by Gary Mulgrew
‘Are they any different?’ I asked, to which he smiled and said, ‘I think the other one sees more action from el gordo hombres.’ The fat guys.
I smiled back. ‘I’ll do this one then.’
‘Tu habla español?’
‘A little, un poco,’ I answered, annoyed at myself for letting that slip.
‘OK, I will start in the other one. Don’t fuck around with me, Escosais,’ he added, his smile suddenly gone. ‘If you don’t clean good, I have to clean after you. Comprende?’
I nodded, nervously. He was maybe around thirty, well built, with a handsome face and a decent bushy moustache. Like me, he wore no top, but he had shorts on and some decent shower shoes. He had a couple of tattoos on his muscular forearms but I couldn’t see them properly without staring.
‘Should take no more than two hours then we done for the day, but don’t ask for the mop until later so the cops don’t know we’re done. OK, Escosais?’
‘OK, I got it,’ I said relaxing a little. This was getting easier. I could do ‘cool’, I was Escosais, Scotland, the new cool kid on the block. ‘Hey man, what’s your name?’ I asked trying to move a step forward, wondering if I should have used the word ‘man’.
He smiled. ‘They call me Gateau,’ he said raising his fist into bump mode.
‘Oh, like the cake!’ I said, way too quickly, thinking French, not Spanish.
‘Erm . . . no. Gato, like the Spanish word for a cat,’ he said, giving me a dubious look, and turning his fists around to show a huge cat tattoo on each forearm.
‘God, you’re a diddy,’ I thought as I mechanically bumped his fist. So much for trying to act cool. Who the hell would call themselves ‘the Cake’ in prison, unless perhaps the Pillsbury Doughman got banged up? The two huge tattoos of cats on his forearms, I learned later, were the mark of a renowned burglar. No building or bank was too difficult for the man I’d called ‘the Cake’ to enter. I shuddered to think what kind of tattoo I deserved.
I’d had loads of different jobs in my life. I started selling rolls in Dormanside Road with Joe at the age of nine, before we graduated to the newspaper run together. After I had been indicted by the Americans in 2002, Joe and I – still the closest of friends – bought a building company in Lewes called Allen & Joy, giving it a legal name of ‘Dormanside Rd Limited’. Ironically, NatWest ended up lending me more capital to set up my new business ventures than I was ever supposed to have stolen from them in the first place. All this in spite of my indictment being plastered all over the Internet and attracting so much publicity. That’s what I call a loyal bank.
Throughout my life, whenever I did any job, I tried to do it well, no matter how horrible or boring it was. I took the same attitude with the latrines. I had always worked. I’d even spent a whole summer shovelling shit, so cleaning the bogs for eighty inmates wasn’t going to faze me. It was, of course, quite a contrast from my time spent working in the City, then New York and Tokyo. I’d worked throughout Asia, Europe and Latin America, at one point becoming NatWest’s youngest Managing Director, with a few hundred people reporting to me. I’d made it to the so-called top from a very low starting point, but now here I was, cleaning toilets in a Texas penitentiary. ‘So be it,’ I thought, because deep down I felt in some ways I deserved it. It was six years since they had indicted me, and although I didn’t believe what I was supposed to have done constituted a crime, in time I had considered that in some ways it was a moot point. There was a greater wrong there; a wider offence against society. Despite my humble upbringing, somewhere along the road to success I had taken a wrong turn. The one benefit of a poor childhood should have been a heightened sense of responsibility towards the less fortunate. Instead, by the peak of my career, I ran a group whose one purpose was to take the accounting or tax rules and find ways to ‘mitigate’ (or avoid) them for the benefit of our clients.
New rules would come into play, designed to ensure that big corporations paid the appropriate levels of tax. The assembled geniuses in my group, managed and cajoled by me, would then spend all their time figuring out how to get around those rules while still staying on the right side of the law. At some point someone in Enron decided to go a step further but that was just the step into illegality – the step into immorality had been taken by all of us, myself included, some time before.
The more tax or accounting benefits we gleaned for our clients, the more we were paid. The more we bent the rules, the harder people would try to straighten them, until we found kinks in them again. We were producing nothing, making a negative contribution to society, just making ourselves and our already rich clients even more wealthy, and deluding ourselves that we were of value. Hardly any of us ever thought through the consequences or gave consideration to the morality of these actions – in the world of banking, such an approach would have been thought suspect. You had to be in that industry to win – otherwise someone else would quickly take your place.
But I did think about it. And I should have known better. I was from a different background – I understood that when one group gets ridiculously rich, another gets catastrophically poor – yet because I was on the right side of the line this time, I played along. The truth of it was that when I got paid the big bucks I enjoyed it – not so much for the money itself, but for the validation it gave a working-class boy from a children’s home in Glasgow. It felt like I had beaten the system, managed to stand up for myself and achieve something in a world where people like me didn’t belong.
But now at the end of it all, I stood in a Texas prison, looking at the urinals with my bucket and brushes in my hand, with an overpowering sense that I’d been found out, and placed where I really belonged. Maybe I deserved this prison after all; maybe I deserved a lot worse. I had climbed the ladder of success only to realise I’d perched my ladder against the wrong wall. One thing I didn’t feel – didn’t allow myself to feel – was sorry for myself. The sad thing was I was boxed in. I knew if I lived my life a hundred times over, I would still have needed that success, that validation, that sense of achievement and belonging. I would have done the same thing over and over again. All the roads led me here.
I walked over to the urinals and got down on my hands and knees and started to scrub, with an intense sense of starting all over again. This was the beginning of the way back, the nadir, the low point. I gave them a pretty decent scrubbing using the magic powder supplied in each of the packets. They weren’t too bad, other than an initial scuttling of cockroaches as I disturbed them, and I was grinding along thinking I would be easily finished within an hour. That changed a bit when I got into the first cubicle. Getting down on my hands and knees again I started scrubbing hard. Then I looked under the rim and saw that it was total carnage.
‘Man, this hasn’t had a good scrub in a long time,’ I thought as I started applying a little elbow grease to my work, part of me perversely amused by how eagerly some journalists would have leapt on this final fall from grace. I could imagine the headlines and that amused me further. To keep my mind off how disgusting the job was, I challenged myself to come up with some other positives about my new position while I kept scrubbing. I thought of my commute first of all. I had a good – no actually, change that – an outstanding commute. I used to travel up to an hour and forty-five minutes to get in and out of the City, now I only had to walk about forty-five steps to the urinals. Instead of having responsibility for a few hundred employees and the good name of the bank, I now only had to be sure not to piss off ‘Gato the Cat’.
I was thinking about what other positives there might be, and getting up quite a sweat as I continued to dislodge some serious human debris from under the rim, when I noticed two bare-chested Hispanics standing outside the cubicle watching me and chatting. Tuning into their conversation, I picked up a couple of words here and there. ‘Gringo, vea, bueno, rodillos, limpian,’ which I guessed basically meant ‘good to see a white boy on his knees cleaning.’
Ignoring them, I just kept on belting into the Gre
at Rim Challenge, periodically adjusting my position to glance over at them both still standing there, arms folded, fascinated, it seemed, by Scottish cleaning techniques. Eventually I stood up, accepting of the fact that I was a sinner, a flawed man, sweating heavily both from my body and forehead. It was so hot that even the simplest exertion resulted in you being bathed in sweat. I was significantly taller and bigger than the Hispanic guys, but they both looked muscular and unfazed by the size differential. The front one’s entire torso was covered in tattoos – testimony to a long and distinguished career in some Latino gang, no doubt. He also wore a bandana, which I had to admit made him much cooler looking than me with my baggy pants and Coco the Clown shoes.
The second guy was also covered in gang memorabilia and looked just as intimidating. As I looked at him I noticed a nasty facial scar, which gave him an even more fearsome look. Both sported moustaches, which pigeon-holed them as ‘two wee Mexicans’ in the complex filing system my mind had set up to figure out who was who in the Big Room. I was quickly realising, however, that the category of ‘a wee Mexican with a moustache’ covered about 60% of the room, and I was going to have to work on my descriptive techniques.
‘I haven’t cleaned those two toilets in there if you need to go,’ I said slowly and in English, turning and pointing to the two other stalls next to me and hoping that might make them go away.
‘No. We use this one!’ said the leading Mexican emphatically with a big grin that revealed a couple of whopping big gold teeth, as his buddy nodded in agreement. Thrown by his gaudy gnashers and by his strong lavatorial preferences I hesitated for a moment, wondering what was so special about this particular little palace. I looked around for a moment, sighed, thought disappointingly about my half-finished rim job, placed my brushes and powders back into my bucket, and started to head out.
‘No, cabrone!’ said my friendly little Mexican gang-banger, this time looking not nearly so friendly. His hand was out in front of him in the universally known ‘stop’ sign, so I duly obeyed ‘You clean. I shit. Then you clean again!’ He smiled once more to re-emphasis the expensive nature of his dental work. This stumped me. I never faced this type of situation at NatWest.
‘Yeez,’ added his number two in much more heavily accented English, ‘then I sheet. You clin and I sheet again.’
His English wasn’t great, but I got the general picture.
‘What do you do now, smartarse?’ I asked myself, staring at the two grinning hombres. Of course, in the movies, this would be the bit where I stuck the bucket over their heads, nutted one of them, kicked the other one in the balls, stuck one of their heads down the toilet and flushed it. But these guys looked tough and were probably well versed in dealing with the whole ‘gringos in the toilet’ sketch. One thing for sure, though, I wasn’t about to get on my hands and knees and start scrubbing again, let them shit, and then start cleaning again. Fuck that. I was sure that would go round the room in about two seconds and next thing I would be hand-wiping anyone’s backside who wanted it. I felt my heart start to race – I had a decision to make.
It seemed too early in the morning for someone to be beating up another inmate; I always thought that kind of stuff would happen after the watershed at 10 p.m. Hoping I was right, I smiled, picked up my little brush and theatrically threw it into my bucket. Then I picked up the bucket and slowly walked out past the two of them, trying to emphasise, as best I could, my height advantage over them. I didn’t look long at them – just the briefest eye contact in case they went for me (at which point my plan was to hit one of them as hard as I could, Sergei-style). Instead I just brushed past them, skin briefly touching skin (much to my discomfort) as I moved out of the bathroom across the room and hauled myself up onto my bunk in a ceremonial huff. I lay back and looked straight at the ceiling above, waiting for the fallout to come, my heart racing, my breathing heavy as I wondered if my penance was about to deepen.
They never came.
Half an hour or so later, I was back in cleaning the stalls, having given up on stall #1 as I couldn’t bring myself to re-enter, it having so recently seen action. Gato had come over and was helping me out with the sinks. ‘Those two guys like to play around with all the new cleaners?’ I asked the Cat, as we scrubbed two adjacent sinks.
‘No cabrone,’ he began seriously. ‘You are an easy target. You stand out; you’re not a gringo and you’re not one of us. You can’t afford to take too long to decide who you eez runnin’ with, or else you are isolated. That is a bad thing here. Why did you say no to the two guys last night?’
‘Those two white men?’ I asked rhetorically, worried by his tone. ‘They are racists right? Aryan Brotherhood. I have zero in common with them; nothing. I can’t join up with a gang like them.’ I tailed off, wondering how isolated I might become.
‘Oye cabrone,’ he said. ‘Very brave, but maybe very foolish. People may think that you find trouble, then it becomes very dangerous for you in Big Spring.’ With that, Gato walked off to his bunk.
In the afternoon I was called out to change into my regular prison attire, my first-day suit having served its purpose. McKenzie seemed pleased to see me and actually made an effort to give me clothes that fit this time: five everyday khaki shirts; two pairs of khaki trousers; six white T-shirts; seven pairs of underpants; eight pairs of socks; and one pair of industrial-strength black reinforced boots. There was probably some logic in the quantities, but it escaped me. In addition, I received one set of ‘visit clothes’ – basically the same khaki shirts and trousers and undershirt, but in slightly better nick.
‘Not new, Scotland; just newer!’ McKenzie surveyed me approvingly in my new prison fatigues. ‘Now you almost look like you belong,’ he added, obviously pleased with his work. Tank and the others looked on, disinterested and sluggish in the heat.
10
THE RAT & THE COWARD
IN PRISON, TIME PERFORMS THAT STRANGE trick of seeming to pass slowly and swiftly at once. A couple of weeks went by, suddenly and yet tediously, taken up with a simple routine of scrubbing the toilets with Gato in the morning, writing a few letters and studying Spanish in the afternoon, then heading to the chow hall in the evening with Chief and Kola. During that time I was keeping a low profile, and hadn’t explored any further around the prison. A glitch – or perhaps just the enduring sluggishness of the system – ensured that I still had no money, so no phone calls and no training shoes, which you needed to be allowed to go up into the gym and the Yard. I felt a million miles from home. I’d already decided that even when I did get money, I wouldn’t spend it all on the usual luxuries of coffee, biscuits and chocolate and the like. Phone calls were $1 a minute to call the UK, buying me all of 7 minutes a month on my toilet pay so I guessed I would need all my money for that and stamps for my letters. Anyway, I wanted the discipline of the spartan lifestyle. I thought it would be better for me never to get too comfortable in my surroundings.
The Range was filling up rapidly, with five or six more people arriving every week or so – all transfers from other prisons. Focusing on the positives, I’d received two sets of legal papers: those for Cara Katrina and those from my case. The former were to refer to in case anything happened with or to Cara while I was inside; the latter my case papers so I could confirm with my Case Manager the deal the Department of Justice had made with me.
There was another reason everyone needed their case papers; so their roommates could confirm they were in there for the reasons they’d stated. One of the reasons Kola had been suspicious with me at the start, I later found out, was that the despised chomos would often claim to have ‘robbed a bank’ rather than admitting their true crimes.
The Range’s checking-in process was every bit as detailed as the one performed by the prison officers – twice as deadly if you slipped up, too. Every day, in between writing letters or reading my book, I’d watch the new inmates arriving as our room continued to fill up. Within a short while of dumping his stuff, the new fish would be a
pproached by the members of his own ethnic group as had happened with me with the AB’s. He would be told to remove his top and trousers and a careful inspection of his tattoos would take place – not dissimilar to the inspection the cops would have completed as the inmates were booked in. This would be accompanied by a close grilling about where the newbie had been transferred in from, which august members of America’s burgeoning prison population he’d served time with, and what gang he’d run with, if any. There being no glitches in his story, then and only then would the new arrival be furnished with his shower shoes, toiletries and other essentials.
Towards the end of my second month, as I was kicking back in my bunk one afternoon, an older inmate walked in. I noticed him straight away, because he walked faster than people normally did when they first entered the room. Usually they walked in quite slowly; looking for people they knew or might have heard of. This man looked scared straight away. Mid fifties, I guessed, with a full head of grey hair and a grey beard. Betraying your fear wasn’t that unusual, but he was Hispanic, and I noticed that none of the other Hispanics came near him as he found his bunk about ten beds away from mine – no more than thirty feet away. I’d never seen that before; even to my untrained eye, it didn’t look right. My corner bunk position afforded me a perfect view of the room but I didn’t want to be caught staring, so I positioned myself so it looked like I was still reading. Chief had lent me his headphones and his radio and I turned the volume down when I heard Joker bark out some instructions to a couple of his minions, who then ran quickly from the room. It was clearly something to do with the new arrival, and Joker stared unapologetically in the man’s direction before turning his back on him and continuing his card game. The tension in the room was palpable.
What happened next unfolded so quickly I barely had time to process it. Four men entered the room, moving at speed. They were completely silent and bare-chested, with their heads and faces covered by assorted scarves and shirts. They each took a separate path through the maze of beds in the Big Room, each heading directly towards the new arrival. I don’t know if he saw them coming, they were upon him so fast. I noticed that two were carrying a ‘lock in a sock’: the weapon of choice in Big Spring when a good old shank wasn’t available. With Joker and the rest of my roomies all turning their backs on what was about to unfold, and calmly going on with their business as if nothing was happening, the first protagonist came from behind his victim, grabbed his arm and his hair and quickly rammed his face straight into the cast-iron frame of the bunk. No introductions, no conversations, just swift and brutal justice, Big Spring style. The sound – a cross between a cracking noise and a more general thunk – would have made me wince, had it not been followed up so rapidly by a number of other connections; each one swiftly executed and each one seemingly worse than the last.
