Blow (18 page)

When George arrived at Danbury, it was his good fortune that the chief clerk in the warden's office was a thirty-three-year-old man named Arthur Davey. Just a year older than George, he turned out to be not only a fellow marijuana smuggler but also, coincidentally, a native of Weymouth, Massachusetts, whose family had moved him away when he was age twelve. In the course of becoming pals, Arthur and George arrived at various ways to make each other's life in the prison more pleasant, if not cushy. Raspy-voiced, with a machine-gun delivery and a mania for orderliness, Arthur had graduated, class of 1964, from Northeastern University with a degree in business administration. After school he had spent several years in the fuel-oil business before deciding abruptly to buy a boat on Cape Cod and become a fisherman. “Codfish don't talk back,” he explained. He spent a year or so running after tuna before a cousin persuaded him in late 1970 to join him in another seafaring occupation that paid a lot better, which involved steering the boat down to Jamaica in the West Indies and running it back to the States with large loads of marijuana.

After about eighteen months of operations, Arthur was arrested in 1972 as part of a major bust by agents of the CIA, the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics, the FBI, the Jamaican navy, the Jamaican Coast Guard, the Jamaican military police, and the Jamaican Defense Force, while he was ferrying seven and a half tons of pot to an eighty-four-foot steel-hulled mother ship sitting six miles off the Jamaican coast. Before facing charges in the United States, he had to do his Jamaican time, eight months in a prison just outside of Kingston. Constructed around the time the Pilgrims were landing at Plymouth, it contained eight-by-ten-foot stone cells, each with a single barred window ten inches square. One of the units had been reproduced by a French movie director and set up a hundred feet away for the filming of
Papillon,
about Devil's Island, where it served as the Dustin Hoffman character's place of solitary confinement. In real life, eleven inmates plus Arthur were crammed into the same space, and with the prisoner-classification system being fairly primitive, Arthur found himself thrown together with an interesting array of characters. One cell mate was an eighteen-year-old sugarcane worker with a barrel chest and a normally equanimous disposition. While he was cutting cane in the field one day, something went awry in his wiring system, and before anyone could successfully interfere, he'd whacked off the heads of seven coworkers with his machete. In prison he was known as Time Bomb.

In Danbury George was trying to make friends with a certain inmate who lived three bunks away from him in the dormitory, an endeavor in which Arthur would prove of great help. About six feet tall and weighing three hundred pounds, the inmate was known as Fat Harry. Harry carried such bulk—the upper part of his legs contained as much mass as some people's whole bodies—that later, on the outside, George observed that he had difficulty inserting himself behind the wheel of even a commodious Cadillac Eldorado. Fat Harry was an important member of the Winter Hill Gang in Boston, a now-extinct organization of Irish-American mobsters headed by Howie Winter, which operated out of an auto-body shop in the town of Somerville. The gang split operations on a territorial basis with the Italians, including control over the distribution of every cigarette dispenser, jukebox, and pinball machine in the Northeast. Along with running the book on the South Shore from Boston to the Cape, Harry was also an associate in the Teamsters union. It was some trouble involving union matters, an accounting problem, Harry said, that had landed him in Danbury.

George wanted to get close to Harry, not so much for his connections, although they did come in handy later on, as for the fact that Harry worked in the prison kitchen, as a baker. This meant he and his friends had access to steaks, pastrami sandwiches, desserts, anything they wanted, and at almost any time of day or night. Given the tedium of prison life, what an inmate gets to eat looms as one of the major preoccupations of the day, and so George set out to get the inside track on this bonanza. “I'd keep going over to his bunk and talking to him, but he'd constantly ignore me, try to get rid of me. ‘I'm reading now, can't you see?' Or he'd get up and talk to someone else to get away from me. This went on for three weeks. Then one day he looked at me and laughed. ‘I checked you out,' he said. ‘You were driving me fucking cuckoo, kid. I thought you were a cop they planted in here.'” So now, at least, Harry didn't cringe when George came over to chat. He even gave him some tips on how to be a successful hijacker. Think small, he said. “Razor blades. Did you ever imagine how many of those little boxes of razor blades fit into a semi? Easy to carry, everybody needs them. We hijack a truck and there's razor blades, we just take them, leave everything else.” But Harry didn't grant him any food privileges, until one day when he asked George to do him a favor. George knew Arthur in the warden's office; would he mind asking him to look up this certain person in the records, see if there was anything to indicate whether he'd been sent to Danbury after cooperating with the government? Harry would greatly appreciate knowing this. Arthur told George this was easy. The jackets of all the snitches were starred with an asterisk—as seemed to be the case with this guy he was asking about.

Soon George's life improved considerably. First off, he and Arthur got preference getting into the dining hall, which normally involved waiting for a half hour in line because the room could only accommodate so many at a time. And once inside, they were treated with the same deference as Harry's pals. “If you worked in the kitchen, your wife might be getting a thousand dollars a week for you to take care of certain guys,” George says. “So when you came along, they'd take your plate and bring it over to a different pot and put on the special stuff.” Thursday night was spaghetti night, and whereas the regular inmates got the Franco-American treatment, the Italian mob guys, who had the kitchen jobs, would whip up some dishes from home just for their designated friends; they'd take all day working up the sauce, doing the sausages and meatballs just right, veal
piccata
or chicken Parmesan. At breakfast, the normal cooking style with eggs was to break the yolks and fry the thing up so it looked as if it had been run over by some vehicle. For George it could be eggs Benedict, poached just right with fresh-made hollandaise sauce. He, Arthur, and a British hash importer they liked who played classical music in his cell and told the guys all about the high life on the Spanish island of Ibiza, had a table specially reserved for themselves; they didn't have to scramble around for seats or sit with guys who chewed with their mouths open. On weekends, when everyone was out in the yard on a warm day, the mob guys had the trustee in charge of driving the prison garbage to the city dump stop in town and pick up some Smirnoff at fifty dollars a bottle; they would mix it with a little orange juice and sit out in beach chairs, sipping and catching some rays. The time could slide right by doing it this way.

One thing everyone had to do in prison was work from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon. The pay was twenty cents an hour, and the jobs ranged from swabbing floors to working in the prison factory on a subcontract Danbury had through the Defense Department to make wiring harnesses for intercontinental ballistic missiles, the inmates helping keep Uncle Sam out front in the cold war. Thanks to an Italian he'd befriended through the mob guys in the kitchen, George got recommended for one of the plum jobs, which was teaching high school classes for inmates preparing for the General Equivalency Diploma exam. Inmates lacking high school degrees didn't have to take the classes, but Danbury had a merit system whereby you could earn up to fifty points on your record as a way of showing the parole board you were using the time to enrich your life. The GED classes were worth six points. They were also a good deal for inmate teachers. The school was the only place besides the warden's office that had air-conditioning, and you also got to schmooze with outside teachers, most of them female, who would arrive in the morning with doughnuts and a cheery smile. More important, the school happened to be run by George's caseworker, the one who would watch over his situation and make the recommendations at his parole hearing. While others had to wait weeks for a half-hour appointment with their caseworker, George could chat with him anytime he wanted. “Mainly,” he says, “I spent the time giving him reason to like me a lot.”

And much to his surprise, George found he actually took to the teaching itself. His first class consisted of twenty-two black pimps from the streets of New York City, who wound up at Danbury as the result of an experimental tactic by the U.S. attorney's office, since abandoned, of charging pimps with income-tax evasion as a way of combating prostitution. On racial grounds, the hustlers were the wrong color for Danbury, since its population of white-collar offenders, mob guys, and upper-echelon drug dealers was mostly white. Educationally they were also at a disadvantage, since a majority couldn't read. So before they could learn how to give the correct answers on the test, George had to first teach them to read and understand the questions.

From his initial confrontation with the group, this didn't look like it was going to be easy. “The first day of school I stood up in front of the class and told them who I was and what I wanted to teach them and passing the GED was going to help them get jobs on the outside. And they said, Fuck you, man, we're not listening to any of your bullshit, whitey motherfucker.” Now, normally George's response would have been to not care whether they learned anything or not. But their attitude posed a threat to his job security, because if he couldn't get them to do the lessons and take the GED, he'd be back in the prison, with no air-conditioning, maybe pushing a broom. “I knew I had to get them in line, so I said, ‘Okay. Okay. Any of you know how to smuggle dope into the United States out of South America and Mexico?' I could tell I had their attention. ‘You can make a hell of a lot more money smuggling than you can being pimps, I'll tell you. So I'll make a deal with you. We're not going to tell anyone, but we'll teach a little class in that, too. I'll teach you everything I know about it, but the deal is that then you have to learn the other bullshit, okay? And get your GED's. We'll have smuggling classes for a while, and then we'll have regular classes.' So they started asking questions, and I began about airplanes and Mexico, the price structure, how to take a motor home across the border. There are no black smugglers, I told them, but we might have twenty new ones right here! I didn't tell them that black people wouldn't get too far taking a motor home full of pot across the Mexican border. But that was okay. They didn't know where Mexico was.”

With Professor Jung popping up the flash cards and sounding out the consonants and vowels phonetically, the class learned slowly and steadily how to read and write. And after that they learned English grammar, arithmetic, history, and geography—becoming especially knowledgeable about the California desert country. “It turned out that most of them, once they started studying, did pretty well. We got into areas I enjoyed, like the Civil War, and certain presidents I liked. I told them about Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, how his men were pinned down at the bottom of San Juan Hill and he charged up on his horse and got his glasses shot off. He put on another pair, and how this inspired his men to charge up after him. I told them how Harry Truman was a regular guy, and wasn't from a wealthy family, that he started out as a haberdasher. And John F. Kennedy, how he was killed by the oil people and the money brokers. They were interested in the slave issue, and I told them a great injustice had been done to them, and how they were still enslaved. I didn't have to say much on that, of course; they already knew it. But I told them I understood how they felt. I'd been to school in the South and almost got the shit kicked out of me for standing up against the injustice down there. A majority of them became very involved in the class and did fairly well. And when they got their GED's, there was a little ceremony. They tried to be cool about it, but you could see they were really proud of the diplomas. It gave you a good feeling.”

*   *   *

Along with the celebrities and public officials doing time at Danbury because of momentary lapses in judgment, the prison contained people with a lot of expertise in criminality—the tenured faculty, if you will, of a school for scoundrels. They had a lot of good advice to impart when it came to making money doing something illegal, and when he wasn't busy scheming with George, no one took more advantage of this opportunity than did George's good friend from Colombia, Carlos Lehder. It helped that Carlos was friendly, attractive, and likable, with an ingratiating manner that was almost courtly, and which had he not possessed a foreign accent would have earned him a reputation as a weirdo. “He was very charming,” says George. “He would act almost subordinate to you. It was always, ‘You know so much. I respect you so much. I'd really appreciate it if you would share some of your knowledge with me.' He'd befriend people. Then he'd suck their brains out.”

George's friend Arthur, for instance, was planning to get back into the fishing business after prison and had brought his charts of the waters off Cape Cod into Danbury with him, along with a set of parallel rules, a manual on the tide tables, and a small compass. Carlos soon had him explaining the arts of navigation, showing him the difference between true and magnetic north, showing him how to plot a course and set up a deviation card for the ship's compass. Arthur spent hours with him, demonstrating how to locate your position off the coast using buoy markers and other navigational aids, how to plot out and follow a course by dead reckoning, working out the time, rate, and distance calculations for, say, hitting somewhere along the Florida Keys from the Colombian coast.