Beat the Reaper Read online

  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.* 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 Rosalita, 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.

  I figured all told I would prefer Marion. But I didn’t worry about it too much, because the choice of whether you spend the rest of your life at Marion or at Leavenworth is not one you get to make. Bizarrely, it’s not one anyone gets to make. It gets decided randomly, on the basis of available beds.*

  And anyway, I was planning to avoid both places. By snitching or whatever else it took.

  I was willing to tell the Feds everything I knew, about the mob in general and David Locano in particular. True, I had once loved Skinflick like a brother. His parents had been closer to me than my own parents. Also true, I loved Magdalena so badly that I would have sold the Locanos and anything else I had access to in an instant, for one hour alone with her, anywhere.

  I just didn’t know how long to wait. If it turned out that I would somehow walk, it would be crazy to tangle with the mob unnecessarily. But if I waited too long, and got convicted, it would be a lot harder to plea-bargain.

  Locano’s guys were smart enough not to threaten Magdalena—or me, for that matter—directly, because they knew that if they did I’d start thinking about how to hurt them, and never stop. But they didn’t have to say much. I was in a cage, and they were out there, where she was. The ones who came to visit mentioned her all the time: “The case is bullshi’. It’s shi’. You’ll be back out wit your girl again. Wha’s her name? Magdalena? Nice name. Gray girl. You’ll be wit her in no time. We’ll sen her somin.”

  Magdalena herself came to visit me four times a week.

  Visitation rights are looser in jail than they are in prison— because Hey, you’re innocent!—and apparently they’re looser in Fed than they are in State. You’re not allowed to touch, but you can sit at opposite ends of a long metal table that has no divider, as long as the prisoner keeps his hands in sight on the tabletop. The visitor can keep her hands wherever, and do things to herself with them while you talk, and after a few weeks you don’t even think about the guards being there when this happens. And if you and she are fast you can stand at the same time, and you can kiss her or she can get her fingers into your mouth before you’re pulled apart and she’s thrown out and you get searched by a dentist. Because the warning that she won’t be allowed back turns out to be bullshit. And the guards, those sorry derelicts, are all willing to lie for you.

  I loved Magdalena more and more with each visit and with each of her strange, formal letters. “In the quartet they keep telling me I am playing out of time. I am, because I am thinking about you. But it makes me play better, not worse, as I am so much more alive then, so I do not feel I am letting them down. I play best when I play from my heart, and you are my heart, I love you.”

  If that feels to you like one of those fucked-up prison romances where the obese woman writes to the celebrity wife-murderer, I don’t care. It saved my life, and my sanity. Her visits blotted out the squalidness of that shithole for days after she left.

  Magdalena talked to Donovan more than I did. After he suggested to both of us separately that we might want to get married in case she was subpoenaed,* Magdalena told me that of course she would. That she would do anything.

  I told her I didn’t want to, because I wanted to marry her for real. She said, “Don’t be stupid. We’ve been married for real since October Third.”

  I’ll leave that one for you to figure out. It would be like trying to describe what the surface of the sun looks like.

  Not that anyone seriously thought Magdalena would be subpoenaed. She would break a jury’s heart like that.

  She brought me books, which were hard to read because of the noise. Then she brought me earplugs.

  And, without telling me, she began the process of applying to become a Federal prison guard, so she’d have a chance in hell of being near me if things went badly.

  Early in the summer of 2000, I was taken out of my cell and brought to an office in the FMCCNR I’d never been to before. That itself was not unusual, since every couple of weeks or so there was an “initial appearance” or “pretrial hearing” or whatever, to verify things like that I was who I claimed to be or who the Feds claimed I was, and that a crime had been committed at all. But this time the guard left me in the office alone and went and stood outside. Which felt extremely strange, even though I had wrist-waist and ankle cuffs on.

  I immediately searched for a phone to call Magdalena. There wasn’t one. The wooden desk, like the wooden bookshelves, was empty. The wooden chair was the old slat-back kind. Out the window there was a ledge, and if I’d wanted to escape that would have been a good time for it. For a minute or two I considered it, and I was still looking out the window when the door opened behind me and Sam Freed came in.

  He was in his late sixties then, immediately likable in a wrinkled gray suit. When I started around the desk he held a hand up and said, “Sit.” So I took the desk chair and he pulled over one of the ones along the walls.

  “I’m Sam Freed,” he said. I’d never heard of him.

  “Pietro Brnwa.” There was something about him that made you feel, even in your orange jumpsuit and leg irons, like a human being.

  “I’m with the Justice Department,” he said. “Though I’m mostly retired now.”

  That’s what he said. He didn’t say, for instance, “I invented WITSEC,” though that would have been true. He didn’t say, “I broke the mob’s back, and
the people I gave immunity to have the lowest recidivism rates ever seen.”

  Of course, he also didn’t say that he was one of the most loathed people in law enforcement. Because sure, he’d struck the mafia a deathblow, but only at the cost of setting a bunch of scumbags up with new lives, which most cops and even Feds found unforgivable.

  He was Jewish, of course. Who else would fight that hard for justice in a way guaranteed to make him a pariah? His father had worked the Fulton Street Fish Market, paying 40 percent off the top to Albert Anastasia.

  Like I say, though, at the time I had never heard of him. “Huh,” I said.

  He said, “I heard about you from Baboo Marmoset.”*

  “I don’t know who that is,” I said.

  “Indian kid. Doctor. Long hair. He did your physical a couple of months ago.”

  “Oh, right.” I remembered him now, though only someone of Freed’s generation would say he had long hair. Marmoset had talked on the phone and done my paperwork at the same time he’d examined me. Then he’d said, “You’re fine.” I was pretty sure that was the extent of our interaction.

  “I’m surprised he remembered me,” I told Freed. “He seemed a bit distracted.”

  Freed laughed. “He always does. God knows what he’d be capable of if you could get his attention. I’ll tell you a story.”

  Freed put his feet up on the desk. “My wife and I like to go out to dinner theater,” he said. “These things at a Chinese restaurant where some actors stage a crime and you have to solve it. It’s ridiculous, but it feeds us and it feeds the actors, so there you have it.

  “Sometimes Baboo comes along. He never seems to pay attention at all. He’s usually got some date, in fact. Spends the whole night with his face in her boobs or else checking his voice mail. At the end of the evening, though, when it’s time to guess who committed the crime, he’s always right.”

  “No kidding,” I said.

  “None,” Freed said. “Anyway, he’s the best judge of character I know. And I’ve known a few.”

  He didn’t say, “Like Jack and Bobby Kennedy,” though he could have.

  He said, “Baboo called you ‘an interesting and possibly redeemable individual.’ By which I assume he meant not only that you deserved a second chance, but that you probably had enough information to trade to earn one.”

  I shook my head. I already felt like Freed was someone I didn’t want to disappoint, and I didn’t want to lie to him, either. “I barely talked to that guy. And I’m not willing to testify,” I said.

  “Okay. It can wait. But not for long. Speed the plow. The opportunity won’t keep forever.”

  “I’m not interested in entering protection unless I have to. I’m not ready for it.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Freed said. “Protection’s not what you think. It’s not about becoming someone else. It’s about becoming who you were meant to be in the first place.”

  “That’s a little deep for me,” I said.

  “I don’t believe that for a second,” he said. “Think about what your grandfather would have wanted.”

  “My grandfather?”

  “I’m sorry to get personal. But I think I know what he thought of you, and what he’d think about you being here, and I think you know too.”

  “Do you do this to all potential witnesses?” I said.

  “Absolutely not,” he said. “But Baboo Marmoset thinks you can take it.”

  “He doesn’t even know me!”

  Freed shrugged. “The man has a gift. He probably knows you better than you know yourself.”

  “That wouldn’t take much,” I said.

  “No it wouldn’t, toughguy,” Freed said. He swung his legs off the desk and stood up. “But I think you know what this mob stuff is worth. It gives you a couple of headwaiters kissing your ass because you pay them and they’re afraid of you, and it takes everything else away. Including that lovely young lady of yours.”

  Somehow when he said it, it didn’t bother me. But intellectually I knew better.

  “You’re conning me,” I said.

  “Takes one to know one,” he said. He opened the door but turned around before he went out. “You know, if I was conning you, I’d say this: Why did the the mob want the Karchers dead?”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” I said.

  He ignored me. “You saw how isolated the Karchers were. Who could they identify? You think they knew people higher up in the chain?”

  I just looked at him.

  “They didn’t. They knew people below them. That’s why the mob wanted them gone. So the business itself could keep going, under a different subcontractor.

  “I’ll be in touch later. But if I was conning you I’d ask you to think about that, and what your grandfather would have said about it.”

  Freed was right about the Karchers, of course. It had occurred to me a million times before.

  But that night I slept without my earplugs so I wouldn’t have to think about it.

  The trial itself you already know about, you child of Fox News, you. But you have no idea how injuringly boring it was, even to me. The Feds had been running “Operation Russian Doll” for months before I stepped in and fucked things up for them, so there were thousands of financial documents that anyone capable of getting a job in the private sector would have known better than to read to the jury. And which had almost nothing to do with the Italian mafia. Or, as the FBI calls it, “the LCN.”

  “LCN” stands for la cosa nostra—“the our thing,” or “the thing of ours.” I have never once heard anyone in the mafia actually say “la cosa nostra,” let alone “LCN.” Let alone “the LCN.” Why would they? It’d be like a bunch of French criminals calling themselves the LJNSQ, for “the le je ne sais quoi.”*

  Anyway, for a while the trial was just a slog. Then, about ten days into opening arguments—right after they played the recording of my 911 call from the gas station, which a speech expert said was my voice “to about eighty-five percent certainty”—the prosecution produced the Mystery Evidence, and the whole thing took off.

  The Mystery Evidence, of course, was a skinned, severed hand, which the prosecution said they would prove had once belonged to Tits.

  The Hand was disgusting. You had to admit that it looked too delicate to be anything other than female, but also just a little too large to be that of an adolescent Ukrainian girl. And it was easy enough to take the Feds’ word for it that the Hand had been found outside the compound, right near where the car had been parked that they said they were going to prove I had driven away. And that the knife marks all over the Hand made it clear that it had been skinned, and not, say, picked over by some weasels or whatever.* It was a thing of deep horror. Particularly when the Feds projected it, huge, onto a screen at the front of the courtroom.

  Naturally, Ed Louvak objected, but Donovan had been right: although it ran contrary to Brady v. Maryland for the prosecution to have kept the Hand secret from the defense, the judge allowed it into evidence anyway, since it was so grotesque and so likely to generate press coverage. And also, I suppose, because it was the only thing likely to get a conviction.

  You have to understand that, relatively speaking, July 2000 was a terrific time to be tried for murder. Five years earlier the O. J. Simpson trial had managed to slander the concept of circumstantial evidence, which up to that point had been the basis for almost every criminal conviction in history. Circumstantial evidence includes everything except physical evidence and direct eyewitness testimony. If you buy a speargun, tell everyone in the bar you’re about to go shoot someone with it, then come back in an hour with the gun but not the spear and say you did it, that’s all just circumstantial evidence. The O.J. trial managed to make even physical evidence look suspect, because any gap in the “chain of custody” made it conceivable the cops had fucked with it.

  And eyewitness testimony, by that time, had been under fire for years as being unreliable. Which it is. Though in my
case there wasn’t going to be much anyway—just Mike the Grocery Boy, on what he might or might not have seen in his rearview mirror.

  The Feds, meanwhile, had barely any physical evidence other than the Hand. There was mud all over the Farm, but none of the footprints in it were large enough to be mine.*

  So the Hand had been scrupulously protected, and supposedly kept under direct observation at all times from the moment it was found. Which seems silly. I mean, whose job is that? Do you have to sit in a refrigerator to do it? But it got the point across.

  The Feds didn’t even have to DNA-test it—which they couldn’t have, because they had no reliable sample from Tits to compare it to. The O.J. trial had made DNA testing seem like a conspiracy by a bunch of assholes with jobs to fool jurors they thought were stupid. The defense was welcome to DNA-test the Hand—and come across as smart-ass elitist dickheads, for a result the jury would just ignore anyway—but the prosecution wasn’t about to.

  It all confused the shit out of me.

  I mean, there it was. The Hand. I couldn’t remember whether Tits had had long nails or not. But it was somebody’s hand. If the Karcher Boys hadn’t cut it off, then somebody else had, which meant I had to think about whether someone was setting me up.

  But who, and why?

  The prosecution referred to the Hand constantly, no matter what boring shit they were shoveling in the foreground. Like the surveillance tapes, which had so much static that the prosecution had to project subtitles up at the front, causing half the courtroom—and two thirds of the jury—to fall asleep. Until the prosecution said “Bear in mind they’re talking about the kind of vicious criminal who would do this to a woman’s hand,” and put the image of the Hand back on the screen, and everybody woke back up.

  Things got more interesting when the prosecution started showing photos of the Farm, including the storm cellar, and then again when they finally called Mike the Grocery Boy to the stand about driving us into the compound in his truck. Mike was impressively sullen, and he got a laugh by saying, “From what I saw, it could have been Bigfoot back there.” The prosecution also began to lead up to calling the imprisoned mob turncoat, which might have been interesting.