by Gary Mulgrew
‘First one to plead out gets the best deal,’ the US prosecutor had gleefully told the three of us, as we arrived in court in Houston the day after my introduction to Marshal Dave. It was, in fact, the only words someone from the DoJ would ever speak to me – before then or since. Of course, at that stage we were all sure we would win and had privately mocked him later. ‘Twat,’ I had called him. ‘And a cocky twat, at that.’
Of course he had the right to be cocky; in a Federal prosecution the US Government hold all the cards. After eighteen months in Houston and four trial delays our resolve had weakened; a lack of access to witnesses – few of whom were willing to expose themselves to the glare of the world’s press or be associated with anything connected to Enron – had just about finished us off. Around that point the DoJ approached Giles with an offer that he could go home immediately if he pleaded guilty.
‘If you don’t plead, we’ll go to Bermingham next (David), then Mulgrew. One of you will be home for Christmas,’ the cocky twat had added. Reid was worried Giles would plead out, and Dan Cogdell, David’s lawyer, even more so. But I wasn’t worried. Giles and I had been great friends for over twenty years, since I had first moved to London and started working with him. Giles was godfather to Cara Katrina, and I to Lucy, his third-born. And besides, we weren’t guilty of what they had accused us of.
‘Have you seen your buddy in the last few days?’ Cogdell asked me one day, when I rolled up, late as usual, for our bi-weekly meeting in his downtown Houston office. Jimmy, David’s other lawyer, was watching me expectantly. I was always a lot closer to Giles than David, and for much of our time in Houston we had hung out together when we could find a lawyer to be there, the judge having ordered that we couldn’t be alone together without the presence of an attorney. He hadn’t specified what kind of attorney though, so we had co-opted Troy, a local lawyer more used to dealing with traffic offences or minor drug infractions, enticing him with beer and tacos. He’d even joined a five-a-side ‘soccer’ team with us, playing in a weekly league. And it worked well – except when he was late for a match, when I’d tell Giles I wasn’t allowed to pass to him, judge’s orders.
‘I haven’t seen Giles for a couple of days,’ I admitted, sitting down and wondering for the first time if there was any significance in that.
‘So no one has seen him since the DoJ contacted him to do a deal?’ Dan sighed, leaning forward. ‘Schwartzy? Did you get that?’ he asked, speaking loudly into the speaker-phone. I hadn’t realised David Schwartz, a key leg of my legal team, was on the speaker-phone from his Washington office.
‘Yup, I heard it,’ said David in an I-told-you-so tone. David did most of the day-to-day work with me on the case. Like Reid and Kevin, he had become a good friend and had a tremendously inquisitive mind.
‘Hi David,’ I said, trying to sound positive.
‘Hi Gary,’ a much more morose-sounding David responded. The atmosphere became leaden. Jimmy stood up and looked out of the window.
‘Come on guys, Giles wouldn’t talk to them,’ I said, looking at their unconvinced faces. Even my own voice sounded like it had lost the edge of certainty.
The room was oppressively still and Dan was just gathering himself up to say something else when the door opened and in bounded Giles, meatball sandwich in hand, full of energy and smiling happily.
‘Hey. How’s it going?’ he said, seating himself in the middle of the room. He unwrapped his sandwich and leaned forward and took a bite. Wiping his lips with a napkin, he became suddenly aware of the silence. He looked quickly from face to face, staring a little longer at mine.
‘What? What?’ he asked all of us, still taking mouthfuls of his sandwich.
Dan leaned forward across the table, just opposite Giles. ‘Hi Giles. Nice to see you. I was wondering if you’d spoken to your buddy Leo, the prosecutor?’ asked Dan, getting straight to the point. Giles stopped chewing. He looked again from one of us to the next, again resting his eyes longer on me – no doubt the focus of his disappointment. He carefully placed his sandwich down, his appetite seemingly lost.
‘Oh, I get it. I get it,’ he began, addressing the table initially. ‘You want to know if I’ve ratted out on you to get myself home?’ he asked, raising his head to face us. I couldn’t look at him. How could I have doubted my good friend for even a second?
‘Well Giles,’ said Dan in a very precise, calm, lawyerly fashion, ‘it must be a big temptation for you.’ I liked Dan. When we had first arrived in Houston and the judge had released us on tag, Dan had stepped up to the plate and said we could stay at his house – all three of us – until we could find somewhere to live. Although those first two weeks staying in his daughter’s bedroom had been difficult, I’d never forgotten his kindness. He was also a great guy to socialise with, very charismatic and funny. But this wasn’t the side we were seeing now.
‘Do you think this is about me? Do you think any of this is about me!?’ Giles began. He looked disgusted with us, and I averted my eyes as he suddenly pointed at me.
‘It’s about him!’ he continued, the emotion bubbling up in his voice. ‘It’s about his daughter, Cara Katrina. My goddaughter! It’s about his son waiting at home for him to come back. It’s about David’s children and his wife Emma; my girls, my family, my friends; the thousands of people who supported us on Friends Extradited; all the people who marched in London.’ By now all of our heads were hanging.
‘Do you think I would even contemplate it for a second? Do you think I would put you two in jail, while I went home and lived my life knowing I’d ratted you out to save my own skin? Do you think I could get up each day and ever look at myself in the mirror again . . .?’ He left the last question hanging indignantly in the air. Thankfully Dan spoke, still calm and assured.
‘Sorry Giles, we needed to ask. It must be a temptation . . .’ he said quietly.
‘Needed to ask? Needed to ask?’ Giles almost shrieked, the strain clear in his voice. ‘Don’t you know how desperately I want to see my girls!? Do you have any concept of how much I miss them, of how much I miss my fucking life?’ He was standing up now, leaning directly over the table. I felt ashamed. I raised my hand to him to calm him down, but he just flicked it away. His heavy breathing dominated the room. David was looking at the table while Dan still looked calmly at Giles, compassion in his eyes. Giles’s breathing seemed to ease as he began to speak again, more quietly this time.
‘No matter how much I’d give to go home,’ he began, slowly and deliberately, ‘I would never, ever, even contemplate doing it at someone else’s expense.’ I had a surge of pride in him and wanted to stand up, hug him and say ‘I told you so’ to the others – and to myself. Unfortunately, David got in before me.
‘Giles,’ he began softly enough. ‘Dan was only checking because he’s got to ask.’
That was pretty diplomatic for David, but barely waiting for him to finish, Giles picked up the rest of his tomato and meatball sandwich and hurled it across the room, shouting, ‘Fuck you! Fuck the lot of you. Why don’t YOU go do a deal, fuckers?’ as he stormed out of the room.
David and Jimmy gazed on in shock as Giles hurled the sandwich at them, and in a scene reminiscent of the movie Pulp Fiction, they looked firstly at their pristine shirts, both miraculously untouched, and then to the wall behind them, which was festooned with dripping meatballs and tomato sauce, sliding slowly down to the floor. They both grinned foolishly as they realised they hadn’t been hit.
‘What just happened?’ a disembodied David Schwartz asked from the safety of the speaker-phone.
‘Giles just launched a meatball sandwich at Bermingham and Jimmy,’ a chirpy Cogdell responded.
‘He missed,’ Dan added.
‘Shame,’ said David, his meaning not entirely clear.
By the time I had entered the chow hall, Kola had relaxed and was explaining a little more about how the prison operates. The dining hall was swarming with inmates and filled with the smell of burritos. We
queued along the left-hand wall and collected our trays just near the far end of the hall. There had to be at least five hundred inmates eating at any one time – a third of the total population – and I guessed the slowly moving queue was partly necessary to regulate the flow of inmates. At the top of the hall was a series of aluminium counter-tops where kitchen staff served the inmates – cups of water, bread rolls, then the dreaded burritos and the fillings. Many inmates had their own plates and cutlery, otherwise you used the plastic plates, and the combined fork and spoon called a ‘spork’ on offer beside the trays.
The dining room was split in two by a rather incongruous salad bar in the centre and another water fountain. But the main split was on racial lines. The Blacks occupied about half of the space on the far side of the hall. The Hispanics filled in the rest of that side and almost half as much space again in the near side of the hall. Then there was a small gathering of Natives, where I guessed we would head, and then an enclave of no more than forty or fifty Whites just beside the Indians. I tried not to look at them, but I could sense they were looking over and I quickly picked out SlumDawg and Tattoo Chest. They were looking right at me and pointing me out to a particularly nasty-looking skinhead, who appeared to have been sculpted, badly, out of white putty. I was too far away to make out his tattoos, but I guessed they were the usual array of artistic delights. Kola was talking to me, but I was barely listening. I was concentrating on not making an idiot of myself as each inmate served me, and also trying not to get too distracted by the continuous assault on my senses from every direction. At the end of the food queue there was a drink fountain offering some strange coloured juices and then to the right of them a section occupied largely by white men sitting either alone or occasionally with one other.
‘Chomos and psychos,’ whispered Kola as he caught the direction of my gaze. I saw Spiderman sitting there alone, and recalled his rancid breath and the spittle on my face as I crossed the Yard.
‘Total fucking psycho,’ Kola said emphatically, following my gaze. ‘You stay as far away from that motherfucka as you can!’ he elaborated, as he lifted his tray and led the way over to what I hoped was the relative security of the Natives’ enclave.
The burritos were every bit as bad as I imagined, and I picked at my food until Kola asked for it and quickly devoured it. The chat was mainly about the mundanities of prison life, but it was all useful information for me and I listened without saying anything. The enormity of this day and the reality of the life ahead of me in Big Spring were hitting me both at once. When we had finished, we returned the trays to the side of the kitchen area and walked past the two cops checking people periodically for food theft from the kitchen. It occurred to me again how few guards or cops there were around and how much we were left to our own devices throughout the prison.
‘That’s how they like it,’ Chief told me. ‘The prison is really policed by the gangs.’
‘How do I find out about them?’ I asked.
‘They’ll find out about you. They’ll know already you ain’t running with the ABs. They’ll come to you soon enough,’ he continued, this time without a smile.
By now I’d reached information overload. Kola was going for a walk at the top of the Yard but I was drained and wanted just to head back to the Range and to try and sleep. That felt like the safest option. Chief came back with me and returned to his drawing. I envied the solitude he seemed able to find, as I lay silently on my bunk and thought as little about Big Spring and as much about home as I could. Chief had confirmed to me that it would take at least three or four weeks before I’d be able to make a telephone call as all my numbers had to be submitted on a set form each Tuesday (today was Wednesday), then pre-approved before I could dial them. I had already told Calum I didn’t want him to come and see his father in this place and I was glad now I had made that choice. Letters and phone calls would probably be my only contact with the outside world. The pre-approval process involved the prison calling the number to ask the householder if they wanted to accept a call from you. Chief told me that was often the moment a new inmate would find out his relationship was over, or that friendships you thought would endure had not. ‘Shit, that’s the day some dudes find out even their own mothers don’t want nuthin’ to do with them no more,’ he told me whilst shaking his head.
In the same way, it would be a few weeks before my ‘account’ would be open, allowing me to use the prison shop on my one allotted time per week (also a Tuesday) and obtain vital supplies like paper and pens, stamps, tea, coffee, toiletries and shower shoes. I thought again of SlumDawg and more wistfully of the chocolate and other goodies they’d offered me. It seemed strange that the prison authorities would ensure that you had absolutely nothing and were so isolated for the first few weeks on entering prison just when you were most vulnerable to extortion – a situation that played right into the hands of the gangs and must bolster their power. Surely they must realise that this was how things worked? But then I was already beginning to sense an uneasy truce between the guards and the gangs – almost a ‘live and let live’ approach.
Too intimidated to try the TV room, and with nowhere else to sit, I lay back down on my bunk. My bed was narrow and rock hard, and I wondered if I would roll off the top bunk during the night and fall the six feet to the concrete floor below. I needed the bathroom again, but couldn’t face making that trip and having to deal with the next nutcase or psycho. I may have started drifting off to sleep, when I felt a nudge and saw two grinning Indians looking up at my bunk.
‘Here Scotland,’ they said, ‘it’s not much,’ before offering me a coffee and a few broken biscuits, some writing paper and a pen. ‘And before you ask,’ added Kola smiling, ‘no, you can’t join the Natives’ gang!’ Before I could thank them, they had turned and headed back to their bunks. I wondered, as I drank the coffee and demolished the biscuits, if I’d ever been given a more beautiful gift. With that thought, though, came a sense of unease. I wanted prison to be black and white for me, full of bad guys that I could keep my distance from, convinced in my mind that I wasn’t like them. That would make it so much easier to get through my time here. Acts of compassion or generosity just complicated things. I was starting to like these guys already, which was the last thing I wanted.
The nine o’clock count came and went and no one else approached me. No one noticed me as I lay there wondering how life could take such twists and turns and lead you to a moment such as this. I tried to block out the incessant noise and wondered again how I’d cope as the Range filled up. At ten o’clock exactly, the lights went dim, but they did not go out, and an uncanny quiet descended upon the room. I sat up on my bunk and looked around and watched the overhead lights flickering weakly. So the lights never went out in Big Spring. I smiled to myself as I thought how that was one fear I didn’t have to face. There would always be at least a little light, a little hope – a simile for my life here, perhaps. Maybe one day I’d get my life back, get back to my children. It was surprisingly chilly at night as the air-conditioning seemed to finally kick in, and that was a welcome respite. I pulled both my thin blankets around my shoulder and repositioned my pillows. I turned to face the wall and started to count ten good things from this most traumatic of days. And I found them, more easily than I found sleep.
9
TOILET CLEANING
‘MULGREW!’
‘Yo!’ I shouted, quite impressed with my response.
An officer with a clipboard was standing near the centre of the room as I leapt down from my bunk. After a restless and difficult night, I’d been awake for a few hours watching the other inmates get dressed and head off to work.
‘I’m Mulgrew,’ I said moving towards him while hanging onto my huge pants. He barely looked at me, instead just offering up a bucket with a couple of tired-looking brushes in it.
‘Latrine duty!’ he said matter-of-factly, as I took the limited cleaning equipment off him.
‘Oh, right,’ I said trying
not to sound too crestfallen.
‘$7 a month pay, until further notice. Sign here for the equipment and remember to return it when you’re done,’ he said brusquely.
I signed an official form stating that I acknowledged that the loo brushes and detergent were Federal Government property and that I faced at least another 140 years’ imprisonment if I dared pinch any of it. With that, the officer was gone and my on-the-job training was over. Most of my other ‘roomies’ had already departed and I was alone, other than a few waifs and strays, and a small group of Hispanics down near the end of the room who never seemed to actually work. Among them was the fearsome Joker, who I could see was rubbing his big hands together, laughing and joking again.
I tied up my balloon pants as tight as I could, rolled up the legs and headed over to one of the two toilet rooms. It seemed the air-con was ineffective during the day, so the heat was oppressive. I wasn’t wearing my ridiculously tight T-shirt, having already decided I had to go bare-chested if I was going to survive the heat for even one day in this room. That made me feel more vulnerable, but many others in the room were bare-chested and it was just too sticky to put my tight T-shirt back on.
My cleaning equipment consisted of a bucket, a scrubbing brush that you would typically use to wash dishes, and a heavy, hard brush for scrubbing those particularly tricky spots. In addition, there were about ten small packets of some kind of powder – maybe ammonia or bleach or some combination of the two. With that I was good to go. I stood there for a moment trying to figure out where to start, when a Hispanic guy I had noticed the night before came up and spoke to me.
‘Hey Escosais. You want to clean this one or the other one?’
