I’m dubious of their whole scenario. To me it reeks of an elaborate bluff to try to scare me into implicating—who else? Norman Mailer.
The prosecutor carries on. This is clearly his show. The DEA agents are extras. The government, he says, can produce witnesses who will testify regarding the seven-ton importation of hash into the port at New Jersey. My partner in that trip, Sammy Silver, his father, his brother, Sammy’s driver, Fat Bobby—everyone connected to that smuggle will be located, arrested, and prosecuted for conspiracy to import and distribute fifteen thousand pounds of hashish. Biff has already been arrested and made a number of incriminating statements to the agents. As the prosecutor continues, I get an uneasy feeling from the way he says this that Biff may have gone over to the government’s camp. No surprise there, either.
“Special Agent Wolfshein has just returned from Beirut,” Stuart Little says, and he lets this statement hang in the air. “There is a sealed indictment about to be handed down once some of the other co-conspirators have been located and apprehended,” he goes on, and looks at Berlin, and then at me. “Mr. Stratton, you appear to be the organizer and manager of the conspiracy. This could result in a significant sentence in addition to the sentence you are already serving.”
Now everyone looks at me.
“Rich,” Wolfshein breaks the silence, “you’re still a relatively young man. You don’t want to grow old in prison.”
“What do you have in mind?” I ask Stuart Little.
“Any agreement the government would be willing to enter into will require your complete and truthful cooperation. Names, dates, and activities.” And once again I hear the names: Michael Capuana, James Bulger, Jamiel Chagra, the man I call Uncle George.
“Norman Mailer,” he says.
“Mailer had nothing to do with my business.”
“We know he was involved.”
“No,” I say. “You’re wrong.”
“C’mon, Rich,” Wolfshein interjects. “Your boy Biff already spilled the beans. And we have the kid, Mohammed’s son.”
“So?”
“So … the dinner party. Mailer was there,” Wolfshein says. “Who introduced you to Biff? Who introduced Mailer to Mohammed?”
I let the questions go unanswered. Obviously, they already have that information.
“These … events constitute overt acts in furtherance of the conspiracy,” Stuart Little adds.
I had forgotten all about that evening at Biff’s apartment on Riverside Drive, the dinner party. Indeed, Mohammed was there, and Hammoud, his driver and translator. Mailer did stop by with his then very pregnant wife. Biff may have even displayed a slab of hashish and bragged about the successful smuggle.
“You could walk out of here tomorrow,” DEA Agent McNeil offers.
“But I’d be wearing a leash.”
“Call it what you want,” he says. “It’s not handcuffs.”
“You want me to set up Mailer?”
No one answers. I take this to mean they don’t have enough to indict him. I look at Berlin, and then back at Stuart Little. “I’m not following. Tell me exactly what you want me to do.”
I want them to say it.
Stuart Little says, “I told you. The government would expect your complete and truthful cooperation. You would be required to testify at any and all trials resulting from your cooperation.”
Now I see their play. The US attorney’s office is covering their ass. DEA is going out on the limb. That’s why the agents are here.
I ask Wolfshein, “How do you fit into this?”
“Good question. Special Agent McNeil would be your control. I’m his supervisor.”
Control. So they have a scenario in mind where I would be a confidential informant working undercover in the business to set people up for arrest. Mailer would be my first target. Then, after Norman, whomever else I can lure into the government’s trap.
“You want me to agree to set up my close friend Norman Mailer, lie to him, falsely incriminate him, then perjure myself. Right?”
“No, that is not right,” the prosecutor says. He suddenly appears angry, as though he has figured out that I have no intention of helping them. “Absolutely not. We have evidence—”
I cut him off. “I don’t care what you think you have. It’s bullshit. Some people will say and do anything to save their own skin. But that’s not who I am. I won’t be involved in any attempt to put Norman Mailer or anyone else in prison to save my ass just so you can hang his scalp on your trophy wall.”
A brief stunned silence. Now they all glower at me—except Wolfshein, who shows nothing. I’m thinking this guy would make a good poker player.
“You gave the man money,” Stuart Little pushes back. “We know that for a fact. You paid him cash for the property in Maine, and more besides. His name is on the deed. That place was used to store the proceeds of illegal activity. You gave him money on any number of other occasions. He knows how and where you got that money—smuggling drugs. He introduced you to Biff. And he urged you to use him to facilitate the conspiracy.”
“Says who?”
Fucking Biff! That’s who. What else has this weak fuck told these people?
“That makes him a member of the conspiracy,” Stuart Little concludes.
“Him and thirty-five thousand other people,” I say. “That’s a crock of shit and you know it. This is star-fucking. If his name wasn’t Norman Mailer you wouldn’t give a damn about him.”
“How about your pal Rosie in Canada? He’s pretty chummy with Mailer, too,” Agent McNeil adds.
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“The RCMP does.”
I look at Berlin. “Let’s go. This meeting is over. I want to go back to my cell.”
Stuart Little addresses Berlin. “Then we will be proceeding to trial?”
I answer for him. “Yes.” I stand. “And if you think my defense in Maine was wild, wait until you see what I do here.”
Snickers from Wolfshein. Stuart Little shakes his head and gathers up his paperwork.
“Can I have a word in private with Mr. Stratton?” Berlin asks.
“I don’t like the sound of this,” he tells me after they leave the room. “Organizer. Manager. Sounds to me like they’re going for an 848—CCE. You know what that is?”
“I’ve heard, yes.”
“The kingpin statute…. This is not good.”
“No, it’s not. It’s bullshit, and I’m not going for it. Fuck them.”
A long pause as the lawyer looks at me.
“Okay. That’s your decision. But you should know,” he continues and gives me a sad look. “If I’m going to try this case, I’m going to need more money. A lot more money.”
Yeah, right. Money. Everybody wants money.
MY UNIT, NINE North, is awash with dope. I swear people come in to the jail, to the visiting room, to score from the prisoners. What can you expect? You lock up fifty or a hundred of the top drug smugglers in the world, put them all together with any number of relatively affluent junkies with nothing else to do but get loaded, they are going to come up with ingenious ways to ply their trade and keep everybody high. The jail administrators would have you believe the dope comes in through the visiting room, passed surreptitiously from visitor to prisoner. Certainly, some of the low-level dopers swallow balloons full of dope, shit them out in the morning. That is the real shit! But it’s slim pickings. The professionals, the wiseguys, the kingpins, they own the cops or enough of them, anyway, to get whatever they desire. The big packages are smuggled in by staff. At least half the fun is figuring out how to stay high in jail. It’s a matter of concentration. In here, in this POW encampment well behind enemy lines, there is more dope of higher quality than one could ever find in a similar space on the street. The secret is to learn who the players are and then control the flow.
Recently, I was invited to take up residence on Mafia Row, an honor of sorts, and of course I took the wiseguys up on their of
fer. I now occupy a cell all to myself at the end of D tier. It is remarkably quiet here compared to the rest of the unit. A few of the men sit at a table at the far end of the tier near the window, where they play pinochle and tell war stories. Most of the wiseguys stay in their cells and come out only to make phone calls or to go down to the third floor for visits with their lawyers. Angelo Ruggiero is here; he’s said to be close to the ranking member of a faction of the Gambino Crime Family at odds with the boss, Paul Castellano. The name whispered among the good fellas is Gotti, John Gotti. Watch that name, a rising star in the world of organized crime.
As the unit clerk in charge of the bed board, I am apportioned some of the swag that comes onto the unit in exchange for my job of making sure the prisoners assigned to cells are agreeable to each other—in particular on D tier, but throughout the whole unit. This makes for a better atmosphere all around. I am like the concierge of Nine North.
Frin got a job in food service. She and a hot Colombian woman deliver the food carts from the kitchen in the basement to the various units, and this is how much of the contraband gets distributed within the jail. A package will come to me smuggled in the food cart—street food, drugs, cash money, whatever it is—and usually it goes straight down to D tier, to my cell, where the wiseguys whack it up.
Now I get to see Frin twice a day. She comes sashaying onto the unit dressed in tight-fitting kitchen whites rolled up to the knees, tied with a sash at the midriff. Braless. Her ample tits are free even in jail. Depending on which cop accompanies her, I might get a kiss and a quick hug. That’s enough to make me tumescent.
MOST OF MY days are spent in the law library located in the education department in the basement of the jail. My study of the law has advanced to analyzing the intricacies of double-jeopardy rulings as I prepare a motion to block future prosecution on the grounds that I have already been tried and convicted in Maine. Then, as my sojourn in the MCC approaches a year, there are speedy trial considerations to factor into my plea. I read all I can find on the so-called kingpin statute recently enacted as part of the government’s stepped-up war on drugs, known as 848, the continuing criminal enterprise statute, which includes a punishment of life in prison with no possibility of parole.
All sorts of high jinx go on in the law library besides the study of law. A few weeks ago a rogue CIA agent who was busted for allegedly selling plastique explosives to Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya approached me as I stood between the stacks looking for a volume on double jeopardy. Edwin Wilson is his name. He confided that he wanted to hire a hitman to whack the US prosecutor and the federal judge presiding over his case. Did I by any chance know someone who might be interested in taking the contract?
“No,” I said, and I warned Wilson against soliciting murder from within these walls. “This place is full of rats,” I told him. “And not just the four-legged variety.”
Sure enough, Wilson made the contact. The whole deal was recorded on a wire worn by an FBI snitch, a black guy who lives on Nine North. The CIA agent’s twenty-three-year-old son was arrested on the street as he delivered ten thousand dollars cash to an undercover FBI agent posing as the hitman. Now Wilson is in solitary confinement on Nine South and facing new charges of conspiracy to murder a federal judge and prosecutor. This jail is a breeding ground of intrigue, double-cross, treachery, and corruption. Twice in the now ten or eleven months that I have been here attempts have been made to set me up in wholesale drug deals. A rich Pakistani rajah asked for an audience. He came to my cell and wanted to know if I could help him distribute a massive load of Afghan hash he claimed to have already landed in the country. Tempted, I declined. I can smell these rats. Another guy approached me in the law library and claimed to know Biff and Mailer. He wanted to talk about my case, but kept asking questions about Norman. No doubt the guy was wired.
The other day I rode up from the third floor on the elevator with Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, alleged boss of the Genovese Crime Family. Fat Tony hobbles around the jail on a cane, has a choice cigar stuffed in the side of his mouth, looks a little like Winston Churchill. Tony banged his walking stick on the food cart on the elevator and said, “Rats! Rats! Watch out for the rats!” He’s right. The wiseguys know how to do time. Fat Tony and the bosses and hierarchy of all five New York Mafia families have been swept up in a massive new racketeering prosecution, Rudy Giuliani’s magnum opus, the so-called Commission Case. The government brought an indictment charging the ruling council of the Mafia with a plethora of crimes, including dozens of murders in furtherance of the criminal enterprise known as La Cosa Nostra. They are all facing life with no parole. Fat Tony told me he was caught napping in court the other day. The judge ordered him to wake up and pay attention to the proceedings.
“What for?” Salerno quipped. “Judge, the last time I woke up, you gave me a hundred years.”
These organized crime guys, many of them don’t give a shit. Jail for old-school gangsters is a retirement home. They are treated with respect even by the guards and the administration. Once you are in with the wiseguys, doing a bid is a different experience. They have made this life their own. They are firmly entrenched in food service. They make it their business to keep them and their friends as well fed as possible. At least for the present, the traditional mob gangsters hold sway against an onslaught of young, hotheaded, loud, uneducated junior criminals who have no respect. These kids are buried with unbelievably long federal sentences—twenty, thirty years—for dealing relatively small amounts of crack cocaine while wholesale dealers caught with much larger amounts of powdered cocaine get half that time. It makes no sense. Nothing about this war on drugs makes sense. No attempt is made on behalf of the Bureau of Punishment to give the gangsters-in-training any kind of schooling except the advance courses in criminal behavior they get from their elders.
MY OWN NEW case, whatever it is, lingers in a tortuous indeterminate legal state. The indictment has yet to be unsealed, therefore the terms of the speedy trial act are not yet in effect. Sammy Silver is on the run. The other co-conspirators have yet to be arrested and charged. The clock is ticking, but not for me. I busy myself studying the speedy trial procedural rules, hoping to get the case thrown out if the government fails to take me to trial within the allotted time. But it’s a futile effort, just something to occupy my mind, as the jailhouse lawyers who are my mentors tell me the government has all sorts of ways of getting around their own rules and regulations.
But it says it right here, they have seventy days from the filing of the indictment to take me to trial.
So? You’ve been indicted, yes. But they haven’t unsealed the indictment yet. And if they go over the allotted time, they simply impanel a new grand jury and come down with a superseding indictment. There will probably be a superseding indictment in this case anyway as they capture new conspirators, and people roll over and give them additional evidence.
The rules of criminal procedure are made to appear fair, and they are. But it is in the artful application of the rules by lawyers, prosecutors, and judges, and in the establishment of exceptions to the rules that the defendant gets fucked. Of course, it is also true that we are all guilty, if not guilty of exactly what the government has seen fit to charge us with, then guilty of something equally illegal. The Feds know I’m not going anywhere. The clock will continue to tick, ever so faintly, on my fifteen-year sentence. The Feds have as long as it takes them. They can do whatever they want, or whatever some judge in the employ of the federal government rules they can do. I don’t mind this; believe me. I’m not squawking. It’s their game. They make the rules; they break the rules. I didn’t abide by their rules to begin with, so I won’t start bitching now. But I’m not going to just bend over and let them stick it up my ass with no Vaseline. What fun would that be? I love to match wits with these guys —the guys in the suits, the guys with the bank accounts who get a paycheck every week, guys like my new pal Special Agent Bernie Wolfshein. I suspect he’s just as interested
as I am to see how this whole drug war plays out. After all, he’s spent as much of his career as I have caught up in the conflict.
Bottom line, I’m still alive. Life, in a sense, is doing time. It’s all about how you do that time. My method for getting through and using the time has become my ever-expanding study of the law. As this study continues, the deeper I get into it, the more I look for metaphors to understand what I am up against—or rather, what I am involved in, for I have chosen to immerse myself in the process. It is too simple to say this is a game of chess. In chess, the rules regarding what moves the players can make are clearly defined. Even the king and queen must move within set parameters. The law exists in word alone. It is constantly evolving, changing, even devolving as new rulings come down from higher courts undercutting established rules and laws and procedures. The letter of the law is plastic; written law is a theory more closely related to fiction than to fact. It is a story told by men and women who are highly educated in the finer points of how to give a word several nuances of meaning.
Okay, I like that. I can play that game. Where there are likenesses to chess, it is in the realm of devising a strategy. To have a strategy is in itself a strategy. One must meditate and plot and plan. Watch your opponent and figure out your next move based on his anticipated moves. To occupy the brain is half the game. And I have the secret weapon—THC. Recently a friend of mine from the West Coast straggled onto the unit. I have begun to call him Smog Monster because he looks like one of those creatures in a Japanese horror movie. He hasn’t shaved or cut his hair for months to protest a grand jury he’s been called before, and before which he refuses to testify. Wherever he parks himself, once he departs he leaves a trail of litter. When he arrived fresh off the BOP express from California, he had a cigar tube full of tightly packed Thai bud tucked up in his suitcase—also known as the anal cavity. The dope reeks so high we have to blow cigar smoke to mask the smell.
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