by Glenn Stout
“Guys will say, ‘Man, slow down, you’re going too fast,’ ” says Michael Keeyes, who is 68 and entering his 43rd year of incarceration. His response is a punch line: “I’ve got Dobermans on my heels!” He ran his first marathon in 2014, finishing in a respectable four hours and 29 minutes. To improve on that today, he has an Ensure nutritional shake poured into a plastic horseradish squeeze bottle.
“All right, good luck, gentlemen,” Ruona says. “We’re going in ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one—you’re off!”
From the start, all eyes are on the leader, Markelle Taylor, who is loping along like a spaceman on the moon. A chiseled 43-year-old former nurse, he went to high school south of here, in Silicon Valley, and ran track on some of the very courses Ruona has trained on. But those were all sprints compared to this—his first marathon. “They call him the Gazelle,” shouts an inmate who’s been watching from a patio the Native Americans claim. “The Gazelle of San Quentin.”
As the hours tick by, the morning grows warm. “There are a number of guys who aren’t going to make it all the way,” says Ruona, studying the hitches and grimaces. Defending champion and course record holder Lorinzo Hopson, 61, who has been running bare-chested with a Rambo headband torn from a T-shirt, drops out at 13 miles. “I still got it,” he says, explaining that he merely wanted “to give the others a chance.” Also stopping halfway is Chris Schuhmacher, an Air Force veteran who has been devising a fitness app for addicts, like himself, to help guide their recovery.
“It’s getting tough, Coach, it’s getting tough,” moans Andrew Gazzeny, a lifer who was denied parole this year, as he lumbers around his 17th mile.
“Nice and easy,” Ruona says.
After three hours, it’s clear that Taylor is living up to the hype. He’s got slender legs and powerful arms, and he’s still running gracefully, in sodden gear, on an institutional diet, over a crazy, knotted course. Until, on his 104th lap—mile 25.75, at the crest of an astounding performance—it happens: an alarm. With one extended, gurgling blast, like a balky game-ending buzzer, it turns the marathon into an emergency drill.
“Oh hell, no!” one of the lap counters groans.
There is no sign of commotion, no explanation for the shutdown and none expected; the inmates know the routine. As Ruona anxiously watches the clock, each runner has to stop in his tracks and sit his butt on the ground, including Taylor, so close to completing the longest race of his life. He rests his hands on his knees, compliant and chagrined, for a full minute and 20 seconds. “Getting up,” he says later, “oh man.” But he does it, peels himself off the earth and, in one last burst of mettle, finishes what he started. Ruona, subtracting the stoppage, is almost giddy: 3:16, a new course record. Out in the free world, Taylor would have come within a minute of qualifying for the Boston Marathon.
As he walks stiffly around the yard in search of dry clothes, his neck still encrusted in salt, I ask Taylor what he’d been thinking about. “Thinking about my family, my kids, running for everybody . . . uh, my victims, everybody,” he says. I inquire about his crime. He sighs and shakes his head. “I foolishly and selfishly took a life,” says Taylor, who was denied parole 13 years into his sentence for second-degree murder, just weeks before the race. “I still have shame for that. That’s one of my motivating factors to get out there and run.”
He doesn’t elaborate, and I decide for the moment not to probe. It seems almost unfair to insist that a man who has just completed such a monumental feat, who has expended everything he has, relive the most horrendous thing he’s ever done. The same goes for the others: Mike Keeyes, who shaved half an hour off his time; Darren Settlemeyer, who broke down at 17 miles last year but finished in 4:04 this year; Lee Goins, who made it to 25 miles today before once again collapsing. “I never ask what they did,” Ruona says. “I feel like it’s not really any of my business. We all make mistakes, and some people make worse mistakes than others.”
Later, when my curiosity sends me digging, I discover why it’s sometimes better not to know. Almost to a man, their crimes are jaw-droppingly atrocious, the stuff of headlines and horror shows. Some of the particulars—unknown to San Quentin’s general population—are so stigmatized within the prison world’s peculiar hierarchy of misdeeds that to identify each runner’s offense, to point out who was the child molester and who killed his own baby, would make those men targets. Several have committed crimes that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, as a matter of policy, refuses to publicly confirm.
Out on the track, there was a man who stabbed his wife, set her on fire, and blamed it on a voodoo curse—“the most heinous crime I’ve ever seen,” said the sentencing judge. Another runner raped and strangled a young lady selling encyclopedias door to door—“the most vicious criminal I have encountered in my career,” that judge said. One marathoner tortured a friend over some stolen weed, handcuffing him to a guitar amplifier, then stripping him naked and beating him with a pool cue before stabbing him with a kitchen knife and dragging his body, rolled up in a blanket, to the trash. Less outlandish but no less violent is the man who killed two people in a mindless head-on crash—a decade after falling asleep at the wheel and causing the deaths of two others.
None of them got off easy. They have all been sent away for a very long time, to a place that could have—and, some will no doubt say, should have—broken them. And yet each woke up this morning with enough of his spirit intact to try something difficult and potentially uplifting, even if nobody else is watching or cares.
To talk about running is often to talk in platitudes, about pain and courage and limits that inevitably turn out to be self-imposed. To prove you have it in you to run 26.2 miles at San Quentin, where the limits are so tangible, is an achievement of another sort, one whose rewards, I’m inclined to believe, transcend any medal or finish-line photo. “You have to have love for yourself,” Taylor tells me. “Treat yourself, take care of yourself, watch yourself, what you do, what you eat, how you act. Before, I didn’t love myself. That’s why it was hard for me to express that love toward other people. But I love myself now.”
With the race over, San Quentin’s marathoners limp from the sunshine of the yard back to the prison’s warren of dank cells. Behind iron bars, they hang their drenched clothes on the webs of twine they’ve rigged as drying racks. Whatever approximation of freedom they’ve experienced today, an uncomfortable reality awaits: to save water in this unprecedented shortage, the state has limited all inmates to just three showers a week. A few of the runners, those who showered yesterday, will have to wait until tomorrow.
LUKE CYPHERS AND TERI THOMPSON
Lost in America
from bleacher report
The calls came around 11:00 p.m. on a cold January night in 2015, first to the Serbian boy with the little Samsung Android phone, then to the Cameroonians. “You ready? I’m gonna come tonight,” the voice on the other end of the line said. “Pack your stuff.”
Within hours, four teenage basketball players had hurriedly filled their gym bags with their scant possessions, including the clothes that now hung off their tall frames like cheap drapes, the result of months of having to scavenge for food from a nearby suburban Atlanta strip mall. They sneaked out of the drab townhouse apartments where they slept jammed into small rooms, usually on the floor and often without heat, and silently piled into a rented gray van.
They had never heard of Lake Wales, Florida, the place where the driver of the van, Gordon Gibbons, an assistant coach who had taken pity on them, was delivering them. They didn’t care. It couldn’t be worse than the place they were fleeing in the middle of the night—Stockbridge, Georgia, and Faith Baptist Christian Academy North. They were sure they had been conned there, and they’d had enough.
Their tribulations began as soon as they set foot in America. Rostand Ndong Essomba, a quick, 6'0" point guard from Yaounde, Cameroon, was told back home that Faith Baptist North was offering him
a full scholarship. He jumped through all the bureaucratic hoops, procuring a coveted I-20 form that grants permission for international students to apply for a non-immigrant visa to enter the country and study in the U.S.
But when Rostand arrived at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta in October 2014, he says Faith Baptist North’s founder, George Flint, took one look at him and told the 17-year-old African he was too short. Rostand says that Flint told him that if he wanted to stay in America, he had to cough up $2,000. “Where’s the money?” Flint allegedly asked his new recruit.
Franck Tsoungui, Rostand’s slender, sharpshooting 6'7" countryman, had left a stable situation at a prep school in Maine five months earlier, enticed by Flint’s promises of a new program playing a powerhouse schedule that would expose his talents to Division I coaches. What Franck got was a merry-go-round of missed meals and canceled games.
Mahmadou Ngoucheme had only been at Faith Baptist North for six weeks, but he packed plenty of suffering into that time. He was seven feet tall, but that was about the only thing he had going for him as a U.S. hoops prospect. He was raw, which was a nice way of saying he possessed few offensive skills, and he had a gentle disposition off the court—and on it.
What he really wanted was an American education, but after arriving in December 2014, Mahmadou had yet to attend a single class. Faith Baptist North had held no classes since mid-November.
Stefan Nakic-Vojnovic grew jaded early. The 6'5" shooting guard from Belgrade, Serbia, had been in Georgia the longest, since July, meaning that he had heard more broken promises than any of them. First there was the matter of the Faith Baptist North campus. There wasn’t one, despite the brochure Faith Baptist North circulated to starry-eyed teens around the world via the Internet, with photos of a beautiful lakeside compound and state-of-the-art athletic facilities.
The real Faith Baptist North was a football field and a rented gym housing a few unused classrooms behind a small church in Stockbridge, south of Atlanta. Stefan lived first in the basement of Flint’s two-story home in Conyers, a few miles from Stockbridge, with as many as 20 other boys, then in a run-down apartment building, where he and some Serbian players pooled what money they had to buy a tiny electric heater to fend off the cold.
During the few weeks of classes held in the fall, Stefan says he took math tests for football players and laughed as Flint lectured students on avoiding bad people. Much of the rest of the time, he says he slept on cold floors and scrounged for food and free Wi-Fi hotspots. He sums up Faith Baptist North in three words: “a big nothing.”
The van ride promised something better. For a little while, anyway. About five hours into the seven-hour trip to Lake Wales, a town in central Florida, Stefan received another call from a Serb who was at Faith Baptist North. Flint now was aware of the getaway, and in response, the founder who referred to himself as a preacher and a man of God had apparently told people he’d canceled the four teens’ I-20s, rendering their student visas invalid.
“We knew that we were basically illegal now,” Stefan says. The boys all had the same thought: “What are we gonna do?”
Over the past six months, a Bleacher Report investigation into Faith Baptist Christian Academy North has revealed how the start-up school ended up crushing dreams, squandering families’ savings, and disrupting lives. The four boys who fled Faith Baptist North for Lake Wales are now witnesses in a widening federal investigation into human trafficking, allowed to remain in the country under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act.
Their flight that January night set off a chain of events that led to the resignation of the Lake Wales High basketball coach and federal raids of Faith Baptist North, which has since closed, and its sister campus, Faith Baptist Christian Academy in Ludowici, Georgia, a four-hour drive southeast of Atlanta.
In a letter sent by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to the federal Citizenship and Immigration Services agency on behalf of one of the boys, Faith Baptist’s south campus in Ludowici was described as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)–certified school that “worked in conjunction with a noncertified northern campus to recruit, exploit and defraud hundreds of international and domestic students.”
George Flint, who founded Faith Baptist North, declined multiple interview requests from Bleacher Report by telephone, text, and mail, saying in a text message in late May, “I really have no comment at this time.”
However, he has denied any wrongdoing to others interviewed by Bleacher Report, including Matthew Sellars, the athletic director at Faith Baptist’s south campus in Ludowici. Sellars recalls seeing Flint at a JUCO jamboree in October 2015, seven months after Faith Baptist North closed. “The first thing out of his mouth was, ‘I had nothing to do with that; whatever it is they said, it isn’t true,’ ” Sellars says.
Bleacher Report has learned that the probe, which includes agents from Homeland Security’s Atlanta, Savannah, and Tampa offices, has expanded its scope beyond Faith Baptist Christian Academy’s two campuses to include potential trafficking cases elsewhere in the Southeast.
On May 16, law enforcement officials in Alamance County, North Carolina, arrested Aris Hines, a former Flint associate who sometimes coached players from Faith Baptist North and worked briefly with Flint in a failed attempt to start another prep school, on state law charges of obstruction of justice and obtaining property by false pretense.
Alamance County Sheriff Terry Johnson told Bleacher Report the charges are part of an investigation into human trafficking of athletes. He said the FBI, ICE, Homeland Security, including Homeland’s Atlanta office, and the U.S. Department of State have entered the investigation, which involves a 15-year-old Nigerian basketball and football player and three girls from the Dominican Republic whom Hines allegedly attempted to enroll in a North Carolina high school with false documents and expired visas.
The sheriff’s office said the search warrants in the case are sealed and police reports are not available to the public because of the investigation. Hines, who did not return messages left by Bleacher Report, denied wrongdoing in an interview with WTVD, a North Carolina TV station.
Depending on the source, the Faith Baptist fiasco was either a cascading failure that started with good intentions or a corrupt, cynical grab for money and sports glory at the expense of gullible foreign athletes and their families. It also reveals that in the U.S., there are still Good Samaritans willing to help kids in trouble. Thanks to the actions of the Lake Wales community, and one family in particular, the four Faith Baptist North players still have a chance at an American education.
Anyone familiar with modern prep school sports agrees the system is rife with problems. A number of American prep schools effectively operate as AAU teams with a “school” around them, coaches say.
For decades, the NCAA has tried to crack down on “diploma mill” prep schools designed to make academically struggling athletes eligible for college ball. The incentives to run such programs are strong. Successful programs not only enjoy prestige for winning and turning out star players, they also can earn money from sneaker company sponsorships.
There are also age-old stories of prep and AAU coaches paying handlers for access to players and getting kickbacks for sending players to certain colleges or steering them to certain professional agents. But the international component has added a new dimension—a massive, global pool of athletes to be exploited.
“This whole prep school thing is an absolute scam,” says one veteran basketball coach who asked not to be identified. “There are literally hundreds of these bad situations throughout the country.”
These situations can appear attractive. “Corrupt schools can put up a front; they may look credible on the surface, but once we peel back the layers, we find irregularities,” says Lou Farrell, director for the Student and Exchange Visitor Program (SEVP), the arm of ICE that certifies and monitors U.S. schools that enroll international students on an F or M visa. “Schools and individuals wh
o try to manipulate the student visa system for personal gain are being held accountable for their actions.”
While human trafficking cases involving sexual exploitation of women are well documented, trafficking of athletes is a subset of labor exploitation that has only recently shown up on the radar of activists and government agencies. But it is a crime nonetheless, says Katherine Kaufka Walts, director of the Center for the Human Rights of Children at Loyola University in Chicago.
“It’s the recruiting, it’s the moving, it’s the harboring and financially benefiting from the involuntary servitude, debt bondage, peonage, or slavery of another person by force or by coercion,” Kaufka Walts says. “The common thread is the economic exploitation of someone else’s body, whether it’s to perform labor in a field or to perform labor on the court.”
At the heart of the U.S. athlete trafficking issue is the quest for I-20s, the necessary form for student visa status. The latest quarterly statistics released by SEVP reveal 1.2 million international students studying in U.S. elementary schools, high schools, colleges, and vocational schools. It is unclear how many are athletes—students aren’t required to reveal their athletic ambitions to immigration agents—but prep school rosters across the country are dotted with, and sometimes laden with, international players.
The come-ons prep schools use to attract these players can be comical. Until recently, the website of the Evelyn Mack Academy, or EMA, a Charlotte prep school stocked with international athletes, featured a photo of an imposing domed structure fronted by Ionic columns. The building didn’t belong to EMA but to MIT—the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
But serious national security issues come into play. Even before 9/11, when some of the foreign nationals who brought down the Twin Towers trained to fly planes in the U.S. due in part to improperly issued visas, security experts worried about bogus student visas being a portal for terrorists.
