“If you want to know who your friends are get a jail sentence.”

— Charles Bukowski

As we celebrate the New Year I reflect upon those wonderful years walking along with a close killer friend and satisfying Sunday meal in Mess Hall and conviviality of prison life in a New York State Correctional Facility. Here’s an outtake from “Gulag” for those who like True Crime and enjoy how things really are in Criminal Justice.

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It was a warm August afternoon so I decided to risk a visit to the Mess Hall. The Sunday afternoon chicken was the closest thing to actual food provided at the prison. Julio walked along with me. 

His white poor-boy shirt, green chinos, and sneakers set off his half-grown beard, three missing front teeth and toothless lisp. I was in good company with my friend the killer.

I was accompanied by brutal, street-wise intelligence. Not the kind of mentor that I had been taught by in NYU Master’s program or, even at the Probation Department in the South Bronx. We began talking about two commonalities: Brooklyn and Wiseguys.

“Y’know Crazy Joe always had a BMW, did you know that?” he asked.

“No,” I said, surprised. “No one had foreign cars in those days.”

“Yeah,” he said, “after they killed him she offered it to me. I bought it for $2500 — I had plenty of drug money then, and business was good.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Yeah,” he said, “she had it for a long time before she sold it to me. Great car. I won’t own anything but a BMW now. They got a ‘7’ now, it’ll probably be a ‘9’ when I get out.

We entered the Mess Hall together.

I noticed the spot where the cutting had taken place the week before. My skin crawled thinking about it and I looked around –making sure that no one was getting too close to me. 

The fact that I was hanging out with a Godfather-type — someone from the REAL neighborhood who was a Hell’s Angel and a Latin King gave me a little sense of safety. And, at 8 years younger he knew the Gallos, the Gotti’s, and quite a few of the underground people that I met on my walking tour of Little Italy that one night. The fact that I also knew people who were connected and still above ground, also impressed Julio.

“You know when my book comes out,” he said, “a lotta people are gonna want to know me. My writer — the guy whose house I lived in behind his when I was on the run — is a sweet guy. He’s the best.”

“What do you mean in the back of his house?” They were sitting at the long stainless steel table in Mess Hall with about 20 others, scarfing down potatoes that were suspiciously creamy with not a single lump — processed soy shit. The collard greens were fresh — right out of  the can that very morning. And — REAL chicken, drumsticks and breasts that we could not test for steroids — as well as a mini container of “ice cream.” 

Henry had butted into our conversation as we returned to the dorm. He bemoaned his belly. He’d grown in recent months, having been cube restricted, and unable to go to Rec didn’t help the size of his stomach. He was now 50 lbs overweight.

“Yeah,” laughed Julio, “he has a weight problem. He can’t ‘wait’ to eat. You fat fuck,” he said to Henry.

Henry turned away and laughed but was pissed off. 

Julio was not afraid of anyone.

“Where was I?” he said.

“Oh,” I said, “yeah, you were talking about Gotti.” 

“He couldn’t keep his mouth shut. They had that club over on — you know – where it splits off from Houston at 6th Avenue. What’s that? Anyway, on that block was where they had their club — you know?”

“You mean in the building where they used the upstairs for meetings?”

“Yeah,” he said, “that’s it. Gravano ratted him out and got Witness Protection for all those murders and then they grabbed him in a drug deal and he was in State prison.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, “and Cutler just got Peter Gotti off.”

“No kidding,” I said, “great lawyer. Too bad the Dapper Don wasn’t a little more low key.”

“I know,” he said, “and Gravano needs to watch out. I heard there’s still contracts out.”

I was bordering on not wanting to know any more.

As we talked, having just had Sunday dinner, we watched inmates in the Yard. It was a mass of inactivity. No exercise at all. Then about six officers brought a guy out of the Yard and handcuffed him, leaned him against a guard’s house and frisked him. A crowd gathered in the dorm to watch as some guy was escorted away to the Box.

My stomach grumbled. It was my first Mess Hall meal in about a week and the third in about 6 months.

As I passed Motz in the Rec room heading towards the bathroom, I asked him if he’d enjoyed the meal.

“Oh,” he said,”I don’t eat that food.” 

“What do you mean?”

“I only eat the kosher diet. You know, it’s real food.” 

“Real food?”

“Oh,” he said, moving from one foot to the other with his dark glasses staring at me intently. He formulated his words carefully with his mouth as if he were preparing to argue a legal brief.

“I used to work in the Mess Hall.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” he said, “I had to get out of there. I couldn’t take it.” 

“Why? The early hours?”

He laughed. “No, I was in the military and saw action in the field, the hours don’t matter to me. No, I couldn’t take what went on there.”

“Like what?”

“Well, for one thing, the civilian food administrators would walk around and pick up food, meat, whatever, without gloves on and then drop it back on the trays. And, I would say ‘Hey, put gloves on’ and they were going to give me a ticket for opening my mouth.”

“Then I’d see guys, inmates, working there — and they had gloves on but they’d sit down and put their hands with their gloves in their pants and scratch their balls and scratch their asses and then handle the food. So, I’d say ‘you’re supposed to handle the food with gloves but you’re not supposed to put your gloves up your ass and then use those same gloves again’ and then again I was being threatened for opening my mouth.”

“Nice.”

“But, that wasn’t the worst part.” 

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” he said, “it was the food.” 

“What about it?”

“There are guys there that owned restaurants on the street. They would talk about the quality of the food. According to them it is the worst quality of food that can be bought. It’s really a step BELOW roadkill.”

“There’s a couple of companies that they used to buy food from,” Motz continued.

“Yeah?”

“There’s a company called Idaho Foods and another called, I think, U.S. Food — and these companies sell to all the prisons and sell absolute shit.”

“Like what?”

“Well,” he said, “even the chicken, which you like, once a week. That comes in a large plastic bag of frozen pieces that is nothing but grease. It’s completely disgusting. If you saw it, this big bag of grease with pieces of what ‘appears’ to be chicken in it you wouldn’t, couldn’t, eat it. Trust me.”

“I do. You know that they just legalized using roadkill for food consumption, right?”

“Really?” he laughed, “well, trust me when I say that the food here shouldn’t really qualify as food.”

“Well,” I said, “the chicken and potatoes aren’t bad.” “I mean, most of the time they have things like what they call ‘Turkey Tetrazzini’ on the menu. Who the fuck knows what THAT is?”

“Sure,” he laughed, “well, that’s mostly soy crap?”

“That’s my guess.”

“Well,” he said,”most of the ‘meat’ is some kind of soy concoction, very little meat of ANY sort, and whatever actually IS meat are meat by-products that you wouldn’t feed your dog. BUT,” he said, “the potatoes you like are, like 65% soy flakes. I know, I mixed them up. There are NO potatoes in that shit.”

I sighed. “I suspected as much.” 

“Well,” he said, “suspect no more.”

“I know,” I said with resignation, “the report about the processed soy causing testicular cancer really warmed my heart…”

“Among other things,” he said. “This shit really WILL kill you.”

“I know,” I said, “the C.O. told me that he was required to eat the Mess Hall food when he was training for this job and he said that he had diarrhea for 10 days until he stopped eating that food.”

“No shit,” I said.