by Larry Lawton
“From Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, I was flown to Rhode Island. Why? I have no idea. My destination was Philadelphia. I was already in Pennsylvania. Go figure. I guess it’s just the crazy Air Marshal Transport system. And so for two days they drove me back toward Pennsylvania in a van. My last stop was the Elizabeth County Jail in New Jersey. How stupid is that? What a waste of money!
“So I was in the Elizabeth jail, and they picked me up the next day, and I went in front of a magistrate judge. Some guy comes over to me and says, ‘I’m going to represent you.’
“I looked at him and said, ‘Who the fuck are you?’ He was a public defender.
“I said, ‘Your honor, can I speak?’
“Go ahead, Mr. Lawton.”
“I said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on. I was kidnapped by these people. I haven’t had a hot meal. I don’t know where I am. I have an attorney, and I smell.’”
That drew a chuckle from the other inmates waiting to be arraigned sitting in the jury box. The judge looked back to the marshals who transferred him and asked if what he said was true.
“We just picked him up from the jail, your honor,” they said.
The judge said, “I’m going to suspend this hearing. I want you to put him where’s he’s going to be housed. I want him to have a hot meal. I want him to get cleaned up, and I want him to have a phone call, now.”
Even though there were signs all over the holding cell area saying, No phone calls, they had to give Lawton one. When a federal judge orders something done, it gets done.
“I called my wife,” said Lawton. “I told her to get hold of the lawyer, my family, and Fat Tony, and let them know that I was kidnapped by the feds and where I was.
“I was then sent to Fairton, a federal correctional institution, somewhere in South Jersey and processed into the carrot unit, the unit reserved for guys in pre-trail not yet sentenced. It’s an actual prison. The only difference is that the guys in orange clothes are pre-trial and the ones in khaki colored clothes are sentenced inmates.
“I called my wife back the next day, and she was hysterical, crying uncontrollably, saying how the lawyer said he needed more money because it came out in the papers that my case was big, that I was involved with organized crime, and I was facing life in prison.
“I calmed my wife down and got off the phone – furious. I couldn’t sleep that night thinking about my wife and kids, and how a lawyer could be so heartless.
“When I contacted my lawyer the next day, it took all of my self-control not to curse him out. That’s why I hate lawyers. Too often they’re sharks who feed on people who are down and out. When they know a guy needs them, they bury you.
“I called Dominick, the big mob boss, who said he didn’t want to get involved, but he gave me the name of a lawyer. I don’t recall his name, but I sent him the paperwork, and he said to me, ‘You know you’re going to go away for a long time.’ Because they were accusing me of using a gun in the four robberies I was charged with committing. Under federal law you get five years for the first robbery with a gun. Every robbery after that you get twenty years running consecutively. I was facing eighty five years just for having a gun.
“He said to me, ‘Go to the law library. Look up the statute. They never found a gun. You never shot anyone. You can beat the gun charge.’
“I had used a BB gun during the Fairless Hills robbery, and I’d turned it in. A BB gun is not classified as a firearm. I told the FBI where I had dumped the guns I had taken from the jewelry store. Divers went into the lake off I-95 and found them. And that was one of the major arguments I made to prove I wasn’t a gun guy. My defense was going to be, If I was going to use a gun, I wouldn’t have thrown the five guns out. Not only that, As I was getting shot at, if I had a gun, wouldn’t I have shot back, even in the air? If I had had a real gun and shot back, you wouldn’t be reading this book. I’d still be in prison.”
In the end the prosecution dropped the gun charge, because they felt Lawton would have beaten it for lack of evidence. Then the feds offered Lawton a deal.
“The feds offered me a three-year sentence if I gave up my accomplices,” said Lawton. “They wanted everyone and their mother. They wanted my fences. They wanted Dominick. They wanted Willie the Weeper. They wanted all my accomplices.”
Lawton wouldn’t do it. He wasn’t a rat.
“There’s no ratting,” said Lawton. “You have to accept responsibility and do your time, and that’s exactly what I did. My crew was always known for how loyal we were. A lot of mobsters, like Sammy Gravano, that prick, say they’re going to be loyal and then rat. Sammy said he feared for his life, but that was bullshit. He ratted because he’s a fucking rat. He wanted freedom more than anything.
“Even though I was facing a long prison sentence, I never told, and the feds punished me for my silence. I would spend a lot of time in solitary as a result.
“They charged me with four robberies, and after they dropped the gun charge I took a plea for twelve years on the condition I didn’t have to rat. I had to give them a profer, meaning I had to admit my crimes and tell them how I did them.”
During his profer Lawton told the court that his partner was John Rodriguez from Miami. The name was fictitious, and he chose it because he knew there had to be a lot of John Rodriguez’s in the Miami area.
“Talk about being smart!” said Lawton. “It was a real smart move until later. Do you know what the FBI did? They pulled every ID card, every driver’s license, and went to see every John Rodriguez in Miami. There must have been five hundred of them. I must have cost the government a million dollars. Boy, were they pissed. Of course, there was no John Rodriguez. He was a fictitious person. He was really my brother David. Everything else I told them was true, except I didn’t do it with John Rodriguez. Five years later, when my brother’s wife, a fucking wacko, turned him in, they ended up throwing him in jail and convicting me on perjury. It was the same charge they leveled at Bill Clinton, filing a false statement. They gave me twelve months for that, but the sentence ran concurrently with my sentence for robbing the stores, so what did I care? My brother ended up going away for ten years.”
At first Lawton thought he was going to go away forever, but then he had that glimmer of hope from Dominick’s attorney, and he beat the gun charge. When he was given twelve years – under the plea bargaining agreement he received four twelve-year sentences to be served concurrently – he was the happiest person in the bullpen, the holding cell under the courthouse where inmates wait until they go back to the county jail or their assigned prison.
Said Lawton, “These other prisoners were saying, ‘You poor guy, you got twelve years.’ Ninety percent of them were snitches, and they only got a few years. But even after getting twelve years, I was a happy camper.”
Because Lawton wouldn’t snitch, the feds decided to take it out on him. Their punishment was to send him straight to USP Atlanta, a maximum security prison.
“They say they don’t do that. Bullshit,” said Lawton. “I went to Atlanta, which at the time was the worst prison in America.
“The guards said to me,’You’re going to Atlanta man. Oh, I’m sorry. You’re fucked. You’re a white guy in that prison. There they torture you.”
CHAPTER 8
Journey to Atlanta
While Lawton was working out his plea deal with the government and before he was sentenced, he was held in detention in medium-security facilities in Fairton, New Jersey, and then was transferred to Schuylkill, Pennsylvania.
The unit for pre-trial prisoners was called the carrot unit because everyone housed there walked around in orange jump suits. Lawton travelled back and forth to the court house in Philadelphia in vans that held seven to ten prisoners.
Before his hearing Lawton sat in a holding cell under the courtroom, and after the hearing, he’d be taken back to t
he cages down below and wait while the cases of the other prisoners were being heard. At the end of the day he’d go back to prison.
*
After a defendant is convicted, the Federal Bureau of Prisons assigns a new inmate a security level. His crimes, length of sentence, past history, and prison infractions are all factors that go into what security level he will receive, and that security level will determine what prison he goes to.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons has four basic levels: camp, low, medium and high. A fifth level, super-max, located in Florence, Colorado, is a lockdown facility for the stone-cold killers and other menaces to society.
Camp is the level with the least supervision and the fewest rules. It houses inmates with short sentences and no violence on their records. There are no fences, no controlled movements, and very few guards monitoring these inmates. Drug offenders and white-collar criminals are usually assigned to these camps.
There are camps at all the high-security facilities, also called penitentiaries. The reason they have camps at the penitentiaries is so non-violent inmates can man the warehouses and take care of the grounds around each penitentiary.
The next level, the low-security facility, is primarily for drug dealers, ex-cops, a judge or two, and white collar criminals – serious offenders who aren’t very violent and who have sentences usually less than twenty years.
Though the prisoners aren’t violent, the low-security prisons still go to a lot of trouble to make sure no one escapes. The lows have double barbed-wire fences and vans with riflemen that circle the prison 24/7 to watch for escape attempts. The fences are electrified and have sensors on them.
The low-security facility has dormitory-style living quarters and group bathrooms with toilets and sinks lined up along a wall. Because it’s dormitory-style living, there are no lock-downs, the periods when inmates must remain locked in their cells.
Despite the non-violent nature of their crimes, low-security prisons are no country clubs. Inmates of low-security prisons don’t have a run of the place. They’re only allowed to move from one area of the prison to another – from work to the cell block, from the yard back to the cell block, or from the cell block to the library, say – during certain times of day and for short, specific periods. These prisons are talked about as country clubs, but they are far from that. They just aren’t as draconian as the rest of the prisons in the system.
At the next level, medium security facilities, most of the men are there because they committed violent crimes. They’ve been convicted of serious felonies such as armed robbery, rape, assault with a deadly weapon, or some crime where someone got shot, stabbed, and gotten the shit beaten out of them. They are sent to a medium-security facility rather than a high-security facility because their violence hasn’t escalated to a penitentiary level.
They have the same precautions to prevent escapes as the low-level facilities, with electrified barbed-wire fences and constant patrols. Prisoners live two to a cell, unless the place is overcrowded, and then three live together, with one of them sleeping on the floor. Or they add another steel bunk, and they sleep as though they are in a coffin.
There’s a lot of violence at medium-security prisons, and the primary weapon used to combat it is called the lock-down. During lock-down, prisoners stay in their cells twenty four hours a day for anywhere from a day to even months. Lewisburg Penitentiary was locked down for six months in 1996, after members of the Aryan Brotherhood killed four Muslims, and the prison administration feared a race riot. On lock-down all you can do is sit in your cell. The guards will search the cells, interview inmates, and do whatever they can to diffuse the situation.
While in the carrot unit Lawton considered what prison he’d have to go to if he was convicted. Lawton was sure he’d go to a medium-security facility. It stood to reason. He hadn’t killed anybody. He didn’t have a life sentence. Penitentiaries were for murderers and repeat offenders. Lawton didn’t even have a prison record.
What Lawton hadn’t counted on was how angry the government was when he refused to rat out his brother David and the others who had helped him stage his jewelry store robberies. The prosecutor decided to punish him by recommending to the judge that he be sent to USP Atlanta, a maximum-security facility.
“My points didn’t justify a penitentiary but they sent me there anyway,” said Lawton. “They say they don’t stick it to you if you refuse to cooperate. Bullshit! Because I wouldn’t rat, I went to USP Atlanta, the worst prison in the country at the time.”
Before he arrived at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, first he would have to endure the trip there. From the Schuylkill, Pennsylvania, prison he’d have to travel first to the transfer center of the prison system, located at the United States penitentiary in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. From there he would wait for an interminable period to take a plane to Oklahoma City – the hub of ConAir -- and then – finally – fly on to Atlanta.
It was like the slow boat to China, but so as far as the prison administration was concerned Lawton had been sentenced to twelve years in prison, so there was no rush to get him where he was going. All they cared about was that he got to where he was supposed to go, and that he didn’t try to escape.
As Lawton sat in his cell in Schuylkill, Pennsylvania, he could only think, What a fucking trip this is going to be.
*
Not a week after sentencing, Lawton was told it was time for him to begin his journey. Because he was classified as a violent offender, he was handcuffed, belly chained, and a black box was placed around his cuffs, making any movement virtually impossible.
“You can’t move your hand more than inches,” said Lawton. “Your hands get numb, you lose circulation, and you feel totally helpless.” On the positive side, because he was wearing the black box, the other convicts sitting around him gave him some respect for being a hard-ass.
“They look at you, and they’re thinking, ‘I’m not going to fuck with that guy. He might be crazy.’”
After Lawton shuffled onto the bus and sat down, he and the other convicts were driven to Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, the facility that housed what they call the “hold-over” prisoners, those waiting to be shipped to their final destination. When the Lewisburg prison came into view, Lawton couldn’t believe what he saw.
“On the way up the hill to the Lewisburg prison, which was built in 1934 and looks like something out of a Dracula movie, I could see forty-foot walls, with gun towers and a lot of barbed wire,” said Lawton. “We arrived in the morning, but the place looked gloomy and drab.
“When we arrived, we didn’t go onto the yard. Almost everyone who got off the bus was sent directly to J Block, where they once kept the Cuban criminals from the Mariel boat lift.”
J Block was the SHU, the special housing unit, or as it was better known, “the hole,” where he was kept in seclusion for almost two weeks. Lawton’s cell, a big block of solid concrete, was like a mausoleum. A broken window with rusted bars let the cold weather into the cell.
“When you’re in the hole, it’s like you’re an animal in a cage at the zoo, only the animals at the zoo have more freedom,” said Lawton.
The front of the cell was a big gray, steel door. There was one narrow slot in the door that opened and closed. Any time Lawton was allowed to leave his cell, whether it was to shower, to see a counselor or a doctor, he was handcuffed.
“No inmate housed in the SHU was ever allowed out of his cell without being handcuffed,” said Lawton. “Every time the guards wanted to open the main door of the cell, I had to turn around with my hands behind my back and stick my two hands through the slot so the guards could cuff me.”
The slot, which was also called the “food chute,” was the opening through which he received his meals, all which he ate in his cell. According to Lawton, Lewisburg, unlike most prisons, actually had pretty decent food. The prisoners at
Lewisburg were allowed showers twice a week, though for Lawton taking a shower at Lewisburg was always unnerving.
“They would cuff you, take you to the shower room with three guys I didn’t know, and uncuff you,” said Lawton. “Then they’d lock the door. Here you were naked in a room with three strangers who had been convicted of violent crimes. You could feel the tension. Every time I went in there to shower, I knew potentially I was risking my life. I went because I stunk and I needed to wash off. But every time I went in there, I was wary.”
The only way Lawton could see what was going on around the cell block was to put a mirror through the tiny ten-inch square hole in the front door of the cell that had two bars across it. Using his mirror he’d look up and down the cellblock. He didn’t know a soul, and since this was a transfer unit, cellmates would come and go. He was lonely, but he knew his stay at Lewisburg was temporary, so he patiently waited out the days until he’d be shipped out.
Once a week the Lewisburg warden’s crew would walk through the hole to see how everybody was doing. The inmates called it “the Dog and Pony Show.”
“They called it that,” said Lawton, “because the whole thing was bullshit. Like the warden really gave a fuck.
“‘How you doing?’ he’d say.
“We were thinking, What do you mean, ‘How am I doing?’ I’m in the fucking hole, jerk-off. Give me a blowjob, and I’ll tell you how I’m doing.
“One Thursday the word went out for all the inmates in the hole to fill our shampoo bottles with shit and piss. You really don’t want to know how we did that, but I’m going to tell you anyway. You shit in a cup, let it sit a day, then mix it with water or piss and liquefy it. You put the mixture in a shampoo bottle, and then you wait.
