Kingpin Read online

  Then, when I was arrested and faced with the choice—To rat or not to rat, that is the question—I committed perhaps the one noble act of my life. I took the weight. I bit the bullet. I refused to “cooperate” with the government in their asinine war on plants. I said, “Fuck it. This is my adventure, my delusion of outlaw fame and fortune. Let me now pay the price.” And that is liberating. Ultimately, I can hope to get free because it still all comes down to me—and God. I believe in the Creator who made me to endure this test. I don’t have to depend on anyone to make things right, and there is no one else to fault when things go wrong.

  Locked up alone in a stripped cell, stripped of all external accouterments and distractions—the money; the women; the real estate and boats and planes and trucks and cars; and the readily available inebriants, the best dope and booze—I can finally make peace with my self-destructive evil twin.

  Chapter One

  THE GLASS HOUSE

  Los Angeles City Jail, June 1982

  IT’S ALREADY LATE Friday evening by the time my old nemesis, DEA Special Agent Bernard Wolfshein, and my new captor, Deputy US Marshal James Sullivan, deliver me to the custody of the keepers at the LA City Jail. This is a hard come-down after a spectacular arrest in the lobby of the Sheraton Senator Hotel—or perhaps not. Maybe it is the beginning of a new adventure.

  “You’ll be okay, right, Rich?” Agent Wolfshein says as he completes the paperwork and I am processed in to the jail. “It’s just for a couple of days.”

  The Wolfman has this way of provoking me with statements framed as questions, questions he must know I cannot answer truthfully. What am I to say? No! Please, Wolf, don’t leave me here! Take me to a hotel. I’ll be good, I promise.

  I have no idea what to expect in this place, except that it’s … jail. Whatever it is, I had it coming. “Yeah,” I say and actually manage a small smile for them both. “I’ll be fine. You guys take it easy.”

  Sullivan nods. “You, too. Have a great weekend,” he says with the hint of a twinkle in his bright blues eyes and a smirk on his mouth.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  “See you in court Monday,” Wolfshein tells me, and they leave.

  Two guards march me from booking to one of the housing units. We stop outside the gate and they order me to strip.

  “Here?”

  We’re in the hallway. There are civilians walking around. The walls are made of glass.

  “Now,” one of the guards instructs me while the second guard stands at parade rest with a truncheon held close at his side. These guys are all business, not a glimmer of compassion. I sense that if I fail to follow their orders, the guy with the baton will club me into submission. So I start to undress. I take off my western-cut, three-piece suit and Lucchese boots and drop them on the floor, stand there in my underpants, thinking how ridiculous my wardrobe is given where I have ended up.

  “Everything,” he says. “Strip.”

  I take off my shorts and drop them on the pile of clothes, hoping there are no brown skid marks in the crotch, and am reminded once again of the old-school wisdom imparted to me by my grandmother Ethel Lowell Burnham, dear Ba Ba as we children called her. She would tell me always to make certain I put on clean underpants before going out. If something should happen to me at school or at play, she explained, and I was taken to the nurse’s office or, worse yet, to the hospital, and had to undress, best to be sure my underpants were stain-free.

  “Lift your nut sack,” the hack says and peers at my scrotum as if trying to appraise the family jewels. Then he pulls on a rubber glove and examines my asshole like a proctologist. He inspects the bottoms of my feet, looks between my toes. He checks behind my ears and tells me to ruffle my hair and beard. He leaves me standing naked while they both inspect every inch of every article of my clothing, looking in the pockets, carefully feeling along the seams of my pants, checking the cuffs, and inspecting the heels of my boots for hidden compartments. My dick and nuts shrivel up in their own embarrassment. From the neck up, I’m in that state where nothing affects me. I don’t give a fuck. It doesn’t matter what they do to me, the worst has already happened—I have been arrested yet again. I know the drill. Nothing to do now but submit to the experience while maintaining my perspective: This too shall pass.

  “Get dressed,” the guard says at last.

  THE HOUSING UNITS are rectangular rooms the size of a tennis court with thick Plexiglas outer walls and barred entrance gates. They resemble nothing so much as huge fish tanks. And here, I suppose, is where this place gets its name: the Glass House, where everything is revealed. We passed several of these glass chambers teeming with bodies on the way to the one that will be my abode for the next few days, and there are more on the floors above and below. This massive jail houses thousands of prisoners, I learn later. As I enter the unit, I must pass through a gauntlet of flailing brown and black limbs stretching out through the bars of the front gate as prisoners grope for pay phones hung on a panel within reach just outside the unit. A long line of prisoners stands inside, waiting for their turn on the phones.

  Bunk beds are stacked around like steel shelving in a warehouse. There are no mattresses, no blankets or sheets—the crazies have burned them all and would set fire to themselves like Buddhist monks if they were allowed matches. All the matches and cigarettes have been confiscated. Everyone is on edge—addicts withdrawing from nicotine, alcohol, heroin, crack, Angel Dust, freedom. The harsh fluorescent lights are never turned off. No one sleeps: they doze, they nod, or they pass out. Drunks reel around bouncing off the walls. Dustheads and dope fiends huddle on the bunks muttering to themselves and gazing at their private hallucinations.

  We are all strangers. That’s the one comfort—no one knows me here. I don’t have to be anything for anyone else. I can simply be who I am, nobody, and hunker down in my corner. In the artificial daylight, time stands still. It’s as if the universe stopped expanding. For two more days I’m stuck in the eternal now like an image caught in freeze-frame.

  One thing I know: nothing will ever be the same. Life as I have known it is over. I’m slammed, locked up, in custody with nowhere to go and nothing to do but be here now. The world outside is beyond my grasp, freedom vague as the misty LA cityscape glimpsed through layers of Plexiglas. In here is the explicitness of shit. I have pitched my tent in the land of excrement.

  There are three open commodes sitting in a bog of piss and floating bits of turd. One would have to wade through the sewage, then hang one’s ass over the bowl full-moon-style and shit with the whole world watching, addicts fixated on your ass as if they expected you to shit cigarettes and matches. I piss from a distance, aim for the bowl—a long shot. I’ll wait to defecate.

  Beefy, baton-wielding, mustachioed hacks patrol outside the unit. The guards are inscrutable, another race of being. They never come inside the unit and even count us through the transparent walls. We rarely see them, but they are always there, watching us with the dispassionate eye of laboratory technicians tending cisterns full of mutant life forms. We exist for them as numbers. I sense that only if they saw one of us lying unconscious in the middle of the tank with the others rooting around in the entrails like a pack of hyenas would they brave the limbs flailing at the front gate and venture into this cesspool.

  I find an unoccupied shelf and cling to it like a life raft. Dustheads, young Blacks and Latinos with their synapses fried on Angel Dust—such a sublime name for so hellish a substance—lurk on all sides like zombies. In the corners, Chicano dope fiends crouch together like beaten dogs. I think I spot another white guy in the tank, but like a cuttlefish he disappears in the flow of bodies. During this night that is as bright as day, when I dare close my eyes, I am jerked rudely from my dreams by some demented drunk tugging at my feet, trying to steal my boots. Reflexively, I kick him in the throat and send him sprawling across the slimy floor. Everyone watches, but no one does anything.

  In the Glass House, where everything is reveale
d, no one sees anything.

  HOURS PASS LIKE days. As I lie on the steel bunk and stare at the plank above, smudged with burn marks and autographed by former prisoners, I ponder how the Feds were able to set me up and bust me at the hotel. How did they know I’d be there? I narrow it down to two possibilities: either the Captain’s phone was wired and he breached security by claiming he was calling me from a pay phone when in fact he was not, or he is a double agent working for the DEA. The Captain is indeed a captain in the US Army. If he set me up, that would mean the arrest was an elaborate choreographed show—the Captain’s resisting arrest, the free-for-all and cop pig pile, heavily armed agents dressed up as hotel staff, Deputy US Marshal James Sullivan’s claims of C-4 explosives in the Captain’s black bag: why go to all that trouble? Why not just bust me as soon as the Captain and I met? If the Captain’s phone was tapped and he did in fact bring the C-4, he must possess serious juice to be allowed to walk out on the arrest and take his explosives with him.

  It’s dismaying; I can’t figure it out. Maybe the Captain has been working with the Feds all along. Perhaps he is some sort of active government spook. But his father, Abu Ali, is the biggest hashish and heroin merchant in Lebanon’s outlaw Bekaa Valley. How is this possible? None of it makes sense. Or maybe it does, and I’m the sucker. It’s like DEA Agent Wolfshein said: There is a whole other level, a whole other dimension to this drug war. And while I imagine I know what I’m doing—calling the shots—in reality I am merely a pawn in someone else’s bigger, higher-stakes game.

  These thoughts vex me; they replay in my head like a video loop. I can’t stop thinking about how I got here, who set me up … until a drunk falls from the bunk beside me. He lurches to his feet, staggers back toward the wall, stumbles, and then projectile-pukes all over my legs. He spews hot bile and sour alcoholic swill on my pants and boots to remind me that how I got here—the ins and outs of whatever devious machinations resulted in my being in this place, this Glass House—none of that matters. For the truth is, I am here now. This is what’s happening. It’s swim or drown in the brightly lit shit lagoon. I had better stop fretting about how I got here and deal with the puke on my pants. Deal with the fact that this is my world now, and I have got to survive. That in order to clean my pants, I am going to have to wade through a puddle of piss and shit to get to the sink.

  Forget it. The sink is broken. Or maybe they shut the water off to stop the crazies from flooding the tank. I’ll just have to live with the puke-stained pants until—what? I can send them out to the dry cleaners? I think not. Face it, Stratton: You are fucked. You may have believed you were some hot-shit international fugitive outlaw smuggler with all your cash and exotic stash, your women, your booze and horses and trucks, your homes you were never in, the plush hotel suites, the Lear jets and suitcases full of money. But look around, son. That’s all gone, over and done. You’re in the jailhouse now, motherfucker. Let’s see you get yourself out of this mess.

  THE MORNING FEEDING begins well before dawn. I’m still angling my way along the line to get to the phones on the other side of the bars at the front of the tank when guards arrive to slide open the gate. Those of us with the ability and the will to stand up and march three floors below to the chow hall line up to be fed. The guards swing long black truncheons with steel balls in the tips—rib spreaders, they are called—and order us not to speak.

  “Shut up! No talking!”

  Once we leave the tank, enforced quiet. No talking, muttering, babbling, or screaming during the descent down into the depths of the Glass House. During the feeding, the monastic rule of absolute silence obtains. I move numbly along the chow line and receive my portion: microwave-crusted instant potatoes like a hard mass of unfinished ceramic; a wafer of sausage that floats in a puddle of fat. The fake eggs, like the coffee, are cold. Only a half-starved moray like the huge black dude beside me could eat this shit.

  When I go to pass him my tray, the guards bellow at me: “No giving away food! You don’t want it, throw it in the garbage!”

  This strikes me as unreasonable and wasteful, but I am not about to protest. Maybe the rule is designed to prevent predators from extorting food from the weak, to discourage trafficking in caked potatoes and sausage patties. When you have nothing, even slop has value.

  On the march back into the tank, I see my opportunity and make a dive to the front of the phone line. I sit on a bench; stick my arms and legs through the bars like a man in a pillory. I press the phone to my ear; my face is pressed to the bars so I can reach the dial pad on the pay phone. It’s 5:30 a.m. in Los Angeles, 8:30 on the East Coast. I reach my attorney, Channing Godfried, at his home in Cambridge.

  “Will you accept a collect call from Richard?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hello.”

  “Rick, where are you?”

  At least now I can tell someone.

  “In jail,” I tell him. “The Los Angeles city jail.”

  He says he’ll call someone and have them come see me. I tell him I’m due in court Monday morning. There is nothing else for me to say, no one else for me to call. I’ve had my one phone call, and it was all of thirty seconds. I consider hogging the phone, provoking the guy in line behind me, and calling my former partner and ex-girlfriend Val in Maui. But it’s the middle of the night in Hawaii, and why chance that they are monitoring these phones and tip them off to her whereabouts?

  Anyway, that’s over. It’s all over, my life before this. I must stay focused on the here and now. I pull my arms and legs, my puke-stained pants and boots out from between the bars, climb down off the bench, and wander back into the depths of the tank.

  Someone has taken my plank. Nowhere to sit except on the floor. I wander around, not so much looking for something to do as looking to mind my own business and not get involved in anyone else’s craziness. Most everyone dozes in the bright light. You can tell the prisoners who have been here for a while from the fresh fish from the street: the old-timers are dressed out in army-green jumpsuits and rubber shower shoes. Several of the men, I notice, have grossly bloated arms and legs covered with scabs and open sores from shooting junk. Men cough and hack and spit on the floor.

  “Cigarettes? Cigarettes?” they ask me as I pass by, hoping against hope that somehow the white guy in the puke-stained suit managed to smuggle in some smokes. I’m thinking about the eight grand in cash, the Rolex Presidential, and my wallet the Feds seized from me back at the airport satellite cop station, wondering if I’ll ever see that again, wondering if there was anything incriminating or of evidentiary value in my wallet, if I had any scraps of paper with notes and phone numbers on me when the Heat came down. I try not to think about all the property and money and loved ones I left on the outside. My parents back in Wellesley will be relieved. Godfried will call Mary, my mother, and let her know her son is all right. No one will be surprised to hear that Richard Stratton is in jail, least of all my father and mother. Mary will say, “Thank God he’s alive.”

  THIS IS THE longest Saturday of my life and it could go either way. I could wallow in self-pity. Poor me! I don’t deserve this! Send lawyers, guns, and money…. It was only pot! Big fucking deal. What do I have to do? Name it. I’ll do anything. I’ll rat on all my enemies and my friends. Just get me the fuck out of this place, out of the Glass House where even my cowardice is revealed. Or, I could swim through the puddle of piss and shit pooled around the toilet bowls, drop my drawers, hang that ass, and take the biggest crap of my life right here for all to see.

  There! How do you like that? Let’s see you flush my shit down the clogged toilet of your criminal justice system. I’m like Nixon: I am not a criminal. You know we Capricorns are a stubborn lot. Goats. We hate to give in. Muhammad Ali. Elvis … well, there is that tendency toward self-destruction. But the truth about me is I don’t give a shit. I will not become just another turd in this sewer. I’ll fight them to the end and enjoy every minute of it.

  Yeah, right…. Keep telling yourse
lf that, Dick.

  I AM SO fucking hungry I could chew on a dirty bone like a junkyard dog. I can’t even remember the last time I ate before that inedible breakfast. Was it Friday morning? My stomach growls, my bowels rumble. My throat is parched. When they open the gate for lunch, around 10:00 a.m., I line up again and join the march back down to the mess hall on the slim hope for something I can swallow.

  “No talking! Shut up!” Different cops, same orders.

  Lunch, well, let’s just say there reaches a point when a man has got to eat. Doesn’t matter what it is. I’ve been on a strict raw food veggie diet, weight way down. Now, after a day of no food and all the excitement and tension of the arrest, I’m starved. But I’m concerned about putting this greasy mystery meat in my stomach. I nibble on some soggy canned vegetables, drink the Kool-Aid. Eat a piece of white bread, anything to ease the ache in my gut. The guy at the table beside me is laughing, mumbling to himself, and grinning at his food like the madman he surely is. It’s the big, hulking black guy I tried to give my tray at breakfast. He has a thick wad of flesh over his brow and heavy sagging jowls, rolls of fat on the back of his neck, hunched shoulders, and a wide, humped back.

  “Shut up!” a guard commands. “No laughing!”

  There is nothing funny about this. But the guy looks up, flashes the cop a toothy grin. He guffaws. His laugh becomes a bellow.