Part 1 of 3
ONE: No Excuses
"Me personally, I have never been arrested for something I didn't do. I grant you that there's nobody that gets the full panoply of due process in the Constitution. We ain't got a perfect system, but it's the only thing we got." This is Howard talking, jailhouse lawyer of some repute and former creeper. Howard claims to have the ''uncanny ability" to enter an occupied room so imperceptibly that he might as well be wearing a cloak of invisibility. The rooms he prefers to "creep" in this manner are usually small businesses with a cash drawer he can rifle. He'll stand at a checkout counter and, if the cashier looks away for an instant, Howard will stick his hand into the register and grab the money. Strictly speaking, Howard is a till-tapping creeper.
"If you had your back turned for just a minute, I could probably creep in this office here, get your tape recorder, take it, and leave. You'd turn around, and it'd be gone. I never broke into nobody's house. I always do my wrong while the businesses are in operation. Not by force-by trickery, by sneaking, by subtlety." I'm not sure how good Howard really is at being invisible. This is his fifth time in prison, but I suspect he's done much more than just creeping and gotten away with the crimes.
"The reason I say I didn't get in trouble for nothing I didn't do is because you probably talked to a lot of inmates who will get up on their escape valve, and say the reason they're here is because they are black, or because they are poor, or because they didn't have no daddy to teach them right from wrong," Howard continues. '"Statistically, I'm not arguing that point. But you're talking to me, and I'm telling you that I ain't never been arrested when I didn't do it. I started getting in trouble when I was sixteen, and I'm thirty-three now. You count how many years that is."
Howard was exactly the kind of guy I wanted to talk to. He is a person who has devised a whole life from cheating on the straight world, maneuvering through our intricate justice system, and building time in prison-a person law enforcement agencies and correctional institutions identify as a career criminal. Howard made a choice to "do wrong." Maybe not the first time he got in trouble, but somewhere along the way he chose to make breaking the law a vocation. He chose to be an outlaw.
We are scared of people like Howard. Crime is one of the most talked about social issues in America today. There is a grass roots conviction that crime is worse every day, even though statisticians claim the overall crime rate has remained relatively stable over the last twenty years, and recent surveys show major crimes have declined in some large metropolitan areas. Part of our perception of lawlessness in the nation has been shaped by television. We are bombarded nightly with lurid images of crime, starting with the evening news, through t1w tabloid magazine shows, right into primetime re-creations of actual felonies in so-called reality programming and TV movies "based on real events." Crime has been dragged to the center of the political arena, so politicians from the local to the national level compete to prove they are tougher on crime than their opponents while partisan radio talk show hosts shout imprecations and fan the flames of fear from the sidelines.
The fear is more than just a media induced mirage. Even if the rate of crime is the same as twenty years ago, still the number of crimes has grown enormously along with the population. The perpetrators are younger every day, more and more prone to violence. Arrest rates among juveniles aged ten to seventeen for violent crimes jumped 100 percent between 1983 and 1992. Many criminologists suggest that we are actually experiencing the calm before the storm of violent crimes beginning full-force near the turn of the century when the number of teenagers in America begins to increase again after a dropoff in the 1980s.
In the past, the cities were considered the incubators of crime, dangerous hot spots that could be avoided. But today's criminals roam our dislocated and mobile society far from the urban centers. The days of leaving doors unlocked in rural America are over. The clipped lawns and shopping malls of the suburbs are posted with warnings of electronic alarms and armed response to intruders. More and more average folks buy handguns every year for personal protection.
There are 1.5 million men and women in local jails, and state and federal prisons, twice as many as two decades ago. America's prison population grows by about fifteen hundred new prisoners a week and, if this growth continues, will easily break two million by the year 2000. Surveys of state prisoners have found that 94 percent had previous convictions or are in prison for violent crimes. Other studies of inmates show that the median number of crimes they committed in the year before they were caught and incarcerated was twelve to fifteen. Since law enforcement agencies admit to solving only a small percentage of the crimes they investigate, there are many more criminals on the street than in the prisons. The danger is very real. The question in America today is no longer who are the victims of crime, it is who hasn't had their home invaded, had their heart in their throat as they walked to their car across a darkened parking lot late at night, or seen a playground in their neighborhood littered with the glint of tiny crack vials.
For all the hue and cry for more cops on the streets, tougher sentencing, and more prison cells, for all the Congressional reports, screaming headlines, the polls and the statistics, despite the generalized dread among us, we know very little about the people we are so afraid of. Who are the men and women who have us holed-up in our houses, who are these bad guys who so thoroughly chill us to the heart?
I'm a writer, not an expert on crime. All I claim to be good at is getting people to talk to me about themselves. So tins book won't give you the answers to the big questions about ('rime and criminals: What are the root causes of crime? Why is criminal activity so much higher in our society than in other countries? Why are there more than seven times as many blacks as whites in prison proportional to the number of blacks and whites in the general population? Why is the problem of crime in our culture so intractable? Certainly racism and poverty are important issues in the discussion of crime, as are privilege, class, and drug and alcohol addiction. Intellectual and scientific arguments take place over the genetic and sociological components of criminal behavior. But all I hoped to accomplish was to put a human face on our fears, to shed some light on a very dark corner of ordinary, everyday life in this country.
Figures compiled by the U.S. Justice Department Bureau of Statistics indicate that the number of crimes committed every year is in the range of 35 million. There are thousands of people -- thousands of us -- out there committing criminal acts day in and day out. I wanted to find out what makes some criminals tick. I wanted a glimpse of that life, and I wondered what a snapshot of the world looked like from their point of view. We call them animals, or worse. Do they see the rest of us as prey, blind marks, the enemy? What makes them so different from us, or are we all that different in the final analysis?
We tend to look at career criminals in one of two ways: The conservative approach is to view them as societal vermin to be exterminated, disturbing statistics, and a drain on the economy. The liberal take is to see criminals as underprivileged, misguided dimwits who just need some psychological counseling and a job skill to help them fid a place in society. Neither point of view has much to do with the reality of the human beings I met.
Howard told me, "I never considered myself a bad guy. I still don't. But again, that's my opinion." Howard offered as proof of his humanity the fact that on one job he had been captured by an older woman confined to a walker. "I snuck into the place, had the money in one of them big money bags you put a key in to open it, and was headed out. I found out later in the trial, man, that there was $36,000 in there.
"I couldn't shove her out of the way. I should have. I probably could have got away. When the judge sentenced me, he said, 'Howard, I know that you got found guilty, and I got to adhere to that, but what I want to know right now is why didn't you run?'
"I told him, 'She was in the way, man, and I wasn't going to knock over that old woman, I probably would have broke something else.' The prosecutor looked crazy, she looked crazy, everybody looked crazy. She said, 'He was extremely nice. He was so polite the way he just sit there while I called the police. I thought maybe he was on drugs, but most people that be on drugs ain't so submissive.' I wasn't on nothing. 1just needed that $36,000. That's why I know, regardless of what anybody say, I don't believe that 1 am a criminal. I got a problem, and I don't believe anybody can solve that problem but me."
Sitting in a department of corrections' conference room, brightly bathed in greenish fluorescent light, flanked by the state and American flags in the corners of the office, Howard seems perfectly reasonable, a thinker. He thinks maybe he is a little too softhearted and easygoing to be a bad guy. Listening to Howard, I begin to rationalize that most people leave a wake of disorder of some magnitude behind them as they pass through life. I've had bosses who caused more panic and heartbreak every day of the week than the average burglar. But as Howard describes just how much he has reformed his behavior lately, he reveals a brief flash of the alternate reality that is the life of crime.
"I've come a long ways from when I first came to prison. started from fighting every day, breaking in lockers, robbing, stealing, jacking, selling marijuana, smoking marijuana, drinking buck, selling buck, messing with homosexuals, although I never been a homosexual myself. You name it. I done it. Now, the last three years, I've been clean, improved psychologically and socially. I got an agenda now, a positive agenda.
"Guy told me about a month ago, "You done got soft.'
"'What you talking about, nigger?'
"'You done got soft. You act like an old cracker-man.' He wanted to trick this dude out of thirty dollars, and he needed my help to do it. I still get commissions to do shit like that, because they know I can do it.
"'Fuck that. Naw, I can't do it.'
"'What's wrong with you, man? Thirty dollars, I'll give you fifteen. You done got soft.' I didn't have a dime either. It would have been easy to do, because it was a white kid just got here in orientation. He didn't know what the fuck was going on. He was scared to death anyway. I could just have called him round the corner of the building and took it out of his pocket, he wouldn't have been able to stop me. But I ain't stole nothing in years, and I've had chances to steal."
Slowly, elliptically, the true brutality, the disregard for human life, and the looking-glass thinking of criminality begins to come through. Howard tells this story about a friend of his, Kimble, a story Howard finds truly tragic for his friend:
"Kimble and me did a lot of time together. Kimble had been in foster homes all his life, ain't never had a stable family. He's twenty-three years old now, six-foot-four, 265 pounds -- this is a big guy. He left me in prison, man, got out, got with these guys that was selling dope. Kimble is in a baseball dugout in a city park. Girl comes up to him one night -- woman about thirty years old -- and she wanted a dime off him, but she didn't have no money. So he said, 'Give me some of that head, and I'll give you a dime off me. '
"He made the mistake and gave her a dime out first. She smoked it, then she wanted another dime, but she ain't give him no head. "'Bitch, stop playing,' he said, and he slapped her, Bow! 'Get down on your knees and get busy! Pay for my dime 'fore I break your shit.'
"She got down there went to sucking his dick, and she bit it off. When she bit down on his dick, his reaction was he broke her neck. She was a crack monster, didn't weigh but 110 pounds, skinny neck they get smoking that shit. Strong as he is, he just broke her neck and killed her. He didn't even know she was dead. He got found guilty at the trial, and he's on Death Row right now. Twenty-three years old, he's on Death Row."
Opening this book, you are passing through a portal into this parallel universe where wrong is right, bad is good. It is a world of lawless acts and outlaw ideas. It is an exploration of the minds of individual men and women through the stories they tell about themselves. As alien as it may seem in places, this is still a very human story: great intelligence and promising potential gone wrong, shrewd ingenuity and bold bravery in the name of a bad cause, the exhilaration of beating the odds, the failure -- sometimes hilarious -- of grand schemes, the banal savagery and creative cruelty we humans are capable of expressing,
I didn't go looking for serial killers who cannibalize their victims, or even the more common murderers who generally kill only once, usually someone they know, I wasn't looking for shock value or headline crimes, I wante.1 to interview the people any of us might run into one day, I talked to the people who really should be feared, the ones who will jack your car at a red light, sneak into your hotel room while you're in there sleeping, prowl the hallway of your home in the middle of the night when you get up to go to the bathroom; the people who will stick up the McDonald's down the street, a drug store, bank, or 7-Eleven where you shop or work; the people who will steal your credit cards, cash your paycheck, bilk you out of your savings, and gorge on your vices.
Many of these men and women are personable, often charming and articulate, sometimes downright sympathetic. A few of the narrators are so full of an electric energy that it is easy to find yourself caught up in tales of wild enterprise that suddenly turn to nightmares of pain, All of these men and women have been dangerous.
It's ironic that so many of the people involved in crime see their profession as the easy way to make money, the easy way to get over on the straight world, when it sounds in the telling like such a strain on their minds and their resourcefulness, not to mention the physical danger and emotional drain. These are certainly not heroes, but many of them possess a heroic stamina and tenacity of purpose that would be admirable under other circumstances,
For all our aversion to crime, Americans have always had an attraction to criminal behavior. As Howard put it, "You ain't trying to get an interview with the governor. That would be boring. That's why you're writing about me." The outlaw is part of American heritage. Many years ago, my great aunt May wanted to join the Daughters of the American Revolution, so she sent off a small check to a mail-order genealogist to confirm her credentials. She was soon gratified to be told that, yes, several of our direct forebears had been modest landowners and the proprietors of small businesses who fought on the side of the Patriots in the war for independence. Greedy for a tinge of blue in the blood line, she sent another payment to the researchers asking that they follow the family history back to the "Old Country," hoping, I suppose, to find nobility. She was told that almost all of our progenitors arrived in the New World with an expedition led by the British General James Edward Oglethorpe. Of Irish, Scottish, and English birth, they were cutthroats, horse thieves, or debtors who chose an uncertain future in the swamps of the king's crown colony of Georgia over the dead certainty of rotting prison ships or the gallows.
Aunt May needn't have been so embarrassed as she was. An overwhelming number of Americans can trace their roots to similar sources -- the poor, the outcast, fugitives from the law or the established Church, the unwanted and the unwashed from nearly every society on Earth. It occurred to me as a boy, when I first heard about Aunt May's predicament, that perhaps the reason the founders of this nation were so keen on freedom was because of all the time they'd spent in jails.
For all our harumphing over moral rectitude and all our handwringing over crime, our heroes are often loners, rebels, mavericks, romanticized outlaws. We treasure the legends of Billy the Kid, Jesse James and the Dalton Brothers, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd, John Dillinger, Willie Sutton.
When I first started this project, I naively expected to dig up people who called themselves safecrackers or cat burglars, second-story men or madams -- men and women who considered crime their profession~ with the exacting standards and code of ethics one would expect of professionals. A few of those criminals still exist~ although they are a dying breed from a bygone era. I got the feeling that their perception of themselves, like my expectation, was more influenced by the gangster movies of the 1940s and too much Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett than by the facts. Even as they lamented the passing of crime into the hands of opportunists and young sadists, it's doubtful that their own youth was spent that much differently. As one FBI agent put it, "Who was Dillinger? A guy with an eighth-grade education who got shot to death."
Over the course of a year, I interviewed sixty people for this book. The majority of them were in county jails or state prisons, a few were free on parole or probation. Two had not been involved with any criminal activity for many, many years, and are upstanding members of the communities in which they live and work.
The ages of the people I talked to ranged from twenty to fifty, with most of them in the twenty-five- to thirty-five-year-old range. Fifteen were women. The men and women in prison decided to talk to me for reasons that ranged from simple boredom to egotism to a genuine sense of duty to warn away young people who might be tempted to follow in their footsteps. Others were just curious about me, a real live writer. At least, on one particular day they were more curious about me than they were about going to their prison jobs. I didn't have to be much of an attraction to beat out the dull routine behind bars. On the other hand, all of the prisoners knew that they had nothing to gain from talking with me.
I guaranteed all my subjects anonymity. I thought they might be worried telling me about crimes they had committed in the past, but their actual apprehensions were different. Men and women who had a criminal past, but who are now free, didn't want their neighbors or business associates to know about their pasts, because of the obvious suspicion and stigma that goes along with such a personal history. The main concern of the people still serving time was that they protect their families and friends from embarrassment by association.
Prisoners who agreed to talk to me ran other risks in the complex system of paranoia and suspicion that rules the population behind bars. As Howard explained it, "I'm up here in this conference room talking to you, but somebody is out there, right now, saying I'm in here snitching to the superintendent. Yeah, that's why a lot of guys didn't want to do this, because coming into this building right here is bad, man. When I walk out of here, guys will be saying, 'Why the fuck you been gone so long? Hey, man, what you doing up there?' A snitch in prison is like a person with leprosy." Administrative officials at one prison told me that they assembled over a hundred inmates as meeting the criteria for my interviews -- recidivists who qualified as career criminals. All but a handful of men stampeded for the door when they were told about my project. They wanted nothing to do with me or my questions.
***
Only a few of the people I interviewed tried to romanticize their stories, to rationalize their behavior as some rebellious act against the unfair restraints of an overbearing society. You could see the romantics coming when they started evoking the name of Robin Hood. None of the self-styled Robin Hoods I met gave anything to the poor, or gave much thought to anyone other than themselves.
I wasn't surprised that there was vanity and exaggeration in these interviews. But I was surprised that there was no whining. No one tried to tell me they didn't do it. When I asked how they got where they are today, there were no excuses. Not one of these men and women blamed anyone but themselves. Most of them had thought a lot about their lives; they were more introspective than I had expected they would be. There's a fair amount of psychobabble about self-esteem and co-dependency, because so many inmates have been exposed to Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous as well as various 12-step programs recently introduced to prisons. That's not all bad since a life of crime superficially seems to be an inability to "just say no" to alcohol, to drugs , to the adrenaline rush of doing the wrong thing. Howard was fairly typical:
"I ain't 'sick,' I don't think. I ain't got no problem recognizing wrong from right, or recognizing what adjustments I need to make in life. Most of my problem comes from a lack of self-discipline, Any time a man got lack of self-discipline, it stands to reason that he's going to have complications. You got to have a management system in your thoughts and your reason, your logic. If that's missing, then it's either prison or the graveyard for you, Have I learned my lesson? Learning your lesson and knowing not to do it anymore are two different things. I believe that I am now labeled a social deviant, no matter what I do, and labels can kill you. I'm not going to take that and say fuck it, fuck society. I'm not going to take that attitude because I know I got to truly love me now. I haven't been doing that in the past, and I can't rely on other people to love me. So I got to fall in love with myself, so to speak."
In between interviews in a state prison, passing the time while the entire institution came to a standstill for one of the many "counts" during the day when every inmate must be accounted for, I sat with a woman corrections officer in a glass booth overlooking a waiting room packed with men on wooden benches. They were supposed to sit in silence, tediously watching the clock until they were called for doctor's appointments and counseling sessions, administrative interviews, and parole hearings. She must have screamed out, "NO TALKING!" a million times a day as she scolded, cajoled, and ordered those men around, separating pairs who misbehaved when they were together. "They're just like a bunch of little kids," she confided in me, "a bunch of grownup, mean, dangerous little kids. They'll try and get away with whatever you'll let them get away with and a little more."
If there is one thing these criminals have in common, it is the inability to grow up. The criminal life outside prison is a ruthless Neverland where pleasure is not deferred, nobody tells them what to do, and adult responsibility is unthinkable.
***
Almost every career criminal I talked to got started on the wrong path very early in life. A lucky few figure out the odds early, and slip away from the criminal life before it really starts for them. But most of them would never have stopped to think about the course of their lives if they hadn't suddenly found themselves in prison, approaching their mid-thirties with a much longer sentence than they'd ever had before. They are punted into awareness by a growing sense of their own mortality. Only when it looks like they might be wasting most of the rest of their lives being told when to get up, when to go to bed, and when to go to the toilet do they suddenly start to wonder how they got into this fix in the first place.
Their recollections of their early years are as individual as the life stories you'd hear at your twentieth high school reunion. For some, it starts with a mistake that leads to another and another, until doing wrong just becomes a habit. Committing crime seems normal to them. A few of these people grew up in communities where a life of crime is more common than a college degree. Others are rocketed into a life of crime because of the feelings of power they get from the manipulation and mental domination of their suckers, or from the terror a gun inspires in their victims. One or two have been bad to the bone from the day they were born. Howard says, "Myself, I started out just by peer pressure. I was short. I was always short. I'm short now. I wanted people to see how big I could be. But I got brothers ain't never seen the inside of a police car. I'm the only one in my family that's been in jail before, I'm the only one got a prison record. So I know it's got to be me."
***
I was adopted. My dad was ex-military, worked for a big corporation. My mom finished her degree and taught at a stale university. I really can't blame my past on my parents. I was raised upper-middle-class. I didn't have everything I asked for, but I had everything I needed all my life. I was a straight A student. I always liked learning, but I didn't get anything for that. That was expected of me.
I started shoplifting. not because I needed anything-I had all allowance, I mowed lawns and shoveled snow. I had money in the bank, and I wasn't stupid with it. But I could get attention shoplifting. I'd actually go in places, steal stuff, and then just throw it away if they didn't chase me. It was the thrill I was interested in.
1 got off on my first girlfriend. I was a sophomore, and she was a senior. I say my girlfriend: I sat back and wanted her, she sat up there and didn't know I existed. They had a party after a basketball game, BYOB. I didn't drink, and I didn't know how to get it, so I stole a bottle of Cutty Sark scotch out of my dad's liquor cabinet.
It was a Friday night. I knew she was going to be there. "Then I offered her a drink, she wouldn't drink with me. That was it. I didn't have any conversation. I'd never had a relationship. When she said, "No, I don't want a drink." that was it for me. Evidently. it was obvious on my face that I was disappointed, because she made a point of telling me at school Monday, "The reason I didn't drink with you was because I was doing Crystal Meth."
"Oh, yeah, okay."
"You know what it is, don't you?"
"Oh, yeah, sure." I didn't have the slightest idea what it was.
"My boyfriend who is at State University works in a lab up there, and they're making it," she said. "I can get some for you if you want."
"Yeah, I'll take some," I said, just because I wanted to be cool with her.
"Okay, I'll bring you a dime tomorrow."
So the next day she gives me a little cut-off corner of a baggie with just a match head worth of white crystals in it. I thought, "That's probably worth a dime." And that's what 1gave her was a dime. If she hadn't said, "You do have the ten dollars," I wouldn't have known what she was laughing about. 1wasn't going to back down, but at ten dollars I'm thinking a whole lot more about it than I had been. For ten dollars I'm not putting this in a trash can.
"You can shoot it, snort it, or eat it." I didn't even want to think about what shoot it meant. Snort it -- I had nothing to base what that meant. I don't know if you've ever tasted the stuff, but chewing aspirins is nothing compared to this crap. Some of the nastiest stuff I ever had. So I put it into a Coca-Cola and drank it.
Every school has their star athletes. Every school has their nerd, and then they have their fat kid. I was always the little fat kid, which made gym in particular always embarrassing. It just so happened that I did my first hit of this Crystal Meth about forty-five minutes before gym class. Well, that was the best gym class I ever had in high school. I couldn't do anything wrong. Every basketball I shot went through the hoop. I ran all the laps with everybody. Gym class just wasn't the total embarrassment it had been.
That was it. I bought a dime that day. I bought a dime the next day, and the next day. She even tried to slow me down. She asked me. "Are you eating or sleeping or anything'? You know, you're buying a dime every day, and I know you're not doing all these." It was just a little bit of powder. I didn't know I wasn't supposed to do all of it. Of course. by the fourth time. all of it didn't work as good anymore. Trying to back off a little bit, she gave me some mescaline.
I was working part-time al the stadium -- basketball games, hockey, Ice Capades. I was supposed to work that night, so I took the mescaline. The attraction that evening was The Led Zeppelin Tour. I was not into music at all, not rock music, not any kind. Needless to say, between the mescaline and the Crystal Meth. I got into it that night.
T went relatively crazy at that point. If it was drugs, I was interested. It didn't matter if it was ups. downs. psychedelics, I was into it. Of course, that gets expensive, but I had six hundred dollars saved up that I was going to buy a car with.
Drugs also bring with it another lifestyle. My whitewall haircuts, wearing a tie to school, all that stuff was getting to be pretty bothersome. I got told by the dean of students to get a haircut. I ignored him. The second time he told me, I got detention. Both my parents work. They don't know I'm in detention unless I tell them. so they didn't find out. The third time, I got suspended for three days. They found out about that.
Being raised in a Catholic family, you didn't cuss around my house. You definitely didn't say no to my father. Catholic and ex-military'? It just didn't happen. But it was getting to the point where I thought I could handle everything.
I came in to eat supper, sat down at the table. and my dad handed me two dollars. I said, "What's this for"?"
"Get a haircut."
"No, sir."
He hit the table so hard all the dishes bounced. He said, "I didn't ask you to get a haircut. I told you to get a haircut."
"Fuck you."
He was at one end of the table, and I was at the other. I didn't realize the old man could move that fast. I thought he was going to beat me. I'd gotten spankings before, but I was never an abused child. He was mad. I punched him, just enough to give him a bloody nose. The blood that came out of his nose wasn't as red as his face. The expression on his face made my arms drop to my side. I definitely didn't think about doing it again. He picked me up by my shirt and slammed me into the wall. My shoulders went in between the studs when they broke the plaster board. He gave me one of these, "This is my house, this is my food. If you want to live here then you do what I tell you, when I tell you, the way I tell you. If you don't like that, then there's the door."
I made what was probably the most serious mistake I ever made in my life: I walked out.
I had two or three dollars in my pocket. It was October in the northern Midwest. It was cold already. I was a kid, just turned fourteen. I decided I'd better go someplace warm. I did go by and shoplift a nice leather jacket. Shoplifting quit being a game and became a matter of survival. I hitchhiked down to Daytona Beach, Florida.
At fourteen you can't work full time, and part-time don't pay the rent. Now I gave working a shot. I went to work at a McDonald's down there. But I had to do something to supplement my income. I didn't have any money, so the drugs actually stopped when I left home. My weight kept going down, because the meals became fewer and far between. My first problem was I had no place to sleep. They had the old transients law there. You had to have money and a place to stay or you could be arrested.
I'm hanging out at the beach at night, and I go to lie down on a bench. A couple of other runaways said, "What are you doing?"
"I'm going to sleep."
"Man, you can't go to sleep. They'll put you in jail. You get caught out here at night laying down on the beach, on a bench, in a car, if you're not doing something, they're going to stop you, and put you in jail."
I'm only working half a day, so I'm sleeping on the beach in the day time. You could go to Denny's and drink coffee all night long for a dime. A dime was a lot easier to get than white crosses and Crystal Meth.
Eventually, it got to where I had a little bit of money. If you want to eat ten hits of speed, you buy twenty and sell half to pay for the first ten. This went on for a while. I did all right on the speed, but it got to the point that I was eating too much of it. Where I actually started making a good amount for a kid that age living on the beach is that I was able to find somebody who was selling LSD. I could buy 100 hits for ten dollars, and then sell them for two dollars apiece on the beach. That's two hundred dollars if I don't eat any. So the profit margin was considerably different.
Then I found out about navy bases. I was going up to the naval base at Jacksonville and getting five dollars a hit off the squids coming off the ships. Sometimes it was real acid, and sometimes it wasn't. It was irrelevant. It was a financial thing. I didn't live up there, so I didn't have to worry about it.
But then I got robbed. I lost five hundred dollars, but it was more than that at the time -- I lost everything. I didn't have cash to get the product to get started again, and I didn't have a pay check coming for two weeks.
I was talking to a friend of mine who had done a burglary, and he had a pistol. I said, "Man, let me borrow that pistol." I took it back to my runaway buddies. These guys were going to rob somebody coming out of a club where they had to go through a little alley to get to the parking lot. I said, "Man, you're going to rob them coming out of the club? What money are they going to have?" The robbery didn't make sense. They think I'm just scared. The truth was that I was scared, but I got put in this situation, so I said, "Okay, let's just do a smart robbery."
"What's a smart robbery?"
The one thing I knew about was McDonald's. One thing about Mc- Donald's is they are the same everywhere. Anywhere you go, their training program is identical. The buildings might be a little bigger or smaller, one might have more tables or a playground, but their systems are the same.
McDonald's does night deposits. Nowadays they use older people, but back then they used three kids and the assistant manager who is usually just a kid, too -- maybe nineteen years old. So you got four people. I've been there when they're getting instructed. They're told if you get in an emergency situation, just give it up. Pay attention to detail, call the police as soon as you can, don't get anybody hurt, give them the money.
We pooled our little bit of cash and bought an old shotgun at the pawn shop. It was so old that if you pulled the trigger, the shotgun would break open. You can't fire it, but I'm not planning on shooting anybody. It's all psychological.
You got kids out there today who are doped up, and they'll shoot you, then get your wallet. My sister got killed in a robbery, a purse snatching. She had fourteen cents, but she hung onto her purse, and the guy stabbed her. I've never done a crime high. You don't plan them high, you don't do them high. You get high afterward, and there's an adrenaline rush to doing crime.
The three of us go to this McDonald's. I know when they are going to close. I know that they lock up while they're cleaning. But there's a pan on the side of the grill called a grease catcher. It's where they scrape the grease and the left-over little things of fat. It's collecting grease all day long. Before it cools, it has to be dumped in one of the barrels they keep out back. They can't clean the grill until the place is shut. The guy has to open the back door to get out to empty the grease catcher. While they're cleaning, the assistant manager is sitting at a desk. counting the money for the night deposit. The safe is open, you don't even have to make him open the safe.
We sat out there in the trash bin for about half an hour, which is probably the most scared I've ever been in my life. J didn't want to do it. but I didn't know how to get out of it either. I didn't want to look like a pansy. The other two didn't want to do it either. If anybody had backed out, the other two would have gone in a heartbeat. 'Course they would have blamed the first one.
We went in there. I pointed the gun at the guy and told him to put the money in the bag. I was young. my voice sounded young. I had a ski mask on, and [ had a pistol in my hand. The guy looked at me over his shoulder, snickered, and went back to counting his money. So J aired the hammer back on the pistol. There's a definite sound to that. I'm watching the guy, because at this point I'm ready to piss on myself. When I aired that hammer back, his whole demeanor changed. He put the money in the bag so fast it would make your head swim.
When we got out of there, we had almost seven thousand dollars. These other two guys were saying, "Let's go get some drugs!"
I'm high. I'm high on the control and the power and the being obeyed. I don't know how to put it all in words, but I'm high, and I don't need to go get some drugs. I want my cut of the money, and I want away from these two idiots. So I take my part of the money, and I kept the pistol.
There was a God complex that came with it. I got to the point where I was doing a robbery two or three times a week. You don't need that much money, I don't care what kind of drugs you're doing. I was doing it for the sheer power.
I made my way back to the Midwest, and did three or four more McDonald's with another guy. But when he left, I wasn't quite comfortable doing them alone without any backup. So I went to work for some people who were selling high-end stereo equipment to people. They deliver the equipment and set it up, then they give me the address and tell me when to go there and steal the stuff back. In a three week period, I had done thirteen of these burglaries.
I didn't get caught doing the burglaries, but I made the mistake of letting my girlfriend drive me on them. I got knocked off for public intoxication by a minor, malicious trespassing, and narcotic paraphernalia -- I had a pipe. They gave me sixty days. They were asking me about these burglaries, but they don't have nothing on me. They know something: The one thing all these burglaries had in common was the business that sold the equipment, and I work for them.
The girl I was hanging out with came up to visit me in jail. She was quite a bit older than me, an alcoholic, and not the smartest person in the world. The detectives convinced her that it was a good time for me to get my life in order, and why don't we just go ahead and get it all cleared up now. She told on me.
Even though I was only fifteen, they sentenced me as an adult. My parents weren't willing to stand up for me: "He left. He's been out there for a year and a half. He's involved in drugs. He got in trouble, let him get out of it." The judge gave me a one to five year sentence, but he told me, "You finish your high school education, and I'll consider bringing you back and putting you on probation."
They sent me to an adult prison for first offenders. I only had about a year and a half of credits in high school, so I had quite a bit of work to do. That's the only thing I did. I'd go to school in the day and take tests. I'd take the books for the next test home with me, and I'd read them until lights out at night. I'd go in and take that test again. I maintained an A average all the way through, and tested out to get my diploma in about seven months.
I didn't really have any interest in going to college, because I knew I couldn't afford it, but I thought, "I'll make this look good." You could take classes by correspondence from the State University for one dollar a course. I hustled up a few dollars, and in the next three months I had finished three college level correspondence courses. I was rather proud of my fifteen-year-old self.
I wrote the judge, and he says, "Fuck you." These weren't his exact words. What he said was, "I don't think you're ready yet. I think you just did this to get out."
Yeah, I did. That's what he told me to do, and that's how I thought about it.
I take a copy of the newspaper article where the judge sentenced me, a copy of my high school diploma, my grade sheets with my 4.0 college average at fifteen from prison, and I send it all to the governor. It was an election year, so the governor played this into "Governor Helps Youth."
I'd done twelve months and nineteen days of my sentence, and they paroled me to the university. It was an opportunity that was unheard of. All I had to do was make a C average or above. I had a clothing allowance. They're paying my housing, my tuition, my books, everything. You go into the gym and sign up for classes. They give me a check from the federal grant program, a check from the state, this and that. I signed them. They took the checks back, which was what I expected. I go to the next table, and they gave me the cash for the checks! Okay. There's still four or five more tables. They're going to take this money back from me, aren't they? They only took the first month's housing, the first semester tuition, and paid for my food card. I'm supposed to take care of this year's worth of money. I'd had large chunks of money before, but never when I'd had to be -- what's the word? -- responsible. I'm still kind of dazed when I got out of the back end of the gym with something near three thousand dollars.
"All right," I said. "Cool." I just got out of the joint, too. I went and bought new clothes. 'Course, I had to have a new stereo system, and da da da dah. First thing you know, money's just about gone. I need to invest some of the money I have left. I buy a pound of reefer. The reefer's not selling. So I've screwed up all this money. I also had a checking account. Nobody had taught me how to use checks. I didn't even know what the back of the check book was for. It really was an accident, but I ended up with $350 in bad checks out. The next thing I know they're looking for me for bad checks. I know this violates my parole. Maybe it could have been solved, but I'm not going back to prison on the house. If they want me, they can find me. I take off.
I went to New Orleans and did four or five robberies down there. I got arrested with the two guys I was working with, but I was the only one who ended up getting any time, because my parole violation came up. They send me to Angola, which is definitely not a fun place.
Again, I play the education game to the hilt. There's not six weeks between the time I left college and when this happened down South. I'm still enrolled in college, carried a 4.0 average, still got this endorsement from the governor. I shoot all this to the Department of Corrections. I've only got a five year sentence. They drop my custody, and send me to a place called Jackson Barracks in New Orleans where they have a work/study release program. They're sending me down there to go to school.
I walked in the front door of that place, and out the back door, got on a bus, and went back to Florida. There wasn't anything big to the escape. I conned them into sending me where I could make a move. You don't make a move from Angola. That's a serious prison.
Coming into Florida on 1-10, they had this big welcome station. Right next to it is a Highway Patrol station with one of those yellow signs out front for drivers' licenses. I had been using fake I.D. for a long time. I had memorized the information on one I'd used before in Florida. I walked in and said, "I'm Mike Miller. I've lost my driver's license, and I definitely need to get some I.D. I'm backpacking."
"Just a minute, Mr. Miller. What's your birthday and your Social Security number?" I gave it to them. "Your license is valid." They took my picture, run it through the machine. "Here's your license, sir. That'll be a dollar."
Within ten hours of escaping, I had another set of I.D. I had also snagged a backpack, which contained three changes of clothes that didn't fit, and a pistol.
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