Vincent Zandri - The Innocent

But for a man living and working inside an iron house, you didn’t take snow for granted. A fresh dose of snow always broke the endless monotony, pumping good vibrations throughout the facility so that even the hardest inmates showed wide ear-to-ear smiles on their scarred faces. And happy faces meant that, for maybe a day or so, you wouldn’t have a prisoner shivved square in the chest with a homemade blade or a psyche case tossing a handful of human waste at an unsuspecting officer or an HIV-positive lifer spitting a mouthful of blood at his cheating honey or a nineteen year old scared-out-of-his-wits man/boy wrapping a sheet around his neck and tying it to the overhead light fixture. What you might get instead was two thousand men joining in song, the gentle hum radiating against the concrete walls like music by moonlight while flakes of white snow drifted slowly down to earth.

What we got that winter instead of snow was rain and slush and bone-hard, damp cold. From New Year’s to Easter alone, we had six shivvings that resulted in four deaths and two badly rearranged faces. We had seventeen beatings that resulted in one death, and one inmate who (mysteriously) fell from the third-floor gallery in F-Block and who would now do life inside an infirmary, taking his meals through a feeding tube.

That winter we had two ODs, one death by hanging, an inmate who somehow got his wife pregnant during visiting hours, and another who acquired a good old-fashioned dose of the clap. To make a dismal matter even worse, we also had a group of twelve corrections officers who attracted national attention with their own arrests after a bachelor party turned ugly. The short of it was that my COs thought it would be funny to pelt unsuspecting passersby with raw eggs from the open windows of the school bus they’d rented for the occasion. One elderly citizen, who stood outside his car on a side street in Newburgh and protested, was given a special dose of humiliation. (As of this writing, his suit against Green Haven Prison and the State of New York is pending.)

But these were not the most serious things that happened during that winter.

We also had an increase in the inner-prison drug and contraband trade, in the form of pot, crack, heroin, liquid hormones, and assorted pharmaceuticals. I was personally forced to retire a record number of COs, not because I wanted them gone (I didn’t have enough support staff to run the prison as it was), but because the Commissioner of Corrections for the State of New York had sent down his official mandate. And what’s more, the winter of 1997 was the first I had spent without my wife, Fran, in more than twenty-five years-although by then nothing more could be done for her.

To add insult to an otherwise uncauterized injury, we had been cheated of our spring. Even the anticipation of spring rains and fresh muddy yards and good sleeping weather (there is no climate control inside a concrete prison cell) had been taken from the men who occupied the walls of Green Haven Prison. The heat of summer took over early with all the force of martial law, and what was supposed to be a “green haven” turned into a broiler oven. What little green vegetation there was within the concrete and razor-wire barriers turned brown and died. Even the baseball diamond cracked and heaved, like the blood that thickens and cakes on the upper lip after it oozes from the nostrils of a man’s nose when his body writhes and convulses during an execution by lethal injection. (For anyone believing lethal injection is the humanitarian way out, think again. I’ve witnessed three, and during all three, the men convulsed, choked, snapped their own ribs, and bled from the nose and mouth.)

In May of the year 1997, my prison smelled only of low morale, treason, and pity. And it tasted of sweat, concrete, and human decay. And my God, it was hot. But as for me, Jack Marconi, the keeper…the warden…the superintendent in charge of all things living and dying inside the iron house?

I did the only thing I could do under circumstances best left in God’s hands.

I blamed the weather.

GREEN HAVEN REACHED THE boiling point on a sweltering afternoon in May with the escape of convicted cop-killer Eduard Vasquez. Since I couldn’t very well blame the weather on a notorious killer who had practically been handed the keys to the front door, I found myself sitting on the edge of the desk in my office on the second floor of our administration building, holding my head in my hands. I had managed to take control of the situation as best I could so that it had been only twenty minutes since I’d ordered a general lockdown of the nine blocks. Now, instead of holding my head in my hands, I had to take the steps necessary to get my head together.

I’d just seen Robert Logan, one of the two COs held at gunpoint when Vasquez had escaped from their custody four hours before. Dan Sloat, my First Deputy Superintendent for Security and my second in command, was on his way downstairs to meet up with a detective from the Stormville PD. Stormville, along with the New York State police, were making preparations to head up the pursuit for Vasquez, at least to the outer fringes of their jurisdiction.

In the meantime, I had more pressing matters to attend to.

I turned to my secretary, Val Antonelli. “Whadaya mean the file’s missing?”

“I mean Vasquez’s file is gone, missing, outta here,” she said.

“Jeeze. Stormville’s gonna want information. Photos, rap sheets, next of kin. All of it.”

“Maybe Vasquez signed it out before he left this morning.”

“I don’t need jokes, Val,” I snapped. “I need that file!”

“Raising your voice does not change the fact that it’s hot in here or that the bacon cheeseburger I had for lunch is coming up on me or that Vasquez’s file is missing.”

Val sat in my swivel-back chair in the middle of the room with her legs crossed tight at the knees, making last-minute corrections to her freehand transcription of Robert Logan’s statement. “I’ll see if a folder was signed out this morning,” she offered. “For all I know it’s in the filing bin downstairs.”

“Try to get it before you leave tonight,” I said. Then working up a smile. “I’m asking, not telling.”

“We’ve got copies on microfilm anyway, boss,” she said. “So it really doesn’t matter if the file’s missing or not.”

I took a hot, sour breath and stared up at the cracks in the plaster ceiling of my fifty-five-year-old office-a square-shaped room inside a maximum security prison that had housed German POWs during World War II. Now it housed close to twenty-five hundred permanent inmates and transients on their way upstate to Attica or further downstate to Sing Sing.

Most of my prisoners were black and Latino. Kids mostly, with rap sheets so long they’d wear you out just getting past the list of youthful offences. Murderers and gangland killers and torture experts and organized professional killers. Some men with nothing on the outside but poverty and death, but some with beautiful cars and houses and beautiful women in furs who came to visit every day and bank accounts that would make the governor look like a pauper. Evil, mean-spirited killers, but likable killers, too. Tough killers and not-so-tough killers and killers who gave up being men altogether to take hormone injections, as if spending the rest of their God-given days inside five air-plane-hangar-size buildings were enough to eradicate the man, give birth to something distorted and freakish.

Inside the sweat-covered concrete walls and razor-wire fences you’d find weight lifters, junkies, drunks, health-food addicts, junk-food junkies, thin men, fat men, small and tall men, Muslims, Catholics, Five-Percenters, Buddhists, Jews, serial killers, man-eaters, kidnappers and child snatchers. You’d find bankers, accountants, lawyers, professors, teachers, architects, welfare cases, preachers, pimps, and you’d find high school graduates and college graduates and illiterate men who’d skipped school altogether and inmates so out of it they couldn’t tell you what month it was. Not far down the gallery from them you’d find the queers and steers and crybabies with long French braids, false eyelashes, thick red lips, and tattoos of broken hearts on their freshly shaved butt cheeks. Men with names like Black Jack, Lizard Leonard, and Ricky Too-Sweet. Butchers with baby-blue teardrops tattooed on the soft skin below their left eyeballs (one for each of their victims); men who’d arrived in the 1940s with all the piss and spunk of youth and who now, in their old age, would never consider leaving the comforting walls behind. There were cons and jokesters and pranksters and victims of circumstance, and men who did nothing wrong at all except hire the wrong lawyer, and kids who suffered so much for their mistakes that at night you could hear the echoes of their sobs as they called out for their mamas and you’d gladly wrench your broken heart out of your chest if only it would get them a fair shake in life.