by Neil White
The CIA had partnered with one of his Mafia clients. In an attempt to bring Castro’s reign to an end, the CIA looked to Mafia bosses who stood to lose money if Castro were to stay in power. According to Frank, the CIA gave Santo Trafficante hundreds of thousands of dollars, along with poison pills, to kill Castro. Santo took the money and flushed the poison pills down the toilet. He used the payoff for his business interests in Cuba and told the CIA the assassination attempt had failed.
Then Frank mentioned that the Public Broadcasting System had just released a one-hour documentary about his life as lawyer to the Mafia.
A week later, Frank and the prison librarian received permission from the warden to show the documentary to the inmates. Filmed by PBS’s Frontline, the documentary was entitled “JFK, Hoffa and the Mob.” We made arrangements with the guards to show the one-hour film in the large classroom as a part of the current events class. I made flyers to promote the occasion and persuaded the new menu board guy to plug the event in the cafeteria.
About thirty inmates attended, including Steve Read, Doc, Art Levin, Dan Duchaine, and Frank’s best inmate friend, Danny Coates. A couple of dozen counterfeiters, tax evaders, swindlers, and drug traffickers also attended, as did a new arrival at Carville—a computer whiz named Gary, who, at age twenty-four, had tapped into the Federal Reserve system and wired himself $125,000. As I looked around the room, I thought there probably should have been a law against this industrious group’s convening, but no guards were in sight.
Art Levin, the man who had watched over Carlos Marcello and helped me beat Steve Read in Monopoly, sat in the back of the room as Frank introduced the video.
The film featured Frank Ragano as the intimate friend and lawyer to Teamster president Jimmy Hoffa, as well as attorney to Santo Trafficante, one of the most feared Mafia bosses. The documentary asserted that Ragano was the first mob lawyer to go public with what he knew. During the interviews, Ragano recounted mob involvement in CIA plots to kill Castro. He alleged that the Mafia had orchestrated the murder of Jimmy Hoffa and the assassination of John Kennedy, and he admitted, on videotape, to “toasting” the death of JFK. In the end, Frank told the interviewer he had unwittingly delivered the message from Hoffa via Trafficante to Marcello to have JFK killed.
It was a sobering moment. There was silence in the room as the credits ran.
I turned on the lights. Frank asked if there were any questions.
Doc raised his hand. “How much did you charge these guys?”
Frank said he charged Jimmy Hoffa about $40,000. “I never charged Trafficante anything.” Doc looked suspicious, as if he couldn’t imagine performing a professional service gratis.
Steve Read blurted out, “I have a two-part question, Frank: one, was JFK the first president you knocked off? And, two, do you have your sights on Clinton?”
One of Frank’s friends yelled back, “What about you, Read!? What country music star are you gonna kill next, Dolly Parton?”
The Q & A session broke into a series of sarcastic exchanges that led to a yelling match. I reassessed whether these guys were such a formidable bunch after all.
Then I noticed Mr. Levin. In the midst of the arguing and insults, he sat still. Mr. Levin was counsel to Carlos Marcello. Marcello allegedly handled the details of the assassination. Mr. Levin helped Marcello navigate the Louisiana legal system and operate within the bounds of the law. As one of Carlos Marcello’s closest confidants, he was privy to the details of Marcello’s business.
As the other inmates argued, I thought about all Mr. Levin must have known. Frank Ragano might have been the first mob lawyer in the country to go public, but the one who probably knew the most sat quietly in the back of the room.
CHAPTER 63
I returned to my room to find Doc burning a growth off his torso. This time he had inserted the tip of a sewing needle into a large nodule on his stomach. He held a burning match under the needle to heat it. Doc noticed me staring.
“Needle’s not a bad conductor,” Doc said, as he lit another match. I got the first whiff of burning flesh when four guards marched into the room.
“Goddamn!” one of the guards said when he saw Doc’s procedure. “What the fuck you doin’, Dombrowsky?”
Doc lit another match. The guards hadn’t come for Doc. They had come for me.
“White,” a female guard said, “go stand in the hall.”
“Why?”
“Get out!” she screamed.
As I stood in the hallway, the four guards emptied the contents of my locker and spread them out on my bunk. The procedure was called a “shakedown.” They examined my belongings. They uncoupled my socks, shook each article of clothing, tasted my toothpaste, smelled my bottles of shampoo and conditioner, and flipped through the pages of my books, magazines, and diary notes. They found my stash of scent strips from the magazines and confiscated them as contraband.
“Mr. White,” the female guard called out.
I stepped into the doorway. “Yes,” I said. My heart rate shot up.
“You hoardin’!”
“What?”
“You got ten sheets of carbon paper!” she said. “That’s hoardin’.”
Doc, who had been allowed to stay in the room, blew out his match and interjected, “He really likes office supplies.”
I wrote four to five letters a day, and I made a carbon copy of any I might not retrieve after my release.
“Why can’t I have ten sheets?” I asked.
“You can tattoo yourself!” The female guard explained that I could press a thumbtack through the carbon paper and into my skin to duplicate the effects of a tattoo needle.
I pulled up my sleeves to show her my clean arms, and she laughed. The thought of me tattooing myself seemed ridiculous, even to her. Doc lit another match.
“I keep duplicates of my letters,” I said.
The guard said that if I told her I would use all of the carbon paper within forty-eight hours, I could keep it.
“It should last longer than that,” I said.
“But if you tell me you will use it in forty-eight hours,” she said, “I can let you keep it.”
One of the other guards, trying to be helpful, said under his breath, “Just lie.”
“I’m in here for lying,” I said.
The guards looked at each other for a moment and went back to the shakedown. I stepped back into the hallway and leaned against the wall. For so many years I had used my connections to get special treatment. I expected people to overlook my tendency to bend the rules or cut corners or even kite checks. Standing in the hallway, temporarily banished from my prison room for illicit possession of office supplies, I felt good about telling the truth. It was a small thing. Nothing at risk but a few sheets of carbon paper. But it felt important.
CHAPTER 64
On a Sunday afternoon in late January, more than forty-five inmates packed into the sports TV room to watch a playoff game. All the seats were taken, so several men, including Mr. Dingham and his friend John Gray, leaned against a windowsill. Dingham had a terrible cough. He hacked and coughed, and then hacked and coughed some more. After about fifteen minutes, Juan, the wheelchair-bound Mexican inmate who had been shot by a DEA agent, told Mr. Dingham to leave the room if he couldn’t control his cough.
“I can’t help it,” Dingham answered. “I’m sick.”
“Then shut the fuck up!” Juan said. He and Dingham knew each other well. They were classmates and my students.
The coughing continued, interrupting the commentary and irritating everyone in the room. Juan, who had been cantankerous all week in our classroom, couldn’t take it any longer. He picked up his thermos mug and tossed coffee at Mr. Dingham, except it landed on the man next to him, John Gray.
John Gray stood and walked toward Juan.
Fights in television rooms had come to be expected. Any inmate who spent any time watching television would eventually witness a fight. John Gray didn’t want to fight a
man in a wheelchair. He expected an apology.
John Gray stood before Juan, held out his coffee-stained T-shirt and said, “What the hell did you do that for?!”
John Gray did not get what he expected. Juan, still in his wheelchair, thrust his right hand at John Gray’s chest. It wasn’t really a punch or a push or even a slap. Later, I heard it described as a jab.
Juan turned his wheelchair around and zipped out of the room. John Gray put his hands over his sternum and fell to his knees. Kirk, an inmate from Lafayette, Louisiana, who wrestled alligators, tried to help him up.
“He got me,” John Gray told Kirk. Blood had started to soak through John Gray’s T-shirt. When Kirk saw it, he bolted from the room and ran down the hallway. An inmate in the TV room yelled, “Shank!”
Juan rolled down the hallway as fast as he could, expecting to escape from prison by wheelchair. Kirk tackled Juan from behind, knocking him to the floor. Juan flopped like a fish on the concrete, waving his homemade knife, willing to cut anyone who got near him. Kirk eventually wrestled the knife away from Juan, and in the process saved a guard who had just stepped through a doorway right over Juan.
Kirk controlled the situation. He tossed the shank out of reach and pinned the paraplegic to the floor until the guards handcuffed him.
The shank, a sharpened piece of metal, lay on the concrete floor. Drops of blood spotted the hallway. The tip of the knife was covered in the brightest red blood I had ever seen.
Juan had stabbed John Gray over the smallest act, a twist of fate. I thought about how many times I had leaned over Juan to help him with his math, and I wondered if his shank had always been within reach. I imagined how many times Ella and Harry had passed within one foot of Juan in the hallways.
As the guards dragged Juan and Kirk to the hole, I stared at John’s blood against the dull colors of the colony floors.
CHAPTER 65
The prison alarm echoed through the hallways, and the guards rushed us all to our rooms. When the siren was finally turned off, I heard the sound of the ambulance helicopter that would take John Gray to a hospital in Baton Rouge.
Overnight, Carville became a high-security prison. Our freedom of movement was taken away. We were confined to our rooms. Extra guards were hired. They wore black T-shirts with the letters SWAT printed on the back.
The FBI was called in to investigate. They interviewed everyone who had been in the room. The Mexican inmates said they hadn’t seen anything. A few of the white witnesses told the agents exactly what happened. If Juan were to be convicted, it would be by the testimony of the white inmates.
We were allowed to leave our rooms at mealtimes, but we were escorted by a dozen guards. They cleared the hallway of leprosy patients before they let us pass. Carville now posed a problem for the Bureau of Prisons. There was no way to secure the facility. Two doorways dividing the colony could be locked, but it was impossible to seal the breezeway and the corridors. If an inmate wanted access to the leprosy patients, it would be no problem. In the cafeteria, I nodded to Ricky and Chatto, my Mexican handball buddies, to let them know I was still their friend, but they just looked away. A few Mexican inmates stared into the eyes of those who had “ratted” and made stabbing gestures at their chests.
On the third night of lockdown, Link slipped out of his room to check on me and offer advice.
“You shoulda kept your job in the kitchen,” Link said, “’cause you can fuck somebody up with boiling water.” Link described how he once saw flesh melt off the skin of an inmate at another jail when his enemy had crept up behind him with a pot of water just off the stove.
“Socks is another thing,” he said. Link described in detail the damage that could be inflicted by placing three or four padlocks inside a tube sock. He demonstrated how an attacker could swing the sock to build up momentum, the heavy locks inside gaining velocity on the outer perimeter like David’s sling against Goliath. The impact would break ribs or fracture a skull.
“Thanks, Link,” I said. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Now, if you don’t wanna kill the motherfucker,” he said, “just put bars of soap in the sock. It’ll just bruise him and shit.”
Link’s advice, coupled with the fact that our rooms had no doors, wasn’t comforting. He wasn’t the only inmate making plans. A devout Catholic from Texas—a man who told me I was going to hell for taking Communion at the Catholic church—stole rat poison from the kitchen to use against any inmate who threatened him. Another man stole a baseball bat from the recreation department. Still another was planning to use his roommate’s prosthetic leg to fight off intruders.
On the fifth day of lockdown, we heard the news.
The Baton Rouge Advocate reported that John Gray, fifty-eight, had died of a massive heart attack nearly four days after being stabbed by another inmate. A prison spokeswoman was quoted: “Gray received a superficial abdominal wound. It had nothing to do with his heart attack.” She added that no other information could be released until the FBI completed its probe.
The man we had known for nine months was gone. And every inmate in Carville knew exactly what caused his death.
Lockdown was frustrating. No walking. No library. The leprosy patients, understandably, were nervous, too. We were never to pass a patient unescorted again. Guards were put at every corner of the inmate courtyard, and they increased the frequency of shakedowns and strip searches. One guard kept watch at the breezeway to make sure no inmates had any contact with the leprosy patients.
“I seen you talkin’ to the old lady,” he said to me. “Them days is over.”
The guards had a light in their eyes I had not seen before, as if this were their first opportunity to act like real law enforcement officers. Running around in their SWAT shirts, they enjoyed the drama.
A week after the stabbing, as we were escorted to the cafeteria for breakfast, I heard a guard yell, “Against the wall!” Sixty of us parted like the waters of the Red Sea and stood with our backs to the walls. It was Ella. One guard walked in front of her, another behind. As she rolled slowly through us, Ella made eye contact with each inmate and smiled. When she reached the end of the line, where I was standing, I expected her to nod or wink or give me some kind of special sign, but she didn’t.
I got the same as everyone else.
Betty Martin, who took furloughs from Carville to her home in New Orleans.
CHAPTER 66
In the midst of lockdown, I learned that my furlough had been approved. I would be released for five days. It could not have come at a better time.
In the administration building, behind the door marked R & D, I was frisked by a guard.
“You understand the rules?” he asked. I told him I had read the papers, but he reviewed them anyway. While on furlough, I was not to break any laws, leave New Orleans, use drugs or alcohol, go inside a bar, take prescription medication, go see a doctor, or eat food containing poppy seeds (apparently, it could cause a positive result on drug tests).
I signed my forms and the guard escorted me to the end of the hallway. He opened the door and said, “Be back by 8:00 P.M. Friday.” And I walked out.
I still didn’t understand the logic behind a furlough. Why would my captors, in the middle of my prison sentence, simply say, “Go home for a while”? But I was sure happy about it.
Mom waited in her small, maroon Isuzu with Neil and Maggie. On the drive to New Orleans, Neil and Maggie took turns sitting on my lap. We laughed and played games, and I pulled out a list I’d made of fun things to do during our time in New Orleans.
“Anything the two of you want to do,” I said, “is great with me.”
Mom’s place in the French Quarter was built in the 1800s. The second-story apartment was long and narrow with fifteen-foot ceilings. A small balcony with wrought-iron railings overlooked Toulouse Street. The windows ran from floor to ceiling. And when the bottom window was pushed up, I could walk under it without ducking. The back of the apartment connected to
a huge wooden spiral staircase that led to the ground floor, where there was a slate courtyard with a small fountain and garden.
During my last few months of freedom, I had lived in the apartment above Mom’s. Linda and the kids had lived there after I reported to prison, so Neil and Maggie felt right at home. The neighborhood was familiar territory for them. We walked to Le Marquis for fruit pastries. The manager of Le Marquis, a woman who grew up in New Jersey but donned a French accent for the tourists’ sake, asked where I had been. I told her I had moved. With Neil and Maggie at my side, I didn’t want to try to explain my absence. Maggie ordered a fruit tart, Neil got three donuts, and I ordered a croissant, although the poppy seed muffin looked enticing.
At Jackson Square, we tossed pennies into the fountain. Neil and I threw a Nerf football in a small patch of grass while Maggie ran in circles inside the gated park. We met my father there, who had come to visit. And my sister, Liz, who was living in New Orleans, introduced me to her fiancé, Sal. I didn’t even ask her what excuse she’d given Sal about where I’d been.
Once everyone arrived, we toured the massive Catholic cathedral. We watched street performers walk on stilts and ride tall unicycles and perform acrobatic dances. One of the local magicians asked Maggie to assist him with a magic trick. A tall, thin contortionist had Little Neil squeeze into a tiny, transparent box. Then the man placed his six-foot frame inside. It was impressive.
Artists’ booths lined the outer edge of the park’s iron fence, where they sell paintings and charge $40 for a quick portrait. There were palm readers and fortune-tellers and voodoo ladies. A tarot card reader tried to solicit business from a group of young men walking by. “You can’t change my future, old man,” one yelled out. The tarot man yelled back, “No, but I can help you prepare for it.”
At the end of the day, we all gathered around the granite base of the statue of Andrew Jackson on horseback and asked a passerby to take our picture. My first day of freedom, even though temporary, had been full.
