CHAPTER 25
DICK DILEMMA
“Seven hundred dollars, eight hundred, nine hundred, a G,” says Hector, Flocko’s brother.
I’m sitting in McDonald’s on 145th Street and Broadway in Harlem. Time was running out; I desperately needed to get this abortion done. Tracy (a hood booga gets a name after she has a Negro by the balls) called me to say that she was feeling real sick and that the doctor told her that if she went through with this pregnancy it would be a difficult one. She was practically begging me for the abortion now. I was happy about that but stressing it, too, because I had to make money in order to get it done. Hector says, “Good looking out, G. We need more brothers like you on the inside because sometimes a person be in there under all that pressure and just needs help. Ya know what I mean?” I most certainly do.
“No prob. You know how far back we go,” I tell him.
“Cool, tell my brother I love him,” he says. He finishes eating his burger, then shakes my hand and bounces.
I sit there for a minute and look around the McDonald’s to see if I recognize anybody. My conscience is telling me, “Negro, you ain’t did nothing wrong yet. You only have money on you and nothing else.” I realize this but I still have the jitters. My conscience: “Because you know this shit is wrong!” I shake off the feeling and call Tracy to tell her that I’m coming to get her, so she needs to get ready. I borrow a friend’s car and take her to the clinic. When we park, she asks me for the money as if I’m not going inside with her. I let her know that I am not letting her go in there alone.
“We did this together, so we are going to handle it together,” I say.
She looks at me as if to say the other guys never wanted to come inside. Then she smiles at me and says, “Thank you.” Woman, if you think that I am just going to hand you this money after all the shit I am going through to handle this situation, you must be crazy. Besides, I needed to see this all the way through. Shit, if I could’ve been in there when the procedure was done, I would’ve been.
After it is all over, I feel relieved. I feel that I have dodged a major bullet. It was worth it. I was not about to start another child support case and go through another twenty-one years of terror. I’d recently learned that New York State raised the age from 18 to 21, meaning that you’re obligated to take care of the child until 21 no matter what. Most fathers, like me, thought that once the child was 18, you were free. No-no-no! It’s 21, or 26 if the child is ambitious and goes to college.
When Tracy and I get back around the block, I give her a couple of dollars to get her kids some food and she goes upstairs. I now have to muster up some more courage to complete this mission. I go get the carton of cigarettes and go home. When I get to my apartment, I do the usual and check the mail on the table, then I walk into the living room and see that my momma has fallen asleep again on the couch while watching television. I stand there and watch her sleep soundly and wonder what kind of ass-whipping she would put on me if she knew what I was about to do. I shake my head to myself, remembering how happy I was and how happy and proud she was when I first got this job. Now it has come to this, me smuggling in cigarettes to an inmate, even though I know and trust him, to get myself out of a dick dilemma. I know that she would not approve, but as a man, sometimes to keep things straight you have to do what you have to do. I go to my room and this time there is no dancing, no music, and no drinking. It’s me, my conscience, and a carton of Newport cigarettes.
I’m nervous as hell and very paranoid on my way to work the next day. I’m on the bus looking everyone in the face, wondering if I am being followed. I have this guilty feeling that everyone knows what I am about to do. I get to work and I am at the main control building waiting for the route bus to take me to my jail. While I am waiting there I see some senior officers that I normally joke around with in the morning. I know that they are going to start in on me about me always being a new jack to them no matter how much time on the job I accumulated. Well, this morning I am not in the mood for that or anything else, so when they start in on me and have everybody on the bus cracking up laughing, I blurt out to one of them, “Muthafucka, are you still beating your wife!?” Dead silence. Game, set, match. Everybody on the bus looks at me in shock, because we all know that it is true, but I guess they feel like what the hell is wrong with me and that I do not have to put it out on front street like that. I give him a sarcastic smile and say, “Have a good day!” Then I get off the bus and go to my jail. That little episode reduces my stress level for just a few seconds. Now I am standing in line about to enter my jail with a carton of cigarettes tucked into the side of my pants.
I purposely wore my uniform to work today so that when I beeped going through the metal detector it wouldn’t be a problem. Here we go. My breathing gets louder. My heart rate increases. When it is time for me to pass through, the captain who is standing there to oversee the search process stops me. Shit! I knew it was too good to be true. I’m caught. He then yells to the other officers behind me, “Now see, this is what I am talking about, an officer that comes to work already dressed and ready to start the day.” He then pats me on my back as I walk through beeping. I didn’t waste any time going to my locker. I go straight to roll call because all I want to do is get these things off me.
I’m standing at roll call listening to the announcements of the day. They’re taking longer than usual. I look around at the other officers because I swear that everybody knows what I am doing. After we’re dismissed I go straight to my post, no joking around, no staff kitchen, no nothing, just straight to my post so that I can take my count, relieve the midnight officer, and take care of my business. I get to my post and make a tour, which is nothing more than counting how many bodies are in cells. I get to Flocko’s cell and he is already up and on his door. I wink as I go by and he nods. I tell the midnight officer, “Full house.” Then I sign the count slip that verifies this and the officer is out the door. When he leaves, I lock the gate behind him and now I am alone because my partner, the B officer, has to go to the morning search and won’t report to post until it’s done. I quickly crack Flocko’s cell and he comes out talking loud, asking me to open the broom closet because he and I know that morning, noon, and night there is always another inmate watching everything that goes down. I start to talk loud, telling him what I want cleaned and as he steps inside the utility closet I wipe off the carton with a wet napkin then hand it to him, leaving no fingerprints of mine on it. He puts it under his shirt, picks up the equipment, and goes back to his cell. He knows that if for some reason the search comes now and he gets caught, it’s his loss. The rest of the day I was a nervous wreck, and every time someone yelled “On the gate!” so that I could let them in my area, I would get a surge of anxiety, thinking it was the authorities coming to get me.
When I got home and retrieved my mail off the table I went to my room. I lay on my bed and thought about what I had done. The whole thing, from the abortion to the move with Flocko. I was also sipping, and it felt good. The stress and the paranoia had gone, because I pulled it off and no one jumped out from behind my bed to bust me. I went through my mail and saw nothing but bills, and guess what—I had the money to pay them.
CHAPTER 26
THE ORGANIZATION
“Forty-seven, forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty . . .”
I was counting out the number of Top tobacco pouches and stuffing them inside my stab-proof vest. The pouches were bulky under my vest, but I’m a heavyset guy, so it was the perfect cover-up. Every officer had to wear one, too.
Going through the front entrance was a breeze, because it was a post no one wanted. It was the most tedious and was more repetitious than manning a housing area. At least in a housing area an officer could relax a little and maybe get some sleep if needed. Not on the front entrance post. You had cameras watching you, people coming back and forth all day. From start to finish there was no time to rest. If officers were pe
rmanently assigned to the front entrance, most likely they were only half-ass doing their job because they were upset that they had to work that post all day. Sometimes I was able to go through just by listening and empathizing with the officer that was bitching about the post.
Flocko and I had been rocking for a minute. Cigarettes and tobacco were in high demand due to a recent ban by Mayor Mike Bloomberg. I was making money and slowly getting my life back. Although I was still going back and forth trying to get an adjustment on my child support payment. Every time I would end up with the same judge and the same results. The last time I was in court, I managed to put a little smile on my face after the judge shat on me, because I knew my bills were getting paid on time and I had money in my pocket.
Flocko was my first lieutenant. He had recruited some loyal workers that did most of the dirty work for us. I was cautious about who he dealt with. I did a background check on them by looking at their charges and talking to other inmates that might know them from the streets. I wanted to make sure that they were here for the reason that they said they were.
The profit from the cigarette trade in jail outweighs that of any drug hustle on the street. For one two-dollar pouch of Top tobacco you can make two hundred to three hundred dollars, depending on how desperate some of these inmates are for a smoke. And don’t get an inmate who just came into the system and has been smoking all his life—he’s a cash cow as long as his people support him from the outside. I was amazed when Flocko brought back cash to me from inside the jail. How the hell do these inmates get so much cash inside the jail? Flocko explained to me one day that money like that comes straight from the visitors’ floor and that very seldom can you slip it through the mailroom.
Most of the money is made on Wednesdays, visitors’ day. There are no visitations on Mondays and Tuesdays. Inmates would get straight cash on the visitors’ floor as if it was out of an ATM. I wore gloves for when the cash would reach me. One could only guess how it got transported.
We had our ways to limit suspicion of who was distributing tobacco. We never distributed a large amount at one time, nor did we sell or make sales on Mondays and Tuesdays, the no-visitation days. And most transactions went down either at recreation or when they went to eat and there was no way officers could watch all the inmates all the time. The officers were outnumbered twenty to one. This was also why nothing could be done about fights or slashings until after the fact. If a riot broke out in the mess hall while inmates were feeding and the officers were locked in there with the inmates, the best they could do was contain the situation to one area. Flocko also never carried a large amount on his person and often broke the pouch down into little cigarettes called rollies. If there was a drought, Flocko could sell rollies for upward of twenty dollars each, or he’d sometimes trade rollies for an inmate’s commissary.
So far, so good. I would deliver the pouches and by the end of the day I would have my money. Days went by smoothly. There were no incidents to report. Flocko, being a general in one of the many Spanish gangs in the jail, helped keep things going smoothly. I could never keep track of what inmate held what rank due to the high rate of turnover. Each individual had a different case and different charges. I’d finish my tour and jet home to get some much-needed sleep.
—
One day I arrived at my projects via city bus and taxicab. I ran into my mother coming from the corner store. She had groceries in her hands and just handed them to me before she said a word. Then she began to speak as we made our way to our building, walking through the graveyard. (The graveyard was a path we had to pass along the way that’s littered with makeshift memorials with pictures of young people in their prime at parties or posing when they were at their best with nice clothes on, and you know that there were half a dozen liquor bottles and candles that were posted up in front of the pictures, I guess to show that people celebrated this or that individual’s life.) My mother seemed unfazed by all the death that was around us. I guess her age and the number of years that we’ve been living here have made her numb to senseless deaths. When we walk into the lobby the elevator was about to close, so I ran and caught the door and held it until my mother caught up and got on. I knew that somebody was on it already but did not look to see who it was before grabbing the door.
When my mother stepped into the elevator I heard a familiar voice say, “Hey, girl, where you been?” And when I looked it was Ms. Daniels, and by her side stood Biz. Our eyes locked. I was a little shocked, because I had not seen him since the incident in jail and did not know that he had come home. His eyes were ice-cold and unmoved by my presence. I saw that the wounds on his face had healed. Obviously he had not told his mother what had happened, because they were chatting away as the door closed and the elevator took off. They were going on about the happenings in church this past Sunday, mentioning Pastor Johnson’s toupee coming off during singing rehearsals and that Deacon Jones was messing with one of the ushers.
All the while me and Biz never said a word to each other and remained staring at one another. I saw that he had the grill face on, so I matched his intensity. At the time I had not known that it was him under that hoodie and that my job was at stake. I knew that trying to explain that to him was futile, so I didn’t even try. Then he made a move and lifted up his shirt, exposing a snub-nosed .38. I was caught off guard by this. Then I looked at him, then at our mothers, who were oblivious to what was happening. The fact that he couldn’t care less that our mothers were there angered me, so at that point I gave him an evil glare and zipped down the jacket that I had on and pulled it to the side to expose my 9 mm Smith and muthafuckin’ Wesson. This time I looked at him, then at my mother, then back at him, silently indicating, I’ll shoot you and take a bullet before you harm her. Then I unclipped the holster that secured my weapon. He saw the look on my face, a look that I know he knew from when we were kids growing up. With that, he decided to make the best move he could make for the both of us and put his shirt back down, indicating to me another time and another place. I was undeterred by his move and kept my hand on my gun, letting him know, I will be ready at all times, Negro. The elevator stopped, and as they got off, Ms. Daniels said bye to my mother and looked at me and winked.
“Take it easy, Ms. Daniels,” I said.
“Bye, Ms. Heyward,” Biz said, and got off the elevator.
The door closed and my moms turned and looked at me. I looked at her and wondered if she had a clue as to what just happened. Then out of nowhere, she took her thumb, licked it, and wiped something off that I had on the side of my face.
CHAPTER 27
DIRTY TACTICS
“THAT BITCH CAN SUCK MY DICK IN MACY’S WINDOW AT CHRISTMAS!” an inmate screams at a female officer as I approach my housing area for my morning shift.
When I get on my post, the B officer informs me that the inmate arrived last night from another jail after getting into an altercation there. I’m dirty with pouches of tobacco, so I have to think fast and find a way to hide my product. So I tell him to go ahead and do the search, and that I’ll handle the inmate that’s screaming. The B officer is more than happy to leave, telling me on his way out that that bitch, meaning the A officer from the midnight shift, is nothing but trouble. I nod and let him out of the area. Then as soon as he’s gone I stash my stuff and proceed down the walkway to see how my day is going to start.
As I’m walking down the walkway toward the female officer, who’s standing in front of an inmate’s cell, I pass Flocko’s cell. He tells me through his door that that’s some new troublemaking nigga that came in last night. I continue walking, getting close to the officer, and she turns and sees me coming. Then, all of a sudden, she begins getting really disrespectful with the inmate, telling him he is a bum nigga for being in jail and how some other man is butt-fucking his girl right now, and so on. When I get to the inmate’s cell he comes back at her raw, saying, “Bitch, you better respect J-Murder, you ugly fat
bucktooth orangutan-in-the-face-looking bitch! Look atcha self. I wouldn’t fuck you right now if you begged me, and I’ve been down some joints. You know you ain’t no dime on the streets. Hell, you ain’t even average! Don’t let these niggas in here fool you into thinking you’re somebody, ’cause you’re not. They just trying to get their dick sucked! You’re just a thirsty ass cock-gazing bitch, always creeping up on a nigga when he gets out the shower trying to get a peek. You ain’t getting no dick in the streets but walk around here like you the Queen of Sheba or something.”
I’m about to step in and shut him down when I look at her and see that she is teary eyed. I’m at a loss for words. Come on, sis, even if he’s right you’re not supposed to let him see you like this. He sees that he has her stuck and starts to laugh out loud and says, “Don’t worry, bitch. I’m a nice guy. I’ll let you lick it later on when nobody’s around.” Then he steps back and exposes himself. As I step toward his cell, she pulls me back and says, “Heyward, I fight my own battles,” and gestures for me to follow her. I do so and we go back to the officers’ station. When we get there she pulls out the inmate’s locator card with all his information on it, like his home address and what charges he is in for, and so on. Puzzled, I ask her what she is doing, and she responds, “Just sit back, and learn something. Everything can’t be handled with brawn. You have to use your head sometimes, especially us females.”
She makes a phone call and gets the inmate’s PIN number that identifies him whenever he goes to commissary or uses the telephone. Once she gets this she calls around to other areas in the jail and tells the other officers to give it out to other inmates so that they can use the money in the inmate’s account, thus leaving Mr. Loud and Disrespectful high and dry with no money and unable to make phone calls. Inside, everybody knows that being able to call home keeps an inmate sane sometimes. When he finds out what has happened to him there will be nothing that he can do. I often wonder why some inmates think that they can say or do things to a CO when the CO always has the last laugh and can do just about anything while they’re locked up in here. She hangs up, looks over at me, and says, “I ain’t finished.” Then she calls our area supervisor and says that we have one who wants to sign in. At the same time, she reaches inside the front desk, pulling out an inmate sign-in form that states, “I am a homosexual and want to go to homosexual housing for protection.” She fills it out with his information on it and signs his name to it. She then tells me that she’s cool with the captain, and after she tells him that the inmate exposed himself to her he will do this for her, which means that Mr. Peep Show will be forced to go and live in a housing area that houses only gay inmates. Mind you, she is doing all this when she should be on her way home. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. She leaves with the papers in hand that are going to change this inmate’s life forever.
Corruption Officer Page 10
