Easy for him to say. I’m the sucker who’ll do the time—including the extra six months.
GUILTY AS CHARGED.
I am 0 for 2 in this trial game. It did take the jury a few days to reach a decision. Ultimately, it was an eleven-person panel that returned the guilty verdict—another anomaly of this case. Judge Motley dismissed the alternates once the jury withdrew to deliberate. But at the outset of the trial the judge had promised one of the jurors that she would be excused and allowed to leave town over the Jewish holidays. Despite defense counsel’s objection, Motley ruled she would allow an eleven-member jury verdict. Yet another issue to be taken up on appeal.
Only Bobby is acquitted. Just goes to show, if at all possible you should always call your mother to testify. The judge sets different dates for sentencing. I will be sentenced last after the other defendants, who are all allowed to remain free on bond pending the outcome of their appeals.
THE HEROIN IS gone, the trial is over, and I am going through withdrawal. I can’t sleep. My legs cramp up at night, and I lie in my bunk staring at the cinderblock wall. I’m constipated. I seem to have lost my mojo. I am afraid of what the judge will do to me, though I will not show it or admit it.
Mailer comes to visit. He too is utterly stunned by the outcome of the New York trial.
“Rick, buddy, tell them whatever the fuck they want to hear,” he says. “I don’t want you to do all this time for me.”
“Come on, Norman. I’m not doing it for you. Fuck these people. They don’t get it. It’s a fucking plant. It will be legal someday if these fuckers ever wake up and get real.”
My mother comes to visit. She’s irate. No one can believe it. She says the old man, my father Emery, is taking it hard. He’s afraid he won’t live long enough to see his son get out of prison.
“Let’s not give up yet,” I encourage her. “There is the appeal. Let’s see what Judge Motley does to me at sentencing.”
In the presence of others, I keep up my pretenses. In the solitude of my cell at night, I face the harrowing prospect of the prime of my life being spent sucking ass in the Bureau of Punishment.
No! I’ll escape. I’ll … I’ll … I’ll do something. But no way am I going to do decades in prison. That must not happen.
SENTENCING DAY ARRIVES. I’m rehabilitated. Clean and sober. Got my wits about me. I’ve been working out every day in the little exercise area off the common room. I’m in love with the sister of an Iranian guy who has become my best friend here in the Criminal Hilton. His sister lives in Boston. She drives down with my mother to visit. She is absolutely stunning. Long, thick black hair. The features of a Persian princess. And charming. And she seems to like me, attracted to the hopelessness of the situation. So we write to each other; we talk on the phone. I write her poems. She sends me photos. Diana is her name. There is something tragic about her I can’t quite put my finger on until I learn from her brother that their father was a suicide, hung himself in the basement. Then one day it is over. She comes no more. I stop calling. Stop writing. Hard to sustain these long-distance jailhouse romances.
ON SENTENCING DAY, I stand before the good judge, Honorable Constant Baker Motley Crew. Somehow, through it all, I sense the old bag kind of likes me. She makes it clear that she does not see why a man from my background would resort to criminal activity when, obviously, with my education, my intelligence, I had so many other options in life.
Okay, be that as it may, I say, and then I invoke the sixties. C’mon, Judge, you were there. The civil rights movement. The antiwar movement. I was a card-carrying member of SDS. Like you, your Honor, I believe in social justice and an American citizen’s duty and right to oppose those laws that are wrong. And furthermore, I make note of the fact that possession of two ounces or less of cannabis in the state of New York is not even considered a criminal offence.
“What are several tons of cannabis but many, many decriminalized ounces?
“Judge,” I say, “you sat here and heard heroin dealers testify that Stratton would never touch cocaine or heroin, that I was strictly a marijuana smuggler. Mohammed Bero and his son were never prosecuted for attempting to sell ten kilos of heroin. They are allowed to go free in exchange for implicating me. How is that right or fair? Surely you are aware that it is hard drugs such as heroin and cocaine that are doing so much more harm to our neighborhoods than marijuana. You were a product of those same times I came of age in. You must see how inconsistent our drug laws are and how little sense it makes to let heroin dealers go free in exchange for testifying against someone like me. This whole case, Judge, I mean, I’m already doing fifteen years! How much more time do they want me to do?”
Once again I detect that Judge Motley is feeling unsure of herself. The woman has a heart. And she is also known for making bizarre rulings. In fact, she is the district court judge who has been overruled by the appellate court more than any other jurist sitting in the Southern District, which bodes well for my appeal. My stand-by counsel, Bob Leighton, is beside me. He likes where this appears to be heading. The judge is feeling my allocution. She’s unraveling and traveling down those mean streets with me, seeing the needle and the damage done. She’s remembering those marches on the Pentagon. “Mailer was there, your Honor. The great man you would ban from your courtroom and accuse of trying to frighten the jurors into doing—what? Come on, that too was a foolish move on your part, Judge, and it will not go over well with the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, either. I may be a difficult defendant, willful and arrogant, but I had a pretty good defense going there for a minute. And then you rammed this conviction down my throat—or up my ass—by trashing my defense midway through the trial.”
Now dear Motley seems to be searching around for some solid evil upon which to base her sentence. I wonder if she has even predetermined how much time she will give me or if she is flying by the seat of her judicial robes. Making it up on the spot. She is strangely moved, and a little nonplussed by my meditation upon the sixties. I love it when Lady Motley looks confused. She becomes stern, statuesque. Her black skin is as smooth as obsidian. She has a wide, straight nose like the prow of a ship, and high cheekbones as though she might be descended from some Ethiopian tribe. She seems humorless, but I bet when she gets loose and lets her hair down she’s got a funny bone or two. Come on, Judge, remember those good old days, and don’t hate me too much. Are you going to tell me no one ever blew a stick of reefer back in the early days of the NAACP? Yes, it’s true, I am a spoiled white boy from the wealthy suburbs of Boston, and I never should have become a criminal. Okay, I watched too much TV as a kid. But, please, hear me: I was an outlaw, your Honor. I was selective in the laws I broke. I only violated laws that are stupid and anti-American to begin with, laws that never should have been enacted in the first place. These laws have caused much more harm than the cannabis plant itself.
Oh, yeah, yeah, sure, Stratton we have heard all your self-serving pleas and excuses before, too many times to count. The fact is: You don’t give a fuck! That is your real crime. You are defiant. You won’t knuckle under and kiss Uncle Sam’s ass. You have shown that to be true time and time again. And for that, you must be punished.
“I will agree with you,” Judge Motley declares as she pronounces her sentence. “I don’t think that marijuana is as dangerous a substance as heroin or cocaine. And for that reason, I am going to give you the minimum allowed by the statute. Ten years.”
What did you say? Ten years! Holy shit!
A long judicious pause. A shudder and a fleeting gasp of relief. She gazes at me imperiously. And then she continues.
“However, I think that your sentence probably should be made consecutive for the reason that it might convince you that cooperation with the government is in your best interest; and so I intend to make your sentence consecutive for this reason: that is, I expect that you will reflect on your conduct since you are in a reflective mood at this time, and I understand that the government can benefit from your c
ooperation in respect of other people who were involved in this, so if you are interested in getting out of prison soon and really rehabilitating yourself, the best way to demonstrate that is to cooperate with the government with respect to this matter.
“Now, Mr. Stratton,” she continues, making her intent perfectly clear, “if you decide to cooperate with the government in this matter, you have 120 days to apply to the court for reduction of your sentence, and the court will consider reducing your sentence based upon the nature and the extent of your cooperation with the government. So that in addition to the fifteen-year sentence you now have a sentence of ten years to follow that.”
The final tally: twenty-five years, plus six months for contempt.
I am a bit shaken by all this. Ten years sounded great until the judge decided to run it consecutive to the fifteen I am already serving. As we leave the courtroom, I query Bob Leighton, my stand-by counsel. “That doesn’t seem right. She proved my defense. This whole prosecution was about trying to force me to cooperate. Can she do that?” I ask him. “Can she give me more time for refusing to rat?”
He shrugs. “They do it all the time.”
“BACK IN YOUR cells, motherfuckers! ” the fat cop yells. “This ain’t no motherfuckin’ hotel! ”
Ah, but it is, and he knows it.
It’s the Criminal Hilton. And the time has come for this unlucky guest to check out.
Chapter Seven
A SKYLINE TURKEY
FCI Petersburg, Virginia, September 1985
TWENTY-FIVE YEARS PLUS six months. Fifteen paroleable with ten non-paroleable running wild, and six months for criminal contempt on top of all that. What an unwieldy sentence!
Once again, there is so much to think about, and so much time in which to think about it. I need to come up with a new plan.
FROM MCC, AT long last I am delivered first back to the US penitentiary at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, to K Dorm, that transit hub in the federal gulag, that way station teeming with travelers on the highway of the condemned. There I get stuck again, kept much longer than normal as Bureau of Punishment paper pushers try to come up with a suitable real prison in which I am destined to serve my burdensome sentence. My security level has actually dropped, even with the additional time I picked up in New York, due to the now three-plus years I have been locked up. Instead of sending me to the pen in Terre Haute, Indiana—my original destination, known in the system as a gladiator school—or keeping me here at Lewisburg—an elite finishing school for professional criminals and my preferred designation—in their infinite wisdom, my BOP masters decide to ship me here, a day’s ride on the punishment coach, to the Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) at Petersburg, Virginia.
I got lucky. This is a sweet stop, a mellow high-medium–security prison in the mild climes of eastern Virginia just south of Richmond. There are manned gun towers at the corners of double, chain-link fences spooled with shiny coils of razor wire surrounding the compound. We are subject to controlled movements; convicts can move only on the hour during a ten-minute period when we must make our way from the housing units to the chow hall, or to the prison industries factories, known as UNICOR, or to various work details, and then back to the cellblocks at count time. But otherwise I might be enrolled at an all-male college where the curriculum is an experiential course in how the federal government wastes taxpayer money. Waste, waste, and more waste dominates. Waste of lives. Waste of precious resources. Waste of time and energy. Waste of manpower. Waste of food. One cannot imagine the amount of food that gets thrown away here, enough to feed an entire starving Third-World nation.
For the seasoned convict, doing time in prison is all about figuring out how to get by and get over. You keep your mouth shut, you look around, you get a feel for the joint, you determine who has the juice, who controls the action, and then you make your moves. I had the best possible training in prison life during my long apprenticeship under my jailhouse gurus at the MCC. Like the song says, if you can make it in New York, you can make it anywhere. I am determined not to waste this weighty time. And with a shitload of time, FCI Petersburg is not a bad place to do it.
I live in a large single cell, practically a condominium compared to the cramped quarters I am accustomed to, with an actual bed—c’mon now, tell it—with a pillow, fucking sheets!— yes, brother—and a blanket; a locker for my meager possessions; a desk and chair; a ventilated window. Now get this: my cell has an actual door. We’re not talking bars here, no sir, a door with a narrow, rectangular window and an actual doorknob I can use to open and close the door—except, of course, when I am locked in at ten o’clock at night until around six in the morning after the early count clears and they let us out for breakfast. When not locked in, I am free to wander around the unit. Take a shower in a shower stall. No gang showers to get buggered in while bending over to retrieve a bar of soap. (I love these jailhouse clichés.) Watch TV. Play pool. Sign up to use the phone. Can it get any better? Oh, yes it can. There’s commissary. One can buy ice cream! Fucking Häagen-Dazs or Ben & Jerry’s in several flavors. And sneakers. A tennis racket can be special-ordered. You call this punishment? Please. For a compulsive wanderer and guilt-ridden ambitious outlaw, this is an enforced vacation, a time to meditate upon my misspent youth, and try to come up with a way to make sense of it all.
AT FIRST I am assigned a job in the education department cleaning toilets, which sucks. Twenty-five years of cleaning up someone else’s piss and shit. No, of course not. We can’t have that. Nothing lasts forever. After a few weeks, my mafia connections from MCC get me a much better gig in the recreation department, working—if you can call it that—outside in the recreation yard. I am not required to report to my work detail until after lunch. I spend my mornings working on my novel, now titled Smack Goddess. I wear athletic garb to work, shorts, T-shirt, and sneakers. I pick up a few cigarette butts and then spend the rest of the afternoon playing tennis. What, you say—tennis? In prison? Yes, because we are at the inception of the renewed get-tough-on-prisoners mindset, a reversion to the pre-Attica penal philosophy that will soon strip these so-called correctional facilities of any semblance of rehabilitation, take away the weights and the tennis courts, end the education programs, and turn these joints into what they were intended to be in the first place: factories behind walls.
My days are unremarkable. Say it again: routine is the prisoner’s succor. We live by rote. When not writing, I pass my mornings in the law library consuming legal tomes, digesting appellate court decisions, further refining my study of the language of the law, and looking for the right words to continue fighting my case. One must never give up. Persistence is its own reward. The soul lives where hope abides.
I live in anticipation of legal mail, answers to my various post-conviction remedies. The appeal of my Maine conviction has been denied by the First Circuit Court of Appeals; no relief there. The direct appeal of my New York conviction is still pending in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals; a breath of hope there. In the afternoon, I play tennis or work out with weights, do chins and dips, walk around the yard in the hot southern sun. I read or write letters in the evening.
LIKE PRISONERS THROUGHOUT this vast penal system, I do my burdensome sentence one day at a time, day in, day out, week after week, month upon month with little or no variation until one day—any day, a day like this day—there is an event. Something out of the ordinary happens. Someone does something unusual to throw everyone else’s routine out of sync.
No one witnesses the actual ascension. Big Bird—a huge black convict well in his fifties—just appears there in the morning, roosting on the catwalk atop the lofty water tower in the middle of the compound. He makes a nest of blankets and parcels like a bag lady, settles in for a long siege with magazines and a portable radio, perched in his rookery like some daft old crow that suddenly moves into the neighborhood.
“Reminds me of when I was in Texas,” says the Old Con at breakfast.
We sit at our usua
l table in the front of the chow hall. In the limpid early-morning sky the water tower is silhouetted high above the buildings of the prison complex. We can sit, sip coffee, and watch Big Bird through the window. It is an occasion, something to distinguish this day from hundreds upon hundreds just like it.
“Texas? When was you ever in Texas?” asks Red, who’s done almost as much time as the Old Con. They’d been together at the penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, before that joint was locked down and turned into a control unit. They’d been together at Lompoc in California when that institution became a maximum-security penitentiary. They have seen the Federal Bureau of Punishment expand and morph into a virtual secret society with its own esoteric methods and mores, its primitive rituals, and its encyclopedia of rules and regulations. Red has been locked up so long his full torso and arms are covered with intricate tattoo work that has faded and sagged like a wrinkled old paisley shirt.
“They had them turkeys out there,” the Old Con goes on. “Big old turkey buzzards they called ’em.”
“You was never in Texas,” Red insists. “Old fool’s been in jail all his life.”
“So? They got jails in Texas, don’t they? An’ prisons, too. Lots of ’em. You never heard a’ Huntsville? Rough stop. An’ federal joints. La Tuna. Bastrop. Seagoville. I got out one time in Texas. Went to work out there in a place near San Antone. Turkey ranch, they called it. Had all these turkeys runnin’ around a big fenced-in area—jus’ like us in here. All day they’d hang out in flocks waitin’ for food. Then at night—I never seen ’em, but somehow they must a’ hopped up in the trees, them scrubby little trees, live oaks, they call ’em, an’ mesquite—’cause in the mornin’ when the sun come up, that’s where I’d see them turkeys, sittin’ in them trees all along that big ole skyline.”
The Old Con lifts his coffee mug and points out the window, and all our eyes follow back to the water tower. “Jus’ like that fella there.”
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