Hard Time (2 page)

Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, boasts he is ‘America’s toughest sheriff’ and the most famous sheriff in the world. He feeds his inmates green baloney and dresses them in pink underwear. But he’s also the most sued sheriff in America. His jail system is subject to investigation by human- rights organisations including Amnesty International and the American Civil Liberties Union because of medical negligence, violence and the extraordinary death rate. Victims include Charles Agster, a mentally disabled thirty-three-year-old arrested for loitering. He was hog-tied, jumped on, punched and strapped into a restraint chair, where he stopped breathing. And Brian Crenshaw, a partially blind shoplifter the guards pulverised for failing to produce his ID. He was found comatose with a broken neck, toes and severe internal injuries. The list goes on, earning Arpaio the nickname the ‘Angel of Death.’

Most inmates housed in Arpaio’s jail system are unsentenced. They’re supposed to be presumed innocent until found guilty, yet the conditions in the jail system are far worse than those in the prison system where sentenced inmates are housed.

Despite all of the adverse publicity and investigations, Arpaio is still in charge. He’s had two books published and starred in the TV shows
Smile . . . You’re Under Arrest!
and
Inmate Idol
.

‘It costs more to feed our police dogs than our inmates. The dogs never committed a crime and they’re working for a living.’

—Sheriff Joe Arpaio

16 May 2002

‘Tempe Police Department! We have a warrant! Open the door!’

The stock quotes flickering on the computer screen lost all importance as I rushed to the peephole. It was blacked out. Boots thudded up the outdoor stairs to our Scottsdale apartment.

Bang, bang, bang, bang!

Wearing only boxer shorts, I ran to the bedroom. ‘Claudia, wake up! It’s the cops!’

‘Tempe Police Department! Open the door!’

Claudia scrambled from the California king. ‘What should we do?’ she asked, anxiously fixing her pink pyjamas.

Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang!

‘Open the door!’

We searched each other’s faces.

‘Better open it,’ I said, but before I could make it to the door –
boom!
– it leapt off its hinges.

Big men in black fatigues and ballistic armour blitzed through the doorframe, aiming guns at us. Afraid of being shot, I froze. I gaped as they proceeded to convert my living room into a scene from a war movie.

‘Tempe Police Department! Get on the fucking ground now!’

‘Police! Police! On your bellies now!’

‘Hands above your heads!’

‘Don’t fucking move!’

As I dropped to the floor they fell upon me. There was a beating in my chest as if I had more than one heart. Crushed by hands, elbows, knees and boots, I could barely breathe. Cold steel snapped around my wrists. I was hoisted like a puppet onto my feet. As they yanked Claudia up by the cuffs, she pinched her eyes shut; when she opened them, tears spilled out.

‘I’m Detective Reid,’ said a tall burly man with thick dark hair and an intimidating presence. ‘English Shaun, you’re a big name from the rave scene. I’m sure this raid will vindicate the charges.’ There was a self-satisfied edge in his voice, as if he were savouring a moment of triumph.

Dazed by shock, I fumbled around for an appropriate response. ‘There’s nothing illegal in here.’

He smirked knowingly, then read my Miranda and consular rights.

I wanted to put my arms around Claudia to stop her trembling. ‘Don’t worry, love. Everything’s going to be all right,’ I said, trying to hide my fear.

‘Don’t fucking talk to her! You’re going outside!’ Detective Reid took a dirty T-shirt from the hamper and slapped it on my shoulder. ‘Take this with you!’

‘I’m exercising my right to remain silent, love!’ I kept yelling as they pushed me out of the apartment.

‘Shut the fuck up!’ Detective Reid growled.

‘We told you not to fucking talk to her!’

Yelling over each other, they shoved me down the stairs. They briefly removed my cuffs, so I could slip the T-shirt on.

‘Stand by the stairs and keep fucking quiet!’ Detective Reid left me guarded by a policeman.

The heat of the sun rising over the Sonoran Desert soon engulfed me. Detective Reid escorted Claudia out and locked her in the back of a white Crown Victoria. It sped off with my girlfriend of one and a half years. Police in state uniforms, federal uniforms and plain clothes swarmed our place. Every so often, Detective Reid and a short bespectacled lady conferred. Neighbours assembled, fascinated. Sweat trickled from my armpits and crotch. I thought about Claudia. What will they do to her? Will she be charged?

Detective Reid stomped down the stairs, scowling. ‘Tell us where the drugs are, Attwood. It’ll make things much easier for you in the long run. They in the safe?’

‘In the safe’s just a coin collection and stuff like my birth certificate.’

‘You’re full of shit, Attwood! Where’s the key for the safe? You might as well just give the drugs up at this point.’

‘The key’s on my key chain, but it needs a combination as well as a key.’

‘What drugs are in it?’

‘None.’

‘Don’t play games with us, Attwood. Don’t force me to call a locksmith.’

‘I’m telling the truth.’

‘We’ll soon see about that.’ He sounded desperate.

I was about to volunteer the combination, but he pulled out a cell phone and dialled a locksmith.

‘Get in the back of that car over there,’ said an officer in a dark-blue uniform, 40-something, with a rugged face. He looked the type who liked to take a detour on the way to the police station to teach certain criminals a lesson. New to manoeuvring in handcuffs, I fell sideways onto the back seat. I straightened myself up, and he threw a pair of jeans on my lap. He got in the car, mouthed a stick of gum and turned on 98 KUPD Arizona’s Real Rock. He bobbed his head to the music as he drove. Every now and then he looked over his shoulder, and I saw two tiny distorted images of me on the lenses of his reflective aviator sunglasses.

‘Looks like we’re gonna be waiting outside,’ he said, parking by Tempe police station.

Sealed in the Crown Victoria, I knew my life would never be the same after today. Cuffed, cramped, sweaty, I asked myself,
How did I end up here?

Drugs start out fun at first. That’s why I did them. I have no excuses. No sob story to tell. I was raised by good parents in a loving home. Other than having to eat Brussels sprouts with my Sunday dinner, I suffered no abuse as a child. I excelled at school, and dated some of the most popular girls at college. Even when my mother launched her shoes at me for teasing my sister or my father showed my girlfriends naked pictures of me scampering around as a baby, I never had an urge to run away from home. In fact, I enjoyed living there so much I chose the nearest university, Liverpool, so I wouldn’t have to move out.

When raving began in England, I went to a club in Manchester called the Thunderdome and tried Ecstasy and speed for the first time. Before drugs, I didn’t dance, but on Ecstasy and speed I couldn’t stop dancing, smiling and hugging people I didn’t know. Studying hard on the weekdays, I lived to rave every weekend with a friend from my hometown, Wild Man. Every time I took drugs, I told myself,
I can quit whenever I want. I can party and still function. I’ll never get addicted.
I was oblivious to the downside.

Even though I sat some of my finals coming down off Ecstasy – with techno beeps and beats resounding in my brain – I scored a 2:1 with honours. Wearing a mortarboard cap over my short Mohawk and a ceremonial robe with what looked like a superhero’s cape, I strutted into the Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool. Receiving my BA in Business Studies, I – the first in my family to go to university – soaked up the admiration from my parents: an insurance salesman and teacher from a chemical-manufacturing town called Widnes.

Long before my graduation, I set my career sights on finance. I’d been following the stock market since age 14 and at 16 had doubled my grandmother’s money in British Telecom. I read hundreds of books on the subject. Historical accounts of legendary stock-market operators made the hair on my arms stand up, made my spirit feel at one with the likes of Jesse ‘the Boy Plunger’ Livermore and promoted visions of my own future financial greatness. After university, I applied to be an investment analyst in London. Convinced I’d be hired on the spot because of my passion for the stock market, I ended up going through months of gruelling interviews. Each job rejection crushed my optimism.

Casting around for work elsewhere, I thought of my aunt Sue in America. She lived in Phoenix, Arizona, where she’d earned a reputation for being one of the toughest insurance adjusters in the Wild West. She said Phoenix was booming, and from previous visits during my teens – that involved her slightly altering the date of birth in my passport so I was allowed in bars, and her introducing me to people in said bars as Paul McCartney’s nephew – I knew I could go a long way there with just my English accent. My parents supported my decision to emigrate, and in 1991 my mum waved me off from Runcorn train station. ‘My whole life is in that case,’ I told her. I was sad to leave but excited by the prospect of conquering Wall Street. I planned to make my first million within five years.

I touched down in Phoenix with a six-month traveller’s visa and only student credit cards to survive on. My aunt Sue showed me how to obtain a Social Security number and forge an H-1B work visa using a simple printing set from an office-products store. ‘It’s fuck or be fucked in the business world,’ she said, and coached me on what to say to prospective employers. I felt nervous bluffing about my status in the country at job interviews, but getting a job as a commission-only stockbroker was all the proof I needed that it paid to bend the rules.

For the first few months, I cold-called from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. for no pay, walked to work and lived off cheese on toast and bananas. When my credit cards reached their limits, I feared I’d have to return to England. Seeing I was getting nowhere, the three hardy stockbrokers I shared a table with schooled me in the art of poaching other brokers’ clients. Things started to improve.

Stretching their advice beyond its intended limits, I had the idea to dumpster dive for sales leads. In Fashion Square Mall’s busy parking lot, I sat in the car of another rookie stockbroker, reconnoitring the dumpster used by our rival, First American Biltmore Securities. When no one was looking, we hurried to the dumpster. Wearing rubber gloves and armed with box cutters, we extracted bags of garbage. Each bag we sliced open assaulted us with the odour of coffee-soaked paperwork and leftovers putrefying in the desert heat. We examined the contents, found nothing and threw back bag after bag. We almost gave up. But then we found a bag full of client account statements and correspondence. We took the bag back to my apartment and split the leads. Starting with those investors who’d written letters of complaint, we opened new accounts. One transferred his six-figure portfolio to me.

After breaking the record for the most new accounts opened, my commissions started to climb. Convinced the meaning of life was making money, I had become a piranha among the sharks.

Five years later, I was the top producer in the office, grossing more than $500,000 a year. I had my own secretary and cold callers. I won awards and was sent to luxury hotels and skiing in Colorado. But I’d worked so hard I had what the stockbrokers called BOBS: Burnt Out Broker Syndrome. To counter my stress, I returned to partying on the weekends like I’d done at university.

The first time I took Ecstasy in America was at the Silver Dollar Club, a gay bar frequented by ravers in Phoenix’s run-down warehouse district. Hovering around the bar, I waited for my high to arrive. It took about 30 minutes for my knees to buckle. The sides of my head tingled as a warmth inched in. The warmth swept my face, the nape of my neck and travelled down my spine. My diaphragm and chest moved in harmony as my breathing slowed down. Each exhale released more tension. I grew hot but relaxed. Unable to stop smiling, I drifted over to the dance floor in the dark room. The dancers on a platform grabbed my arms and pulled me up. Inhibitions gone, I moved effortlessly to the music. I closed my eyes, and allowed the music to move me. I seemed to float. Rush after rush swept my body like electricity.
Are you ready?
came the vocals.
Jump everybody jump everybody jump
. . . I leapt from platform to platform. When DJ Sandra Collins played Prodigy’s ‘Charly’, I thought I was at an English rave. I danced my way to the front of the main stage, dripping sweat, hands in the air, eyeballs rolling towards heaven, hugging the strangers around me, grinning at the throng of freaks below. I felt right at home.

Tired of being a worker ant, I salted money away into tech stocks, and retired from stockbroking in 1997. With no office to attend or boss to answer to, I thought I could make a living out of partying. It began with house parties that went on for days, fuelled by drugs I bought for all of my friends.

I still remember how nervous I felt the first time I bought 20 Ecstasy pills in America. I had to wait in my parked car outside an apartment in Tempe while a Native American high on Special K went inside with my $400. Stuck to the seat by my sweat, I was sure Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents were about to jump out of nowhere with guns and surround my vehicle. I was also worried about the Native American running off with my money, or the people he was dealing with pulling a gun on him. Even when he returned with 20 Eurodollar Ecstasy pills, I drove away terrified, convinced I’d be pulled over at any moment. But when I didn’t get robbed or caught or run into any of the other scenarios I’d seen in
Miami Vice
, I started to believe I could get away with anything.

I wanted my American friends to enjoy the rave atmosphere I’d experienced in England, so we mostly did Ecstasy. My number of friends increased fast – as it does when you’re giving drugs away for free. When the local dealers could no longer supply my needs, I found out who their main supplier was in LA – a surfer gangster called Sol – and arranged to buy 500 hits from him.

Two carloads of us took the I-10 to a house in West Hollywood. Annoyingly, Sol wasn’t home at the prearranged time. From a vantage point in a side street, we sat in our cars and waited. Our stress rising. Carrying a surfboard, Sol showed up hours later.

‘I’ll go in now,’ I said to Wild Man. ‘If I’m not back out in 15 minutes, come and rescue me.’

Wild Man was my raving partner from England who’d grown into a goliath. Two years younger than me, I’d looked out for him when he was just a chubby boy his older brother used to beat up. In his later teens, he honed his fighting skills on nightclub bouncers.