“He who loses wealth loses much. He who loses a friend loses more. But, he who loses courage loses all.”
– Miguel de Cervantes
An attorney sent me an article in the New Yorker written by a journalist who had written about prison, C.O.s, inmates and the vicissitudes of life for those behind bars. She was writing about it from the outside, looking in. After five years of writing about it from the inside looking out, I found it amusing. Not funny, but amusing. After all, with a degree in mental health I was running a therapy group for murderers and assassins. The Master’s at NYU and post-graduate training in Psychoanalysis hadn’t included any pointers on drawing out killers so that their aggression was mollified. In fact, one guy really looked like he wanted me to be his next victim.
But, having been brought up by hardworking people who enjoyed a good joke there were times when I’d sift through the debris of my existence looking for gems. Here’s a sample from one day “behind the wall.” Who knows, maybe the New Yorker might want to print somethng about reality someday?
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“Among the new people coming in was Mike, a Sicilian assassin who was a friend of Santelli’s.
Now, there were two Sicilians, one who was White Collar and another who was a contract killer for the Mob. I liked Mike, though. I was okay with assassins. Everybody’s got a right to make a living, right? And, he was a nice guy. We’d been in a therapy group for 13 weeks that I ran at times. To me, Hit men were several steps above Charlie, the Pussy Killer who’d emptied his .357 magnum into his ex-wife’s vagina. For me, I questioned the sanity of the prison’s two female administrators or wardens, who were deferential towards him. They seemed oblivious to Charlie’s crime.
Now I had a group of Italians for friends. So, I told our assassin about my roots in Brooklyn and being brought up by another Sicilian, Al Gallo, a family man who lived in my building when I was a kid. I also mentioned Anastasia and the Profacci’s, with whom Gallo was associated.
I had just finished “Opening Belle,” a book about Wall Street and the glass ceiling and I was re-reading ‘The Godfather.’ Tony, who was part Polish and part Sicilian was complaining that Mike was too close to the “moulignones,” making him untrustworthy. What bothered me wasn’t that I was too close to the Blacks. He was too close to Charlie and his ‘Nigas,’ a special kind of sneaky, anti-white, Black coward who would screw you. Melanese meant eggplant and Moulignone was slang, not Italian. So, now there was a growing white, Italian, Sicilian contingent.
The two women who ran the prison came in and I ignored them but Charlie ran up to them and was all smiles.
I detested the women for being so weak, pandering to an obvious fraud who appeared to have gotten them to respond. He not only had murdered and tortured a woman but was a dangerous manipulator. The Superintendent, with 1950’s hair and her Deputy, superciliously walked around together. Despite my liberal attitudes on feminism, I had zero respect for them.
Having Mike in the dorm was a good thing as far as I was concerned. I’d rather have a contract killer than a sniveling, grasping, thieving kid who wanted to steal your teeth if he could get something for them. Mike, at least, had values — like Santelli who looked down upon Tony. He was a half-Sicilian, who’d been rounded up in an “Enterprise corruption” case when his door on Staten Island had been rammed open. According to Santelli, Mike considered Tony a “wannabe.”
Santelli and I were going to the Gym. He did his exercise, which was speed-walking. He looked like he’d just escaped from Dachau but walked earnestly. He made me look like a straggler. That’s how fast he was. He managed to do 4 miles in the time that I only did little more than 3, partly because I’d also done some light weights.
When he slowed to talk me I asked him about his fellow Sicilian. I considered myself a bit of an expert because of my background in Brooklyn as a kid, but also because I was ensconced in re-reading ‘The Godfather.’
“If Mike was hired and did the job, I thought the deal was that they took care of you?”
“Who?” said Santelli.
“Who?” I thought. Is he kidding?
You didn’t have to be an expert to know that short-timers were expected to keep their mouths shut. Omerta and all of that shit. But, with long-term sentences the whole thing got dicey. RICO cases were successful because wiseguys started to rethink things when 20 years was the offer on the table.
“Mike,” I said, “you know, the boys?”
“Oh, well, he’s been in for 27 years. His father and mother have made sure he was okay. But, his family’s been taken care of all this time.”
That sort of cleared it up. His father had to be Sicilian. Was he perhaps one of the boys? And had an assurance that his family had been taken care of all of that time.
Mike was about 6 foot tall, graying short hair, a glance that was cast slightly downward and a minor Brooklyn accent. He seemed like a gentle guy but, was easily and quickly roused to anger. That had come out once in the Law Library when I had made copies for him.
He’d gotten irritated. He’d been imprisoned in 1990 or 1991 and was about 50 now. Since then, especially after I had been in group with him, we got along. And, that was before I found out that he had two bodies. He had now been in for 27 years and had taken a plea of 19 years to Life.
I now understood why he had taken such a draconian plea.
“He’s goin’ to the Board next month,” said Santelli as he rounded the court with me.
“He probably won’t get it, though.”
“Probably not.”
“With murder, they usually make them do 30 to 35 years. And, with a contract killing and two bodies?”
“Yeah, I agree.”
“Murder is one thing. A contract killing is another.”
“What about Charlie?” asked Santelli.
“Well, she was a cop. He was a cop. They don’t like rogue cops. He may never get out.” I said. That thought did not sadden me.
“Yeah.”
“Like that guy Harris. He’s already got 40 years in. They told him he’s not getting out.”
“What’d he do?”
“Killed his girlfriend, chopped her up. They say he sent the pieces to her family.”
“They take a dim view of that.”
In the midst of this discussion, CO Colgate wanted to know if I had gotten my helmet yet — his feeble joke about my having repeatedly being hit in the head by basketballs as I rounded the court — and he had made a report about it to protect himself – and his pension.
A brain bleed in prison? Good luck with that, I thought!
Then I was on the walkway with Cuba.
“You goin’ home, Mac,” said Cuba excitedly.
Why didn’t I think that? I was being very cautious. Very superstitious about something, anything, going wrong.
“Well, I’ll tell you, if it weren’t for the fact that you told Cleveland and then I talked to McCoy, I’d be more worried. But, they know the score and they know the situation. I’m glad you took care of that.”
“Lissen, Mac, I woodna’ letchu down. Dey gotchya back. Don’ worry. Nothin’s gonna happen. Trus’ me.”
The entire staff of the prison knew I was in danger — targeted by Charlie, the killer.
I got back to the dorm and spoke to my eldest son who was doing well in school, except for math. We spoke about getting a tutor. Then I spoke to my wife about money. Big mistake. There wasn’t any. She hadn’t been able to pay February rent yet and now it was March.
That depressed me.
“You really shouldn’t come up to visit until you’re able to pay it, baby.”
“What’s the difference?” she said, resignedly.
“Listen, think about it, please. Just come up to pick me up if I get Parole. okay?”
That ended the conversation. I was depressed and unhappy. She was doing everything she could and with the foreclosures on all of my property arranged bt the DA and the Town of Southampton and the harassment by the Town — for having rented to Latinos and Blacks while I had exposed political corruption — the Code Enforcement Police were telling tenants not to pay rent. It was all closing in on me. Their hatred for me and the Latino and Black workers was irrational and boundless.
After speed walking the day before, I was depleted. Of course, I slept in a dorm with 59 other guys who coughed, sneezed, farted and talked all night long. Several had very deep, hacking coughs that did not sound good. A couple of them had been called to the Infirmary for follow-up on their TB tests and I did not find that amusing.
“One a the guys has HIV and cut his hand, bleeding all over,” confided Santelli. “He also had Hep-C.”
“Well, now I feel MUCH better.”
“Aren’t they supposed to quarantine these people?”
“Sure, but why run up expenses? One guy with Hep-C just left. Maybe your guy was the token Hep-C guy. You know, we’re all PC here, after all. Right?”
He shook his head.
“They don’t give a shit what they expose us to, do they?”
“Hey, you see any Polonium laying around here? Of course they care!”
They got into a discussion about cleanliness and cleaning, in general.
“You know, I had an environmental clean-up company.”
“Yeah, I remember your telling me that. What kind of jobs did you handle?”
“Oh, we had everything from cesspool back-ups to suicides. The last one we had was a murder.”
“Oh, so you’re a Cleaner. Like the guys that they call in the Intelligence business when they need to sanitize and eliminate the scene of a ‘wet job’?”
In a number of Intelligence novels a Cleaner was called to tidy up after an assassination.
He laughed. “Well, something like that. We usually would come in after the cops called us to clean up and the insurance company had been alerted. There’s a lot of money in that.”
“Like what?”
“Oh, like, for a small room in an apartment, could be $10,000, $20,000 to do the job. We’d rip up the carpet and throw it away. Sometimes the furniture too. Depends.”
“Depends on what?” I said, curiously.
“Well, with suicide, sometimes there were a couple of rooms involved.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the best ones are called ‘Walkers.’”
“Walkers?” I said. “What the hell is a ‘Walker?’”
“Well, with a murder, or a suicide, the guy gets shot or slices his wrists. And, then he walks around. You know, he spreads it all around the apartment. The bill could be MUCH higher then.”
I laughed. “Yeah, that sounds profitable. So, what was your strangest job?”
“We got a call from the police that some guy had been murdered in his building and we get there. Nobody knew that he was gay but when we got there, the guy’s laying in the hallway handcuffed, shackled, gagged and bound. And, he had a sword up his ass.”
“His boyfriend had killed him and let him bleed out all over the hall carpet. We got a nice check on that one.”
“No shit?”
“Then, there was the miscarriage at a McDonald’s. That was nasty. Hell of a clean-up. Girl just went in for a burger and exploded.”
“She exploded? So, you rip up carpets and throw furniture out. What happens if there was, like, a Manson murder?”
He laughed. “Well, in one case we had to clean the walls as well as the floors and dump the furniture. It had been a murder scene and one of the victims was a Walker. So, we hadda clean brain matter off the walls and put Kilz on it.”
“You had to put what on it?”
“Kilz. It’s a chemical you put on before the walls can be repainted.”
“Good name.”
“Then, another case we had to get some guy out of the tub.”
“Why?”
“Well, he committed suicide and he was laying there for almost a month before they found him.”
“He must’ve been cute by the time you got there.”
Santelli laughed. “Yeah, he was all blown up. But, we didn’t actually have to get him out. The EMT’s did that part,” he continued.
“How’d they get him out?”
“Pricked him with a pin. You know, they blow up like that when they’re old and left to rot.”
“I would think? Some really elegant stuff.”
“When you gotta go, you gotta go,” he added.
“But, as my father used to say,” I said. ‘Who wants to be in the plane when it’s the pilot’s time to go, right?’”
He looked at me suspiciously.”How’d you know about that?”
“What?”
“About the plane crash?”
“What plane crash?” I said.
“I was in a plane crash, didn’t you know that?”
“No,” I said, looking at Santelli. He appeared to actually be concerned. As if I had known something that I shouldn’t have known. “That was a joke my father used to tell. But, you know, my wife says I’m a Warlock.”
He looked at me suspiciously.
“WERE YOU in a plane crash?”
“I was coming back from Palm Beach one day and I was sitting next to this 90 year old woman who was dressed to the nines. Suddenly, the plane, a 747, touched down, and the landing gear collapsed. Suddenly, the wing was sheared off from dragging along the ground and the plane started to spin around. When I was able to look out the window all I could see was a line of trucks and foam everywhere. They put up the chute and this 90 year old woman winds up in my lap. We were sliding down the chute together. It was amazing.”
“So, nobody was hurt?”
“No. I was very lucky.”
“Sexy too, huh?” I said.
Copyright 2025 Confessions from the Gulag
SoHo Journal 