Gangster Redemption

by Larry Lawton

  *

  During the time Lawton was in the hole he was being harassed by another inmate, who constantly gave him a hard time.

  “The guy was talking shit to me, just being an asshole,” said Lawton. “We would curse each other through the door like animals in a zoo. They call that door warriors, and I usually ignore it, but I told myself, I’m going to get that motherfucker.

  Each day at Jesup the prisoners in the hole were allowed one hour on the yard. They were handcuffed and led to the yard.

  “Come to the yard, motherfucker,” Lawton screamed at him.

  At Jesup the rec area for the prisoners in the hole was a small cage.

  “They brought me to the yard,” said Lawton, “and I had a paper clip hidden in my hand. I went into the cage, and they let him in, and I slipped my cuffs with the paper clip. He was handcuffed and I threw him a severe beating. He thought nobody could get to him, so I beat him until I was pulled off of him. He was bleeding and screaming while the guards were yelling, ‘Lawton, get back. Get back.’ But I just kept beating the guy.”

  Lawton was given a longer stint in the hole, but he didn’t care. His mentality was, It’s me or the other guy. He was just trying to survive.

  “By now I was in prison five years, and I had learned how to live, how to hustle, how to beat people, how to do everything just to survive.”

  Again, he was transferred, and his next stop would be a hell hole in South Carolina twenty-five miles north of Augusta, Georgia, called Edgefield prison. His country club existence had come to a screeching halt.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Abu Ghraib of America

  Larry Lawton had to leave the cushy environs of Jesup prison because of the extensive damage he did in the unit manager’s office. There may have been another reason as well in that the Jesup administration, as at Coleman, feared he was gaining too much power with the other inmates.

  Lawton was beginning to see that prisoners in American jails had absolutely no rights. A prisoner who kept his nose clean, he saw, could be railroaded just because someone in power dictated it be so.

  “The arbitrary nature of it all is enough to drive a man insane,” said Lawton.

  Unfortunately for Lawton, he was sent to Edgefield, South Carolina, a maximum security prison every bit as bad as Atlanta had been. The inmates were more dangerous than at Coleman or Jesup, and so were the guards. Lawton was forced to revert back into survival mode.

  When he arrived at Edgefield, Lawton continued to pursue his study of the law. He was befriended by an inmate by the name of Pauly Tallini, who was serving a thirty-year sentence for cocaine trafficking. Tallini, who was originally from Boston, was living in Miami when he was caught with fifty keys of coke. Pauly had spent years in the law library trying unsuccessfully to appeal his conviction, and he encouraged Lawton to keep learning what he could about criminal law so he could be a successful prison advocate. Little did Lawton know that his learning the Code of Federal Regulations would help him in a four-year campaign to publicize the abuses of Edgefield prison.

  *

  Lawton was in the Atlanta holdover unit heading to Edgefield, his new prison, when he learned that his beloved grandmother had died.

  “I was real close with my grandmother,” said Lawton. “When I was out running the streets in Ft. Lauderdale, she lived in Hollywood, and I used to take my limo down to see her and take her to shows and out to Denny’s. She liked that a lot. My grandmother was healthy when I went to prison and was never told the real story of why I went away. She was told I was a bookmaker, and that was it.

  “My grandmother was going to be 100 on May 7, 2003. She already got a letter from the President of the United States. I didn’t know this but when you turn a hundred you get a birthday card from the White House.”

  Lawton’s mother had called the prison and asked them to send down a pastor to tell him that his grandmother had died. They never did. On March 30, Lawton called home and asked his mom how grandma was doing. His mother became silent.

  “Didn’t they tell you?” she asked.

  “Tell me what?”

  “Grandma died eight days ago.”

  Lawton dropped the phone and went back to his cell. He lay down on his bunk. All he could think about was how much he had messed up his life. How he had messed up his kids lives and his whole family’s lives. For what! Money and power? What a waste, he thought. It was a real turning point.

  “I didn’t blame the prison, didn’t blame the system,” said Lawton. “I blamed myself and had to come to grips that it was my choices that got me here. I wasn’t able to attend my grandmother’s funeral or my nephew’s funeral, and I wasn’t around to be with my kids during their most precious years. I wasn’t around to see my son play basketball, go to his graduation, listen to my daughters’ recitals, and all those things. It’s sad, and the system has no heart at all. I was about to find out how bad the system really is.”

  *

  Lawton’s approach to how he was going to spend the rest of his time in prison changed dramatically one day when he was playing horseshoes in the yard with an inmate by the name of Jim Arch who began complaining about chest pains.

  “Arch,” said Lawton, “Go to medical.”

  Arch went to the infirmary and told the staff he had chest pains and that his left arm was hurting. All signs pointed to his having heart failure.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you,” said a member of the prison medical staff. “Get out of here. You’re all right.”

  Arch complained for a whole week about not feeling well. He went to his job in prison maintenance, and when his boss saw how terrible he looked, he called over to the medical department to say that Arch needed to be seen immediately.

  “You have gas,” the medical staff told him. “Get out of here. Here’s Maalox,” he was told.

  The distance from the medical department to the unit where Arch lived was only about a hundred yards. After making it back to his unit, Arch said to an inmate friend of Lawton’s by the name of Jimmy Brown, “Jimmy, I’m dying.”

  Lawton was there when it happened. Lawton and Brown helped Arch into a chair. Arch then keeled over, fell face-first onto the floor, and died. Arch was only 46 years old.

  *

  Arch was the third friend of Lawton’s to die needless in Edgefield. One friend, an inmate by the name of Shifflett, had cancer, and for the last week of his life he complained about how badly he felt.

  “He never should have been in prison,” said Lawton. “He should have been in a medical care center.”

  On the night Shifflett died he was banging on the door of his cell in pain for thirty minutes, but no one came. He was vomiting up blood, and that night he bled to death in his cell.

  His cellmate, a redneck who had been around slaughterhouses, at the funeral service described it as “the worst death I ever saw, worst than killing an animal.”

  Lawton’s other friend who died needlessly went to the prison’s medical facility to get medication for a heart problem. He was so sick he had to be brought to medical in a wheelchair. The patient should have remained in the prison medical department, but the administration didn’t want to have to pay for a nurse, so he was sent back to his cell. . The medical staff gave the medication to his cellie and told him, “Give him the medication at night.”

  When his cellie woke in the morning, the inmate was sitting in a chair stone cold dead.

  “Have you ever seen a man die?” asked Lawton. “They shit and pee themselves. The stain is what tells you he’s dead.”

  *

  After Jim Arch collapsed onto the floor, the guards came running.

  “Lock down, lock down,” the guards screamed. All the inmates scrambled to return to their cells.

  Lawton’s cell was facing the front of the unit. As La
wton watched the guards place Arch onto a stretcher and then onto a golf cart, Lawton became angry when he saw them laughing as they drove off toward medical.

  Heartless bastards, thought Lawton.

  SIS did an investigation and went cell by cell. The administration, afraid of liability, immediately tried to cover up what happened. One of the investigators said to Lawton and Brown, “You saw Arch hit his head, right?”

  Shouted Lawton at the investigator, “Fuck you, you killed that man,”

  Lawton was ordered taken to the hole.

  Lawton, who was close to Jim Arch, was incensed at the injustice. If any of the medical staff had taken the time to examine Arch or the other two inmates who died, they could have diagnosed their conditions and could have taken steps to save them.

  “There’s no medical care in prison,” said Lawton. “They are heartless.”

  *

  Even in the hole Lawton had access to law books. A friend on the outside, Steven Lander, mailed him the books he needed for his studies. Lawton also had the right to mail letters, and mail letters he did.

  “The worst thing you can do is fight the system,” said Lawton. “You’re telling the brass how incompetent they are, and they don’t like it one bit. Never mind that they are the worst people in the world.”

  The primary reason Lawton began his letter-writing campaign was that he himself was in a lot of pain, and the prison medical staff was doing nothing about it. While enforcing fishing regulations on the Bering Sea as a member of the U.S. Coast Guard, in rough seas Lawton fell into a cargo hold and was severely injured. Lawton retired from the Coast Guard with fifty-percent disability due to the severe condition of his back.

  At both Atlanta and Coleman Lawton was on light duty status because of his bad back. At Edgefield, however, the administration doctored Lawton’s records and forced him to do heavy lifting. They also put him in a top bunk, a difficult task for a man with severe back pain. Lawton sought fair treatment.

  Equally important, he wanted the world to know that the people who ran Edgefield prison killed Jim Arch and his other two friends, and he wanted the world to learn of the abuses and inhumane conditions at Edgefield. Prisoners in solitary weren’t getting any recreation despite federal regulations that demanded it. Prisoners in the hole at Edgefield weren’t getting psychiatric attention despite other regulations that called for such treatment.

  Prisoners have rights, Lawton told himself. This is America, not a third-world country.

  In July of 2004 Lawton mounted a furious writing campaign to senators, congressmen, media outlets, and others in power in Washington and across the country.

  He wrote to senators and congressmen. He wrote to The Progressive, the Human Rights Watch, The Southern Center for Human Rights, Frontline, and even the American Friends Service Committee.

  He didn’t get any coverage from the publications or TV, and most of the politicians didn’t respond. But a few did. Lindsay Graham, the U.S. senator from South Carolina, wrote back to say he would look into his case with the Bureau of Prisons.

  Lawton’s letter writing made him an enemy of Edgefield’s warden, John LaManna, who was so angry about what Lawton was doing that he told one of his lieutenants, “I’m going to get that man.”

  “He sure hated me,” said Lawton, “and for the next four years he made my life even more of a living hell than it had been. LaManna was running a prison of 2,000 inmates, and I was causing him a lot of problems. I was getting the attention that was needed at a prison where they were killing people.”

  On August 17, 2004 Sen. Graham replied to Lawton with an attached letter written by warden LaManna. In the letter LaManna refuted every charge Lawton made. Lawton had complained he wasn’t getting medication for his bad back. LaManna said that Lawton had been examined, was prescribed medication, but that Lawton “failed to report to the pill line.” Later when he was prescribed medication, “he failed to pick it up.” Another time, said LaManna, “he was prescribed Tylenol.”

  The warden concluded, “Please be assured that our Health Services staff are providing appropriate medical evaluations and treatment for Mr. Lawton.” LaManna invited Sen. Graham to give him a call any time.

  LaManna’s answers were enough to keep Sen. Graham at bay.

  On August 26 a woman friend of Lawton’s wrote a follow up letter to Graham and other senators. The gist of the letter was that Lawton’s back hurt him so much that he belonged in a cell for the disabled. She charged that the prison was doctoring records, ignoring requests for help, and sweeping Lawton’s complaint under the table.

  Sen. Ernest Hollings wrote to say he was contacting the Bureau of Prisons. He too received the same response from LaManna.

  LaManna struck back. At Edgefield Lawton initially had been placed on chronic care, but then on September 1, the clinical director, a Doctor Serrano lied about his condition and took him off chronic care.

  Lawton then filed suit. He was then thrown in the hole when he wouldn’t accept a program assignment. Even when a handicapped cell became available, he wasn’t assigned to it. LaManna instead kept him in isolation.

  Lawton went to see his unit manager, a Mrs. Hobbs, who went to see Doctor Serrano, who told her, “We know about it. Forget about it.”

  *

  As punishment for his war of words Lawton spent most of his last years at Edgefield in the hole. He was thrown in there for imaginary, made-up offenses. One time he was charged with having bookmaking equipment in his cell. Another time he was accused of having contraband. The contraband cited was a pair of knitted socks. The charges were made up, Lawton swears. Lawton spent the next eleven months in solitary confinement. “All because I was fighting the abuses,” said Lawton.

  *

  For part of the time Lawton was in the hole, the inmate in the cell next to him was named Jack, a black man who was doing life for selling drugs.

  “When you’re in the hole for a long period of time you get to know your neighbor,” said Lawton. “You talk to one another through the vent. You can actually have a normal conversation without yelling too loud if you jump up on the stainless steel toilet and sink combo and talk right into the vent.”

  The inmates, who were nothing if not resourceful, would also communicate through their kites.

  “Jack and I would use kites to pass magazines back and forth. Using a kite you could also pass things like a stamp, a piece of paper, or a little coffee, if you were lucky to have it in the hole. I got so good at it that I was able to shoot the rope way down the hall to communicate with a lot of the inmates on the tier.”

  Like Lawton, Jack was a physical fitness devotee, and using kites they would send their workout schedules back and forth so they could coordinate them. Simultaneously Lawton and Jack would do burpees, a totally exhausting full-body workout.

  “One day Jack and I were doing burpees through the vent,” said Lawton. “I would do mine and yell, ‘Go’, he would do his and yell, ‘Go,’ and we did this back and forth for an hour. At the end of the hour we were drenched. On this day we finished our workout about 3:30 in the afternoon when Jack said to me, ‘Hey brother, I love ya. I’m checking out.’

  “I said, ‘Where the fuck are you going? You’re in the hole with me.’ Then it dawned on me what he was going to do.

  “I jumped up on the toilet sink combo and shouted into the vent. ‘Jack, relax man. After count we’ll talk about it.’ He didn’t reply.”

  In the federal prison system every inmate has to stand on his feet at 4 p.m. until the guards make a head count The guards will open the door at the end of the tier and scream, “Count Time.” They then walk past every cell and count the inmates.

  “They passed my cell and stopped at Jack’s,” said Lawton, “and I could hear them screaming in their radio, ‘Man down.’ They also hit their body alarm. Everyone came
running.

  “Jack had hung himself. It isn’t hard to do. You can hang yourself from a chair, the rung of a ladder, even a shower head – any place where you can tie a rope around your neck and cut off your air. You don’t even have to be hanging.

  “The guards removed Jack’s body from his cell, recounted, and then they started chow,” said Lawton. “It was as if nothing had happened.

  “I couldn’t eat and laid back down on my bunk. I was in shock. It was at this time I actually heard God speak to me. I was starting to question my sanity, and wondered if I would make it. His death was so unnecessary. Being in prison is so dehumanizing. Nobody cares about the inmates.

  “In the hole, guys go crazy all the time. There was this totally crazy guy at the end of the tier who would sing all day and night. He drove everyone on the tier crazy. The other inmates would be screaming for him to shut-up, and when he kept singing, they’d kick the doors and make it seem like the tier was going crazy.

  “The guards didn’t give a fuck. Why should they? They weren’t on the tier. They didn’t have to listen to his constant craziness. They only came on the tier to feed us and make rounds. Like a dog in a kennel, in the hole you are totally forgotten.

  “To block out all the distractions I used to get in a groove by working out and by reading. Even when I was doing that there were times when I couldn’t help but feel sick about what was going on around me.

  “One time the staff was putting on its usual bullshit dog-and-pony show where the administrators walk around ask if we’re okay.

  “Fuck no, we’re not okay. We’re locked in a hole, forgotten with no sunlight and no fresh air.

  “On this particular day one of the inmates after the breakfast meal wouldn’t allow the guard to close the door of the food chute by hanging his arm through the slot. This is called “jacking” the food chute. I’ve seen an inmate who was doing this get his arm broken when the guard got mad and slammed the chute door down on the guy’s arm.