Six by Ten

by Mateo Hoke

  We have Davon’s ashes in the living room. I have a mantel with Davon’s pictures and his ashes. So I try my best to keep Davon Jr. knowing that his dad is here. He’ll ask me, “Why did they do that?” And I’m like, “Baby, I don’t know.” To this day, he’ll go up to the fireplace and say, “Daddy, I miss you. Why can’t you come home?” It hurts my heart! It hurts because there’s nothing I can do to bring his dad back. There are times when I tell Davon Jr. to go talk to his dad and his dad will send him answers in some kind of way. I tell my kids, “Your dad lives through you.” I try my best to let my kids know, “Your dad is here and this isn’t a choice that your dad is gone.” Justice is two now. She is the daughter we had always wanted. That’s the way she came. It’s like, Davon was gone and then I got her. That’s why I named her Justice, for Davon.

  * * *

  15. Bakersfield is a city of 375,000, located in central California, roughly 120 miles north of Los Angeles.

  16. Lithium compounds are psychiatric medications commonly prescribed as a treatment for bipolar disorder. Side effects include increased thirst, dizziness, and fainting, among many others.

  MOHAMMED “MIKE” ALI

  age: 40

  born in: Navo Nadi, Fiji

  interviewed in: Hayward, California

  The knuckles on Mike Ali’s hand spell out “F-I-J-I” in fading tattoo letters, a subtle clue to his former life as a young gangbanger. But these days, “Crazy Mike” lives a relatively quiet life. He works full time at a hospital taking out trash and collecting linens, which he says pays well and provides solid benefits. He lives with twelve members of his extended family in a four-bedroom house. It’s cramped, but he’s hoping to move out soon to get more room for himself and his brother’s four kids, whom he looks after. Mike’s brother is serving a sentence of fifteen years to life for the kidnapping and torture of the boys’ mother.

  Mike came with his family from Fiji to the United States as a child and turned to gang life in the 1990s as protection from being bullied in school. He spent much of his teens and early twenties between juvenile hall, jail, and prison before being detained for deportation at age twenty-four. Mike experienced long stretches of isolation in a privately run immigration detention center and struggled to maintain hope with an uncertain sentence and the threat of deportation hanging over his head for over four years.

  The United States maintains the world’s largest immigration detention infrastructure, with upwards of four hundred thousand people detained each year. Many of the detention facilities that house these prisoners are privately run. These facilities typically earn a fee from the federal government for each night a detainee is held. In order to minimize costs and maximize profits, facilities are often overcrowded, and medical and mental health care go lacking.

  Mike has shining dark eyes and a round face. His short-cropped hair is going gray. His body carries severe scarring from the life he’s led, but his cheerful personality means he laughs a lot during our conversations, even when telling us about getting beaten up, stabbed, or shot multiple times with a shotgun.

  A BIG OL’ GANGSTER PREDATOR

  Immigration detention is fucked up, man. More fucked up than prison. With prison you got a date to come home. With immigration, you don’t.

  My name is Mohammed Ali, but everybody calls me Mike, or “Crazy Mike.” When I was younger, Mike Tyson was famous, so everybody started calling me Crazy Mike, from me fighting too much. It stuck with me.

  I was born in 1978 in Fiji, in a little village called Navo Nadi, and I grew up there until I was ten, in ’89. That’s when we came to the US. We landed in San Francisco—me, my big brother, two sisters, and my mom and dad. We had our green cards already. We came as permanent residents and were sponsored by an aunt. My mom’s family was here, which is why we ended up coming here. I think we would have had a better life in Fiji.

  I was okay when I first got here. You know how you get wowed when you first land—’cause Fiji don’t have high-rise buildings, nice bridges, all that stuff. At first it was like, Wow, this is cool. And then after living here for a while I was like, Damn, this sucks. I should have stayed in Fiji.

  We lived in Oakland for a year, then we moved to Hayward.17 My mom worked as a housekeeper and my dad was a chef. In Hayward we were the minorities. Me and my sister were the only Fijis in the whole elementary school. We got bullied a lot. Then we went to junior high at Winton, and we were getting bullied again. And then we moved to South Hayward and went to La Vista Junior High, where there were four other Fijis. The majority of kids were Mexicans. There were Blacks, whites. The Mexicans didn’t like us and were always bullying us ’cause back then we didn’t know about deodorant. In our houses we were cooking with a lot of curry, so we all smelled like that. They used to jump us, so me and my four homeboys, we made our own gang and we start beating them up too. We were like twelve years old and we were all Fijis, all from South Hayward. We didn’t have no outsiders. Four or five guys would hit us, but then we’d grab one and beat the shit out of him. And then things just kept on escalating.

  After that, me and my homeboys were just gangbanging. I was gangbanging all the way out. It was like the coolest thing to do. If you were a gangster, you were the coolest cat in the street, in school, everything. I first went to juvenile hall in ’92. I pulled a gun on somebody at school. We got into it, and I happened to have a gun on me I got from one of my homeboys. It was a Smith and Wesson .32. But I didn’t know how to use it. If I’d tried, I probably would’ve ended up accidentally shooting myself.

  I was in juvie for three months. It was hell, man. Everybody who goes to jail the first time, they bust out and cry. I cried in front of my mom. My older homies in juvie were like, “Man, you can’t do that shit in here. You gotta swallow your emotions. It makes you weak, it makes you our prey.” So it just kind of made me tougher.

  When I got out of juvenile hall everybody started looking up to me. I was the coolest cat in the whole group because I’d done time. That time in juvie made me a predator instead of a prey. A big ol’ gangster predator. I came out with more knowledge. Now I knew how to structure a gang, right? Like hey, this is what we can do, this is how we get away, if we did a drive-by, we need to throw this, this, and this away.

  Around ’94, when me and my homeboys went to high school, we started claiming Bloods as our gang. We called ourselves the Red Blood Fijians. We carried red rags. We imitated the way the Mexicans dressed. We wore Dickies and white T-shirts. We got more into it. Like, really more into it. Before we were like 40 percent, 50 percent, now we’re 90 percent into it. Getting bullied meant we had to watch our backs. We were the minorities back then.

  At fifteen, my cousin gave me a line of speed, and it was like the best fucking high in the world. I’m telling you, man, it was a rush you could never get from anything else. When you’re running down the street, fighting all the time, it was like a totally different high. It enhanced my rage, you know? If you have that anger and hate inside of you, that drug just blows it out of proportion. I started having a drug problem in ’94. I was like Speedy Gonzalez, man, always going. That year, I went to juvie again. I’d pulled a knife on a principal. And then Hayward PD came to the house and got me and took me to jail. I went to juvie, did six months or something.

  Later that year, I got jumped and was almost killed. We had problems with the Indians; we didn’t get along. But I was dating an Indian girl, and she’s the one who set me up. She called me to come outside my apartment and the only thing I remember is getting hit. A group of Indian guys jumped me with baseball bats. They broke my jaw, cracked my head open, stabbed me. My sister found me on the concrete inside my apartment complex, and I made it to Saint Rose.18 They saved my life.

  I met my wife, Janet, in ’94, when I was sixteen, and my son was born in ’96. I was there at the hospital when he was born, and it was one of those feelings you never get
in life, you know? A one-of-a-kind feeling. It was just amazing the way he looked. He was so cute and adorable. His name is Mohammed too. But just because you have a kid doesn’t mean you’re a father. You have to be around. I wasn’t around. I was always on the streets or I was locked up. I went to jail like every six months. And shit, I didn’t know nothing about being a dad. It just happened. I was a baby myself, and I was always on drugs, so having a baby didn’t make a difference to me. My wife, she tried. She was like, “Hey, man. Get your shit together.” I tried, too. But I was so much into the gang life. I got more deep into it than I realized. I kid you not, my heart was into it, and I couldn’t leave no more.

  I got shot in ’97 by some dudes we were having trouble with in Berkeley. They hit me with buckshot from a sawed-off shotgun. And I got stabbed a couple of times after that. I have a loud mouth. People would get intimidated, think I’m trying to punk them, and then things would go from there.

  SANTA RITA was like college

  I went to jail in 1999, when I was twenty-one, for drugs. Got caught with an ounce of dope and a scale. They sent me to Santa Rita.19 I watched too many fucking movies, so I was like, Damn, I’m gonna get raped here! I was small, motherfuckers in there were like fucking twice my size. I’m in Santa Rita scared shitless like, Fuck! This is gonna be all bad in here.

  But I didn’t realize going in that people from my city who I knew were there doing time. And they’re all the ones that I’d sold dope to or that I did dope with. So I got to my pod, and this homeboy from Hayward is like, “Man, what’s up, G? What’s up, dog? Hey man, what you doing? Why don’t you come and kick it with us?”

  I think I was in Santa Rita six months. Janet never came to see me. My mom had just passed away, so I was in a rage, and nobody wanted to come see me. I didn’t expect no one to come visit me. I messed up all my relationships. All of them.

  The whole time I was at Santa Rita and prison, I absorbed every bit of knowledge. You know how you go to school and you observe? Imagine not going to college, right? Instead, you choose to be a gangster. A dope dealer. You’re in junior high at juvenile hall. You got this junior high knowledge and you graduate. You go to high school, right? From high school, now you graduate and go to college. Santa Rita was like college. And then your whole goal is to graduate from college. You get pointers on how to be a real gangster. How to be a real dope dealer. How to be a real hustler. How to do all the stuff you didn’t think you could do. Remember, you were in there for petty shit compared to all the other people been doing time for ten years, fifteen years. They taught me how to be a man—how to fight better than before. Like I said, man, in high school I was a rookie. Now I’m a pro, you know?

  After that I kept getting arrested every six months. Possession, stealing cars. I ended up going to San Quentin and then Folsom. I came home in 2003 from Folsom. They were supposed to hold me there because I had an immigration hold.20 But they fucked up and misfiled the hold, so they released me to the street. After a month on the street, I went to immigration to pick up my green card, and that’s when they picked me up again.

  It was me and maybe fifteen other inmates. They took us to Marysville County to sleep in a holding tank. Next day, we went to Oakland Airport, then LA, San Diego, then to Florence, Arizona, and from there a bus took us to Eloy, which is migrant detention.21 They were going to try to deport me.

  Immigration said my crimes were deportable, so that’s why they picked me up again. The drug cases are what sent me to immigration detention, even though I never got convicted for transporting, just possession. Immigration said I was transporting. So that’s why I got sent to Eloy, to await deportation.

  NEVER COMING BACK TO THIS COUNTRY AGAIN

  Eloy was loud. We were secluded from the world in a desert. There’s sandstorms, and when we had to go to the cafeteria during a sandstorm, we’d walk outside and the sand would be so thick you couldn’t see the guy in front of you. The sand and dust would come through the vent. We’d get spiders and scorpions in there. It was cold at night—we’d have to wear our beanies and jackets. The water was harsh—it was well water, and it tasted like chemicals. We’d melt ice down and drink that instead. Some of these guys they’d bring in off the street would have bad odor. There’s two prisoners per cell so if one smells, they make your whole cell smell bad.

  Going to prison and going to an immigration detention center are two different things. Prison is more structured. Immigration has all these people who come and go. In prison, you know your sentence, how long you’ve got left. But in immigration detention, they’ll hold you until they can deport you. And that’s for life. You’re never coming back to this country again.

  Going back to Fiji might sound nice to some people, but remember, going on vacation and getting deported are two different things, right? If you go back in shackles, it’s a whole different ball game. You wouldn’t get the same respect or treatment. People in Fiji would see you as a criminal. I didn’t want to go back. I decided I’d fight my case as long as it took me.

  Also, there’s a lot of people in Eloy who came to the US so young that growing up they thought they were US citizens. I thought I was a citizen. I didn’t know I was only a permanent resident until I was trying to get a driver’s license after I got out of prison in 2003. Shit, I thought I was a citizen!

  In immigration detention, everybody was fighting for their lives but in different ways. In immigration you didn’t know when you were getting out. You knew you might not ever see your family again. There’s dudes I met that were just picked up at home after living their whole lives in the US. There’s one cellie I had, a buddy from Vietnam. He was at home with his kids eating dinner when immigration came for him, came in the house and cuffed him in front of his kids. He’d been in the US twenty-four years. Turned out when he was eighteen, he’d gone joyriding in a car that a guy he knew had stolen. He didn’t do nothing, but they found him twenty-four years later, came to his dinner table, cuffed him in front of his kids. He was in Eloy for six months. They don’t deport people to Vietnam, so he ended up going home.22 But people put in that situation are really stressed out, and at Eloy everybody’s stressing out.

  Janet left me in 2004 while I was at Eloy. We had never got married legally, which was a good thing. I found out when I called my dad’s house from Eloy. He said Janet was there, and that she’s getting remarried. I was mad, but I couldn’t do nothing about it. I didn’t know if I was going to get out in the US or get shipped back to Fiji.

  I was looking for a way to vent. I got segregation a lot for the fighting, especially with guys who’d never been in prison before. But I wasn’t the one starting the fights. See, there’s a difference between convicts and inmates. Inmates don’t know prison rules. There were a lot of guys in there for immigration reasons who hadn’t really served time. Maybe they’d done thirty days, a few months before, but they’d never been in a prison structure. Convicts like me had been in prison before, and we knew there’s rules, there’s respect, there’s ways to act to avoid conflicts.

  Honestly, the inmates, the guys who’d never been in prison before, they’re the ones that started the most shit. They started race shit, tried to call the shots. But convicts don’t put up with that. You don’t kick off shit when you’re a convict, you sit down and talk. You’re supposed to understand the situation. We’re all trying to go home to our family.

  Unfortunately, the COs allowed these conflicts to happen by putting everybody together, maximum-security convicts with the inmates. So hell used to break out. The COs would run around like little girls when fights broke out because they didn’t know what to do. The problem was, these COs weren’t well trained. It was probably the highest-paying job in the area, and they’d just grab guys off the street to work in this private prison. Otherwise the area in Arizona where Eloy is is just crops and cattle. The people working there weren’t used to prisons. They’d go on a little power trip to make up f
or it. They’d try to bully us and intimidate us. They didn’t realize some of us had nothing to lose.

  They should have separated us convicts from the other inmates. In prison you might know when you’re getting out, but over here, you get deported, you’re never going to see your family again. You don’t know how long you’re in, and you get into a fight, and the chances of getting deported go up. So these guys come in and mess it up for everybody. Some guys know they’re gonna get deported and just want to fuck things up for everybody.

  SEND ME BACK TO FIJI

  I first came on the SHU for fighting in 2003, right after I got to Eloy. I got into it with a Southern Mexican from LA. I did two months before I got out. I went in and out of SHU, but eventually they put me in SHU indefinitely because we had a riot, and they said I “called the shots.” They thought I set it up, but they couldn’t prove it, I was like, I didn’t. I didn’t say nothing, man. It was a fight, then bah! The riot started, and I was just sitting back and watching.

  At Eloy in the SHU, they got you alone in a cell. And you got to learn to live with this now. You’re confined in a six-by-nine cell with a solid steel door that has a metal screen in it so the guards could look inside and see what you’re doing. You get three meals a day. You get yard for one hour three times a week, then a shower. Every time you move you gotta get shackled up.

  In order to survive, you gotta structure yourself. Gotta get up, work out, take a shower. Pray. Eat. Stay up all night and sleep all day because when you’re up all night you pass the days quicker. A lot of people are backwards. You gotta get a couple of good books, you gotta read books, you gotta keep yourself busy. Soon as you’re thinking, Aw, man. Shit, I ain’t got nothing to do. Now your mind’s wondering, What’s going on in the streets? Now your mind’s wondering what’s your wife doing. Now your mind’s wondering how’s your kid doing, how’s your mom and dad doing, right? Soon as you start thinking more, you start stressing. As soon as you start stressing more, you start tripping out more. So then you start tripping out more, now the walls are tripping on you, right? You start getting delusional. You start seeing all this shit that’s not there, because your mind’s fucking running wild. You can’t sleep ’cause you close your eyes, but your mind’s still running.