Newjack (50 page)

Four B-block officers—Pitkin, De Los Santos, Garces, and Lopez—had gone out drinking. At a Queens strip joint called the Playhouse, Pitkin—a short, pugnacious, extroverted officer who some felt had a Napoleon complex—ran into an ex-con in the men’s room. The man had been a B-block inmate with, apparently, a long-standing grudge against Pitkin. He recognized the guard and, possibly as a prank, held a ballpoint pen to his neck. The two tussled, and the fight spilled out into the main room, where the three other officers joined in, not only subduing the man but, according to the stories, handcuffing and then
continuing
to “subdue” him, all in full view of the other customers. One officer, during this final phase, apparently drew his gun to keep other patrons at bay. The police were called and, upon arrival, arrested the officers on assault charges.

All were released pending an investigation, but we learned the next day that Sing Sing had demanded their badges. They were suspended without pay until the matter was resolved. Soon, investigators from the Department’s Office of the Inspector General were interviewing them, and, not long after, we learned that the district attorney had decided to bring felony assault charges to a grand jury.

All the information was passed around piecemeal, but this consistent story emerged and pieces of it were confirmed to me by superior officers; one lieutenant, while signing my logbook, told me, sotto voce, that he had been the one to accept their badges. Most jailhouse gossip quickly makes its way to the inmates, but officers were uniformly insistent about keeping them ignorant about the story of the Playhouse Four, as the group had come to be known. We’d whisper about it in stairways or around the OIC’s office.

“You heard?” I asked one officer from Yonkers—Camacho—who had been away on vacation. We were standing alone by the yard door. I told him.

“Payday” was his first reaction, and for the first time I realized that, yes, it had happened on one of the alternate Wednesdays when we were paid. Payday was party day. The story also seemed to reinforce one of Camacho’s most strongly held convictions: “Don’t ever hang out with COs!” he said vehemently. “When they’re together, they think they’re like—” He held his hands out as though to indicate an extremely big head. In other words, like the whole world is their cellblock.

Feliciano, as we stood next to each other in lineup one day, murmured, “You know that inmate who attacked Pitkin? Turns out he’s the cousin of my friend’s girlfriend.” The lesson for him was: When you are from the big city, it’s a very small world.

Another officer, Riordan, brought the matter up with me when we were near the center staircase during the morning count; no one could see or hear us. Any of the four would lose his job if convicted of a felony, he said. De Los Santos was especially vulnerable because, like me, he had worked less than a year as a guard and was still on probationary status—not afforded all the protections of union members, in other words.

“What I don’t get is why they had to handcuff him first,” said Riordan. “Just beat him up without handcuffing him!”

“I think it’s just lucky they didn’t shoot him, too,” I replied. Riordan took out his little two-inch knife, the maximum size we were allowed to have, and, seemingly on a whimsy, sliced up all the notices on the inmate bulletin board. One of them had to do with the upcoming inmate Jaycee rap contest. Riordan extemped his own rap: “I live in B-block, I’m in for life. / This big guy is Wally, he’s my wife.”

I wasn’t exactly sympathetic to the Playhouse Four, but I did find myself hoping they didn’t make it into the news. Around this same time, tabloids and local TV news shows were full of revelations about the abuse of a Haitian immigrant, Abner Louima, by New York City police officers who had shoved a broomstick up his rectum. Any further incident of police brutality would be tinder for this media fire. But, maybe because the Playhouse incident involved minorities on both sides, it got no press.

In late November, two months after the event, I arrived at work
to find the following message written on a chalkboard: PLAYHOUSE 4—NO TRUE BILL—JUSTIFIABLE FORCE. In other words, the grand jury had decided not to indict the officers. I felt myself breathe out a little of the collective sigh of relief. The guys, as other officers had noted, were just doing what we’d been taught to do inside prison when one of us was threatened: respond en masse. The handcuffs, pistol, and continued beating were unfortunate but, hey, when you all shared the same difficult circumstance—prison work—you tended to give each other the benefit of the doubt.

Still, the idea that there is a current of brutality in corrections work is hard to deny. Anyone who follows the news knows that you don’t have to look far to see correction officers at their worst. In New Jersey in 1995, jail guards processing inmates who had rioted at an immigration detention center ran them through a punching and kicking gauntlet, and later placed at least one of their heads in a flushing toilet and pulled out the pubic hairs of another with pliers. In Florida in 1999, nine guards armed with a stun gun conducted a putative cell extraction of an inmate that left him dead; they have refused to talk, and the state has classified it a homicide. (It seems relevant that the inmate was on Death Row for having killed a CO.) On Long Island in 1997, an inmate who annoyed his guards by calling out for methadone died of a ruptured spleen after two of them beat him in his cell. Before he died, it was alleged, they tried to get him to sign a statement saying that his injuries were accidental. (A joke I heard from a CO in a bar upstate: How many COs did it take to push the inmate down the stairs? None—he fell by himself.)

Every single story about guards seems to reinforce the brutal stereotype. When I see accused officers on television or read the remarks of union reps in the papers, what disappoints me is the universal denial that the events ever took place as alleged, or any admission of the obvious, that among the many good officers there are also a few bad ones. Even as what journalists call background—remarks made without attribution—guards don’t dare admit that all of us at times feel like strangling an inmate, that inmates taunt us, strike us, humiliate us in ways civilians could never imagine, and that through it all the guard is supposed to do nothing but stand there and take it. This information wouldn’t excuse the crimes, but it might chip away at the stereotype by making a
few of the incidents more
understandable
. Instead, guards adopt a siege mentality—a shutting up, a closing of ranks—that is law enforcement at its stupidest.

Abusive guards are out there, no question. They were not, by and large, the newer officers at Sing Sing, the ones I worked with in B-block. I think the constant turnover worked against the news-making brutality: B-block officers lacked the solidarity, the shared experience and mind-set of an upstate prison that could allow bad things to happen and be successfully covered up. But I could sense the potential for abusiveness in a couple of officers from outside the block whom I’d come into contact with or heard stories about.

In the early fall, I was working V-gallery, on the flats, just downstairs from W, when above me I heard a commotion. “House nigger!” an inmate shouted angrily. “Doing the white man’s work!”

“Bitch!” an officer shot back, along with some other things I couldn’t hear.

The action was taking place two floors up, on X-gallery. I stopped to watch, as did the officer working the yard door and another. We stood next to each other, and ascertained that the yelling officer, the one the inmate had called “house nigger,” was up there doing a cell search, probably as a result of a tip that the inmate had drugs or money or a weapon. He was a senior officer with a reputation for being tough; he sometimes came over to B-block on an assignment like this. Probably near fifty, he was built like a tank and always seemed to have his jaw clenched.

The inmate whose cell was being searched was a tough-looking guy in dreadlocks. Typically during a cell search, one officer did the searching while another stood with the inmate outside the cell. But in this case, there were two big officers assisting the search officer; they probably had expected some trouble.

The officer was pissed off and in the guy’s face, repeatedly calling him a bitch. The two other officers, one of them from my class, held their hands off their sides as though they expected action any instant.

“Fuck you, man, I’ll see you in New York!” said the inmate.

“Is that a threat?” asked the officer, now
very
close.

The inmate said something else, and the officer spit in his face. The inmate tried to retaliate but was brought down in an instant,
crunched by the three big guys. As they subdued him, the inmate next door started screaming out, berating the tough officer.

“You a low creature, man! I can’t believe you done that! You lower than dirt.” Inmates down below called up to ask what had happened.

“He spit on the brother.”

“Who did?”

“That officer from the hospital, the same one that snuffed Mad Dog when he was in the Visit Room.”

Then an inmate called out to us on the flats: “You all were witnesses!”

It was true, though we all knew it meant nothing. We’d never act as witnesses for an inmate. We hadn’t seen a thing. Then an inmate yelled out: “Plummer, how would you feel if that was your little brother or cousin?”

Plummer was one of the officers I was standing with. Like the tough officer upstairs, he was black. Plummer said nothing.

I wondered how the paperwork was going to be handled on this one. The next day at lineup, I asked Officer Z, the one I knew from the Academy, who had been standing there, about that part of it.

“Well, we all sat down in the sergeant’s office and talked about it,” he explained.

“And what did you say about the spitting?”

“Well, he didn’t spit at him. What happened was, he was yelling at the guy and some spit came out of his mouth—you know how it is when you’re yelling.” Ah. It was interesting to watch Officer Z maintain this story even though he knew that I knew it was made up. A time-honored law enforcement ritual, one of the few creative acts the job demanded: remembering an incident, revising it so that it happened as it should have, and then repeating that story until it sounded real.

When I thought back on the altercation, though, what stuck with me wasn’t the cover-your-ass part so much as the inmate calling down to Plummer and asking how he’d feel if it were his little brother. “My little brother wouldn’t have called him a house nigger,” I imagined Plummer saying to himself. But it went to the heart of the complicated situation for minority officers. They were working for the Man in an unequal, sometimes unjust society—I doubt that many would quibble with that description. It didn’t mean their position was untenable; it just meant they had to put up with a lot of shit that white officers did not.

House nigger
was the leading epithet. As one inmate on R-gallery had explained it to me, “In the old South, you had your house Negroes and your field Negroes. The house Negroes were the maids and the cooks and the butlers and such. And the field Negroes were the brothers and sisters out there with dirty hands. And even though slavery’s gone, technically, you still got your house Negroes and your field Negroes. And the difference between them is that the house Negro’s gonna be sad when the house burns down. And the field Negro ain’t.”

It wasn’t just the black officers who were compromised. In June, an escort officer up on T-and-Y had marched with a law enforcement contingent in New York City’s annual Puerto Rico Day parade. I was listening the next day when other officers asked him how it went. He shrugged. “Lot of people watching give you shit, man. They don’t cheer. I’m not going to do it next year.” It took no more explanation than that; his listeners all understood. “But I’m, like, Hey, at least I’ve got a job,” he added.

Outside the mess hall another day that fall, I spoke with Brown, a young black woman officer from the Bronx whom I respected, about the same general conflict. When inmates gave her trouble about her job, she said, she told them, “Do you know right from wrong? Then what’s the problem? Why you talking about the system, the man? There’s you and there’s me.”

But surely minority officers’ allegiance to the system was constantly tested in ways that white officers’ was not. Alcantara, for example, told of one day double-parking his van in Harlem so that he could drop off something at a relative’s apartment. With his wife waiting in the passenger seat, he had jumped out of the van and begun to jog down the sidewalk to the building’s front door. His wife watched in horror as two undercover cops appeared, trained their pistols on him, and told him to freeze. Alcantara said he did exactly as told, lying on the sidewalk, and then asked the officers to remove his wallet so they could see his badge. The crisis was over in a moment, but these kinds of things happened all the time. Smitty, who drove a Lexus with tinted windows, said he was pulled over in lower Westchester every month or two. As a young black man in a nice car, he took it for granted that he fit a police profile.