Caged to Kill

by Tom Swyers

  “Yes, it might lead to something, or it could be a blind alley. But I’m afraid it might involve some paperwork on your end.”

  Julius sighed. “All right, Thompson, I can at least listen to you. Just don’t put me to sleep.”

  “You mean you don’t have an afternoon coffee in your right hand?”

  “I’m trying to cut back. Doctor’s orders.”

  “Okay, well maybe this little mystery will wake you up. I’m trying to help out an ex-con by the name of Phillip Dawkins.”

  “Yeah, I know about him.”

  “Professionally?”

  “No. I read about his release in the newspaper. It raised some eyebrows around here—a guy in solitary for thirty years for a crime he supposedly didn’t commit. What about him?”

  “Well, it seems there are some people who don’t want to see him succeed on the outside.”

  “What’s been going on?”

  “CO harassment via an unwarranted traffic stop, a rogue state inspector at his barbershop.”

  “Really? That’s weird.”

  “I’m just scratching the surface of weird, Julius.” David had no intention of ever telling Julius that Phillip thought about killing him. He didn’t want Julius to get sidetracked and start investigating Phillip.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I’ve got a letter—one of many—from someone with the initials “EC” and someone named Boris Dietrich. It’s dated January 24, 1966. In it, EC tells Boris that he went through a loyalty background check with the FBI in the late 1940s and tells him how difficult it was for him and his family at the time. I need you to run through the FBI archives and find that report. I need to find out the identity of EC as a piece to the puzzle.”

  “What puzzle?”

  “Long story, but these letters were in a file with Phillip Dawkins’ name on it. I don’t know if there’s a connection or not between these people and Phillip, but I want to look into it.”

  “You mean you want me to look into it. Do you know we might have a bunch of ECs who went through loyalty checks in the late 1940s?”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “Harry Truman signed an order in 1947—Executive Order 9835—otherwise known as the “Loyalty Order” to do background checks on people. I think they did close to 30,000 field investigations. I’m sure there were a lot of people who have the initials EC who were investigated. Can you narrow it down any?”

  David shuffled through the letters. Some of them were contained in envelopes. No return address. All hand-addressed to Boris Dietrich at a PO Box in Slateville, New York. He looked at the postmarks. “Yeah, I can narrow it down. Look for someone in the upstate New York area between Montreal and Albany. I’ve got letters postmarked from both Montreal and Albany. While you’re at it, see if you can track down anyone by the name of Boris Dietrich in Slateville, New York. I think that’s located close to Kranston.”

  “All right, that narrows it down. I’ll see what I can find.”

  “Thanks, Julius. I owe you one.”

  “Yes, you do,” Julius said, before hanging up.

  “Who was that?” Phillip asked.

  “He’s a friend who works at the FBI. Phillip, let me ask you something. Who is the superintendent at Kranston?”

  “Mr. Martin Kleinschmit.”

  “Have you ever heard of someone by the name of Boris Dietrich?”

  Phillip rubbed his chin, eyes fixated on a colorful brochure from Boscov’s Department Store. “No, can’t say I have ever heard of anyone with that name.”

  “How was Kleinschmit as a superintendent?”

  “He was a good superintendent.”

  “How so?”

  “He gave me special privileges that inmates in solitary don’t get.”

  “Like what?”

  “A pair of long johns, sneakers, shower sandals, stick deodorant, extra bars of soap. That kind of stuff is not allowed by the Bureau of Prison directives.”

  “How could he do that if it was not allowed by the directives?”

  “He said he had broad authority to do things that were in the best interest of the facility. Sometimes that authority could work against you, too.”

  “Did it work against you sometimes?”

  “Yeah, it did. At one time, they had me in restraints moving in the facility. Handcuffs and waist chains are normal for guys in solitary. But they had me in leg irons, too, without a restraint order. That went against directives, but they said it was for the safety of the facility because they thought I was an escape risk.”

  “So directives aren’t really directives at all then?”

  “Right, just like promises, directives are made to be broken. Usually they are broken under the cover of safety and security of the facility, but the real aim is to show the inmate who’s in charget.”

  “I suppose it wasn’t in the best interest of the facility for Kleinschmit to let you out of solitary confinement—to give you a chance to live with the general population.”

  “Mr. Kleinschmit couldn’t.”

  “I don’t understand. You told me once that your segregated status was reviewed every thirty days by a committee made up of prison personnel and that they would submit their recommendation to the superintendent, but that he had final say in the decision.

  “Right, but he really didn’t have a say.”

  “I don’t get it. Why were you different than anyone else in solitary?”

  “I was a central office case. The brass in Albany were responsible for monitoring my case and telling the superintendent what to do with me. Mr. Kleinschmit said that he wanted to let me out of solitary, but he couldn’t because the central office told him to keep me caged up. Yet every other cop killer and guys who had escaped were assigned to the general population.”

  “What was the purpose of the reviews then if all they were going to do was rubberstamp what the central office wanted? The Due Process Clause of the U.S. Constitution requires that you have a meaningful review of your status. How could it be a meaningful review if the result was a foregone conclusion?”

  “Like I’ve said, the system is designed to break you down. Superintendents aren’t super—they are slaves to the central office. Directives are optional. ‘Meaningful’ really means ‘meaningless’ so reviews are shuck and jive. Up is down and down is up. It’s like living in an alternate reality that messes with you, tortures you, and then finishes you off by frying your brain for good. Do you understand it now?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Don’t you see what they’re doing now? They’ve brought their reality into this world—your world—via me. COs do pull-overs, not police officers; phantom state inspectors show up to shake me down and then disappear. In the weeks before my release, so many COs hung around my cell gate and said my life would be great after they set me free. It was all a set-up, a con job. They wanted to raise my expectations so they could crush them.”

  David would normally consider this as one of Phillip’s paranoid rants, but this one had a ring of truth to it. David wondered if Phillip was right or if he’d been sucked into Phillip’s delusional world. “But why would they do that, Phillip? Why would they invest all this time in making the life of an innocent man miserable?”

  Phillip dropped his mail on to the table, leaned toward David, and got that wild and crazy look in his eyes. David rolled back his chair from his desk. He felt Phillip was about to lunge at him.

  Phillip screamed, “It’s the system! Don’t you get it?”

  “Calm down, Phillip—”

  “You calm down. You calm down and accept that it’s the system!”

  “Okay, Phillip. I’m trying to understand—"

  “Try harder.”

  “Okay. Okay already.”

  Phillip recoiled, sat back in his chair, and closed his eyes. Inhale through your nose, hold it and count to four, exhale through your mouth. Think positive thoughts. After four cycles of breathing, the rage drained from h
is face. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “I have to fight off the demons at times. I know this is all new to you. Just keep in mind: I follow you in your world. You need to learn to follow me in mine.”

  “All right,” David said, watching Phillip go limp at the shoulders. “But can I ask questions like you do about my world?”

  “Yes, sure, go ahead.”

  “Do you think Kleinschmit is part of the system?”

  “Yes and no. Yeah, he draws a paycheck from the system—so he’s part of it. But he’s a good superintendent. He’s one of the few good guys in the system. He allowed me to be a porter, to come out of my cell and clean the corridors, to help out any way I could. Mr. Kleinschmit kept telling me I was doing a great job.

  “But then the central office called and told him to put me back in my cage. Mr. Kleinschmit apologized to me, but said he had to lock me up again. When Kranston personnel approved a family visit with a distant cousin who’s an ex-con, Mr. Kleinschmit approved it but the central office shut it down days later.”

  “Help me understand. Who at the central office has it in for you and why?”

  “The State Commissioner of the Bureau of Prisons is Edmund O’Neil. I think it might be him. He’s from Syracuse—you know, my hometown. He might remember Pete Carlson. But there are deputy commissioners, assistant deputy commissioners—a yard-long list of people who could claim to be acting on behalf of the commissioner. There are scads of employees at the central office.”

  “How could someone get away with impersonating the commissioner?”

  “They don’t impersonate him in person. They could say it over the phone or have someone else make the call and say that something was ordered by the commissioner—or his office—and nobody would know any better on the other end. Maybe they’d do it when the commissioner was out of the office or on vacation. The prison doesn’t shut down—it runs all the time. Decisions have to be made. That’s when the underlings shoot out their gremlins in the form of written orders on commissioner letterhead and send it through interagency mail; you know, the state’s snail mail system. Anyone with a sheet of stationery letterhead with the commissioner’s name on it can issue an order and set the system into motion to wreak havoc. You as a con could work hard to get a privilege, like maybe a commissary buy of coffee. You get the privilege with one order and then a day later—before you get the coffee—that order is countermanded by another one prohibiting the coffee for absolutely no reason except one: The system is designed to destroy you.”

  “But the commissioner would see these orders when he returned.”

  “The chances of that happening are slim to none, and Slim has got one foot out the door. There are nearly 50,000 prisoners in the system in more than fifty facilities statewide. They can’t keep track of every piece of paper floating around that manages these cons. The left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. The order just gets filed away. Out of sight, out of mind. And, if, by a miracle someone in the chain of command finds some order out of whack, the blue wall of silence takes over—nobody rats on anyone else. The bogus order sticks forever and a day until a new one comes along. If one ever does. I read everything I could get my hands on about the system—studied all the angles—so I could try to figure out who was keeping me caged up in solitary.”

  “So why do you think it’s Commissioner O’Neil then, when it could be anyone?”

  “It’s just a hunch and it has a lot to do with what Mr. Kleinschmit said. He didn’t come right out and say it but I can read between the lines.”

  Just then the landline rang. Out of Phillip’s eyesight, the handset display on David’s desk showed Johnny was calling. David picked it up. “Hello,” he said, walking the phone upstairs into the kitchen so Phillip couldn’t overhear. David didn’t want to let Phillip know that Johnny was calling. Phillip didn’t trust Johnny—or any CO—and David didn’t want to set him off.

  “I’ve got something for you,” Johnny blurted.

  “What’s that?” David asked closing the basement door behind him.

  “I heard they’re coming after Dawkins and you again.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Let’s just say I was in the right place at the right time.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “The State Police this time.”

  “You mean COs dressed as the State Police?”

  “No, the actual New York State Police.”

  “You’re kidding me. Since when does the State Police carry out the dirty work of a group of COs?”

  “This goes higher than the COs at Kranston. Much higher. Probably to the central office level.”

  “I’m not one for conspiracies across state agencies—”

  “Who said it was a conspiracy? It could just be that someone owes someone a favor. But ignore me if you want. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “What else do you know?”

  “Only that they are going to raid you when you reopen.”

  “What do you mean by raid?”

  “That’s the word they used. That’s all I know.”

  David’s stomach churned. The war they were waging didn’t look like it would ever end. “Why are they going after us, Johnny?”

  “I don’t pretend to know. I’ve got to get back to my post at Kranston. I’m in town and my break is about to end.”

  “One more thing before you go. Have you ever heard of some guy by the name of Boris Dietrich? You know, the guy named in the correspondence you gave me.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “All right, thanks for the heads up.”

  “Be careful,” Johnny warned before hanging up.

  David had his reservations about Johnny, but his warning seemed aboveboard. It made sense. Word must have spread that we won the hearing. Having failed once, why wouldn’t they come back and try to shut us down again? But why not just try another inspection? Why raise the stakes with a raid? David didn’t begin to have the answers. He opened the basement door and climbed down the stairs while deep in thought. Why would Johnny warn us about a raid if it wasn’t going to happen? If Johnny was lying or misinformed, David figured they’d know soon enough because he said they would be coming when the shop reopened. David reclined his office chair and stared at the ceiling while rubbing his chin. We may be outnumbered, but we know when and where our enemy will attack.

  “Phillip, have you ever read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War?”

  “No.”

  “Sun Tzu said, ‘He who knows when he can fight and when he cannot, will be victorious.’ I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of playing defense. I think it’s high time we go on the offensive.”

  Chapter 12

  When the Lenco BearCat armored vehicle crept into the barbershop parking lot on June 1st at 10:15 a.m., David knew that Johnny was right. The raid was on. The vehicle looked like a Wells Fargo armored car with a gray-black matte painted finish and no markings. The only identifiers he could see were subtle. It had the Lenco insignia on the front grille and a New York State Police license plate hanging underneath it that read “MRT 3.”

  David had seen a sister armored personnel carrier at the New York State Fair in Syracuse at the State Police exhibit two years earlier. He knew it was used by the Special Operations Response Team. “MRT” on the plates stood for “Mobile Response Team.”

  He and Phillip had set this trap a few days earlier. They hung a sign in the barbershop window saying that it would reopen at 9 a.m. that day. As they worked off and on to comply with all the barbershop regulations, David knew someone was watching the shop. There might even be many someones. Through the barbershop front door, as they prepared to reopen, the pair saw plenty of suspicious cars with a driver and a passenger repeatedly slow to a crawl in front of the strip mall. The occupants would leer in the direction of the shop as they passed it at a snail’s pace on Central Avenue, running the risk of a rear-end collision from passing traffic
.

  But this morning the two men weren’t inside Phillip’s Barbershop. David didn’t know what Johnny meant by a “raid” and didn’t want to be in the shop to find out. They had parked the Mustang in front of the shop at the crack of dawn. Then they walked in through the front door and straight out the exit door in the rear. It was easy to disappear into the woods, only to circle around and cross an empty Central Avenue. Then they took up a position in a private booth at the Yellow Ribbon Diner. The menus they casually propped against the glass picture window ensured no one could see their faces from the outside. Mission accomplished. He and Phillip ordered breakfast and waited while they drank their way through bottomless free coffee refills.

  “Looks like we have our first customers,” David said.

  “What is that thing?” Phillip sputtered.

  “That’s the State Police’s version of a SWAT team.”

  “Oh my God,” Phillip gasped, as he began to stand up.

  “Sit down, Phillip. Stick to the plan.”

  “But I’m afraid of what they’ll do to the shop.”

  “I know, I know,” David said, “but you need to sit down. It’s too late for us to do anything else. We have to let this play out. Don’t worry.”

  Phillip slowly sat down with a grimace, eyes fixed in a glare on the scene that played out beyond the window.

  A few troopers in a cruiser was what David had expected to see—not an entire army. As the rear door on the BearCat swung open, the SWAT team emerged one at a time. Each had a semi-automatic rifle drawn to eye level, scanning for danger. They began to stack up on the side of the BearCat away from the barbershop, using the vehicle’s armor as a shield. The troopers were decked out in total camouflage—helmets to boots. Their outfits had no markings to denote they were from the State Police. If David hadn’t already seen them at the state fair, he would have thought they were members of the US Army Special Forces.

  A few members from the SWAT team ducked and made a dash for the rear of the barbershop. One of the figures behind the vehicle now held a megaphone up to his lips. If he was saying anything, David and Phillip couldn’t hear him.