Josh Bazell - Beat the Reaper - A Novel

“I have no idea,” I said. Which was the truth.

David Locano was paying for all this, by the way, though not directly. He didn’t want a formal link to me, and probably also wanted to be able to cut me off if he thought I was turning dangerous to him or Skinflick.

But at the moment there wasn’t any reason for that to happen. We all knew the Feds would hold off on prosecuting Locano for solicitation of murder until they had proven that I had, in fact, murdered someone. And Skinflick wasn’t even a suspect.

Locano had kept Skinflick scrupulously clean. He had forbidden him to take credit for the hits unless it became clear that there wasn’t any heat. And he himself had never once mentioned Skinflick in connection to the Karchers outside of the steam room of the Russian Baths on 10th Street.

Unfortunately, he had been a bit looser when it came to me. The Feds had about eight hours of recorded phone calls in which he referred to me as “The Polack.” As in “Don’t worry about the Brothers K. The Polack’s visiting them next week.” But at least that gave Locano a strong incentive to try to keep me from being convicted.

The Feds told us about the tapes early, to encourage me to turn on Locano. They also told us they had some already-incarcerated mob guy who was willing to testify that, in general, I was a hitter who was known to do work for Locano.

But the Feds were keeping the Mystery Evidence, if Donovan was right and they had some, a secret till the last moment.

And in the meantime I rotted in jail.

Wendy Kaminer, that genius, says that if a Republican is a Democrat who’s been mugged, then a Democrat is a Republican who’s been arrested. You might think a mafia hitman is not exactly the guy to be representing that argument, and in fact fuck me, but let me point a couple of things out.

One is that, if you are accused— accused , mind you—of a capital crime, you will not be offered bail. I was in the Federal Metropolitan Correctional Center for the Northeast Region (FMCCNR), across from City Hall in downtown Manhattan, for eight months before my trial even started.

Another is that, unless you’re a scary-looking famous hitman like I was, what will happen to you in jail will be a fuck of a lot worse than what happened to me. I was never forced to sleep next to the lidless aluminum toilet, for instance, which had a perfect surface-tension dome of urine, shit, and vomit at all times, just waiting to slop over any time anyone used it. I was never forced to do what they call “taking out the laundry,” or any of the other thousand fantastically imaginative degradations incarcerated people come up with to demonstrate their power over each other and to fight off boredom. Even the guards kissed my ass.

And remember: this wasn’t prison. It was jail. The place they send people who are presumed innocent. In New York City, getting sent to Rikers Island (where I would have gone if my charges hadn’t been Federal) just means you’ve got charges pending.

And you might think you’ll never end up there, because you’re white, so the justice system works for you, and you never smoke pot or cheat on your taxes or leave any other opening for anyone who wants to hurt you—but that doesn’t mean you won’t. Mistakes get made, at which point you will fall into the hands of what is essentially the DMV, but with much less stringent hiring requirements.

And—even in New York City, and no matter who you are—your odds of getting arrested are about 150 times your odds of getting mugged.

Plus, newsflash: jail sucks.

Like they promise, it’s loud. Dog kennels are supposedly loud because any noise over ninety-five decibels is painful to dogs, so once one dog starts barking from the pain, all the rest start too, and the decibel count just keeps rising. In jail it’s the same thing. There’s always someone too crazy to stop screaming, and there are always the fucking radios, but those things are only part of it.

People in jail talk constantly. Sometimes they do it to hustle each other. In jail, even the people so stupid you’re surprised they know how to breathe are constantly on the make. Because odds are good they’ll find someone even stupider than they are: someone more stressed-out, or more fucked-up on drugs, or whose mother drank more alcohol when she was pregnant with them or whatever.

But people in jail also talk just to talk. Information, in a place that chaotic, comes to seem vital no matter what the quality.

The real value of conversation in jail, though, seems to be that it keeps people from thinking. There’s no other way to explain it. People in jail will have a conversation with someone four cells away rather than shut their fucking faces for two minutes. Like there’s not enough noise from the guy knifing and/or raping someone near you, or sharpening his homemade syringe on the wall. People you threaten with death will keep talking to you.

What they’re all hoping for is that in the mindlessness of the place you’ll tell them something you shouldn’t, which they can then go sell to the warden. People in jail talk all the time about how much they hate snitches, and how people shouldn’t snitch, and how you’ll have to excuse them for a minute while they go off to knife someone for snitching . “Snitch” is one of their favorite words. [46] And sounds even more Dr. Seuss–like when paired with “bitch,” which is another of their favorite words. But all those fuckheads, no matter how many times they tell you they’d rather die than be a snitch, spend most of their day trying to dig up something to snitch about. To lessen their sentence, or kiss ass, or just to fight the boredom.

Another favorite topic in jail is where everyone is headed.

As a mob guy and a killer, it was clear I’d be sent to one of the two facilities that make up Level 5, the highest level of security in the Federal system. The question was which one—Leavenworth or Marion.

What’s interesting about Leavenworth and Marion is that although they’re the only two Level 5 prisons, and although they’re also the two worst prisons in the U.S., they’re complete opposites. At Leavenworth the cell doors are open for sixteen hours a day, during which the prisoners are free to “mingle.” Apparently the mingling gets particularly baroque from June through September, because that’s when the warden leaves the lights off in the upper tiers. He has to: it gets so hot in Leavenworth that if he turns the lights on, the prisoners will destroy them to cut down on the heat production.

At Marion, meanwhile, the esthetic is completely different. You’re in “Ad Seg,” or “Administrative Segregation,” which means a tiny white cell, alone, with a fluorescent diffusion light over you that never shuts off and is the only thing you have to look at. You spend twenty-three hours a day there, with the other hour spent showering, going out to a solitary twelve-foot pacing run, or putting on and taking off your leg irons, which you have to do any time you do anything. In your cell you start to feel like you’re floating in fluorescent white nothingness, and that nothing else really exists.

If Leavenworth is fire, Marion is ice. It’s the Hobbesian hell vs. the Benthamite one. The dipshits I was in jail with all said Leavenworth was preferable, because at Marion you inevitably go insane. They also said that in free-range Leavenworth I, particularly, would do well, since as a mob guy I would get respect . At least as long as I was young enough to defend myself.

“Respect,” by the way, is the third word people in jail say all the time. As in “You tryin to start a war, dog? It ain’t respect to call that punk bitch Carlos! You got to call her Rosa lita, dog. No, I mean it ain’t respect to the violators who are men in the block!” Which a guard actually said to me once.