Law Man: My Story of Robbing Banks, Winning Supreme Court Cases, and Finding Redemption

by Hopwood, Shon

  That night passed, and the next and the next.

  After two weeks some of us were herded onto a JPATS flight to Chicago O’Hare. The first time I flew to O’Hare had been a few years earlier, before the bank jobs, when I was heading to Navy boot camp after ditching college. By coincidence my uncle Dan was the pilot on that flight. He spotted me and took me into the cockpit until it was time to take off. I wondered what he must be thinking about me now. In the Midwest you define yourself early in life, and that’s who you are forevermore in your town. You are the guy who got a nickname like “Gumby” based on your wrestling skills, only to find that it came to represent your goofy demeanor. You are the girl who disappeared for a weekend right when that teacher disappeared for the same weekend. You and your brother are the entrepreneurial twins who ran a lawn mower service and now build houses. I was the guy who had robbed five banks. I wouldn’t live that one down. Not ever. I was not going to be invited into any more cockpits by proud uncles, nor driven around in the town parade. I would forever be the bruise on the town apple.

  We landed on the back strip of O’Hare; they weren’t foolish enough to march us wolf-whistling through the terminal. That was just as well for me, as I wouldn’t enjoy being taunted by things I couldn’t have—with the aroma of coffee and food I couldn’t taste, with glimpses of well-dressed travelers I couldn’t talk to. From a back ramp we were stuffed into a bus and driven to the Federal Correctional Institution at Pekin, Illinois, just outside Peoria. That was as close as the sentencing judge’s recommendation could get me to my family—about an eight-hour drive from David City. I was thankful to be even that close, as it would mean the possibility of visitors.

  As we neared the prison, I saw its razor-wire fences, towers, and lights. Otherwise the low modern buildings looked more like a business park than a federal prison. Green land surrounded it. Our bus pulled up to the gate. Again we faced a reception line of guards with shotguns and automatic assault rifles. Some of the prisoners relished the attention.

  “Look at this. We some killers,” a fat Hispanic guy said, admiring the firepower.

  The twenty of us marched in, handcuffed and shackled. You’d think this would be the worst day of your life, but after being herded around between county jails for ten months, the idea of staying in the same place for a while, the ability to go outdoors and exercise, and the luxury of having a bunk to call your own was a relief.

  Anyway, now I could move on with my life. I knew I had to make something of this strange period. Here I would have enough time to design a new life of some sort. Unlike a lot of the men around me, who had been beaten down longer and harder than me and were not blessed with good families, good hometowns, and decent friends, I still believed that I wasn’t a lost cause. I had made a mistake—a gigantic mistake times five. But I was certain that, if I survived, I would graduate from this place a better person. I had to believe that. The other possibility was too depressing to think about. Mostly I wanted my hard time to begin so it would start to end.

  And, honestly, there was a certain excitement to the idea of a federal pen. I looked over the place with Jimmy Cagney eyes. Although I was scared, I wanted to see the place and know that I could handle it—that I could survive. I knew my courage would be challenged. It was inevitable.

  The doors closed behind us. We were taken to small holding cells where we slept on concrete slabs and waited until guards pulled us out one by one for cursory medical exams and fingerprinting. We were each issued a hunter orange jumpsuit and a pillowcase containing a toothbrush, toothpaste, and bar of three-cent soap that, according to a couple of guys with me, would dry out your skin and leave you scratching for a week.

  We were given a handbook of rules and etiquette. It began with an assurance that Pekin inmates “are housed in a facility which best meets their security needs …” I wished it was honest enough to say we were housed in a facility that best met society’s security needs, but the deceptions and fantasies of American culture take an extreme form in prison.

  After two hours of processing, a young guard finally walked me across the large yard—a grass acreage surrounded by buildings and webbed by sidewalks in the manner of a shopworn campus. He escorted me to my housing unit, Illinois One. He was pimply faced and looked like maybe you could trick him into opening the front gate and away you’d go. He pointed out the buildings: the mess hall, the other housing units, my housing unit up ahead, the athletic fields, the gym. The cellblocks, he explained, include four houses named after the states of Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, and Indiana, with two units in each.

  “I think I’ve seen enough of this place,” I said. “Plus I’d prefer something closer to town.”

  He smiled and sighed, and we kept walking. I think he was picturing himself in my shoes. Some people can empathize and some people can’t. I think he could. I was still working on it.

  As I walked closer to what would be my home for a decade, the reality of my situation flooded in. I had done a lot of harm to a lot of people, including my family. I wasn’t one of those guys who was cool with all that. I had poisoned my life and future, not to mention the lives of a few others, and I was being escorted to a little cage in a zoo, where the days and nights would extend as though forever. I did not cry, but if there had been a secret place under a bush where I could have curled up like a kid and let it out, I might have.

  I knew this was all a big storm coming and I wanted to be under the basement stairs with Mom and my brothers and sisters. “You’re a good boy, Shon, and God will protect you. Remember that,” she had whispered in the courtroom after I was sentenced.

  I shook off the emotion. I was on a different planet now. Sure, a strong will is what landed me here, but it was also the only thing that might help me make it out.

  The young guard turned some keys and led me into Illinois One. Like each of the housing units, it has two levels of cells arranged in a U around a sky-lit dayroom and a guard’s office. I scanned the space quickly. Except for the cigarette smoke and urine yellow lighting, it was clean and modern. We walked through the dayroom past tables of men playing cards and dominoes, and watching half a dozen TV sets mounted on balcony railings above them. They had earphones tuned to whichever shows they were watching: a couple of ball games, a soap, a Spanish-language soap, and a Golden Girls rerun. Most of the men were black, and they showed no interest as I walked by them.

  I was marched to the guard’s office, a converted cell with its door open to the dayroom. The guard on duty continued filling out a report as I stood there waiting.

  An inmate who had been watching TV spotted me and popped up to meet me. He smiled but offered no handshake. He was taller than I, thin, about my age, with thick dark hair and chalky white skin. He looked like a cheerful castaway hermit who thought I might have a pocketful of cheese for him.

  “Milan’s my name. It’s spelled like the city in Italy, but you say it like, you know, this land is your land, this land is Milan—that’s how you can remember.” The headphones parked around his neck were blaring canned Golden Girls laughter timed to his lines.

  I nodded but was wary of making the wrong first friend. I told him my name. We waited for the guard to finish his report.

  “I will tell you something,” Milan said. “New guys go into the three-man cells. You get transferred to a two-man cell when one becomes available. Three-man cells are a little crowded. Did you know that?”

  I shrugged.

  “Where you from, Shon?”

  “Nebraska,” I replied.

  “I’m from Chicago,” he said, “the best state, if you ask me.” On the bus ride to Pekin I had already experienced the sentiment that Chicago is a state. A lot of Chicago guys seem to believe that.

  “My guy, Bee Dog, has a two-man cell. His celly was transferred out a few weeks ago, so maybe you could get that bed. Bee Dog is good people. He’s about the same age as you and me. So tell the cop here you want cell 304.”

  You don’t want the first t
hing you do on your first day to be some sucker move. I thought this might be a gay thing or a setup. Maybe the white guys were trying to keep the cell white. I had no idea. And why didn’t he just ask to be moved in with “his guy” himself?

  The guard was named Vaughn. On top of his wrinkled and stained shirt sat an anvil-shaped head.

  “Hey, Vaughn, why don’t you put him in with Bee Dog. He don’t have no celly now, and they would get along.”

  Vaughn glanced at the cell assignment board.

  “Bee Dog has been saying he don’t like it, not having a celly,” Milan rattled on.

  I liked the idea that things were maybe negotiable, as I considered myself fairly competent at persuasion.

  Vaughn hadn’t looked me in the eye yet. He was still shuffling and signing papers—his big head bouncing side to side as he signed.

  “That’s a two-man cell, Milan,” he finally said.

  “Right, but who cares? It’s been open for two weeks.”

  The guard finally glanced up at me to see if I looked worthy of this early and unearned bonus. I put my hands up and raised my shoulders, as if to say “why not?”

  “What the hell. If the counselor don’t like it, they can move you out.”

  Vaughn took me to a supply closet and handed me a two-inch thin, dark green plastic mattress. I hoped it had been steam cleaned. Milan tagged along. When we got to the cell, Bee Dog was reading a girlie magazine, discreetly tucked inside a biker magazine with an equally lurid cover. Nudy books, as they were called, would be banned a couple of months later, courtesy of a congressman from Florida.

  “Bee Dog, this here is Shon, your new celly,” said Milan. The guard went away, having said nothing, really. He pointed to my upper bunk and I slid the mattress up there. The cell doors were wide open, which is the way it is most of the day in a medium- to high-security pen like Pekin. The building’s doors are locked, of course.

  Bee Dog mumbled, “What’s up?” then tried to return to his reading.

  “So you owe me one. You said you don’t like having no celly. I guess I got you one, so don’t forget.”

  Bee Dog looked up from his magazine. I worried that maybe I was a peace offering from a guy Bee Dog didn’t much like or respect.

  “Well, I’ll leave you two guys alone,” Milan said. “Let’s all go out for a drink later.”

  I was still new enough to incarceration that I thought for half a second that he had a good idea and that we would do that. The habit of freedom dies hard.

  Bee Dog chuckled at Milan’s joke, so I figured they were friends after all, and I was in a stable situation—assuming I hadn’t cut in front of some killer waiting in a crowded three-man cell for Bee Dog’s spare bunk. Maybe that was it.

  Bee Dog was short and knuckly with a few faded prison tattoos. He was a Piru Blood gang member from Tacoma, serving six years for illegal possession of a firearm—illegal because he was a felon. He was about my age, early twenties, and was built like he had lifted some iron when he was in high school or juvy.

  He asked questions and I gave the answers: Nebraska, five bank robberies, twelve years and three months.

  A new cellmate always wants to know what you did so he knows what kind of animal he is bunking with. The last thing anyone wants for a celly is some chester—short for child molester—or someone who snitched on his codefendant. Chesters are the lepers of prison who hang out only with each other and are regularly chided, cheated, and sometimes brutalized. Snitches are pariahs, too, though the War on Drugs has turned nearly everyone toward plea deals to avoid mandatory minimum sentences and three-strikes provisions. Now only 5 percent of federal defendants take their cases to trial; the rest either plead guilty or cooperate in some way. So you accept some of that cooperation, whether or not you want to call it snitching. But you don’t talk about it or admit to it.

  Bee Dog seemed okay with the bank robbery thing, even somewhat pleased. I laughed when he asked if I was a snitch. He took that as a no.

  “But how’d you get only a dozen years for five banks?”

  He was suspicious. Gangbangers especially do not tolerate any form of snitching, as loyalty is their primary belief system. Life imprisonment would be preferable.

  “Criminal history category one,” I said. Federal sentencing was guided by your number of priors. Never having been in real trouble before, I was in category one.

  Bee Dog continued to squint at me, so I added some information. I never fired a gun during the robberies, nobody was hurt, good lawyer, great judge. He nodded, processing it. He massaged the little bit of stubble on his chin and made a De Niro frown as his head kept nodding. “Okay,” he said. It was feasible.

  “So another bank robb-air.” He French-accented it, as if bank robbery was a silly Pink Panther crime.

  “How many?” I asked.

  “There’s a lot, actually. Milan, for one. He’s been in for about two years and has four or so to go. Had a good lawyer I guess, like you, though I think he just robbed one bank.”

  “Where?”

  “Chicago or north of there. I don’t ask him about that stuff much. He doesn’t talk about his past. And, hey, when you see him in the shower, you’ll see those big whip scars across his back. Don’t ask. He doesn’t like to talk about it. He had a tough daddy. His folks were from Yugoslavia or somewhere, and they raised him old school, which didn’t do him much good.”

  “He seems like a good guy.”

  “He is a great guy, always looking for some way to help—and very loyal. You can probably take lessons from a guy like that.”

  I didn’t know if he was trying to imply something.

  He went back to the magazine.

  There is no best way to settle into a prison cell. I didn’t have IKEA furniture to assemble or paintings to hang. Someone takes you to your cell and pretty much says to wait here for a dozen years—it’s awkward. And it’s lonely, even when you do have a celly. You look around, not knowing what to do in the first few minutes.

  “Take a nap,” Bee Dog said. “They’ll start your orientation in a day or two, and you’ll have a job soon after that. So take a nap while you can. Later I’ll tell you what you need to know about this place, and you can tell me how to get caught robbing banks. Right now, I want to finish this important article, so take a snooze. When you get up, I’ll give you the news.” It was the first rhymed rap line I had heard at Pekin, but I knew there would be lots to come. There are more metered rhymes in any jail or prison than in all of Shakespeare.

  I climbed up to my bunk and closed my eyes. Everywhere was the deep sound of metal and machinery: the clank of metal doors, rattling keys on chains, the starting and stopping of air-conditioning that just moves musty cigarette smoke and the smells of crowded humans from cell to cell. It was a metallic world that, except for the grace of one window, might have been in a submarine.

  This was the middle of May 1999. The Kosovo War was under way. George Bush was governor of Texas. The Twin Towers were still standing. The Backstreet Boys released their Millennium album. Star Wars, The Phantom Menace came out, as did Windows 98, second edition. Google was getting its first major financing and Mark Zuckerberg turned sixteen. For me a lot of things would freeze at this time. I would barely touch a computer again for ten years. It is beyond strange to be in such a place and feel your life freezing over, like a sci-fi story where you lie down in your rocket, not to return until everyone you know is old.

  I stretched out and decided the first thing to do the next day would be to find out how to send letters. I would write to my family and then to Tom, who was settling down in a Minnesota prison.

  Tom and I had been friends since grade school. The first bank was his idea, but it only happened, really, because I pushed it. We were in a bar and in a bad mood and it was just crazy talk while drinking, until I said yes.

  I was living in my folks’ basement in David City at the time, after an honorable discharge from the Navy.

  I had first taken an a
partment in Lincoln, but other than partying and college girls there wasn’t anything for me there—not that I looked too hard.

  I’d hung out with a guy named Kirk who’d introduced me to a guy named Tyler, a medium-level drug dealer and part-time college student. We hadn’t done one another any good.

  Tyler didn’t look like the Midwest; he was short with a fade haircut. He wore a baseball cap and baggy pants, and he had a vacant face. He sold drugs and could provide whatever a bad guy needed: guns, stolen cars, whatever. Had he started life in slightly different circumstances, he would have been fine; he was intelligent and had good parents. But he had been bused to a school in a rough part of Omaha and had settled in with a bad crowd.

  I knew I needed out of Lincoln, out of the orbit of these guys. My parents helped me settle some debts, and I moved into their basement in David City. Dad found me a job working for a gruff old farmer he knew, but it didn’t help. I was depressed and broke and literally shoveling crap seventy to eighty hours a week. Usually when I was down Tom would pick me up, or vice versa, and we could keep each other going. But when we were both way down, things could get out of control in a hurry.

  On the Saturday when Tom and I went scouting for a good bank to rob, Tom was driving a blue Ford Tempo. Its trunk and bumper had recently been repaired after I had crashed into Tom in a snowstorm a few weeks earlier.

  That snowstorm had come in April, which was late, but all the snow had melted, and the green buds were winning out over the brown and white of winter. We drove around the countryside scoping out banks. I was in a pleasant mood. Even my folks had noticed it, and they had seen it as a sign of good things to come. I had a notebook on my lap, a pen in my mouth, and a map spread across the dash.

  The small-town banks were quaint; I hadn’t really noticed that before. Some had front pillars, some had a single drive-in or walk-up window, some a sign announcing simply BANK, like one you might find in the toy town of a train set.

  We were headed north because Tom’s father owned a small farm property around Norfolk, Nebraska. The cornfield was the ideal place to conceal Tom’s car after the bank robbery until things cooled off—assuming we could find a decent bank in that area. We would need to be hidden away while the cops combed the highways looking for two bad guys.