In the Sanctuary of Outcasts (22 page)

As the Bureau of Prisons continued preparations to take over the colony and evict the patients, dozens of new, sick inmates were transferred to Carville, men with amputations, spinal injuries, and failing organs. Among them were a young boy, not much past eighteen, who weighed over five hundred pounds, and a man with an enormous right leg that was nearly three times the size of his left. It extended straight out in front of his wheelchair.

I stood in the hallway with Doc and Steve Read. We watched as he was pushed down the hallway by an orderly.

“Looks like elephantiasis,” Doc whispered.

“That’s a form of leprosy, isn’t it?” I said.

“Hey,” Steve said, “he’s got dual citizenship.”

The prison population swelled, and rumors about the fate of the leprosy patients continued to swirl. The lives of my Carville friends, on both sides, seemed to be unraveling, just as I was beginning to feel hopeful about my own.

Fights were rampant on the inmate side. Sergio, the Cuban who had baked sweets for Neil and Maggie, was hit in the face more than a dozen times because he switched channels in one of the TV rooms. His lacerations required forty stitches, and he was thrown in the hole for fighting.

A skinny black kid named Calvin, who had been a Golden Gloves boxer as a teenager, pummeled one of the obese inmates to the point of tears. The big guy had snitched on Calvin for selling stolen batteries.

Two inmates in their seventies attacked each other with five-pound dumbbells. On the same day, a small disabled inmate used a walking cane to open a huge gash in the back of his roommate’s head.

The hole, the real jail inside Carville, was full. Anyone who ran into serious trouble now would be sent, temporarily, to the Iberville Parish Jail.

CeeCee was caught having sex with her new boyfriend in one of the janitorial closets. She was shipped off to the parish jail, along with her new friend.

Link, who had already been in the hole for biting, continued his quest to avoid work. If guards dragged him to the landscape department, he found a comfortable spot at the base of a tree and took a nap. If the guards looked away, he slipped back to his room and climbed under his blanket to sleep. Finally, the guards shipped him off to serve two weeks in solitary confinement at the parish jail.

Dan Duchaine was caught recording bodybuilding audiotapes over the pay telephones. His telephone privileges were taken away. If a guard caught him using the phone again, he, too, would be shipped off to join CeeCee and Link.

Doc was also having trouble. He lost his visiting privileges. His girlfriend had tried to smuggle Super Glue into the visiting room so Doc could perform some dental repair work. The guards told him his visitation rights might never be reinstated.

Even Steve Read was having difficulties. He started finding small piles of his hair on his pillow. He blamed the water. Carville was in the heart of Cancer Alley, a thirty-mile section of the Mississippi River where petrochemical plants dumped their toxins in the ground. “It’s cancer,” he said, “I just know it.” He also had a strange rash on his torso; he was sure he had leprosy.

In addition to the fights and loss of privileges and confinement in the hole, tragedy struck both sides of the colony. On the inmate side, José, a jovial Puerto Rican who had been imprisoned on corruption charges, died in his sleep. A bank president from Florida died of a massive brain aneurysm. And an inmate from Texas, after hearing of his wife’s affair, tried to commit suicide by drinking battery acid. A
helicopter from a Baton Rouge hospital transported him out late at night.

Things weren’t much better on the leprosy side. A friendly, often drunk, leprosy patient disappeared from the hallways. When we asked a staff member about her whereabouts, he said, “She passed.” One morning on the way to the cafeteria, I noticed that another leprosy patient had recently lost a leg.

About the only break from the tension was the Carville Book Club. The prison librarian had helped two graduate students from the English Department at Louisiana State University finagle permission to lead the discussions. The first book we read was J. D. Salinger’s
Catcher in the Rye
. I arrived at the classroom early. The two grad students were sitting at the front of the room. The woman, Nancy, had rather large breasts and wore a shirt two sizes too small. The man, slender and effeminate, introduced himself as “Tater.” While the three of us waited for the other inmates to arrive, they asked me a few questions about my life before Carville, but they didn’t mention books or literature. I wondered whether they had come to talk books or to meet men.

The first discussion didn’t go so well. Dan Duchaine was in a foul mood. He kept referring to Salinger as a “latent fag.” I felt bad for Tater and tried to steer the discussion in another direction, but Duchaine was relentless. After about twenty-five minutes, when the discussion waned, Nancy polled the group. More than half the men admitted they hadn’t bothered to read the book.

“You’d think we have plenty of time on our hands,” I said, trying to smooth things over. Nancy and Tater smiled. I was beginning to feel like the teachers’ pet.

We met for four weeks in a row. We read a collection of short stories, a southern novel, and
A Lesson Before Dying,
by Ernest Gaines, a Louisiana native. The book revolved around the execution of an innocent but illiterate black man in Louisiana. Capital punishment seemed to resonate with the group. Then, at the end of a robust discussion, Nancy and Tater said they wanted to try something new. They asked us to answer, aloud, three questions:
What was your crime? What is your favorite book? What is your sexual fantasy?

I knew then Nancy and Tater weren’t here for altruistic motives, and I was pretty sure it would be their last week leading our book club. I noticed Mr. Povenmire, the guard who was in charge of the education department. He stood just outside the door listening to the discussion.

When my turn came around, I hesitated. Then Duchaine jumped in: “As English majors, you’re gonna love this guy’s crime.”

“What’d he do?” Nancy asked.

“He’s a creative check writer!”

Back from two weeks in parish jail, Link had found a new object of his affection, a young, quite beautiful leprosy patient from Brazil who had just arrived to seek treatment at Carville. She was tall and blond and curvy. Her clothes were tight. When she walked down the corridor between the inmate side and the leprosy side, she got lots of attention.

Link yelled, “Will you marry me!?”

The woman smiled and waved at Link. She rounded the corridors several times a day.

“I’m in love!” he screamed.

After the woman was out of sight, Link walked over to the bench where Frank Ragano and I were reviewing a dummy cover for his forthcoming book,
Mob Lawyer
.

“That bitch fine,” Link said.

“Good God, man!” Frank said. “She’s got leprosy!”

“I’d fuck her,” Link said. “She only got half a foot, but I’d still fuck her!”

Link ran off to wait for her next pass.

Frank handed me a letter he had received from his publisher, Scribner. “What do you make of this?” he asked. Frank had written a book about representing notorious criminals, but the publisher wasn’t completely happy with the manuscript. Frank knew I had been a magazine publisher and, occasionally, he would ask my opinion.

The letter explained that the editors had decided to alter the format of his book, to publish two parallel narratives. One written by
Frank; the other written by Selwyn Raab, a reporter of such distinction that his writings had inspired the television series
Kojak
. Scribner intended to list Frank Ragano
and
Selwyn Raab as authors. Frank had confided to me how much he relished seeing his photograph in the newspaper or on the evening news. He didn’t want to share credit for his book.

“They think enough of your writing skills to keep the manuscript intact,” I said. I explained that, albeit unusual, it was better than having a book written
with
another writer. What I didn’t mention was that Raab’s alternate voice was certainly the publisher’s way of saying
we question your credibility
.

Frank had also received a proof of the book’s cover art. The cover was black with white typography. The title,
Mob Lawyer
, was in bold white script with red ink seeping into the letters, like blood might soak into a white shirt. The subtitle of the book read
Including the Inside Account of Who Killed Jimmy Hoffa and JFK
.

“A good color combination,” I assured Frank.

Frank was waiting for his wife and son, who were coming to visit. While he waited for them to arrive, I asked him about the JFK assassination.

“It started with a message,” he said. Frank believed he unwittingly delivered the message from Jimmy Hoffa to Carlos Marcello to kill Kennedy. Later, his belief was confirmed by a deathbed confession of a Tampa Mafia boss.

“I wish I had never met those people,” he said. Born to a struggling merchant in the poor section of Tampa, Frank could never get enough. And that led to terrible regret. Regret that he had helped his clients continue to do horrific acts. Regret that he had become known as the “mob lawyer.” Regret that he had become a target of prosecutors and was spending one of his last years in a place like Carville.

Frank and I sat quietly for a moment; then he told me another story.

The CIA had partnered with one of his Mafia clients. In an attempt to bring Castro’s reign to an end, the CIA looked to Mafia bosses who stood to lose money if Castro were to stay in power. Ac
cording to Frank, the CIA gave Santo Trafficante hundreds of thousands of dollars, along with poison pills, to kill Castro. Santo took the money and flushed the poison pills down the toilet. He used the payoff for his business interests in Cuba and told the CIA the assassination attempt had failed.

Then Frank mentioned that the Public Broadcasting System had just released a one-hour documentary about his life as lawyer to the Mafia.

A week later, Frank and the prison librarian received permission from the warden to show the documentary to the inmates. Filmed by PBS’s
Frontline,
the documentary was entitled “JFK, Hoffa and the Mob.” We made arrangements with the guards to show the one-hour film in the large classroom as a part of the current events class. I made flyers to promote the occasion and persuaded the new menu board guy to plug the event in the cafeteria.

About thirty inmates attended, including Steve Read, Doc, Art Levin, Dan Duchaine, and Frank’s best inmate friend, Danny Coates. A couple of dozen counterfeiters, tax evaders, swindlers, and drug traffickers also attended, as did a new arrival at Carville—a computer whiz named Gary, who, at age twenty-four, had tapped into the Federal Reserve system and wired himself $125,000. As I looked around the room, I thought there probably should have been a law against this industrious group’s convening, but no guards were in sight.

Art Levin, the man who had watched over Carlos Marcello and helped me beat Steve Read in Monopoly, sat in the back of the room as Frank introduced the video.

The film featured Frank Ragano as the intimate friend and lawyer to Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa, as well as attorney to Santo Trafficante, one of the most feared Mafia bosses. The documentary asserted that Ragano was the first mob lawyer to go public with what he knew. During the interviews, Ragano recounted mob involvement in CIA plots to kill Castro. He alleged that the Mafia had orchestrated the murder of Jimmy Hoffa and the assassination of John Kennedy,
and he admitted, on videotape, to “toasting” the death of JFK. In the end, Frank told the interviewer he had unwittingly delivered the message from Hoffa via Trafficante to Marcello to have JFK killed.

It was a sobering moment. There was silence in the room as the credits ran.

I turned on the lights. Frank asked if there were any questions.

Doc raised his hand. “How much did you charge these guys?”

Frank said he charged Jimmy Hoffa about $40,000. “I never charged Trafficante anything.” Doc looked suspicious, as if he couldn’t imagine performing a professional service gratis.

Steve Read blurted out, “I have a two-part question, Frank: one, was JFK the first president you knocked off? And, two, do you have your sights on Clinton?”

One of Frank’s friends yelled back, “What about you, Read!? What country music star are you gonna kill next, Dolly Parton?”

The Q & A session broke into a series of sarcastic exchanges that led to a yelling match. I reassessed whether these guys were such a formidable bunch after all.

Then I noticed Mr. Levin. In the midst of the arguing and insults, he sat still. Mr. Levin was counsel to Carlos Marcello. Marcello allegedly handled the details of the assassination. Mr. Levin helped Marcello navigate the Louisiana legal system and operate within the bounds of the law. As one of Carlos Marcello’s closest confidants, he was privy to the details of Marcello’s business.

As the other inmates argued, I thought about all Mr. Levin must have known. Frank Ragano might have been the first mob lawyer in the country to go public, but the one who probably knew the most sat quietly in the back of the room.

I returned to my room to find Doc burning a growth off his torso. This time he had inserted the tip of a sewing needle into a large nodule on his stomach. He held a burning match under the needle to heat it. Doc noticed me staring.

“Needle’s not a bad conductor,” Doc said, as he lit another match. I got the first whiff of burning flesh when four guards marched into the room.

“Goddamn!” one of the guards said when he saw Doc’s procedure. “What the fuck you doin’, Dombrowsky?”

Doc lit another match. The guards hadn’t come for Doc. They had come for me.

“White,” a female guard said, “go stand in the hall.”

“Why?”

“Get out!” she screamed.

As I stood in the hallway, the four guards emptied the contents of my locker and spread them out on my bunk. The procedure was called a “shakedown.” They examined my belongings. They uncoupled my socks, shook each article of clothing, tasted my toothpaste, smelled my bottles of shampoo and conditioner, and flipped through the pages of my books, magazines, and diary notes. They found my stash of scent strips from the magazines and confiscated them as contraband.

“Mr. White,” the female guard called out.

I stepped into the doorway. “Yes,” I said. My heart rate shot up.

“You hoardin’!”

“What?”

“You got ten sheets of carbon paper!” she said. “That’s hoardin’.”

Doc, who had been allowed to stay in the room, blew out his match and interjected, “He really likes office supplies.”

I wrote four to five letters a day, and I made a carbon copy of any I might not retrieve after my release.

“Why can’t I have ten sheets?” I asked.

“You can tattoo yourself!” The female guard explained that I could press a thumbtack through the carbon paper and into my skin to duplicate the effects of a tattoo needle.

I pulled up my sleeves to show her my clean arms, and she laughed. The thought of me tattooing myself seemed ridiculous, even to her. Doc lit another match.

“I keep duplicates of my letters,” I said.

The guard said that if I told her I would use all of the carbon paper within forty-eight hours, I could keep it.

“It should last longer than that,” I said.

“But if you
tell me
you will use it in forty-eight hours,” she said, “I can let you keep it.”

One of the other guards, trying to be helpful, said under his breath, “Just lie.”

“I’m in here for lying,” I said.

The guards looked at each other for a moment and went back to the shakedown. I stepped back into the hallway and leaned against the wall. For so many years I had used my connections to get special treatment. I expected people to overlook my tendency to bend the rules or cut corners or even kite checks. Standing in the hallway, temporarily banished from my prison room for illicit possession of office supplies, I felt good about telling the truth. It was a small thing. Nothing at risk but a few sheets of carbon paper. But it felt important.