His personality bloomed, and my interest in the mysterious Indian sharpened. I wondered what he was doing in an American prison, and I assumed he had been arrested for drug trafficking like most of the Asians in the system, mules, busted at airports with false-bottom suitcases, smuggling some drug lord’s junk. He told me he was a Muslim, a soldier for Allah. I watched him pray in the rec yard, his head bowed toward Mecca. His walk became bold, nearly a swagger. When he shaved his sparse beard, I found it odd and wondered if he’d lost his faith. His smile broadened and he became more outgoing as he greeted the friends he was making among the prisoners. Gradually, his foreign look began to fade. He became almost American. As though to complete the metamorphosis, he took up running. I watched him lope around the track in the rec yard with long, gazelle-like strides.
Gathered in the mess hall, we confirm what some of us had already begun to suspect: the young Indian had rabbit fever. Escape, that obsession of the imprisoned, had invaded his dreams. We all long to escape. Our bodies and minds crave freedom like a starving man craves food. The Indian had done what each of us wishes we had the courage and ingenuity to do.
I am surprised to learn he had not been locked up for drugs. Word circulates that he was convicted of the uncommon crime of impersonating a federal officer. He was an imposter, a confidence man, a shape-shifter. The Indian had begun to implement his escape plan from the moment he hit the compound: first by building up his body and his endurance, then by cultivating an American look until, like a chameleon, he transformed himself into a full-blown federal type. Rumor has it that he somehow managed to steal a guard’s uniform; he disguised himself as a staff member and then walked out the front door of the penitentiary.
It is the eve of All Saint’s Day. I conjure images of the Indian at large in the free world, sprinting from house to house trick-or-treating, energizing himself with candy bars as he blends in with the rest of the ghosts and goblins. I am pleased to imagine him running free. At least one of us made it out of here.
“How much time was he doing?” I want to know.
“Six years,” his coworker says. Hardly a harsh sentence in this era of lock ’em up and throw away the key.
My sources tell me the Indian’s compulsion to escape was inflamed by a young wife. They claim he has three children at home who need him. I hope he’ll have the good sense to stay away from family and friends while the manhunt continues. Getting free from the confines of the prison is only the beginning. Staying free requires planning and discipline.
Throughout the night the search continues. Staff is called in to canvas the prison complex once again. Because the secure perimeter appears intact, the guards suspect the missing Indian might still be hiding somewhere within the prison compound. Guards barge into my cell at all hours; they rummage through my locker and look under the bunk. I smile and toss in my sleep, comforted by their unrest. I dream of the lithe Indian, running, changing appearance, and running free.
By morning the stories have taken on a life of their own. Once again, we are ushered into the chow hall one unit at a time and made to eat breakfast surrounded by guards; we are energized by gossip. Most of us still subscribe to the theory that the Indian slipped away by posing as a staff member. It is rumored he had been spotted walking in town that morning by an off-duty officer but managed to evade capture. Many maintain he is still free, though some believe he has been recaptured and is being held in a local jail under heavy guard.
“So why are they treating us like the guy is still on the loose?” someone asks.
“Because they haven’t figured out how he escaped,” another answers.
Later, once we have been locked back in the units, one prisoner goes from cell to cell debunking the tale of escape by deception.
“This guy says him an’ his two buddies sat out there in the rec yard and watched him climb over the fence,” says the convict.
“Bullshit,” someone objects. “How’d he get over the razor wire?”
“He just kind a … wriggled through it.”
“No way, man. Nobody wriggles through concertina wire,” says a voice of authority. “That stuff’ll chew you up like a pool full a’ piranhas.”
“Besides,” says someone else, “the guards in the gun tower would a’ shot the motherfucker.”
No one knows what to believe. The guards are mum. Even the most talkative hacks will not divulge any intelligence. Their behavior confirms the Indian is still on the loose, and his means of escape has not been detected, which means that the general population is to remain locked down until the mystery is solved.
They keep us locked up in the cellblocks all morning—except Food Service workers, who serve as the bearers of news, hearsay, and misinformation. By lunchtime we learn that a team of FBI investigators has arrived on the compound. After a cursory search of the Indian’s unit and work detail, they concentrate on the huge trash compactor behind the mess hall. The smoldering cinders of rumor are rekindled.
Then, as suddenly as it began, just after noon on the second day of the lockdown, the state of emergency is lifted. We are told to “resume normal operations.” Half a dozen Food Service workers are led off to the segregation cellblock—the Hole—in handcuffs. The smirks on the faces of the guards seem to say the Indian has been caught and he ratted out his accomplices. The rest of us return to the factories, the shops, and work details. Prison life resumes in the comfort of mundane routine.
Out on the weight pile, in the absence of the elusive Indian, we have his evolving oral history. I am told by those who claim to know him that his smile and easy gait hid a deeply troubled past. Soon after his arrest, his wife attempted to kill herself. She was hospitalized and their three young children became wards of the state. The Indian was not a confidence man at all but had been arrested for welfare fraud. The Feds were holding him on an immigration detainer. He was desperate to escape and save his family before being deported.
In a manner of speaking, he has escaped. But the story of his masquerading as a staff member is determined to be pure fabrication. I am told by those who know, that he hid in the trash compactor behind the mess hall—exactly where the FBI investigators concentrated their search. He burrowed his way to the end of the container farthest from the massive, hydraulic-driven steel ram that crushes the garbage into a solid block of waste. He made a nest at the end of the container, girded it with two-by-fours and pieces of wooden pallet he believed would resist the force of the piston.
Later, when the guard threw the lever and the wall of trash closed in, the wooden planks snapped like twigs under the immense pressure from the compactor’s engine. He hears the machine kick into operation, and he has a fleeting vision of freedom. But as the slow vibration rattles his body, he struggles against the gradual shrinking of space. Tons of garbage inch closer, squeezing in around him. His dream of escape dies in the grip of panic. And then comes a vision of pure terror. He understands what he’d known all along: that the wooden bulwark couldn’t possibly hold; that it never would withstand the crushing pressure of the machine. His spirit leaps. Allahu akbar! he cries. God is great! I go to a better place.
He is mashed like a seed. Life squeezed from flesh like moisture wrung from a rag. Teeth, hair, skin, and bone melded with two tons of rubbish. The team of FBI investigators who went to the dump where the prison waste is disposed found an inky black stain leaking from the square of compacted trash as the Indian’s blood seeped through the garbage.
A few of the convicts claim the Indian was murdered in the kitchen, dismembered, and then thrown into the compactor in trash bags. They can’t believe anyone would be stupid enough to climb into the machine on their own, and they offer as evidence the Food Service workers still locked up in the Hole as the investigation continues. But the Indian had no known enemies, and in prison, even more so than in the World, killing is rarely random.
One by one, these rumors are discredited as the suspects are released from the Hole. They tell of having been int
errogated about who might have aided the Indian in his escape attempt. Because there is always supposed to be a guard present when the compactor is loaded, prison officials assume someone assisted the Indian by hurling him into the machine concealed in trash. Others claim the escape attempt was a disguised suicide.
We will never know the truth. All I know is that the young Indian lived. Life animated his body. I know he had hope, but circumstance, chance, and fate brought him to our shores where opportunity recoiled and the doors to his future slammed shut. I know that he was lonely, painfully lonely. He longed for those he loved and left in the World. He was bereft, as we all are in the crowd of the imprisoned. I know that he suffered, and not only in his slow time of death.
There are no other facts; there is no more history worth knowing.
Chapter Nine
COP KILLER
QUI CUSTODIET IPSOS custodes? Who shall keep the keepers themselves? A good question. Indeed, the more I come to know these Bureau of Punishment types, the more I have to believe they do harder time than us convicts. We imagine a different life, a better life. This is all they have to envision. They go home at night, yes; but we go to our dreams of freedom. They go home to the bills, the screaming kids, the nagging old lady. We retire to the solitude of the cell and the intimacy of the inner life. They have no excuse for being here, locked up with us, except the exigencies of making a living. We have the ire of the almighty federal government to blame for our absurd predicament—in custody and yet freer than our captors.
Recently I returned from a brief road trip and short stay at my favorite jail, MCC, the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City. One thing I’ll say for the Feds, they don’t give up easily. That redheaded twerp Stuart Little wasn’t through with me. He and his master Rudolph Giuliani convened yet another grand jury, this one targeting my friend and mentor Norman Mailer. They subpoenaed me to testify. I was shackled and chained, put back on the punishment express and delivered to the rock ’n’ roll jail, MCC-NYC, once more to dwell in my familiar haunt on Nine North.
But how the place has changed! There is no more Mafia Row. There are still wiseguys, of course, and plenty of them, what with the new Boss of Bosses, John Gotti, and the entire hierarchy of the Gambino Crime Family awaiting trial on a massive racketeering indictment. I met Gotti on the day after he was brought in. The guards treated him like royalty, and he showed them commensurate respect. The man exuded the charisma of a movie star without the vanity. Due to my previous longevity in the MCC, I had been asked to resume my position as unit clerk of Nine North. On the day Gotti arrived, the unit manager advised me that there would be some procedural changes when it came time for the orientation class afforded new inmates. Instead of the usual lecture on the rules and regulations of the institution delivered to the freshly incarcerated, Gotti, who was being held in isolation in supermax on Nine South, was given an hour alone with the other members of his crime family.
After the meeting, Gotti sought me out. “Richie,” he said, “I heard good things about you from Angelo. Thanks for lookin’ out.” And he shook my hand. “We appreciate it.”
BUT OTHER THAN the few high-caliber crime family clientele, the Criminal Hilton has been reduced to a Bowery flophouse. The place swarms with street-level crack dealers and crack heads, feral street kids caught with a few grams of rock and looking at decades in prison. A new federal holding facility has opened in Brooklyn. And FCI Otisville, seventy-five miles upstate from Manhattan, formerly a medium-security joint known as one of the mellower stops on the punishment circuit—that prison has been converted to a holdover facility for the overflow of pretrial detainees from Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, Staten Island, Long Island, the tristate region, and all over the Eastern seaboard. There is an entire unit at Otisville reserved for rats sequestered in the booming Federal Witness Protection Program, known in federalese as WITSEC. The federal prison population has more than tripled in the now nearly seven years I have been locked up. They can’t build these joints fast enough to contain the glut of prisoners of the war on drugs.
Even my pal Harmless has moved on. Retired, they say. Sly Stone—he was busted. In fact, over a dozen MCC guards were arrested for a host of violations including drug dealing and prostitution and were marched out of the jail in handcuffs. I knew none of the new COs. Only the unit manager, who had been my correctional counselor, and some of the lieutenants remained from the previous regime.
During my stay at MCC, I occupied myself in the prison law library, searching for a legal loophole to slip out of having to take the Fifth before the grand jury and avoid getting hit with contempt time—“dead time,” as they call it. Your sentence stops and you are doing dead time, time that does not count toward your release date. If they grant you immunity and still you refuse to testify, they can hold you in contempt for up to eighteen months, the length of the grand jury, and then they can convene a new grand jury and keep you for an additional eighteen months of dead time. You could be dead by the time they start your sentence up again.
In my hallowed tomes in the law library, I discovered a way out. My research turned up legal precedent for refusing to testify, even after being immunized, on the grounds that the US government cannot protect one who faces outstanding criminal charges in a foreign jurisdiction. Yes! Canada may be next door, just up the road a piece, but it is still a foreign sovereign nation. And I still have charges pending against me in that country. I wrote a brief to the court in which I averred that the government cannot immunize me against the Canadian charges and therefore I cannot be forced to testify. After a four-month stint at the MCC in the middle of my bid, Stuart Little gave up. They put me back on the BOP bus and returned me here to FCI Petersburg. The grand jury failed to return a true bill. Mailer was not indicted. I count this as a victory.
When I arrived at Petersburg, I got my single cell back due to my seniority, but I lost my sweet job in the recreation department. My name is on the list to get that gig back. Meanwhile, I work as an orderly in the housing unit. My “area of responsibility” as they call it, is the Red Section, the two-tier wing where most of the Italian organized crime guys live. It’s an easy enough chore most days, takes me no more than an hour to an hour-and-a-half to sweep and mop the TV room floor, clean the two bathrooms, scrub the showers, sweep the tiers and the stairs. Then my time for the rest of the day is my own. Once a week I might spend an extra couple of hours to strip, wax, and buff the floors.
An orderly’s biggest concern is which hack is assigned to the unit for the day shift. Each quarter the post assignments are rotated and we have to break in a new cop, bring him around to our way of doing things. The units are inspected weekly. So as long as we do reasonably well in inspection, most guards leave us alone. In the first week or two, a new cop may try to assert his authority, to show us who is boss—especially the rookies. But they quickly come to understand that this is our prison, we live here, we don’t give a fuck about them and the “rules and regulations of the institution,” and that without our cooperation they are the ones who will end up looking bad and doing hard time. The men locked up in this prison are serving sentences upwards of ten, twenty, or thirty years. Many have been down for over a decade and are winding up their time. We just want to do as comfortable a bid as possible. Most of the cops understand this and know better than to hassle us for too little.
Afternoons I’m free—as free as you can get and still be in the penitentiary. I get a pass from the unit cop and go out to the rec yard to work out or play tennis. Or I go to the law library and work on my novel or continue my legal research and post-conviction relief filings. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld my New York conviction on the continuing criminal enterprise on direct appeal. They did throw out Judge Motley’s six-month sentence for criminal contempt, however, which brings my time down to fifteen years with ten more years running wild. If I get credit for all my statutory and meritorious good time, and if I don’t get killed or have to kill s
omebody, and if I don’t pick up any new cases along the way, I could max this sentence out and be released after serving a little over seventeen years.
Fuck that. I have not and will not reconcile myself to their reality. I have only just begun to fight the punishment arbiters. There is still habeas corpus, also known as the “great writ,” which translates from the Latin as “have the body,” which in legal speak means have the body of the prisoner brought before a judge to determine the legality of the confinement. I prepared and filed a writ of habeas corpus alleging my imprisonment is illegal on the grounds that Judge Motley’s decision to strip me of my defense midway through the trial, after she previously approved the affirmative defense theory I proposed, denied me the right to defend myself in violation of due process. It took me months to get copies of the transcripts to bolster my argument. We’ll see how far I get with that. I also attacked the constitutionality of the continuing criminal enterprise kingpin statute. These causes can take years to work their way through the tortuous chambers of the federal court system, but what the fuck. What else have I got to do?
Then there is what is known as a Rule 35 Motion for Sentence Reduction, which Motley mentioned when she imposed my sentence. Rule 35 is different; it requires a district judge to reply promptly. Rule 35 motions are usually denied unless one converts and decides to become a stool pigeon. The pleading must be filed within 120 days of the final dispensation of the case. My New York judgment became final two months ago with the Second Circuit’s ruling on my direct appeal, so I still have another sixty days within which to file the Rule 35.
My in-depth study of federal law has expanded yet again, gone beyond the rules of criminal procedure and appellate decisions to include sentencing procedural rulings and what is known as post-conviction relief, the ins and hopefully the outs of the myriad decisions on cases attacking specifically the sentence. I still hold to the belief that Motley was wrong and legally barred from giving me more time for my refusal to cooperate with the government. I ordered a copy of the sentencing minutes to examine the precise wording of her judgment in hopes of finding it in error. Again and always, it all comes down to words, the predominance of language in all things legal.
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