“Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.”
— Honore de Balzac
The greatest fear among the thieves, pedophiles and con artists that now operate and populate our government — is winding up in a prison cell. Steve Bannon, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn, even Thomas Spota, the Hamptons D.A. who prosecuted me for allowing Blacks and Latinos to live in houses instead of the woods while working in the Hamptons, were petrified of prison. Supervisor Patrick Heaney, Investigator David Betts and Town Attorney Joseph R. Lombardo brought the grievance of racists in the Town of Southampton to the D.A. to criminalize humanity.
Some of the characters in that D.C. cabal avoided prison, some did a few months in a country club. But some are like Spota in the Hamptons who did less than 3 years on a 5 year sentence and is buying a pardon with the money he stole while running a criminal enterprise out of the District Attorney’s office. His Chief of Police Jimmy Burke did almost 4 years. By and large, though, it is the threat that counts. Like the people that Trump goes after but who have the balls to point out his own crimes and misdemeanors.
And, can afford to fight.
It’s not always like Orange is the New Black‘s Piper Kerman who did less than a year in a federal camp where you have to put your name on a list for tennis and who now advises people on prison life after collecting millions. Having connections and a family that got her a media deal doesn’t hurt.
But if you think all of the public prosecutions now going on are primarily an attempt to put people in prison — although that would be desired by Trump using the Justice Department at no cost to him — think again. While that might be icing on the cake, the real reason is to do to them what the Suffolk D.A. did to me called A Civil Death — the financial and emotional destruction caused by endless investigation, prosecution, persecution and the COST of defending yourself against a deep-pocketed adversary is the point. If taking a plea is the only option — if you do not have the money to put up a full-fledged defence simply because you are innocent — that’s when the fun begins. And ends, sometimes 20 years later.
Being taxed for foreclosed property, being taxed and losing your driver’s license, losing employment and not being able to find a new job, being defamed by newspapers like John Sutter’s The Villager, Joseph Louchheim’s Southampton Press, Newsday, New York Times, Daily News, New York Post — as I was, is unavoidable. And, it continues for decades since there is no requirement to ever take down defamatory articles appearing on the internet. Add to that any judgments as restitution for outrageous money never owed because you took a plea. When there is no money for the $1000 per hour ($2000-3000/hr. in Washington) defense lawyer if you don’t take a plea. The threat of prison is always there if you cannot afford to fight.
This is why the Justice system is a rigged game. And why the persecutions as Revenge goes on.
Here’s a little outtake, a chapter from Prisoner of the Hamptons, a taste of life in the Big House if you can’t afford justice.
Balls in Prison
Cuba was one inmate among several with the same name in the prison. If you were Cuban, no matter what your real name was, it was likely you’d be called “Cuba.” This particular Cuba was a late thirties, 5’10” tall Spanish guy (in prison there are no Latinos or Hispanics, only “Spanish”). His father had been a successful drug dealer in the Bronx and had trained his son to help in the family business of selling heroin and cocaine. But Cuba got caught shoplifting in a CVS trying to steal razor blades while high as a kite and was jumped by a zealous clerk and set upon by another customer. While trying to escape, he was grabbed by a cop. He tried to get away and fought with the cop because he was on parole from a previous conviction and was seriously high from the “speedball” he’d done earlier. He liked speedballs, a mixture of cocaine and heroin. This became his third theft while on drugs. He drew yet another 2-to-4-year bid while he was still on parole. The judge had not been at all amused.
Cuba was uneducated, but smart and intuitive; he had the demeanor of a character actor and was charming. His mercurial temperament and mannerisms were likened to the Al Pacino character, Tony Montana, in Scarface. While in prison he became a translator, and because he was bilingual and political he translated very carefully. Only certain information reached the ears of the COs when Spanish gang members confided in him.
He relayed only what was necessary for credulity, being careful not to make the inmate’s situation worse. Both the Spanish guys and the cops trusted him implicitly. He only lied enough to stay alive—and to do business.
Cuba operated a store out of his cube. It was his “office” in this medium facility, where he sold Honey Buns, coffee, sugar, and cigarettes. As a result, he got to know all the Spanish guys who hung out together. Most of his teeth were being systematically removed, five or six at a time, since they rotted out from drug use, and lack of dental care. The four spoons of sugar in each cup of black coffee he drank, of course, didn’t help. Implants, while available in the street, like root canals, were unknown in prison. And they would not have worked for him anyway, since his gums and dental bone were rotted from the drugs.
Cuba didn’t smile much due to his missing teeth, a habit he’d learned from reading about the French court in the early 1800s. Marie Antoinette had nothing on him.
Cuba assisted Spanish inmates who had immigration problems that threatened them with deportation. He also helped them with tickets that they’d received (disciplinary notices) from a Correction Officer for violating the rules. Cuba had also developed a positive reputation among members of gangs like MS-13, the Mexican Mafia, the Latin Kings or the Trinitarios.
“Chauty” or Shorty, as was his name pronounced, was a slim 5’4” goateed Puerto Rican inmate.
He had a scar running down his left cheek. He was one of the inmates that Cuba befriended while doing translations. Shorty was an important member of the Latin Kings, a gang with substantial power throughout the prison system. Shorty asked Cuba to help him sue the prison for his medical treatment. He was an influential and powerful inmate, but only among his people and other gangs on the street. He had no power over the prison system or the COs. In prison, he was an inmate, an offender—and at times a victim.
Shorty had visited the Infirmary for groin pain. He was immediately diagnosed as having a hernia by the “General,” a member of the Reserves and a part-time doctor, and was told he needed to go to a North Country Hospital in upstate New York, which treated all of the facility’s prisoners. None of the prison staff or administration would go to that hospital if they could avoid it. They knew better.
For security reasons, he had no idea when this hospital trip would occur. After waiting about two months for medical treatment, Shorty was awakened unexpectedly at 5 a.m. one morning and told to report to the infirmary. He was strip-searched at 6 a.m., fitted with handcuffs, manacles and chains for his feet, and then placed on a bus headed for the hospital. He was also chained to the guy next to him for the trip, which made using the caged toilet at the back of the bus difficult. The cop sitting to the right of the open toilet area had a shotgun resting on his knees. This armed guard watched any inmate who needed to relieve himself.
He watched Shorty drag his new partner, chained to his own ankles, to the unenclosed toilet.
After breathing diesel fumes and squirming in his manacles and chains for five hours, Shorty arrived at the hospital where he was disconnected from his new inmate friend, and then again chained to a bed in the operating room. A CO sat in the room to observe him, for security purposes. Once the hernia operation had been completed, he was again handcuffed and manacled, this time solo, and transported back to the prison on the same bus. But Shorty soon suspected, after bouncing around for the five-hour trip back, that something was still wrong. He was in serious pain, which grew worse after the operation. He felt his testicles starting to swell, and it became difficult to move. They had grown from the size of lemons prior to the operation, to the size of oranges as the pain increased over the next few days.
When he complained to the CO in his dorm, he laughed and said, “S’matta, I thought you had bigga balls annat?” He leaned over his desk in the Bubble and stuffed a wedge of chewing tobacco in his cheek and spit into his coffee cup. “Fuckin’ spic,” he added.
Shorty murmured under his breath, “Asshole.”
Of course, the CO realized he could never say shit like that to an inmate in Auburn or Attica; he might get cut. But here, in a Medium A, no one wanted to take a chance on getting a ticket.
Even murderers that had been transferred here, to a Medium from a Max, knew that they had a chance of being released some day – unless they were pushed too far. No one would attack a cop or slice his cheek with a razor blade when there was a possibility of getting out unless the cop was too abusive. So Shorty visited the Infirmary again after waiting several days for an emergency appointment. The nurse gave him Ibuprofen, but refused to inspect his testicles, as he requested. He didn’t push it, because he risked getting a ticket for a sex charge if the woman made a complaint of any sort. Civilians were extremely dangerous in prison. Anything they said would be believed by CO’s anxious to prove how macho they could be against blacks or Latinos, even while they were in chains. She asked someone else to assist her, however.
“I don’t want to see your fucking testicles,” said the male nurse assistant, who had been leering at him while sporting a small mustache. “The General will handle them,” he laughed viciously. “Sit up straight, asshole, or I’ll write you up.” Shiv, as the nurse called himself, was gay. He took pleasure in being abusive to inmates. Like a Priest pedophile he’d been transferred around from one prison to another.
No prescription medication containing narcotics was ever given to inmates for simple pain. It was well known that inmates would often forgo taking the narcotics so they could sell them to others.
They were known to hide drugs under their tongue, under their armpits, or up their ass and pull it out later for a paying customer. Shorty just needed it for pain.
After very serious consideration by the nurse and the General, who feared a lawsuit—not that their patient would be mistreated—it was decided that Shorty needed to go back to the hospital. Again, he was handcuffed, chained, and shackled at 6 a.m. the following week for another five-hour trip back to North Country Hospital in upstate New York, with swelling testicles, where he was again diagnosed. The surgeon decided that the operation had failed.
Apparently, during the hernia operation, a complication had occurred when the surgeon had gone out for a small pick-me-up and, during his absence, a nerve from the right testicle had inadvertently been crossed with the nerve from his left testicle by an assistant. Essentially, they’d switched his balls.
This was corrected in the second operation.
And, once again, manacled and chained, Shorty was placed back on the bus to the Infirmary. He sat, wistfully watching the cows and pick-up trucks go by as he breathed in the diesel fumes on the poorly maintained bus. He’d never seen cows in East Harlem, where he lived after moving from Puerto Rico, and this bucolic scenery was almost pleasant, as long as he was drugged. Mercifully, they gave him four Percocets at the hospital.
And now he would be staying in the Infirmary while he healed and would be receiving the narcotics and opioids he needed. It was a better deal than at home where, growing up, he’d been sexually abused and beaten. He had drugs and a TV, and the nurses monitored him. No one bothered him.
Ever.
He was left alone in bed with a TV. The nurse-assistant who had gone out for a cigarette while the inmate she was watching bled out in his wheelchair—was assigned to watch him. He shared his room with only one other patient—an inmate in a coma. The roommate had smoked some K-2 (synthetic marijuana) that had been smuggled in by someone who’d stuffed a small quantity of the drug up their anus. This process, known as “boofing,” was dangerous, since the integrity of the latex used to encapsulate the drugs were suspect; not to mention the fact that smoking any feces-soaked herb is just as liable to induce coma as to make you high. Hepatitis was not usually far behind.
Despite his euphoria, Shorty’s testicles now grew to the size of grapefruits. The hospital and the COs, as well as the inmates used fruit sizes instead of metrics as the diagnostic tool to describe size. Nobody was good with math. So Shorty writhed in pain between opioids and could not walk. His speech became garbled and incoherent, but this wasn’t much of a problem. The prison staff neither understood nor spoke Spanish, nor were there any black or Latino COs anywhere in the region, let alone in the prison.
“Can’t you talk English, you stupid fuck?” asked the CO on duty in the Infirmary. He turned to the other CO, “Dis’ guy’s inna gang?” Then he turned to Shorty again and asked, “You Larry or Moe?” Over coffee the two cops laughed, and then switched to talking about retirement benefits. They only had fifteen years to go. Divorce, and the fact that their income was published online for lawyers and everyone else to see and use to prepare child-support and alimony motions, was a popular conversation among COs.
This medical situation lasted for a few days. The COs thought that Shorty’s malady was hysterical. Here was an influential drug dealer and Latin Kings gang member who had “Elephant balls.” But they realized that he might die and make them all look bad. There was also the fact that a lawsuit might uncover some seriously fucked-up treatment. Eventually, the General, as the doctor was known, was called in again from maneuvers at the nearby Fort, where Agent Orange had been produced during the Vietnam War. Again, the nurses refused to inspect the gang member’s testicles. Because they were so large and delicate, it was decided to quickly ship him back to the hospital where they specialized in handling only prisoner’s medical needs, as they had done in two prior operations
Shorty was again placed on the 6 a.m. bus after going through the same ritual strip-search. They affixed handcuffs, manacles, and chains. The COs lifted his body onto the bus by the groin as they laughed about his “big balls” and impending treatment.
Shorty groaned and screamed Spanish obscenities, and the COs just laughed. Of course, they had no idea what he was saying. The cops were not required to communicate with Shorty despite the growing population of Spanish-speaking inmates. Many of them were there because they had taken plea deals with pro bono prosecutors. Neither the Spanish inmates, the prosecutor nor the judge handling the cases knew why many inmates were taking a plea.
Upon arriving back at the hospital he was re-diagnosed and treated in short order. He underwent yet a third operation by the same surgeon although it was discovered that during the second hernia operation—which uncrossed his testicular nerves from the first botched hernia operation (a result of the doctor’s incessant manipulation of Shorty’s testicles and nerves) had caused a new DOUBLE hernia, where originally only one previously had existed. This was cause for several new jokes among the doctors and nurses about who was the biggest ballbuster among them. It was also of some amusement when they realized that “in the street” Shorty probably might have had them all killed.
It was after the third operation occurred – the undoing and doing of Shorty’s twisted, infected, swollen balls – that a new medical chief had come on board at the hospital. Like Dr. Bailey, in “Grey’s Anatomy,” she sailed through the operating rooms with a sly, dry wit, telling it like it was. Dr. Sin White (Sin short for cinnamon, or sincere as the rumor went, and who, it was suspected, purposely misspelled her first name for effect).
She had arrived after graduating from Cornell and had spent a few years at Bellevue’s trauma center. She was 5’5” tall, black, sarcastic, and smart. She literally knew where the bones were buried, especially in the upstate prison system. She hailed from Harlem, and told everyone around her what to do. She had no patience for complaints about deprivation or poverty. Even though there were no other black doctors or nurses at the hospital, she had taken the job. The Governor’s office had appointed her Chief because, with an inmate population that was 85% black, overseen by 0% black COs, administrators, or civilians – and a tsunami of lawsuits for discrimination and abuse – they realized that something needed to be done. The fact that her father was white, and her mother was black – an obvious benefit from the Governor’s point of view – made her unassailable from a racial perspective.
Dr. White reviewed Shorty’s history and held a very brief meeting with the doctors and nurses who’d treated him. She was direct.
“What the fuck did you do to this guy?” They all looked at each other. “Are you stupid? Or do you jess fucking hate prisoners? I ain’t seen any cops or locals bein’ treated here, did you?”
Sin, or Dr. White, as she was variously known, was never really at a loss for words. She adjusted her speech pattern to the audience she was playing. Although from Harlem she was as linguistically capable as “Arthur’s” butler, John Gielgud, when it suited her.
She often played her own “race card” when she wanted to berate inferiors without their consciously understanding that they were being abused.
“This inmate may be a drug dealer, he may be a gang leader, and maybe he’d cut ya throat if he hadda chance, but you muthafuckas been playin’ with his balls an’ nearly killed ’im. This system’s been killin’ guys fa decades, and if you pull this stupid shit again I’m gonna fire ya’ asses. You got dat muthafuckas? I got a degree in medicine,” she sneered. “An’ I also got a degree in muthafuckery. You hear me?”
They’d had to do everything all over again on Shorty’s testicles. They corrected his nerves, fixed the two hernias and, finally, had eliminated the infection. He was then chained and manacled and placed back on the bus and returned to the prison.
Cuba was hired by the Latin Kings in prison to do the paperwork for Shorty’s lawsuit against the State.
He was paid in drugs.
Copyright Prisoner of the Hamptons
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