk. What a victory that would have been! What a high! Better even than smuggling dope.
Sheriff Gilmore, Cosmo the orderly, the jailhouse staff and regulars are sympathetic. Win some; lose some. We still have our cigars. Gilmore will order in lobsters. There is always the appeal. Mai
ler comes to visit.
“Hey, Rick … you put up a noble fight,” he says.
My mother and father come as well. It is the sentencing that is our focus now. Berlin slips me a couple of nips of Cutty Sark he saved from the plane ride from New York. New York. That’s another concern. Maybe the government will be satisfied with this conviction and leave well enough alone. Fat chance.
HANGING DAY. I am pictured in a front-page photo in the local newspaper entering the courthouse wearing a suit, in handcuffs, and smoking a cigar. What? Still no remorse?
Judge Gignoux seems more agitated than I am as I stand before him and refuse to make a comment. I would like to say, “Beam me up, Scotty.” What the fuck planet am I on? A man walks after killing his wife—because he was drunk. I don’t wish Roland any more time; he will suffer for the rest of his life. But how many guys kill their old ladies after smoking weed? It is deemed wise for me to remain mute, given that I might yet be facing another case. And besides, I’ve been revealed as a charlatan.
Gignoux is apoplectic. He cannot look at me as he imposes his sentence—which is about to become my sentence. His hands flutter over his broad bench like delicate birds taking flight as he rustles through some papers. He looks as though he is about to have a stroke.
“Calm down, your Honor,” I want to say. “I’m the one in the dock.”
“Has the defendant read the presentence report?” Gignoux intones.
Yes, yes … get on with it. All this blather about government resources. Fuck that nonsense. The government spends billions waging this ridiculous, destructive war on plants.
Mr. Stratton, bend over. We would like to fuck you in the ass.
Fifteen years, the maximum sentence allowed under the law.
Thank you, your Honor. And fuck you, too.
I AM WHISKED out of the Cumberland County Jail this very afternoon. Highly unusual. Ordinarily, there would be a two-to-three-week delay while the Federal Bureau of Punishment bureaucrats decided upon a suitable penal institution for my sentence. But as soon as I am returned to the jail, my old pal Deputy US Marshal James Sullivan appears with another deputy and teletyped orders to remove me at once. I am not even allowed to return to my cell to pack my belongings. All that has been done for me. My property will be shipped to the prison where I will begin serving my time.
Sully is all business until we are out of the jail and in the marshal’s car speeding along the Maine turnpike heading south. He tells me that they received word I was planning an escape. The empty nip bottles of Cutty Sark were recovered from under the pillow in my cell. It was decided I had too much juice with the local Heat and that I was bribing—or attempting to bribe—officials at the jail to let me flee.
I know where this comes from. That sleazy trustee, Cosmo. He was constantly pumping me for information, and he had proposed that he could help me escape for five grand. I never agreed, but I did entertain the idea. And who knows what I might have done once I was returned to bound-over yardside with a fifteen-year sentence to contemplate.
“Where are we headed?” I ask Sully.
He looks at his partner and smiles. “Sending you to Terre Haute,” he says. “Rough joint. You better watch yourself out there, Richie boy. Don’t let some big buck nigger fuck you in the ass.”
Racist Irish prick. If I could whack him on the back of the head, I would.
“Listen, Sullivan,” I say, “the only fucking I’m getting around here is from the government.”
He laughs. “You got that right.”
You gotta love these Boston Irish.
THE MARSHALS DELIVER me to a county jail in Lowell, Massachusetts, where I will pass the night. Jailers inform me that they have no empty cells in the “regular” jail. So they will have to lock me up in the condemned wing.
Whatever. Who gives a shit? Not me.
Oh no? Check this out.
It’s a fucking dungeon. Nothing more, nothing less. No bed. No toilet. A stinking half-full bucket of piss and shit to relieve myself in. The walls are damp and scummy; the floor is, too. I sit on the floor, draw my knees up and rest my head on my arms.
Say it again, Stratton. Convince yourself: I don’t give a shit. I am beyond caring about any of this. Show me the worst you have got to offer. Lock me in a dungeon in the town named for my forebears. No matter how bad it gets, it is all good. For I am exactly where I am supposed to be—in a prison cell.
Chapter Five
THE CRIMINAL HILTON
Metropolitan Correctional Center, New York City, 1983–1984
THERE ARE GOOD jails, and then there are bad jails. The Cumberland County Jail is a good jail—at least it was for me. The LA City Jail is a bad jail by anyone’s standards. That county joint they locked me up in for the night in Lowell, Massachusetts—that place was beyond the pale. It will go down along with the Glass House as one of the worst jails in America. And with the hefty dose of diesel therapy I received upon entering the federal system of punishment, I have seen my fair share and more of bad jails.
Then there is the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City, known as MCC, a.k.a. the Criminal Hilton. There is no jail in the world quite like MCC; it is in a class all by itself, just as there is no city in the world to compare to New York. MCC is where the criminal elite from around the world gather to bow down before the almighty rule of Uncle Sam’s international police force. Any outlaw or criminal worth his or her salt is bound to make a pilgrimage to this Mecca of the notorious.
MCC is a twelve-story, fortress-like structure protruding from Foley Square in downtown Manhattan. The federal lock-up is attached to the majestic Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse next door by an umbilical-like elevated walkway to feed the accused into the maw of the American criminal punishment system. This joint has such a high caliber of clientele it’s like a think tank for professional criminals; a high-security tenement teeming with deviants; an abode for unregenerate dope dealers and squealers, mafiosi, bent correctional officers, flimflam artists and white-collar crooks, bank robbers, IRA soldiers, international arms dealers, and professional assassins. There are spies and terrorists, mob bosses of every stripe, Colombian drug lords, renegade CIA agents, Wall Street cowboys, racketeers, international confidence men, kidnappers, Black Panthers, gang leaders, Russian mobsters, extortionists, Israeli heroin smugglers, Albanian hitmen, Weathermen, armored-car robbers, counterfeiters, Jamaican posse members, Bloods and Crips, Latin Kings, Hell’s Angels, contract killers, fraudsters—players and rogues from every dark alley in the international underworld.
This is my kind of jail. There is never a dull moment. Nonstop action from the moment they unlock the cell doors in the morning until they lock us back down at night, and often after lock-down into the early morning hours. Like a bus stop on the way to hell, the place festers with a perverse energy that boils over from the proximity of so many dedicated sinners confined in such close quarters.
WHAT WAS SUPPOSED to be a few days’ holdover while in transit to the penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, has turned into weeks of waiting and wondering: What the fuck? They pulled me off the Bureau of Punishment bus headed west and booked me into the ninth floor, maximum-security unit. After a couple of days of total twenty-four-hour-a-day lockdown in segregation, I was moved across the sally port to the high-security intake unit known as Nine North. Here is where new prisoners come straight from the street or from other prisons after lingering for hours and sometimes days in purgatory in the bullpens, the antechambers of hell, waiting on the long-drawn-out process of being checked into the Criminal Hilton.
Each evening I sit in the common area and watch the six o’clock news to see who US lawman Rudy Giuliani locked up on that day. Then, hours later, sure enough those same suckers come straggling onto the unit looking dazed and confused, dressed in ill-fitting orange jumpsuits, with bedrolls tucked under their arms. Millionaire captains of industry, their horizons suddenly diminished to a seven-and-a-half-by-eight-foot cell, they wand
er around like inmates in a mental ward. Colombian drug barons extradited to the US sit glued to the TV, watching their embattled billionaire chieftain, Pablo Escobar, wage war against his government. Domestic and foreign terrorists who would blow up America plot how they will get through the day. White supremacists and Black Panthers stand in line to pick up a food tray or make collect calls from the two pay phones. Militant Zionists and Islamic fundamentalists coexist in this rank hotbed of criminality. International arms traders swap packs of cigarettes for Snickers bars. Radical Puerto Ricans, millionaire capitalists, bankers and loan sharks, intelligence agents who strayed from the reservation—all have been stripped of external plumage and defenses, reduced to their attitudes.
Ah, yes, jail: the great equalizer.
Or—maybe not. For I have discovered that there is one whole tier, D tier, known as Mafia Row where things are not as they seem, where the vaunted rules and regulations of the institution apparently do not apply. The guests housed on Mafia Row have made discrete accommodations. Some of these guys have little TVs in their cells. They dine on takeout from the Italian restaurants on Mulberry Street and from the restaurants of nearby Chinatown. They puff on cigars that are not available from the commissary. They sip on aperitifs or after-dinner brandies. They hire stiffs to stand in line and wait for a turn to use the pay phones. The other prisoners rarely venture onto Mafia Row. The hacks leave them alone.
I have carved out my own unique niche here on the unit and in this singular jail. Because I am being held in some kind of legal limbo with no set transfer date, and, more importantly, because I can read and write with some proficiency, I have been assigned the position of unit clerk. It’s a good gig. I maintain what is known as the bed board, a clipboard with a form attached to keep track of who is in which cell. Many of these correctional officers are lazy, a few are corrupt; but they all leave when their shift ends. We live here. The cells were designed for single-occupancy, but with the drug war raging in the nation and on the streets of New York, the prisoner population is booming, so the cells have been converted to two-man dwellings with the installation of bunk beds. We still have the standard plumbing fixtures: open, seatless steel toilets two feet from the bunk, and a sink. The cells are cramped and there is no privacy. This is a transient unit; most men do not stay here long. But some of us remain on Nine North for weeks or months while our cases wend their way through the federal legal labyrinth. So, who one lives with is of the utmost importance. By controlling the bed board, I have a certain power. Within reason, I can sway the shift CO to assign convicts to the cell and cellmate of their choosing. And as the unit clerk, my cell is always last to have double occupancy.
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