Kingpin

by Richard Stratton

  “What about Carlos Marcello? Do you believe he was involved in killing Jack or Bobby?”

  “Knowing Carlos … it could be. Carlos was a dangerous man. And smart. And he hated Bobby—we all hated Bobby. Bobby run Carlos out of the country. But him and Santo—no … unless they had some fool to do it for them.”

  “Or some patsy.”

  “Anything is possible,” Joe allows. He believes money would have been all the motive they needed. “And for a hit like that, they would’ve needed inside help.”

  “Like who?”

  Joe shrugs. “How should I know?”

  “And you believe, all these years later, you still think this is why the government refuses to let you out?”

  “Excuse me,” Joe barks at me. “You of all people should know how these people are—they never forget! They want me to die in here.”

  He’s got a point. Given my own experience with the Feds, Joe’s story no longer seems far-fetched. I want to go deeper, looking for insight into the most notorious crimes of the century, the Kennedy killings. “You say Marcello—all of you—hated Bobby. You hated Joe Kennedy—”

  Joe interrupts. “I still hate the cocksucker! I hate him in his grave—Irish bastard. He brought all that curse on his own family.”

  “That’s what I’m saying, the way the Kennedys turned on you after what Zwillman and the others did to get Jack elected—you certainly had every reason to want to clip them, right? Why wouldn’t you have wanted to make a move on the Kennedys? That was what you did, Joe, that was how you handled these kinds of situations.”

  “How would I know?” Joe stonewalls me again.

  “You would know. It’s exactly the kind of thing they would have entrusted you with.”

  But Joe refuses to give me any more than he gave the FBI.

  “I don’t know nothin’,” he says and waves me out of his cell. “Now go. Leave me alone. I’m tired.”

  I WRITE UP and file Joe’s BP-9. A couple of weeks go by with no response. Then the old mobster and his jailhouse lawyer catch a break. There is a new warden here at Petersburg, a young, recently appointed administrator named J. J. Clark, who, Joe tells me, was his case manager when he was at the supermax in Marion. I approach Clark one morning while the warden is out making his rounds, and I ask him if he remembers Joe Stassi.

  “Of course, I remember Joe Stassi,” he says. “Why do you ask?”

  “You know Joe is here?”

  “I’m aware of that, yes.”

  I tell him of the discrepancy in the accumulation of good-time in Joe’s case, and that a BP-9 should be on the warden’s desk seeking credit for good-time Joe was denied.

  “I’ll look into it,” Clark tells me.

  This might mean nothing, of course. These people will look you in the eye and tell you what they think you want to hear, and then do nothing. But I have done all I can. And Warden Clark, as Joe’s former case manager, should be conversant with the facts. So this has more promise than the expected routine rejection. Joe is pleased with my efforts on his part.

  There is hope. And nothing to do now but wait.

  Chapter Thirteen

  BANISHED

  FCI Ray Brook, New York

  I AM ALSO in a holding pattern as I wait for a new release date based on my now concurrent sentences.

  It’s been over five months since my court appearance and still no word from the Punishment Bureau number crunchers in Washington. Doing time is so much more arduous when one is made to wait, and with no set release date it becomes a real-world version of purgatory. Time is even more abstract and daunting. I am forced to ponder the nature of time and consider that there really is no such thing, there is only our perception of time passing when in fact it is always now, every day is today, every moment is the moment we are living in, and when one is in prison and made to wait, the moment seems to drag on like a week on Neptune.

  Waiting is hell.

  MY WAIT TAKES a turn for the worse when I receive official correspondence from the Bureau’s central office in Washington, DC, regarding my request for a new sentence computation. Based on Judge Griesa’s ruling at my resentencing, I figure I have to be getting way short, no more than six months to a year to serve before release. But these Bureau of Punishment fuckers are not happy with the outcome in Griesa’s court. They don’t give a rat’s ass what the judge said. As I feared they might, the faceless drones at the computer terminals in Washington are trying to act like my ten-year sentence did not commence until the day it was imposed at my re-sentencing in New York fully six years after my arrest! They want me to do another eight-plus years on top of the seven I have already served. In their new computation, I get a projected release date in 2005.

  No, no way. This cannot be. They are out of their fucking Punishment Bureau minds. I will not submit to this. My agreement with Stuart Little and Judge Griesa’s court not to file any more motions does not include beefing over this latest injustice.

  Back in the law library, I do the research, then I write a letter to Judge Griesa, cite the relevant case law and BOP administrative rules, and request that he instruct the Bureau to interpret his sentence as retroactive, nunc pro tunc in legalese, meaning now for then, beginning back on the very day I was arrested in Los Angeles. Several weeks pass, and then I get a letter from the court. Judge Griesa concurs. He writes an order directing that his sentence is indeed nunc pro tunc and should be so construed. The Bureau of Punishment reluctantly concedes to the judge’s order, and they back down on that one. But they still fail to recompute my sentence.

  Instead, they come banging on my cell door one morning well before dawn.

  “Stratton! Pack your shit! You’re moving out,” a hack informs me, and he slides a cardboard box under the door.

  “Where am I going?” I ask.

  Dumb question.

  “You’ll find out when you get there.”

  These Punishment bureaucrats are vindictive sons of bitches. They hate it when they feel like a convict might beat them out of some time. In their perverse wisdom, they decide to prescribe another dose of diesel therapy. Word has it that they are pissed with me for the work I’ve done on Joe Stassi’s case. They want me out of Petersburg, away from the old man, and back on the punishment highway where I won’t be able to file any more legal paperwork on behalf of senior citizen Mafia hitmen.

  “What did I tell you?” Joe says when I tell him they are shipping me out. “These people don’t quit.”

  THERE IS TURMOIL in the Bureau of Punishment. Riots erupt in Atlanta Penitentiary when Cuban Marielito prisoners go off to protest their continued imprisonment in the land of the free after being kicked out of Castro’s jails. I join a group of convicts shipped out of FCI Petersburg. The BOP puts three busloads of us back on the road in the torture chamber on wheels to make room for prisoners shipped out of Atlanta. They keep me in transit for weeks, with no access to the courts and no way to reach out to anyone to object.

  While in holdover back in K Dorm at Lewisburg, I experience a harsh reminder of the world I live in. On the way to chow one morning, I see a young Latino stabbed to death on the red-top outside the mess hall. It happens so fast, with a kind of choreographed grace, that it takes a moment for me to understand what I am seeing. The shank disappears into the man’s gut once, twice, three times, then is ripped around semi-circle, disemboweling him. The weapon is handed off, and a crowd of convicts shuffles past before the guards can identify who did the work and who has the piece. I look away, absorb the violence and keep walking. Remembering my jailhouse lawyer friend Marcus’s advice, I saw nothing. I don’t want to be identified as a witness and get jammed up here with all I have going on in my case. Do your own time. Such is the self-centered world I live in.

  But then I can’t resist. I turn at the door to the mess hall and glance back to see the gutted convict lying and bleeding red blood on red tile. Curious, I think, as I sit down to eat, and hear the alarm sound, and see the gang of cops fan i
nto the mess hall to shake us all down and search for the weapon they will never find; interesting how the convicts choose to kill on the red-top, the open area covered with red tile directly in front of the manned control center and with guards everywhere. They do it, I conclude, as if to say: See, we will cut them open and spill their guts before your eyes, and you still won’t see who did it.

  Maybe that’s why they do it on the red-top—for the aesthetics, the pure art of the kill.

  Idling in K Dorm, questioned about the killing, I deport myself according to the Joe Stassi school of interrogation etiquette. What did you see? Nothing. What do you know? Nothing. What have you heard? Nothing. I am just another number in a jumpsuit and pair of Peter Pans and subject to having my asshole inspected with no claim on my life and what goes on around me other than what happens inside my head. Name and number: Stratton, 02070-036. Sentence: indeterminate. Designation: unknown. Release date: unknown. Living in an indefinite state with no explanation for this continued delay in recalculating my sentence except that, in holdover status, I have no access to anyone with the authority to find out and tell me how much more time I will have to do before I am to be set free.

  It seems like the plan is to keep me in suspense until I snap and strangle some motherfucker. Ivan Fisher, my mother, congressmen from Massachusetts—no one can get any straight answers from the Punishment bureaucrats. I’m told I must contact my case manager when I get to wherever they are sending me and request the new sentence computation. So shut up and do the time. Every day is one less day I will have to serve.

  AT LAST I am trussed up in shackles and chains, outfitted with the black box, and once again made to board the Punishment Express. I settle into the notion of another mystery transfer with no idea where they will deposit me at day’s end. Again, I cherish the one good thing to be said for all this bus travel: that I get to see some of the World. After so many years being deprived of nature, dwelling in blocks of steel and concrete cells, trapped in herds of men, just to see God’s living creation, even through barred and metal-mesh-covered windows, and to breathe free air, and feel a sense of moving through space is like being unearthed from a tomb. I long for freedom now that it’s so close—or is it? I do not know. But I feel the absence of liberty ever more keenly, as though my soul were being held in suspension between the living and the living dead. Surely depriving one of one’s freedom, and with no idea how long the captivity will last, this is the cruelest punishment of all.

  We are heading east and north, leaving the rolling farmlands of eastern Pennsylvania and traveling up into the wooded, mountainous territories of northern New York. Some convicts we pick up along the way at FCI Danbury in Connecticut claim that we are destined for a federal prison in Ray Brook, near Lake Placid, New York, at the upper reaches of Gulag America’s Siberia, close by the Canadian border.

  Night descends as we enter the Adirondacks. I get to see little of the surrounding countryside. Dense stands of tall cathedral pines make the last leg of the journey feel like a long ride through a tunnel. I am reminded of the Maine woods and of my days and nights working the Canadian border in that other, long-past life. When we arrive at the prison, I trundle down from the bus in my restraints, look up, and see a glittering of stars so bright they appear to rain down like hail on my head. A shooting star streaks across the sky. I take a deep breath of air that smells of pine and feels like medicine. For a minute, it feels good to be alive.

  Over the next ten hours we are processed into the institution, never a pleasant experience. Our bodily cavities are probed for contraband. We are made to sit or stand for hours in the bullpen while the Receiving and Discharge staff tries to figure out where to put us.

  Night becomes day. The cops at Receiving and Discharge don’t seem to know what to do with us. Ray Brook, we are told, is full to over 150 percent capacity. The entire Bureau of Punishment infrastructure is quaking under the pressure of too many convicts in too few prisons and cells. In this joint, convicts are made to sleep on cots in the units’ common areas; single cells have been doubled and even tripled with prisoners sleeping on mattresses on the floor. For administrative purposes, I present a particular problem because of my previously long sentence, high security level, and no set release date.

  The shift lieutenant is called in to review my paperwork. I recognize him as the officer on the BOP bus who wrapped the loudmouth convict’s head in duct tape, suffocating him to death. This lieutenant, who mummified a man, was given a promotion and removed from the transportation detail. Makes perfect sense in federal law enforcement logic: fuck up and get promoted. I know not to object when it is deemed prudent to put me in administrative segregation—also known as the Hole—until I can be reclassified and released to general population.

  MY FIRST TWO weeks at FCI Ray Brook I live in a dark, narrow, stripped cell with graffiti-scarred walls. My meals are delivered on a tray shoved through the trap in the cell door. It is mercifully quiet. I see no one, speak to no one, have no idea what is going on outside the cell, and dwell within my overwrought consciousness. It all seems so bizarre. Win an appeal, get my sentence reduced, and then end up in solitary confinement with no set release date. My dream life takes over. It is the same recurring dream. I am in some abstract prison, locked in by immaterial walls and invisible fences, a kind of thought penitentiary, living with the knowledge that I am not free to leave, not even free to think as I please, and no one can tell me why. There are no answers, only more questions, and more rebuffs from stolid bureaucrats who appear to withhold the answers.

  I awake to find dream and reality have merged.

  THEN ONE DAY in early May, just as arbitrarily and with no explanation, I am released to general population, given a bedroll, and told to make my way to my assigned housing unit. This might be interpreted as a positive development. At the least, I expect it will give me an opportunity to discuss my situation with an actual case manager and get some indication of how much longer I am expected to serve. But I might also see it as a sign that the authorities have concluded my stay is to be lengthy, when in my mind I am due and ready to be released.

  Spring is in evidence as I walk out onto the compound. I look around. Glory be to God! There are no gun towers. No high walls. And there are—what is this?—flowers! Yes, flowers. Turns out, the warden is a freak for flowers. The convicts on the campus-like compound wear civilian clothes, jeans and warm-up suits instead of army-issue hand-me-down khakis. Originally built to house athletes for the 1980 Winter Olympic Games in Lake Placid, the physical facility seems more like a junior college than a medium-security penitentiary. The housing units are named for Native American tribes and set high on a hill with a view of the mess hall, administration buildings, the gym, recreation yard, and prison factories below, and in the distance above the razor wire and chain-link fence it is possible to make out pine-covered ridges and the sheer rock crag of Scarface Mountain.

  A prison with a view: there is something majestic about this setting. As prisons go, Ray Brook strikes me as strangely beautiful and peaceful. The housing units are spacious, with sweeping walls and arced tiers, and they are remarkably quiet for prison. Floors in the common area are carpeted, and there are no clanging steel-barred doors. The cells are like mini-hotel rooms that would be comfortable for one man, but are tight for two. Before I got here, I’m told, before the riots in Atlanta and the massive over-crowding of the entire punishment gulag, there were no controlled movements; prisoners were given keys to their cells and could come and go within the compound as they pleased. Now all that has changed with the influx of higher security prisoners. Still, compared to Lewisburg and even Petersburg, this joint feels more like an overcrowded sanatorium.

  The crisp, clear air and the extreme weather are perhaps the most remarkable features of this mellow spell in my penal experience. Spring seems to come and go in a matter of a fortnight. Summer is brief, hot and humid, and thick with insects. Fall is a memory. Then winter arrives overnight with a blizz
ard in mid-October. The housing units are overheated, and the windows are sealed. In the morning, when I step out into the fresh air, it’s so cold the mucus in my nose immediately freezes. I slide down the hill on sheets of ice. For someone who never felt comfortable in the cold, and after my southern sojourn in Virginia, this North Country seclusion seems contrived to punish me for my successes in the courts. Maybe it is just that I imagine retaliation on the part of the faceless punishment administrators, but the fact that they seem unwilling or unable to recalculate my sentence strikes me as a conscious dereliction of their duties. I try not to let it bother me, but it does. Frustration mounts. What the fuck! Just tell me how much more time I will have to do so I can settle in and do it without this constant uncertainty.

  My case manager is useless. She’s a buxom young Punishment Bureau novitiate who has been elevated to her position from a lowly guard for the reason that she has one or two years of secondary education. She seems at once thrilled and terrified by her position of power over so many apparently dangerous men. When I finally meet with her in early fall, she instructs me to write a cop-out to the records department asking for a new sentence computation—something I have already done several times—and tells me to back it up with whatever legal documents I have to verify my claim that my original sentence has been vacated and a new sentence imposed.

  The problem with this is that my property—the cardboard cartons of my legal papers, the typed and hand-written manuscripts of my novel and short stories, and such personal possessions as I was allowed to keep—has still not arrived from Petersburg. My case manager tells me that some of the boxes were sent home to my mother, who as of the last time I spoke with her had not received them. While others, those containing my writings, are being held while I am investigated for “operating a business while in the custody of the attorney general.”