Gangster Redemption

by Larry Lawton

  “If you miss, you pull it back in and try again. Until you reach him.”

  Lawton got so proficient he could shoot a kite along the floor into just about any cell.

  “I can also make a rope out of a pair of underwear. It takes me eight hours. You take the cotton that goes up and down, up and down, and you twist it and twine it into a rope. That rope makes a better kite because it’s smaller and lighter, but it takes a lot more time to make.”

  The other use for a rope: an inmate can hang himself with it. In that so many of the prisoners were sentenced to life and never were going to get out, some decided to end their lives, or as the prisoners described it, check out.

  “I’d see guys, and then they’d be dead,” said Lawton. “Guys hanged themselves. When you hang yourself, you don’t have to actually be hanging. You can hang yourself on a rung of a ladder on your bunk. You tie your rope around your neck, sit down, and die. What happens, the air is cut off, and you die. People check out. They say, ‘What the fuck. I’m done.’”

  Hanging wasn’t the only means of suicide in Atlanta. A drug overdose was another means of leaving the prison world behind.

  “One time I was in my cell,” said Lawton, “and I was with another inmate, who was a drug dealer. A guy walked into the cell and said to him, ‘Listen; I need five papers of heroin.’

  “My friend said, ‘You owe me money. Get the fuck out of here. You better give me my money, because I’m going to fucking stab you.’

  “‘I’m not going to pay you back,’ the guy said.

  The stare of the drug dealer was intense.

  “‘What are you talking about, you trying to fuck with me?’”

  “‘I’m checking out.’ The guy had a life sentence, and he wanted to die.

  “‘Are you kidding me?’ asked the drug dealer.

  “‘No.’

  “‘Okay, good luck,’ the drug dealer said, and he handed him the five papers of heroin.

  Said Lawton, “I sat on my bunk watching this thinking, Is this for real? Where the fuck am I? Is this real?” It was.

  “The guy went back to his bunk, OD’d on heroin, and died.”

  *

  Lawton saw the need to be tougher. To become physically strong, he invented a workout program for himself befitting a heavyweight champion boxer. His workouts, which he did in his cell usually by himself, were physically punishing. Five days a week he’d do six hundred sits-ups and six hundred push-ups in 45 minutes. He would do a hundred and fifty hand-stand presses where he’d get up against the wall with his feet pointing to the ceiling, and he’d press his entire body weight. He also did burpees by the thousands.

  “It’s an up-down pushup kick-out routine that would make you so soaked with perspiration that you’d look like you just got out of the shower with your shorts on,” said Lawton.

  To look tough Lawton also took advantage of the fact that Atlanta housed some of the finest tattoo artists in the world. Today tattoos cover most of Lawton’s body.

  “Each tattoo means something, whether someone was killed in the institution, whether I wanted to honor my nephew, or if I just wanted some beautiful art. One guy, Andre, an expert at tattooing, was a heroin addict, and for one paper of heroin, worth about twenty-five dollars, he would give me a tattoo that would be worth hundreds of dollars on the street. For some guys, tattooing was a very good hustle.”

  Larry also learned how tattooing, which was against the rules, was done in prison.

  “Inmates are the most resourceful people in the world,” said Lawton. “You can make a tattoo gun in a number of different ways. You can take a toothbrush, heat it, and bend it into an “L”. Then you steal the motor from an electric typewriter or a pencil sharpener out of the counselor’s office, you tie the motor to one end of the “L”, and you take a barrel of a pen and put that on the other end of the “L”. For the needle you might use a guitar string filed down to a sharp point or a needle from a sewing kit. You put that through the barrel of the pen. You attach two batteries to the motor -- you get the batteries from a radio or from the commissary -- and you’ve got a tattoo gun.

  Said Lawton, “We got the ink from melted chess pieces, or you can take a plastic chair, melt it down, and get ink from that. The black guys would buy hair grease, burn the grease, and black smoke would rise and they’d catch that on a piece of paper or cardboard. They’d scrape the black soot into a jar and put water in it, and they’d have black ink.”

  Never far away, Lawton saw, was violence. One evening while Lawton was lying on his bunk he could hear a number of the black inmates screaming through the vent, “We’re going to kill the white guys tomorrow.”

  “You just never knew what was going to happen,” Lawton said. “You never knew who was going to get killed. You don’t know if the cell door is going to open, and they were going to come into your cell or whether they were just saying that. Atlanta was such a tension-filled place, though rarely did the whites and blacks have any problems, because everyone was against the guards. It was a convict joint. People got stabbed all the time, so we never knew whether race was the cause or not. I could hear the white guys screaming back, ‘Fuck you, nigger. Come and get me, you scumbag.’

  “But nothing happened.”

  Sex was one of the major causes for violence. Rapes occurred. Not every day.

  “You don’t see them,” said Lawton. “You only hear about them. You’ll hear about a guy who gets raped in his cell by a bigger, meaner guy or one time five guys with pillowcases over their heads ran into a cell and raped a guy.

  “Rape is not a crime of sex, but rather a crime of violence. It’s to show superiority, to demoralize the person, or to keep him down. You can fight it, but you rarely can stop it. If a guy is intent on rape, he might knock you out before he rapes you.

  “There are two tiers in Atlanta, and one evening I could hear the screams of a guy who I knew by the name of Shane coming from the top tier,” said Lawton. “The guard hit the deuces, and the other guards came running. They screamed, ‘Lock down. Lock down,’ and everyone returned to their cells. The guards went upstairs and we never heard from Shane again.

  “The next day at six in the morning we were sitting around the unit waiting to be called for chow when an inmate friend, who had just come from the infirmary, said to us, ‘Hey, you gotta see this.’

  “It was Shane’s medical report, and it said, ‘Inmate Shane was cut with a sharp object from the top of his anus all the way to his scrotum.’ He had been cut from the top of his ass to his balls, and they found seminal fluid in there. Don’t ask me why someone would do this. But then again, rape is not a sex crime. Rather it’s an act of violence.”

  There’s also a lot of consensual sex in prison, says Lawton.

  “You hear it all the time from your cell, the banging on the walls, the moaning. It’s man on man, but nobody calls it homosexual sex. If you call a dude who’s fucking some punk gay or a faggot, he’ll kill you. That guy doesn’t believe he’s gay. They don’t use the term.”

  A certain percentage of the men in prison liked to look, dress, and act like women. These men, who are called punks, had women’s names like Princess, Goldie, JLo, and Alicia Keys, named after the singer. They tattooed their eyebrows and lips, and tattooed on blush. They took their underwear, re-sewed them into panties, and dyed them pink with Kool Aid. Goldie, a black punk about 50 years old, wore a button-down shirt, and he’d pull the shirt through his top so it looked sexy, and wore red lipstick and a bandana on his head like Aunt Jemima.

  Most of the punks, who were usually very thin, wanted to be women, and they ended up with a lover, said Lawton.

  “They do everything a married person would do, do the laundry for him, cook for him, clean for him, and anything else he wants.”

  Princess was a punk who actually took part in a mar
riage ceremony in prison.

  “Two men had been fighting over him,” said Lawton, “and after they fought, the winner, whose name was Charles, and Princess were married.”

  “Talk about a psycho situation,” said Lawton. “The cells are small, but a large group of us gathered round. They had a guy from the Odenist religion who performed some bullshit ceremony. The groom made a ring from folded, intertwined paper. We were chuckling but not too loudly. You never fuck around with a punk. In prison a punk will get you killed.

  “Afterward they had a party and made a cake out of honeybuns. You could never look at Charles and say he was a gay guy. And how do you tell a guy with a life sentence what to do? I never told anyone what to do.”

  All the inmates may have been men, but jealousies arose exactly as with heterosexual couples. Lawton saw inmates die from lover’s quarrels. Punks could be extremely violent if crossed.

  One afternoon Lawton was in D unit watching TV with his white Italian buddies. He was sitting with his back against the wall, as he always did, when an inmate everyone knew walked in and stabbed another inmate in the neck right in front of him. The guy who got stabbed started fighting back. All the other inmates left the TV room, and then the guard, a woman, locked them in the TV room and hit the deuces, a little orange button on the intercom radio.

  “You hit 2,2,2 on any phone, and the guards come running,” said Lawton. “That’s why they call it the deuces.”

  While the two were fighting, a punk ran up to the female guard, threw her on the floor, took her keys, and opened the door. He ran in and smashed the attacker in the head with a lock.

  “The punk thought he had attacked his lover,” said Lawton, “but it turned out it wasn’t his lover; it was someone else.”

  The inmate who was attacked was taken out on a stretcher. The inmate who did the attacking and was slugged by the punk suffered a concussion and also had to be carried out on a stretcher. The punk was taken away in handcuffs.

  Another time Lawton witnessed a punk who took a bowl of water, put a Snickers bar in the water and then put it in the microwave until the Snickers bar was melted and the water boiled. He then threw the concoction in another inmate’s face.

  “The caramel and the chocolate of the Snickers bar stuck to his face, and I will never forget the scream as long as I live,” said Lawton. “It was a love triangle, and the jilted lover took out revenge on the winner. The victim had to be air lifted to an outside civilian hospital.”

  Gay inmates could be real trouble.

  “There was one inmate we called Mountain,” said Lawton, “because he was six foot six and weighed about 350 pounds. He was gay, and you didn’t want him to like you.” Lawton avoided him as much as possible.

  One potential danger in Atlanta was that AIDs was rampant among the inmates taking part in sex.

  “The HIV rate was very high,” said Lawton. “Who knows if they have AIDS or not? I knew punks who had AIDS, and guys would fuck them. I asked, ‘Why would you do that?’ I didn’t get an answer, but it was probably because they had given up on living. These men think, What the fuck do I care about dying? Otherwise, why would a person do that? Prison is a very depressing place.”

  Serving a long term in a place like Atlanta can make a person go crazy. This happened to Dave Collingsworth, Lawton’s cellie during his last six months at Atlanta.

  One day Collingsworth told him, “Larry, I just won my appeal. I’m getting out.” Collingsworth had been convicted of robbing a bank.

  “I was excited for him,” said Lawton, “but he was freaked. He started putting laundry detergent in a bag.

  “I have to bring it home,” Collingsworth said.

  “What are you doing?” asked Lawton. “Leave this shit and get out of here.”

  “Maybe my mother doesn’t have laundry detergent,” Collingsworth said.

  “He was really freaked out by the thought of returning to civilian life.”

  “Dave,” said Lawton, “just get the fuck out of here.”

  After beating the bank robbery charge, a year and a half later Collingsworth was back in Atlanta. He had robbed another bank and had gotten caught.

  *

  After being incarcerated for eighteen months at Atlanta, Lawton’s counselor suddenly “discovered” that he didn’t have enough points to be housed in a maximum security prison.

  “Just like that,” said Lawton, “I went to a meeting with my counselor, and he said to me, ‘You have low enough points to go to a medium.’ And they transferred me to the Coleman Correctional Institution in Coleman, Florida, which to me was a country club in comparison.”

  But in order to transfer, Lawton had to survive his last few weeks at Atlanta. There was no guarantee. Every day at Atlanta Lawton faced potential danger. Ten days before Lawton’s scheduled transfer, he had a beef with an Indian inmate called Bonnie. Their set-to could well have ended up with Lawton committing murder, or getting killed. That it didn’t happen was as much a matter of good fortune as anything else.

  “On our unit we had TV rooms,” said Lawton. “For a hundred and sixty inmates there were four TV rooms -- a black TV room, a Spanish TV room, a white TV room, and a sports TV room.

  “We were in the white TV room around six thirty in the evening,” said Lawton. “I had brought a chair in there. You have a chair in your cell, and you can bring it to the TV room. I always put my chair up against the wall, because you don’t want anyone behind you. And Bonnie walked over and sat in my chair.

  “Bonnie,” I said, “That’s my fucking chair.”

  “He grumbled, but he got up.

  “I walked away, and I came back, and Bonnie again was sitting in my chair. He obviously was trying to pick a fight with me.

  “Bonnie,” I said, “What the fuck?”

  He said, ‘You fucking guys,’ meaning the Italians, ‘think you own the place.’

  “Before he could move, I hit him with an uppercut, boom. He fell against the wall, and I grabbed his long hair and I kept smashing him. I must have hit him fifty fucking times. Each time he tried to slide down the wall, I pulled him back up and hit him again.

  “The leader of the Aryan Brotherhood, one of the most notorious groups in the prison, tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Enough, Larry.’

  “Bonnie, beat to shit, was all fucked up. He needed stitches under his lip. He was able to get up, and he went back to his cell. The guards never knew what happened, and Bonnie wasn’t a snitch and didn’t tell. Still, I was worried what he or one of the other Indians might do to me.

  “I went back to my cell. I was all hyped up. Reno, who was a Latin King, came to see me. Reno, a psychopath, liked me because I had taught him how to be a bookmaker. Reno stabbed people. He had three life sentences. He didn’t give a fuck.

  “Reno said, ‘Larry, we have to kill the Chief. They’re going to try to kill you.’

  “My life started flashing in front of my eyes. You have to picture Chief, who was the head of the Indian inmates: he was six foot seven, 300 pounds. Every group had an inmate who called the shots, and Chief was that guy, and Reno wanted me to kill this giant motherfucker.

  “The eight o’clock move is the last move of the day, and then they have lock down for the nine o’clock count. Reno was saying, ‘Let’s kill the Chief when he comes in.’

  “I knew the Chief was going to come and see me. I got a knife and put it behind my leg. Reno, who was crazy, stood out in front of my cell. The cells have two-feet-by- six-inch windows in the door, and I could see a shadow come across the window. It was the Chief.

  “In prison you never, ever enter another man’s cell. Chief gave me the courtesy of knocking. He held his hands in front of him and said, “Hey Larr, we know what happened. You’re all right. It was Bonnie’s fault.’

  “‘All right, Chief,’
I said. And that was it. But for the next ten days until the day I left Atlanta, I put my chair in front of the door. I didn’t go into my cell until they locked me in, and when I got up, I was sitting there waiting with my knife. There wasn’t one time when that cell door was open that I wasn’t ready.

  “Atlanta had been the worst of the worst, and I survived it, but barely. When you survive the worst of the worst, nothing else can make you fearful -- to this day.”

  PHOTOS

  Larry Lawton December 1961

  Larry 7 years old

  Larry 12 Years Old

  Bronx NY - Throgs Neck Little League 1970

  Lawton Family Picure 1972

  Grandmother 2003

  St Frances De Chantel Report Card - Mrs. Armelleno 1972-73

  Larry Coast Guard 1979

  Coast Guard Sandy Hook NJ - 1981

  Angela Cusano childhood date 1979

  First wife Roselyn 9-11-1987

  Coast Guard ship running a gambling night 1985

  Lukes Piano Lounge - Queens NY 1987

  Tommy, Louie, Me 1992

  Louie, Cruiser Weight Champ Mark Randazzo, Larry 1992

  Joe Fraumeni 1993

  Uncle Louie Constantino 1993

  Joe Fraumeni and me golfing 1994

  Larry Lawton & Tom Ferrara with his wife -1996 Larry’s Block Party

  Larry with sisters Lynne and Debbie 1993

  Second marriage to Missy 1994

  2nd wife Melissa visiting in prison1999

  Larry Jr. age 11