Newjack (52 page)

Prison now, at age twenty-six, didn’t seem so scary, and time didn’t weigh on him as it once had, though he was serving a sentence of ten years. In fact, he told me, he was lucky that it was only ten years. The immigrant victims of two of the robberies he had been charged with most recently had refused to testify against him. (I knew that this kind of reluctance was one reason that immigrants were often muggers’ targets.) He said he didn’t even know
the exact date he was keeplocked until but thought it was later that month. “And it’s a good thing it doesn’t bother me, Conover, because it isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last.”

About ten days before Christmas, it snowed overnight. Delacruz and his neighbor, Perez, were two of several keeplocks who reasonably opted against recreation in the yard the next day: Inmates had no waterproof footwear. When I peered into his cell later that morning, after my other inmates had all gone to their programs, I saw Delacruz dozing. Perez, who had started acting friendly toward me since my dealings with Delacruz, was staring straight ahead. I had a few moments of free time.

“So,” I said, leaning against the bars and letting a moment of silence pass. “What’s up?”

For a few moments, Perez didn’t answer. He may have been deciding whether to tell me. “Thinking about the robberies I’m going to do when I get out,” he finally said, with the candor of his neighbor. “A year you plan. You think I’m not going to pull it off?”

I raised an eyebrow. Delacruz, I noticed, had sat up on his bunk and was rubbing his eyes.

“I know it’s not a positive thing, but what else do I have to do here?” Thinking through the robberies in advance, he reasoned, ensured their smooth execution. His preferred targets were pharmacies and “numbers joints.” The planning involved considering every contingency: what to do if they reached for a gun (shoot them, of course, even though you wouldn’t want to), what to do if someone else entered the store, where to go afterward, and so on.

“You’re thinking about specific places when you do the planning?”

“Sure,” he said, as though it were obvious.

“They’re in poorer neighborhoods?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell me something I’ve always wondered. Why don’t you ever rob people in richer neighborhoods? They probably expect it less and are carrying more. You wouldn’t have to rob as many times then.”

Here, Delacruz joined the conversation, explaining that you might get more cash robbing a rich person on the street but that you’d have to be in their neighborhood, and judges would hit you harder for that: They would know the victim was white because of the name, the address, etc. It was much safer, obviously, to rob less prosperous people of color.

Still, spur-of-the-moment jobs could land you in trouble. Like the last one. Perez had robbed somebody his first day out from a previous bid, he told me, using a gun borrowed from a friend. He hadn’t gotten caught, but it had made him feel reckless.

“It’s like I’m addicted,” he admitted. “I’m not into drugs. I don’t like hanging out with other criminals,” he told me. “I always do the jobs alone.” His friends didn’t even know where he got the money. “They probably think it’s from selling drugs.” And money was the sole reason for them.

I didn’t want to argue with Perez, and entertained no illusions that it was within my power to change his ways. But I had to ask: “You know robbery, um, hurts people. Scares the shit out of them. Makes them poorer. I’ve been robbed, so I know. How do you justify that?”

“Conover, you know if you got a felony record you can’t even get a job at McDonald’s? Plus, you’d need a GED. You can’t get any job.”

I said I didn’t believe that you couldn’t get any job, that I knew people who had. Here, Delacruz jumped in again.

“Okay, maybe, but it’s going to pay shit and it’s going to take a couple months. And what are you going to wear while you’re waiting? In the ghetto you get no respect if you don’t look right, have a car, a Mercedes-Benz—those things. No woman will go out with you. Don’t get me wrong, Conover
—I’m
going straight this time. But it’s gonna cost me. That’s reality.”

To me it was a weird contrast: the urgency about getting money on the outside versus the seeming lack of urgency about getting out of prison. But then I decided that his blasé attitude about serving time might be a pose. I saw Delacruz that afternoon checking a dictionary, making sure to spell correctly all the words in a legal appeal to get his sentence reduced.

I’d been working up to asking Delacruz about his poem again, to see if now he’d tell me the exact words tattooed on his back. But as I walked into B-block one afternoon, I saw Sergeant Murray escorting him out of the block with all his belongings. Murray later told me he’d been taken to 5-Building after the superintendent received an anonymous letter claiming that when Delacruz got off keeplock, he’d be stabbed over money he owed. I wondered what Delacruz hadn’t told me. I remembered how often he did not take advantage of keeplock rec, and realized now that he might have
been afraid. I wondered whether he himself might have written that letter.

I left Sing Sing before I found out the answers to my questions. But months later, when I had become a civilian and Delacruz had become an inmate at a medium-security prison, I wrote him a letter, with my post office box as a return address. I gave him some news about myself, then closed with a question: “What were those lines of poetry on your back, anyway?”

To my delight, he sent them to me in Spanish. I began my detective work. The library had plenty of editions of Anne Frank’s diary, but not one included a poem. I consulted a couple of experts. Anne Frank had written some poetry, but nothing like the lines Delacruz had sent me, they said. I wondered if Delacruz was somehow mistaken. But then I decided that, addiction to robbery aside, he seemed like a together enough person to keep straight the source of a poem he had inscribed on his own back. I sat down and read the diary one more time, looking for a clue, a reference, a snippet of something that I might have missed. I found it on the last page, in the very last words—not poetry in stanzas, just Frank’s prose.

Delacruz had translated into Spanish from an English translation of Anne Frank’s original Dutch. But the gist was still there. It was unmistakable.

It was easier to stay incurious as an officer. Under the inmates’ surface bluster, their cruelty and selfishness, was almost always something ineffably sad.

The signs were few and sporadic: Perry Como carols played over the PA system in the waiting room of the commissary, seemingly to piss off the inmates; the wilting, Charlie Brown-type tree on Hospital, fourth floor; the memo, read to us at lineup several days in a
row, about how this was a tough time of year for inmates, about how we should be on the lookout for signs of depression and encourage inmates who needed it to seek counseling “or the companionship of their fellow man.” This last line, with its homoerotic undertone, provoked smirks the first time it was read and unabashed laughter by the third or fourth. Even the sergeant reading it had to suppress a laugh.

And then there was another memo, read for several days beginning around December 20, about how anyone who even
thought
about “banging in” (calling in sick) between now and New Year’s would need a separate doctor’s note for every single day and even then would have his records subject to disciplinary review. I had been considering that very thing, the thought of Christmas in prison being so depressing, but the memo pretty much torpedoed the idea.

On the day of Christmas Eve, I supervised the distribution of little holiday “gift boxes” containing useless toiletries and a few snacks, compliments of a charity. And then I watched inmate representatives figure out how to distribute to every inmate the “holiday cheer” they had chosen: a can of Coke and two bags of chips. The cognitive dissonance grew. Standing on the mess-hall bridge, two sergeants waited for inmates to get out of earshot and then wished us all a Merry Christmas. The officer I was with disapproved of this well-wishing.

“This is the time of year when a lot happens, and it’s because officers let their guard down,” he warned.

Certainly it was true that a lot happened this time of year. Anecdotal evidence indicated there was an increased appetite for drugs and alcohol. Just the month before, an inmate on C-gallery had killed another by stabbing him in the heart—apparently, right in front of an officer (“there were gallons of blood,” I was told)—the first murder in a New York State prison that year. A deputy superintendent whose office I passed on my way out told me he was staying late because two years earlier there had been a Christmas Eve homicide on M-gallery. And just as there is said to be a jump in wife beatings on Super Bowl Sunday, so it was true that suicides in prison often occurred around the holidays.

Though it fell on a Thursday, Christmas was handled like a weekend day at prison: no programs and few runs. This should have meant an easier-than-normal day, but I think that for most of us, the relative inactivity just meant more time to feel shitty about
being in prison on Christmas. Everyone’s mood seemed subdued, inmates and guards alike. It wasn’t just because we couldn’t participate in Christmas (though a few inmates had visitors); it was because, as an officer, you mainly had to deny it. Christmas spirit—generosity, forgiveness, goodwill toward men—ran pretty much counter to what we were supposed to be doing. Prison was for punishment; it wasn’t ours to forgive. Kindness, as Nigro had said back in the Academy, was taken for weakness and exploited. Goodwill didn’t enter the picture. This job was about maintaining power, and goodwill could erode that power.

Unless, I thought, it was surreptitious. This idea came to me when I took some men on a package run—the package room was open because of the potential for late-arriving Christmas presents. While the inmates milled around, waiting their turn at the window, I got the package room officers to let me inside, where I sat in a comfortable chair. They were pretty swamped. Bags with inmates’ names on them filled practically every available space. An extra officer was in there, X-raying new boxes and then going through them, throwing out things that weren’t allowed. The discard box was large, and it was quickly filled with toiletries that contained alcohol; clothing colored blue, black, gray, or orange; packages of food that hadn’t been factory-sealed; and … cigarettes.

Cigarette packages that lacked a New York State revenue stamp—cigarettes purchased out of state, for example, or on Indian reservations—were not allowed to be distributed to inmates, and were apparently thrown away. I thought of the inmates I knew whom nobody was likely to remember at Christmas. There were lots of them. My heart went out to the most pathetic. When no one was looking, I stuffed about a dozen of the cigarette packs into my jacket.

Mainly, I gave them to the bugs. One was Addison, a tall, middle-aged black man on W who for weeks had sported a Mohawk; he seemed like a furtive Manhattan homeless person, which perhaps he once had been. I’d had to escort him a few places, after which he didn’t seem as scary as he had initially. He was fearful of other inmates, not of officers, and spent half his time looking over his shoulder for would-be attackers. He spent the other half scanning the floor for cigarette stubs. He was an inveterate collector of these, which, in prison, tended to be extremely short. As I had paused for him to add to his handful one day, he sang a verse from “King of the Road”:

I told him about an old hobo I’d met who claimed you could tell the state of the economy by the length of butts on the ground, and Addison laughed and said, “Maybe so.”

He was just starting his second “state bid,” he told me, having done numerous “skid bids” for turnstile jumping, etc. His nephew, he told me, was locked on the same gallery.

He came from a fucked-up world. I gave him three packs.

I gave Larson a pack. I didn’t think he smoked, but cigarettes were like money.

I gave Cameron (“Don’t get conned by Conover the con man”), who for days had been asking me what I was going to bring him for Christmas, two packs and a slice of spice cake from my lunch bag.

I gave three packs to a bug on R who was forever cadging cigarettes and also had an incredible body odor problem.

I did it all quietly, placing the packs on the cell bars as I walked by, trying not to let the recipients see me and get something on me, though I was planning to resign soon after the new year. When I walked back by the cell of the stinky bug, he was handing a fresh Newport to his neighbor, who was asking him quizzically, “Hey, how’d you get these?”

I gave a pack to the Colombian.

I gave a pack to the old bug who’d wanted Chapstick. Maybe he could trade the pack for some.