We are counted six times a day. For the 4:00 p.m. stand-up count, the guards lock down the entire unit until the count clears, and then the cells are opened to release prisoners for the evening meal. The evening-shift cops open my cell first so I can update the bed board. I go from tier to tier checking the names on the form with the bodies in the cells to make sure they match. Then the kitchen workers’ cells are opened and they set up the food trays, zap them in the microwave, and feed the hungry convicts as they are released tier by tier. Once or twice a week the guards are supposed to take us up to a caged-in area on the roof for a little outdoor recreation, but that rarely happens. Between counts during the day we are allowed to wander freely within the unit. At ten o’clock, they lock us back down for the night.
Days turn into weeks, and then months slip past. The days are so similar they blend into a kind of timeless pause in real life. Routine becomes the saving grace of doing time; uncertainty undermines any measure of peace. It is now over two months since I was sentenced in Maine, and I am still here with no idea what the government has in store for me—no, that’s not true, I do know. I know the grand jury is still convened, still in session and considering evidence against me for new charges. Irving Berlin has come to see me twice, with no real news other than that there are new charges pending.
At night before lockdown I stand in the common area and look out through the steel-barred windows at the city of New York—so close, so real, so enticing, and yet a reality away. Gazing from my cell on the Fourth of July, I watch the fireworks over the East River. America is out there celebrating its independence while I am locked up. Life goes on out there; in here we exist in a state of suspended animation. Out there, millions and millions of people come and go in freedom. Yet they are subject to the constraints of work-a-day lives: having to pay rent or make mortgage and car payments; having to buy food and clothes; having to hold a job, keep appointments, and keep up appearances. Here we are in custody. I don’t have to do shit. I pay for nothing except my mistakes, and pay for them with an abstraction—time—and a feeling—guilt. I try to wrap my head around the whole idea of what it means to be a convicted criminal and a kept human being serving time—as if time were something tangible that could be cooked and served and consumed like a meal.
I’m subject to the constant control and scrutiny of my keepers, yet there is a subtle perversity to being in custody. If they tell me to do something and I refuse, what can they do? Lock me up? I’m already in jail, so it’s liberating. I remind myself almost hourly that the one thing they cannot control is my mind, including my mental attitude. For the first time in my life, I may be totally free, free from the precepts of society, already a convicted deviant and facing more charges. I am never bored. Beside the constant action on the unit—the coming and going of the most intriguing crooks and gangsters—I am fascinated by what is going on inside my head.
I think of the man I was when I was free: obsessed with risk, an ingrate who did not appreciate or use wisely my freedom and the vast amounts of money I made. A profligate. An unfaithful husband. A seeker after cheap thrills. Let me pay now with my time for my mistakes. Let the pain of loneliness compensate for some measure of the karmic debt I owe for the pain I caused others. Let this isolation sustain me as I come to grips with who I was and grow into a different, better person. Out there, the game was a constant distraction. I thrived on the action. All that exists in here, too. But there is a time when the cell door closes and is locked and the unit goes quiet, and I must accept that I cannot run away from my better self. I cannot drink or smoke myself to sleep. I must face the reality of how and why I fucked up my life and abused my freedom, and I must come up with a plan to win it back.
Fifteen years and a new case pending! This is serious. Yes, it’s true, as Special Agent Bernie Wolfshein warned me: these federales don’t play.
“YOU GOT A lawyer visit,” the hack says as he unlocks my cell door after the 4:00 p.m. count. It’s Officer Martin. Cool. I get along with this cop. He’s a tall, slim, studious-looking black man who wears glasses and looks like he should be doing something else, dressed in a suit instead of the Bureau of Punishment uniform, carrying a briefcase instead of a walkie-talkie and body alarm. He scribbles out a pass and hands it to me.
“Everything cool?” he asks.
“We’re good,” I say.
Martin hands me an orange. Fresh fruit is a cherished commodity, an antidote to scurvy. After weeks and months in prisons and jails, my skin is so pale I glow in the dark. I’m transparent. You can see my heart beating in my chest, watch my lungs suck in and expel recycled air.
“On the door,” Martin speaks into his radio. An electronic door release sounds and he opens the gate to the sally port. The cop operating the elevator checks my pass, speaks briefly with Martin.
On the way down to the lawyer’s visiting room on the third floor, we stop on the fifth floor to pick up additional prisoners on their way to visit with their lawyers. A woman prisoner gets on the elevator. What? Females, you say? Yes, as if this place were not enough fun, there are women here. Lady criminals, girl gangsters, chick outlaws, a whole unit full of bad girls, so naughty as to merit federal charges. A teenage fantasy has in a sense become true. We used to drive up to the women’s prison in Framingham, Massachusetts, park on the perimeter road, and gape at the caged females. The women would call to us like sirens from the windows of their cellblock. “Hey, big boy! C’mere and let me show you what I can do with that little thing between your legs!” Sometimes they would show us their tits. They taunted us with lurid intimations of their wet, hairy pussies. We were stunned, too scared of these hellcats even to call back to them. I would lie awake at night and try to imagine what it would be like to be locked up in there with a whole prison full of sex-starved women and to let them have their way with me. Now I lie awake at night in my cell and fantasize what it would be like to be locked up on Five South, the women’s unit.
And here getting into the elevator is the woman prisoner of my dreams. She is attractive in a punked-out sort of way. Wild, frizzy, two-tone hair. Even with her dressed in the pale blue slacks and smock that is the women prisoners’ uniform, I can see she has a good, full figure. We share a quick look. A glimmer of recognition passes between us. Not that we have ever met, but we sense an affinity. We are both white, so-called sophisticated criminals. I make her for a dope dealer who partook of her product and may be going through mild withdrawal.
A guard unlocks the attorney visiting room door and we are herded inside. Irving Berlin waits in one of the small cubicles spaced along the back wall. The attorney visiting room is like a fish bowl with glass walls so the guards outside can keep an eye on what goes on inside. Criminal defense lawyers swim around like sharks in expensive suits looking for fresh meat to feed on. Berlin comes out from the cubicle and greets me—and my female fellow prisoner, the woman I just encountered on the elevator.
“You two should know each other,” he says.
Now I know who she is, the so-called Smack Goddess, dope dealer to the stars whose picture was plastered all over the tabloids a few days ago as a gang of dope cops led her in handcuffs from her Upper West Side apartment building. Allegedly the street where she lived would be choked with limos while her rock star customers popped in for a quick score. Berlin introduces us. Then he takes me into the cubicle for a hurried private conference.
The government, he tells me, has dismissed the grand jury. A true bill was returned. The indictment is being prepared as we speak. A new prosecution is to be mounted against me and as yet unnamed co-conspirators here in the Southern District of New York, brought by an assistant from the office of that champion of law and order, United States Attorney Rudy Giuliani. This comes as no surprise. We knew it was in the works. Rumors and reports of a grand jury meeting in New York and calling witnesses to be questioned about a massive load of hashish imported through the port of Newark, New Jersey, have been relayed to me for months—from lawyers an
d from people called to testify. I had hoped the fifteen years I received in Maine would satisfy the Feds. But it is clear they feel there are more important deviants out there, and they assume I might be the one to lure them in.
“I’ve been in touch with the assistant handling the case,” Berlin concludes. “They want to know if you are willing to take a meeting.”
“A meeting? With who?”
“DEA. The US attorney’s office.”
“What for?”
Berlin shrugs, smiles. “Well, what for? What else? Cooperation. They’re interested to know if you’re … perhaps … more amenable to the idea of … helping them.”
“Fuck that. What more can they do to me? I already got the maximum.”
“They could cut your time. Or they could give you more time. Both possibilities exist, depending on what you decide to do.” He stops, looks around. We are alone in the cubicle.
“You know how I feel,” I say.
“Of course, I do. This is your decision.”
“I’m not caving in at this point. That makes no sense.”
He nods. “I can’t advise you on this, Richard.”
“Don’t they get it? I won’t go there. Tell them they can shove their cooperation up their collective government asses. I’m not interested.”
Pissed off is how I feel. Even though I knew this was a possibility, it feels like overkill. Enough is enough already. Let me go to the penitentiary and do my fucking time. They want to turn me into a rat? What is this, Nazi Germany?
“You can understand where they are coming from. People change their minds,” Berlin reminds me. “Fifteen years is a lot to think about.”
“Yeah, it’s a lot to think about. But I already made up my mind.”
“That’s what I should tell them?” he persists. I’m wondering if he gave them some indication I might be willing to roll over.
“You should tell them to suck my cock.”
Berlin laughs. He loves it when I go convict and talk tough. We both laugh.
“Are we having fun yet?” I ask. “Tell me about her,” I say, meaning the lady dope dealer in the blue smock.
“Ah … I’ll let her tell you about herself.”
“Let’s play their game,” I say, giving the proposal some consideration. “No harm in having a meeting, right? Let’s hear what’s on their mind. At least it will get me off the unit for a few hours.”
I know somewhere deep inside this is wrong. I must not even entertain the notion of cooperation. To meet with the enemy is a breach of honor, a show of weakness, but I can’t resist.
Berlin shakes his head. “There’s only one thing on their mind, Richard: cooperation. You need to think about this. Fifteen years, that’s one thing. You would be eligible for parole after five. If they give you another ten or fifteen, you’re looking at well over a decade in prison—and possibly a lot more.”
BERLIN CONFERS IN private with the lady prisoner, then he leaves us alone to sit together and chat like normal people for as long as it takes for the guards outside the attorney conference room to realize that our lawyer has departed. There’s a curious, awkward feel to the moment. We could be on a blind date. We’re convict chic, she in her baby blue smock and slacks, me in my blaze-orange jumpsuit. I wish I could wave to a waiter and order cocktails to break the ice. But it is prisoners and criminal defense lawyers who surround us, not wait staff. Still, there is the feeling of a potential relationship in the mood, like there might be a second date.
The guards announce, “Movement!” They pull heavy curtains closed around the glass windows, cutting off our view of the hallway outside.
“What’s happening?” she asks.
“They’re moving a rat. Someone who is in the witness protection program. They have a whole unit full of high-level protected snitches here on the third floor. Whenever they move one of them, take them to court to testify, they put a hood over the guy’s head and lock down the whole place so no one sees them.”
“Really? Dear God, I can’t imagine living like that.”
She’s a Brit; her name is Frances, says they call her Frin.
“The reporters asked me how I was finding this place,” Frin tells me. “I said, it’s easy: I just wake up every day and here it is and here I am. All I must do is look around.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes, catching up on my rest. Actually, it’s no worse than an English boarding school.”
She wants to know if I have access to any “gear,” dope of any kind.
“Let me see what I can do.”
“I prefer to go downtown,” she says. I take that to mean barbiturates or smack.
The cops soon cotton to the fact that Berlin has left us alone and move us back upstairs. I leave Frin on the fifth floor with a quick squeeze of her hand and the promise that we will see each other again … somehow.
Life in the Criminal Hilton just got a whole lot more interesting.
THEY COME FOR me in early morning.
“Court,” the graveyard-shift hack says as he unlocks my cell door.
It’s 5:00 a.m. I while away the hours in the bullpen on the third floor. They dress me out in a clean suit my mother delivered to the jail. I’m handcuffed to another prisoner. We are attached to a chain of criminals and pulled across the elevated walkway to yet another suite of bullpens in the basement of the federal courthouse. More hours of sitting around on steel benches listening to criminals complain. I have come to appreciate the stoic men who journey through this inferno, those convicts who keep their mouths shut and accept whatever inconvenience the keepers see fit to impose, unlike that loudmouth, now dead guy who kept bitching on the BOP bus. He didn’t get it. The keepers despise us, which is clear from their attitude. As a prisoner, one must submit outwardly while maintaining a reserve of inner fortitude. For clearly their objective is to demean us, degrade us, humiliate us, and bully us into total submission, often by the subtlest means, simply by making us wait.
Two DEA agents come to the marshal’s bullpen and pull me out. I don’t recognize either of them but they claim to know me.
“That bust up in Orange County. Remember? We were on that one.”
“Oh, yeah,” I say. “The empty truck bust. The load you guys stole and sold. How could I forget?”
“Looks like we got you this time,” the agent gloats.
I say nothing but smile so as to let him know there are no hard feelings.
We repair to a conference room in the US attorney’s office. Berlin is here. And the AUSA who has been assigned to handle my new case, a guy named Stuart Abraham. He’s slight, pale, in his thirties, and has curly red hair. Where do they find these guys? One to two percent of the population of the entire world has red hair. Jews make up a small portion of that tiny segment of humanity. Two of the four redheaded Jews on the East Coast and they both end up prosecuting me? I will call him Stuart Little. No doubt he’s using this stint with the federal prosecutor’s office as a stepping-stone to private practice at some white shoe Park Avenue corporate law firm, where he’ll be pulling down the big fees representing the kind of white-collar crooks he’s now prosecuting.
The door opens and in walks my old pal, Agent Bernie Wolfshein, a.k.a. the Wolfman. He looks harried, slightly rumpled, as though he slept in his suit.
“Rich,” he says, greets me like an old friend. “How have you been?” And to the assembled group, “Sorry I’m late. My flight was delayed,” he adds and looks directly at me. “You know how that goes.”
I nod. I sense he’s trying to tell me something, but I have no idea what.
“Coming from that part of the world,” Wolfshein goes on cryptically and keeps looking at me, nodding his head slightly, adjusting his glasses. I’m struck by how much I have come to like this guy. Clearly, his whole agenda is to destroy everything I have spent the last fifteen years of my life pursuing and to topple the freedom I have labored to bring about, yet when he walks into the room I feel relieved. I’m sure
he would count it a victory if I were to agree to give in and cooperate with the government. But there is an unspoken respect I sense from the way the Wolf sizes me up, and that I welcome. I believe he secretly applauds my refusal to become a government rat. He clearly has a larger initiative in mind.
Now I get it. Wolfshein is hinting that he just returned from a trip to the Middle East. The Wolfman loves playing this game of psychological warfare with me. All along I’m thinking, What do I care? The hash is long gone. I’m already locked up. It’s all over. I keep asking myself: What more can they do to me?
Stuart Little lays it out. One of the DEA agents, whose name I learn is McNeil, went undercover posing as a drug dealer. Hammoud, the taxi driver who acted as my heavy Lebanese’s connection, Mohammed’s translator, got busted along with Nasif, Mohammed’s son, as they attempted to sell ten kilos of heroin to an undercover DEA agent—this same guy, Special Agent McNeil. Both Hammoud and Nasif immediately flipped and began working for the Feds. Hammoud introduced undercover agent McNeil to Mailer’s friend Biff and told him McNeil was interested in buying large quantities of hashish. Biff and the undercover had several meetings. There are tapes of their conversations. This happened after I got a message to Biff that the Arabs were cooperating and that he should have nothing to do with them, a warning he ignored, this fucking idiot. Now the Feds claim they have gathered evidence from the stash house on Staten Island, where we stored the seven tons of Lebanese hashish. What evidence? That has got to be a lie. The hash was sold and that place was emptied and vacated more than a year ago.
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