“What we were after now was the old surprise visit. That was a real kick and good for laughs and lashings of the old ultraviolence.”
— A Clockwork Orange (1971)
Among the fun times in prison were what is called a Shakedown. It’s sort of a mini version of a prison riot except that it’s one-sided. It’s not the C.O.s versus the inmates, who are now lovingly known as Offenders, so as not to hurt their feelings. It’s really the cops going after the Offenders simply to punish them for being in prison. The entire process is intended to abuse, harass, and teach — retaliation for being there.
For the most part, it does not rise to the level of prison riot behavior which is both dangerious and life-threatening. The facility I had the pleasure of living at for nearly five years had only had one genuine riot. Rifles were used, inmates were beaten, people died and the C.O.s in the Tower got to practice with their new scopes–a regular occurrance at other Maximum Security prisons.
This was not a Federal Camp where people like MIchael Cohen (Otisville) or Bernie Madoff (Butner) or even Piper Chapman (Orange is the New Black) spent time playing tennis if they were not relegated to the Box as Cohen was. Chapman did less than a year, and made millions, Cohen did two years and Madoff died in prison.
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March 24th, 2015
I had a good feeling.
It should have been an omen.
LaGault, the night cop, was up turning on lights as soon as he felt he’d had enough sleep. Despite the fact that I’d had to visit the bathroom and then had to listen to at least 6 different rings from the phone on his desk in the bubble which kept me from falling back to sleep, I did manage to get almost 7 hours. That was at the top of my prison wishlist.
Why did it matter to this cop?
He had a thing for Moussa (the obese french guy) and his pathetic PT that was an even more ridiculous attempt at exercise than normal.
LaGault actually was bothered by the fact that guys did not get out of bed at 6:30 and did not join in on real exercise when he called PT. So, this morning, he joined us and did real squats and real arm-stretches.
Of course, Moussa was unable to do this because he was too fat and too out of shape.
He was laughing in his peculiar Franco-African way, and, of course, no one else followed because they just refused to do any exercise at all at 6:30 in the morning. A few of us did, as I did. So, the cop sat down and wrote tickets for people sleeping in ASAT.
After going to Gym and working out and listening to Al and Trauma continue to ridicule my running and “Godfather” image, which I ignored and for which they soon apologized since I wouldn’t talk to them when they did it, I headed back to the dorm for ASAT after lunch.
ASAT started out fairly normally. There were no readings from the A.A. books — which I always found ridiculous since only Dierberger and Roddy, the counselor, did alcohol and neither was there in the Information segment. We went right into “Education” which was read by Green. It was another segment on Friendship and Loyalty. But, then we broke down into two groups.
The first part was to work on our “Easter Bunny” rap song.
I sat there listening to lines of so-called rhyming ‘poetry’ involving the Easter Bunny. Reality was funny, not the rapping.
I’d come so far with this ludicrous busy-work, that I no longer took umbrage. Nothing surprised me at this point. You want a rap song? Fine. You want a rap song about the Easter Bunny? No problem. You want a rap song about the Easter Bunny going through Relapse and Recovery? Piece of cake.
At this point little surprised me in stretching a history of no drugs or substance abuse to fit any kind of scenario to get the fuck out. I was doing just that.
So, when I sat opposite Sal, in the second of our little workshop groups and had to “interview” him about “Support Groups” for Relapse and Recovery which we had never even discussed before, I never thought twice about it.
“What can a support group do for you?” I said, staring into Sal’s face.
“Well, they could probably get me drugs faster,” said Sal, looking at me with a twisted smile.
“C’mon Sal we gotta do this.”
“So, why is this so important?” I coaxed him to get into the mood of this absurdity.
“Oh, so I can hang myself with an appreciative audience?”
I shook my head and we did a few straight lines in order to make Roddy happy and avoid some kind of retribution for not finishing the assignment.
We were saved after only about 10 minutes and were told to circle around. We had another Delbert Boone video to endure.
I sat quietly through the video which lasted about 45 minutes and at its end there were some questions and answers with Roddy joking with Green who was leaving in two days, and Brisco — two guys who had become more vociferous in the program. Of course, they kept their snide remarks about Roddy until after the ASAT sessions.
We all picked up our chairs after having another bullshit discussion about what Delbert Boone conveyed to all of us. Nothing. It was the usual platitudes about Relapse, Recovery, the need for the 12-Step program, yada, yada, yada.
It wasn’t until we were filing through the door with our chairs into the dorm that something happened.
I’d gotten as far as my cube when I suddenly heard Roddy come into the dorm, screaming about what someone had said to her, to Slaney, the C.O. Then she went out to the Rec room again and we all heard her saying,
“I TAKE THIS VERY PERSONALLY,” she screamed.
Green could be heard saying something to her and she continued.
“NO I’M SORRY, I TAKE THIS VERY VERY PERSONALLY. I DON’T WANT TO HEAR THIS. THIS IS IT!
She became hysterical.
“What the fuck happened?” I said, looking at Mitch, the suicidal guy whose mother had traded him to pedophile boyfriends for drugs as a 3 year old. sitting across from me. While I could no longer legally do psychotherapy and had both experience and a 20 year psychoanalysis (since New York State imposed a licensing law) both Roddy and her partner assigned me to handle his “case.”
“I don’t know,” he said.
A couple of the guys filtered back into the dorm from the Rec room and she went up to Slaney again and he spoke to her and then made a call as she ran out of the dorm.
“What the fuck happened?” I asked Henry as he was coming in from listening to Green talk to her.
“Somethin’ about pussy,” said Henry, shaking his head. I went out to the Rec room and saw Mike, the Coordinator.
“What the fuck happened?” I asked him.
“One of these shitheads decided to repeat the line from a rap song, “I smell your pussy” as he was going past her into the dorm. And, she got crazy. This isn’t going to be good. Then Slaney called the Sergeant. They’re probably gonna do a shakedown. So, get ready.
Everyone started removing shit from their cubes. Lights, fans, devices that they’d bought illegally from other guys and didn’t have permits for – permits you get when you buy from an approved online store your family can afford to send to you or from Commissary. All the shit out of their lockers that were considered contraband, like yogurt that I’d gotten earlier or the milk that Sal or Cuba had gotten for me in the Mess Hall. I made sure that all of my medication was in the proper envelopes with my name on it, clearly visible. All of my vegetables had to be retrieved from the Ice Man, in case his locker was raided and all of my food destroyed OR taken and thrown away.
Slaney got a phone call. It was the Superintendent. He spoke with her and then got off the phone and called “COUNT,” and then spoke out loud.
“In case any of you don’t know what happened, some asshole decided to say a few lines from a rap song that included, ‘I smell your pussy,’ in it and said it to Roddy. The Superintendent said she was thinking of dropping everyone from the ASAT program over this.”
Everyone was now standing and there was quiet. I could hear the pounding in my temples and could feel my heart racing. I was 71 and worried about a stroke of heart attack. The oldest guy in the prison.
I briefly reminded myself of the 7 hours of sleep. Safety? Protection? Everyone was watching at the windows.
“You guys are probably going to get a visit. So, be prepared.”
“Here they come,” said Sal, looking out the window to the walkway. Everyone tensed.
It took no more than 10 minutes for the 15 cops that came through the door. They all had already put on their latex gloves. And, as they came into the Rec room, they threw the garbage cans around, ripped things off of the wall, banged the cans and threw anything in their way across the Rec room. Then they entered the dorm.
There were three Sergeants and more than ten regular C.O.s, who said nothing but looking at pieces of paper and then headed for particular cubes.
Then it began.
Henry’s cube was hit first. The cop opened his lockers and threw everything on his obsessively neat shelves which had been folded and stored, on the floor, banging the metal doors and flipping over the entire locker.
Loud crashes and booms could be heard as metal hit the floor. Several other cubes got the same treatment. Sal’s cube, Hiller’s cube, Moussa’s cube — along with many others. There was silence, except for the systematic destruction of personal possessions. A few guys were taken into the shower and a couple out the front door of the building where scuffles and yells were heard in the silent dorm. Some guys looked at each other.
We could hear muffled screams from the shower room.
Shortly after, an ambulance pulled up. We all knew that this was the same vehicle that doubled for use heading to the morgue as well as the Infirmary or the hospital.
Sometimes things went a little too far and got out of hand. But it kept the cops in shape. Just lilke the Suffolk County prosecutors who taught activists and journalists a lesson about Truth.
I could feel my heart pounding but I simply stood and stared in front of me while it was going on. I made no attempt at eye contact or to look at what was happening.
After half an hour of destruction, threats, and a few beatings which occurred out of view, the cops finished up. The place looked like a ransacked homeless shelter — which it was.
I nervously left for work. Everyone behind me had to clean up the mess and I had fortunately been spared the destruction of my things. However, I no longer had an Ice Box. All of the ice had been thrown out by D.J. before the cops came. Had he not done that and had they picked his cube, the food would have been thrown all over the floor and he would have had to explain — who it belonged to and why he had it.
“So, you guys did something stupid today and we’ve come to let you know that you can’t talk to women and civilians the way you have. If this continues. We’ll be back,” said the short Sergeant.
Of course, this instruction apparently only applied to inmates. I’d vaguely remembered hearing about one C.O. who blew his wife’s head off with his shotgun and reported her having committed suicide. He got away with it.
There was an audible sigh of relief just before I went to work. The groans and complaints were starting to come through in muffled sounds.
“Christ my heart was pounding,” I said.
“Me too,” said a tall black 20-something kid. “I’m leavin’ in 13 days. Man, I don’ need this. I’m a wreck as it is, worryin’ about anythin’ comin’ up ta fuck up my release.”
“Hey, don’t look for sympathy, you’re leaving in 13 days.”
Of course, I knew I had an arrhythmia but my A-fib had not yet been officially diagnosed. The sentencing judge, Suffolk County’s alcoholic Judge F.X. Doyle would not allow me to complete my heart monitor test before I was incarcerated. At the behest of the Town of Southampton and D.A. Spota, they were in a rush to stop me from writing. Not to mention the poisoning which the cops themselves knew emanated from the cancer cluster caused by Agent Orange production and mine effluent in the water — which we were all forced to drink.
“Ya should always have sympathy,” he said, smiling.
“Fuckin’ Green. They broke my lamp AND my fan. Fucked up all my shit. Fuckin’ guys.” Henry was pissed off.
Green was widely blamed for this. He’d spoken the words of a Fifty Cent song which Moussa later told me,
“I smell your pussy,
That you Jah,
I smell your pussy,
That you Erv…”
I had no clue that the song even existed, My favorite was still ‘Fuck You’ by Katy Perry.
But, the Keystone Kops. The C.O. crew, upon reflection, were a notch above – considering it WAS prison, after all. But, still I was terrorized. At my age? Jesus Fucking Christ.
Luckily, I didn’t know that with A-fib, it easily could’ve killed me.
March 28th, 2015
Things had started to return to normal after ‘The Terror.’ There were no more shakedowns or urine-test round-ups. And, no one else had been called down or arrested as a result of the tests that had been done.
The way the system worked was that you were called down or brought down, as had been done when they came en masse and taken the 21 guys during the week, and then they all gave urine samples. If you had a problem producing, you had 3 hours to get it moving. After that, you went to the Box, regardless of what the reason was. In my case, since I had a urinary problem, I could be clean and still go to the Box for not producing. Guilt didn’t matter. Innocence didn’t matter. Only test results mattered.
They had 24 hours to do the test and when the results were in, they acted.
Unless.
Unless they froze it.
“You mean, you could take the test and have it be positive, like have ‘dirty urine’ and not be charged with it for weeks?”
“Dat’s it bro’,” said Cuba, “dey can fuck wid you weeks later after you think it’s all ova.”
“Nice.”
But, of course, that wasn’t MY problem. I’d never done drugs, and only was concerned with not being able to produce with some white upstate cop staring at my dick while trying to give him some of my best urine. The urge to piss on their shoes was strong.
But, the fear was subsiding, unlike the winter weather. It was, of course, snowing again. I felt like I was stuck in Bad Santa’s Workshop in Antarctica.
Stalin’s Gulag came to mind. The Town of Southampton had planned to fuck me and did a good job.
It’s no place for old Journalists
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