Overwhelmingly, islanders rejected the notion that the five incarcerated men were criminals. A sign went up at the ferry terminal in Grand Manan saying “Free Our Heroes.” All around the island, red ribbons were displayed to show solidarity with the defendants, who came to be known on Grand Manan as The Boys. A public meeting called by the R.C.M.P. to hear residents’ concerns turned into a dressing down of the police for lax drug enforcement and a pep rally for The Boys. When David Lutz, a New Brunswick criminal lawyer, went to the island to meet with some people about representing The Boys, he was asked what sort of retainer he’d need. He said twenty thousand dollars. The next evening, as he sat in his car waiting to get on the seven-o’clock ferry back to Blacks Harbour, a man he’d never met before handed him an envelope with cash and checks totalling just about twenty thousand dollars. The fund-raising efforts eventually included bake sales and the sale of T-shirts. The father of one defendant said later, “How many criminals are there that the community pays their legal bills?”
In November, when the trial of The Boys got under way on the mainland, a county weekly, the Saint Croix Courier, asked its readers about their sympathies, and eighty-two per cent of the respondents said that they backed the defendants. “These five men did what Mr. McAvity just said that they did,” David Lutz said in his opening statement, after the Crown prosecutor had outlined what the jury would hear. “The issue is why they did what they did that night.” Lutz’s strategy was based on necessity: all five of the defendants under videotaped R.C.M.P. questioning, had admitted their roles in the gunfire or the arson. As the defense presented it, “They acted out of fear for their lives and the lives of others.” Lutz portrayed the gathering at Carter Foster’s house as a sort of “mobile neighborhood watch” that went “horribly wrong” when shots began coming from Ross’s house.
If the crowd had gathered for the “peaceful intervention” that Lutz described, the Crown prosecutors replied, how come there were rifles at the ready? And what, they asked, does setting fire to someone’s house have to do with self-defense? Although “the Crown is not here to support Mr. Ross’s life style,” Crown Prosecutor Randy DiPaolo said, the defendants “do not get an exemption from the criminal-justice system because they’re fishermen or because they work hard.”
Ronnie Ross’s record, introduced into evidence, reflected that before he moved to Grand Manan he was convicted of crimes like extortion and assault. He had never been convicted of selling drugs, though, and there was only sketchy testimony about drug dealing at 61 Cedar Street—most of it concerning Terry Irvine. Ross admitted using crack, but, like Irvine, he denied being a dealer. When Lutz asked him why he bought so much baking soda, an ingredient of crack (“You’re not a baker, are you? You don’t make cookies and muffins”), Ross said that he used it to deodorize his refrigerator. The one person Ross identified as having been at 61 Cedar Street while crack was being smoked was one of the men on trial for trying to burn the place down because it was a crack house. Ross, who had testified that he’d lived on Grand Manan for ten years, said that the assumption that he was a crack dealer was caused by prejudice against outsiders: “Islanders stick together. If one person doesn’t like you, no one likes you. They gossip and stories get twisted around.” As for any plans to travel around in the Yukon burning down houses on a hit list, Ross’s friends testified that they had gathered at his house that night for their usual Friday-night pastime of getting drunk or getting high. Terry Irvine, who, according to some witnesses, may have fired the first shot, testified that he’d been too drunk to remember much of anything about the evening.
The jury found those who admitted to shooting guns that night not guilty—in his charge, the judge had said “the law doesn’t require somebody to run to the woods if they are being attacked”—but it found the two arson defendants guilty. Foster was also found guilty of the minor charge of unsafe storage of weapons, and another defendant was found guilty of firing a flare gun. The verdicts were not popular. There were tears in the courtroom, and the mood on the ferry going back to the island was sombre. The reaction softened a bit when, without objection from the Crown prosecutor, the judge handed down lenient sentences; the most severe, for the arsonists, included a form of house arrest. Editorialists tended to detect a sensible Canadian compromise between the requirements of lawfulness and mercy. “The island people were well satisfied that they didn’t go to jail,” one resident said recently. “If those boys had gone to jail for a year, I’d be scared to say what might have happened.”
A COUNTRY SONG about T he Boys has been posted on the Internet: “They were known as The Boys. And they were fishermen. Cared about their families. They cared about their friends. Looked out for the neighbors. Out on Grand Manan. They were known as The Boys. And they were fishermen.” Some Grand Mananers, including some of those who were willing to contribute to the defense fund, feel a bit uneasy about The Boys’ being portrayed as the equivalent of the peaceful farmers in a Western who finally rise up against the gunslingers hired by the wicked cattle baron. “They weren’t exactly the churchgoing crowd,” one islander said recently. There are, of course, some people on Grand Manan who have never felt even enough solidarity with The Boys to accept the term. (“They’re not boys. They’re grown men.”) Some volunteer firemen, for instance, were shocked at the scene on Cedar Street that night; they are understandably accustomed to a different reception when they show up, at some risk and for no pay, to save a neighbor’s house. “You can’t carry out vigilante justice,” one of them said not long ago. “If the drug dealers had had more people, Foster’s home would have been burnt out.” Such opinions, though, tend to be expressed privately.
By now, most of the red ribbons, many of them bleached pink by the harsh Maritime winter, have been taken down. Among the last to go were three or four bright-red towels that until recently were still draped around trees in the front yard of Carter Foster and Sara Wormell. They have decided to stay in Grand Manan for the time being, although they’d like to figure out a way to spend some of the winter months in British Columbia. By this time of year, tall stakes driven into the ocean floor have been connected with netting, a process sometimes called “suiting your weirs,” and people like Foster are getting up at a quarter to five every morning hoping to find the nets full of herring. The shed in back of their house has been repainted, but Foster can put his fingers in two bullet holes. At times, he has said that he wished he hadn’t been present on the night of the fights and the gunfire and the house-burning. He calls the twenty days he spent in jail awaiting bail the worst twenty days of his life. (“To me, that would have been a good enough sentence if I had done something really horrific.”) He has said that he’s haunted by the thought that he could have been killed or that he could have killed somebody else. On the other hand, he thinks that some good has come of the altercation with Ronnie Ross. “They’re talking about a center for the young people, and a paintball field,” Foster said recently. “There’s going to be some recreation for the young kids. The only recreation I had growing up was to go get drunk.”
Many islanders would agree with Carter Foster that Grand Manan is better off than it was before he and Ronnie Ross met in the middle of Cedar Street—or will be if the grants that the village has applied for come through. That opinion is often followed by “Of course, I don’t condone violence,” but it also might be followed by the observation that a smarter way to get rid of someone like Ronnie Ross would be to wait until he was out of the house some dark night, drop in a Molotov cocktail, and “run off into the woods like a rabbit.” Although there are still drug dealers on the island, none of them are outsiders who make themselves out to be big-time gangsters. There seems to be more focus on doing something about the drug problem. Now that Terry Irvine is no longer making regular visits in one S.U.V. or another, islanders are more relaxed about leaving tools unguarded—even though no evidence was ever presented that Irvine and Ross were behind the thefts. In fact, Irvine is in jail. Th
is spring, in St. John, he pleaded guilty to stealing several thousand dollars’ worth of goods from three Atlantic Superstores, in full view of surveillance cameras—committing what his own lawyer summed up as “a rather stupid offense.”
And Ronald Ross is no longer a menacing presence on Grand Manan. His house is gone. Where it stood, there is simply an empty lot with some charred rubble. People see the end of his Grand Manan sojourn in varying ways. The Crown prosecutors believe, of course, that a mob put itself in the place of legally constituted authorities, while most residents of Grand Manan prefer to believe that islanders, regrettably, had to do what the R.C.M.P. seemed unwilling or unable to do. If it is true that the R.C.M.P. offered to turn a blind eye or even encouraged the violence, the legally constituted authorities could be said to have used the islanders as an unregulated auxiliary to get rid of Ronnie Ross. One resident of Cedar Street told the R.C.M.P. that, despite all the talk of drug problems, the eruption of violence was essentially part of a “personal war” between Ross and his neighbors—another way of saying that what really got Ronnie Ross put off Grand Manan was what Laura Buckley called his “asshole issues.”
At Ross’s trial in April, he was found guilty of the “ball of fire” threat but not guilty on the gun charge. (The judge, who heard the case without a jury, said that in his opinion the islanders at Foster’s assembled not for a peaceful intervention but in the hope that something would start so that they could finish it.) Ross, who had been confined to his father’s house in Nova Scotia since the previous summer, was sentenced to time served. After the sentencing, he told reporters that he might go back to Grand Manan once he is no longer prohibited from returning by the terms of his probation. A lot of people took that as just more Ronnie Ross bravura—when Mayor Greene was asked about it recently, he laughed—but Laura Buckley says that some people who know Ross believe that “he will actually have the brass balls to return.” Being an outsider and presumably not a student of history, after all, he may not realize that, in Marc Shell’s formulation, he has been banished.
CALVIN TRILLIN has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1963. For fifteen years, he did a New Yorker series called “U.S. Journal”—a three thousand word article from somewhere in the United States every three weeks. He is the author of twenty-five books, including Killings and American Stories.
Coda
In the summer, I live on the South Shore of Nova Scotia, so I heard reports on CBC radio about the incident on Grand Manan Island, just across the Bay of Fundy, in July 2006. The South Shore has some cultural similarities with Grand Manan. People in the village I live in have traditionally made their living from the sea—mainly lobstering in recent years, as the supply of ground fish became depleted. Law enforcement is provided by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, headquartered in the nearest town large enough to have a drugstore and a supermarket—although in thirty-five summers the only Mountie I can recall seeing in our village was the one in ceremonial dress who was always present for the blessing of the fleet that used to be held on the government wharf every August. In other words, the presence of a menacing neighbor would present the same sort of problem for our village as it did for the residents of Grand Manan.
One difference, though, is that the South Shore is not an island. I’ve always been intrigued by islands—particularly islands that are relatively remote from mainland population centers. I’ve also been attracted to situations that are, for want of a better word, murky—situations in which the rights and wrongs are not obvious. So a murky situation on an island, involving people much like my summertime neighbors, was irresistible.
Alan Prendergast
THE CAGED LIFE
FROM Westword
WHEN THE GOON SQUAD showed up at his place at five in the morning, Tommy Silverstein knew something was up. He wasn’t accustomed to greeting guests at such an ungodly hour—much less a team of corrections officers, helmeted and suited up for action.
In fact, Silverstein wasn’t used to company at any hour. His home was a remote cell, known as the Silverstein Suite, in the special housing unit of the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth, Kansas. He’d been cut off from other inmates and all but a few emissaries from the outside world for more than two decades.
He stayed in the Silverstein Suite 23 hours a day. His interactions with staff typically amounted to some tight-lipped turnkey delivering his food through a slot in the cell door. The only change of scenery came when an electronic door slid open, allowing him an hour’s solitary exercise in an adjoining recreation cage. Visitors were rarely permitted, and entire years had gone by during which he never left the cell.
But this day was different. Silverstein could think of only a couple of reasons why so many well-padded, well-equipped officers would be at his door, ordering him to strip for a search. Cell shakedown? Time for a game of hockey, with Tommy as the puck? No, that was a captain leading the squad. Something big.
A transfer.
So it came to pass that on July 12, 2005, U.S. Bureau of Prisons inmate #14634-116 left his cage in Kansas for one in Colorado. Security for the move was tighter than Borat’s Speedo—about what you’d expect for a former Aryan Brotherhood leader convicted of killing four men behind prison walls. (One conviction was later overturned; Silverstein disputes the second slaying but admits the other two.) The object of all this fuss didn’t mind the goon squad. He was enjoying the view—and hoping that the move signaled the end to his eight-thousand-plus days of solitary confinement. Maybe, just maybe, his decades of uneventful good behavior had paid off.
“They said for me to keep my nose clean, and maybe one day it’d happen,” he recalled recently. “So I foolishly thought this was it. If you saw me in that van, you’d think I was Disneyland-bound, smiling all the way.”
But the smile vanished after Silverstein reached his destination: the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum, better known as ADX. Located two miles outside of the high-desert town of Florence, ADX is the most secure prison in the country, a hunkered-down maze of locks, alarms and electronic surveillance, designed to house gang leaders, terrorists, drug lords and other high-risk prisoners in profound isolation. Its current guest list is a who’s who of enemies of the state, including Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, shoe bomber Richard Reid, plane bomber Dandenis Muñoz Mosquera, abortion clinic bomber Eric Rudolph and double-agent Robert Hanssen.
When it opened in 1994, ADX was hailed as the solution to security flaws at even the highest levels of the federal prison system. Much of the justification for building the place stemmed from official outrage at the brutal murders of two guards in the control unit of the federal pen in Marion, Illinois, during a single 24-hour period in 1983. The first of those killings was committed by Thomas Silverstein, who was already facing multiple life sentences for previous bloodshed at Marion. The slaying of corrections officer Merle Clutts placed Silverstein under a “no human contact” order that’s prevailed ever since, and it gave the Bureau of Prisons the perfect rationale for building its high-tech supermax. Although he never bunked there until 2005, you could call ADX the House that Tommy Built.
What greeted Silverstein two years ago was nothing like Disneyland. His hosts hustled him down long, sterile corridors with gleaming black-and-white checkerboard floors that reminded him of A Clockwork Orange or some other cinematic acid trip. One set of doors, then another and another, until he finally arrived at the ass-end of Z Unit, on a special range with only four cells, each double-doored. His new home was less than half the size of the Silverstein Suite and consisted of a steel slab with a thin mattress, a steel stool and desk, a steel sink-and-toilet combination, a steel shower and a small black-and-white TV.
Stripped of most of his small store of personal belongings, Silverstein had little to do besides take stock of his eighty-square-foot digs. The Silverstein Suite was a penthouse at the Plaza compared to this place. There were steel rings on the sides of the bed platform, ready for “four-pointing” difficult inmates.
A camera mounted on the ceiling to record his every move. If he stood on the stool and peered out the heavily meshed window, he could get a glimpse of a concrete recreation cage and something like sky. So this was his reward for all those years of following the rules—24-hour surveillance in his own desolate corner of the Alcatraz of the Rockies. He was no longer simply in the belly of the beast. He was, he would later write, “stuck in its bowels, with no end/exit in sight.”
The double doors muffled sound from outside. But over time, Silverstein realized that there was one other prisoner on the range. He shouted greetings. The man shouted back. He asked the man how long he’d been in the unit. Four years, the man said.
Silverstein told the man his name. His neighbor introduced himself: Yousef. Ramzi Yousef. Convicted of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the one that killed six people and injured a thousand. Nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the al-Qaeda leader who recently confessed to planning that failed effort to bring down the towers as well as the 9/11 attacks.
His keepers had put Silverstein in the beast’s bowels, all right—right next to the one man in the entire federal system more loathed than he was. Still, it was somebody to talk to. Shouting to Yousef was the first conversation with another inmate that Silverstein had managed in almost twenty years.
But talking wasn’t allowed. Within days, a new barrier was erected in the corridor outside his cell, preventing any further communication between the two residents of the range. Inmate #14634-116’s transfer to ADX was now complete.
Entombed, Terrible Tommy was alone again. Naturally.
IN THE LATE 1980s, Pete Earley, a former Washington Post reporter, persuaded Bureau of Prisons officials to grant him an unprecedented degree of access to inmates and staff at the Leavenworth penitentiary. Earley was allowed to walk the yard without an escort, to interview inmates without official monitoring, to talk candidly with veteran corrections officers about the dangers and frustrations of their work.
The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 Page 8
