Newjack (30 page)

I walked with the inmate into his hearing at Downstate. All morning—from his strip-frisk outside the protective-custody unit to his handcuffing—he had been the soul of civility, and at the hearing he was no different. No, he told the judge, English wasn’t his first language; that would be Nahuatl, the Mexican Indian tongue. But he could understand Spanish well enough. Through an interpreter, the judge explained that the hearing was about whether he wished to fight the government’s plan to deport him to Mexico as soon as his sentence was finished. No, the inmate said, he would be happy to go home as soon as he could. But there was a favor he wanted to ask. He was serving eight to twenty-five years for manslaughter, he said, and for the past three months, he had been held in involuntary protective custody. This was because his victim had been the younger brother of a leader of Sing Sing’s Latin Kings gang and the administration feared that members of the gang in prison would kill him. Couldn’t the judge please intervene and have him transferred?

Conveying all this information to the judge through the interpreter took about ten minutes; the judge’s reply, about ten seconds. “No,” he said. “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do.” And that was that.

Certainly, I supposed, the matter was outside the judge’s jurisdiction. The Department of Correctional Services transferred inmates according to its own obscure agendas. I (probably along with most inmates) was always trying to figure them out—and I made a bit more progress later that night.

My shift was over by the time Billings and I got back. As we checked in, a black sergeant, Brereton, was trying to decide on the racial makeup of a team of evening-shift transportation officers to send on a five-hour drive up to Great Meadow Correctional Facility, the max near Comstock, New York. He didn’t want to send “all brothers” to Comstock—it would conform too much to the upstate stereotype of Sing Sing. But his regular white and Latino officers were out. I raised my hand to volunteer, and was selected. It was overtime, he advised me; I probably wouldn’t get back until 4
A.M.
“That’s no problem,” I said. This overtime was
easy
.

Sergeant Brereton took me and another officer along to collect the inmate from his cell in 5-Building. This was unusual. Normally, transportation officers collected inmates by themselves. When we arrived at the cell, Brereton was fierce to the inmate: “Collect your bag! Put your shoes on! We’re leaving now!” The inmate was a young black guy named Hans Toussaint. He did not seem hostile, but maybe Brereton knew something I didn’t know.

“No talking!” the sergeant barked as Toussaint paused at another cell to say good-bye. “Direct order! Walk in front of us now! Stop again and we’ll take you down!”

Inmates in neighboring cells snickered at this and imitated Brereton in low tones. I braced myself, knowing Brereton would expect me to do the taking down if in fact Toussaint stopped again. Fortunately, he did not, and Brereton dropped us off at the State Shop, where Toussaint’s belongings were to be inventoried before he was shipped out.

A small crowd of six or seven officers gathered around for this routine procedure, and slowly I learned why there was all this interest: Toussaint was one of the gang members who had been involved in the altercation in B-block yard the day before. We had seen videotape of this at lineup: thirty or forty seconds of inmates massing, running and stabbing, attacking and fleeing. The story was that the Latin Kings had a score to settle with the Bloods. Their fighters had gotten to the yard first, armed with shanks, and taken positions along the fence. The Bloods had known a fight was going to happen, known they were outnumbered, but had gone out anyway. They were clustered near the yard door when the Kings attacked, stabbing numerous Bloods and sustaining lesser injuries in the process. As the Bloods fled down a fenced-in corridor toward 5-Building, the video showed Sergeant Murray, his baton out, flailing away to separate the combatants.

I had passed the door where that corridor emptied into the main prison, walked by the large pool of dried blood just inside it. It now seemed likely that some of this blood had been Toussaint’s. He had just transferred into Sing Sing from another prison the day before; it had been his first time ever in the B-block yard. The officers were marveling over that circumstance as they sifted through his meager possessions.

“So you knew something was going to happen out there?”

“Everyone knew it was going to happen,” said Toussaint.

“So why’d you go?”

“I had to go.”

“Where were you stabbed?”

Toussaint lifted up his T-shirt and showed the cut in his back. He would have gotten a “big stick” in his side, too, he said, had it not been for his protective vest of magazines.

“What magazines did you use?” asked Anderson, the female CO who supervised the barbershop downstairs.

“Ebony
and
Life,”
said Toussaint, smiling. He was charismatic, I could see. Officers kept peppering him with questions, but he was talking especially to Anderson. She pointed to three parallel slashes through one of his eyebrows. “What are those?”

He shrugged and wouldn’t answer.

She persisted. “Why the big deal about your gang?” The Bloods, originally from Los Angeles, were a growing and feared presence in New York at the time. It was said that membership followed a strict policy of “blood in, blood out”: You had to slash somebody—not necessarily a rival gang member, just someone you were robbing, say—to get into the gang, and leaving was impossible without getting cut up yourself.

“Okay, I’ll tell you once,” said Toussaint. He borrowed Anderson’s pen and on a piece of scrap paper wrote
B-L-O-O-D
in block letters. Then he completed the words he said the letters stood for: “Brotherly Love Overrides Oppression and Distraction.” I had never before heard that
Blood
was an acronym. Anderson folded it up and said she’d keep it.

Toussaint had nothing more to his name than an incomplete set of state-issued clothes and a fat envelope of letters from his girlfriend in Brooklyn. (“Dear Sweetie,” began one, which an officer had opened. “Your bid’s not
that
long.”) And, like a bunch of idiot nerd scientists, here we were poring over it all with a fine-tooth comb, grinding along to keep the system going—and the gas in our
SUVs. By comparison, he was like the Rebel, ideals untarnished. His girlfriend would have to write to him at Great Meadow, now. Instead of being placed in protective custody, like the Mexican, Toussaint was being transferred out. This transfer made sense: Toussaint seemed combustible, and getting him out of Sing Sing would help to defuse gang tensions. I felt suddenly sorry for him. These gangs of ghetto kids preyed on the weak, but you had to admit that there was a political element to some of them, a mission of self-help and a drive to maintain pride and focus. Toussaint was not unlike an ambassador from a small, fierce, and backward land.

The only thing I could say on our behalf was that just as everything was finishing up, an officer happened upon a tiny plastic bag with a few leaves of what looked like marijuana in it, enough for just one puff of smoke. The officer held it up accusingly.

“You gotta have somethin’ when you goin’ out there,” said Toussaint, shrugging.

The officer, instead of writing him up, threw it away without comment.

We pulled into Great Meadow around midnight. The officers we saw were all white, and they already knew about the altercation in the B-block yard. They, too, seemed eager to see what Toussaint looked like. A sergeant gave him a stern lecture and a pat-frisk, telling him to look straight at the wall, keep silent, hands flat … and then offered up a sardonic “Welcome to Great Meadow” when he was done. Actually, Toussaint had told us on the drive up, he’d done time here before.

In return for Toussaint, we received an inmate to take back with us. This game of musical chairs, sort of like a reverse sports draft, was the way of DOCS. Inmates were constantly being shuffled in the hope this would avert volatile situations. You could tell that Great Meadow was tighter than Sing Sing; every time this nervous inmate addressed me, even as I was performing the strip-frisk, he called me sir. The inmate was black. Thinking he had probably grown up in New York City, the same sergeant said to him, “Must feel like you’re going home, huh?”

“No, sir,” said the inmate. “Actually, it doesn’t feel that way at all.”

We stopped on the New York State Thruway for gas, within sight of a number of large tractor-trailer rigs. The inmate had been
telling me that the farther north you went in the prison system, the less talking there was between officers and inmates. As we waited to pay for the gas, a big rig pulled out ahead of us, then accelerated onto the entrance ramp.

“That’s what I want to do when my bid’s done,” he murmured, “drive one of those things.”

It made all the sense in the world to me. He wanted to get behind the wheel and eat up the space, drink it in, make his own choices in that great land without walls. He looked like he would have given anything to do it then and there.

One after another, my classmates disappeared. The Department usually gave only two or three days’ notice of a transfer, so often there was no good-bye—just the absence of Dieter, Di Carlo, Colton, Davis, DiPaola, Dimmie, Arno, Charlebois, and the rest, usually to the “jump jails” a short drive north. Occasionally, I’d see a big grin on somebody’s face in the parking lot and they’d show me the paperwork. Bella and Buckner were on their way to Bedford Hills and Taconic, the women’s prisons on the other side of Westchester County. It took a few months, but Miller finally left for the state police academy; Feliciano, for the New York City police academy. A few officers from the city stuck around—Ellerbe, Foster, and Chavez—and I was glad for the familiar faces. I made new friends of more recent OJTs, but reservedly, because they were almost always gone within a few weeks. And I got to know some of the more senior officers better, most of them in B-block, where, shortly, I would be spending a lot of time.

The most dramatic departure was by Officer Mendez, whom I had sat next to against the wall one night at the Academy while waiting for pay phones. Mendez was from up near Buffalo, a strong, articulate, capable-seeming fellow who was still hoping to get into the Secret Service, he told me, and was calling home to see if a letter had come from Washington.

Apparently, Sergeant Holmes had penciled-in Mendez to J-and-N galleries, A-block’s version of R-and-W—a chaotic, transient floor that nobody else wanted. One day, it had proved too much. Assailed by uncooperative inmates, Mendez had finally gone downstairs to the sergeants, screaming, “I can’t do it! I can’t do it!” He wasn’t entirely coherent, and apparently the whole block had grown hushed at the commotion. One sergeant ascertained
that an inmate had threatened to punch Mendez in the face and demanded to know who it was. He dragged Mendez back upstairs, but the officer couldn’t single anyone out. “They were all threatening me!” he wailed.

I saw Mendez in the parking lot the next afternoon, after he’d turned in his badge. He had broken down on the phone with his mother that morning while telling her about it, he told a group of us, and she’d started crying too. He was about to drive home.

“Hey, there’s no shame in it,” another recruit said, and the rest of us nodded. But obviously Mendez—who probably would have made a great Secret Service agent—felt like a total failure. I looked at him with sympathy, envy, and—because any of us who remained could be the next one penciled-in by Holmes—fear.