Hitman, Gangsters, Cannibals and Me

by Donal Macintyre

  I put a call in to Paul’s camp.

  ‘Is Paul coming in by taxi?’ I asked.

  ‘No, he’s running the six miles in. He should be there just before nine,’ I was told.

  ‘Fuck!’ I was panicking.

  But it was only 8.30 a.m. In desperation, I spied a plastic bin liner in the bin in the corner. ‘Well, needs must,’ I thought. In seconds I had it out of the bin and had punched holes in it so that I could wear it as a very fetching vest. I should point out that the bin liner was in fact clean, but I’m aware that I’m grasping at straws if I try to say that this was an indication of a sound mind. I got onto the exercise bike and cycled like a madman for the next 25 minutes, determined to sweat off an extra pound with the aid of my new sports gear. With five minutes to go, I allowed myself a quick shower and towelling off.

  The mood was calm when Paul walked in at 9 a.m. Oddly, he was dressed for the office.

  ‘But I thought you ran in,’ I said, surprised.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘that was a lie. How was your morning?’

  I didn’t reply but just pointed to the scales.

  Paul was first up. I could tell that he had lost just under a stone, and, sure enough, there was whooping from his camp when he came in at 15 st 9 lb.

  ‘Yeah, that’s 12 pounds, Macker. Beat that!’ he said.

  I stepped on the scales. There was silence. 13 st 0 lb! I was declared the winner after losing 26 pounds in just two weeks. I was happy, but my head was fuzzy and my body was exhausted. I may have won the argument but my sanity was slipping away. ‘You are barking,’ said Paul. ‘If it doesn’t kill you, it may just be the making of you.’

  While I was beating my chest and enjoying my victory by celebrating with a fried breakfast, I had to admit that in the battle of tactics, Paul had proved himself to be more adept than I. Although I won the competition (and therefore the argument, let’s remember!), it was Paul who was always in control. He had manipulated me and pushed me into a position where I was able to achieve an impossible weight loss in two weeks.

  Looking back now, I am aware that my behaviour was a little psychotic and I find it hard to understand the headspace that I occupied for that fortnight. But I wish I could draw upon that kind of focus at will and use it more constructively. Paul just laughed at how I had taken the bait and allowed vanity and dogged determination to drive the diet home to its slimline but slightly unhinged conclusion. I think, however, he was making another point, too: left to my own devices, I can end up in uncharted and unlikely waters.

  6

  DEAD MEN WALKING

  The fishing on Lake Killarney is among the finest in the world. The fish grow to huge proportions because only a favoured few are permitted to fish here among the cypress trees. Access to the lake is through a security detail of armed guards, who are constantly on the look out for escaped convicts. The lake of course isn’t situated in the beautiful Co. Kerry in Ireland, but in the heart of Angola Penitentiary in the middle of the Bayou, in Louisiana.

  There are few prisons more remarkable and notorious than Angola, Louisiana State Penitentiary. ‘The Alcatraz of the South’ is an extraordinary complex, built on a loop of Mark Twain’s great Mississippi River and spread over 18,000 acres. It houses nearly 5,500 inmates and employs 1,800 staff. The prison is a commercial entity in its own right and self-finances many of its activities with income from its prison rodeo and farm produce. It is one of the few places where cotton is still picked by hand and you can buy golf tees made out of handcuffs at the Prison View golf course. Thoroughbred draft horses and wolf dogs are bred and trained as Police animals with the help of inmates.

  As a film-set location, Angola has been used for movies such as Dead Man Walking, starring Sean Penn and Susan Sarandon. It has its own American Beauty style suburb, which is home to 200 families. Generations of prison workers have lived here and it is famously dubbed the safest town in America.

  It is the only prison to have its own federally licensed radio station, KLSP 91.7 FM, nicknamed ‘The Incarceration Station’. There’s no gangsta rap here, though: jazz and gospel music are the order of the day. And it has its own award-winning newspaper, the Angolite, which naturally has a death penalty columnist.

  The inmates are nearly all destined to be here for life, as a life sentence in Louisiana means just that: there is no prospect of parole. The death chamber, where state-ordered executions are carried out, may facilitate an early release of sorts, but some prisoners entering as 15 year olds face the prospect of 70 years here. One prisoner has spent 37 years in solitary confinement. ‘You can go a bit crazy,’ he explained with some understatement. The longest serving prisoner, Sammy Robinson, inmate 78589, arrived here in 1953 and has served 57 years. He came as a 17 -year-old and is now 74.

  I was here on a crash course in prison life. My work over the years has been a factor in sending many men to prison, and I wanted to experience for myself what it felt like to be denied freedom. I wanted to know if I would feel any guilt or remorse for what I had done, even if it wasn’t a crime. So I was certainly curious – that’s the stock of my trade. But I have to admit that there was also a voyeuristic element to my stay here. I knew I would be leaving, and in many ways I was no different to the tourists on buses who come to this prison to get a flavour of life behind bars and perhaps congratulate themselves on their own righteousness.

  I became acquainted with its lush, wooded landscape as I fled the prison grounds with Leroy Cutwright, who is serving a life sentence for murder. We were being chased by bloodhounds and a specialist human hunt chase team, who were 20 minutes behind us. We were going for it. There is no clear path through the dense woodland, where wild hogs and bears roam free. Snake-infested marshes and alligator swamps surround the prison on all sides, making escape nearly impossible, but that doesn’t stop people trying. It was hot and humid and I was dripping with sweat. The dense swampland was increasingly difficult for me to negotiate. Leroy, however, was used to the oppressive climate and was making steady and easy progress. He had a silver watch and two rings on his left finger and I wondered how long it must have taken to earn the right to wear those. ‘Fifteen years,’ he replied.

  ‘How often have you done this?’ I asked Leroy.

  ‘Practically everyday,’ he said, laughing.

  Leroy is a trusted prisoner and works with the dog team. He attempts to escape from the prison every day to test the team.

  ‘Do you ever think: “Someday, I’ll do this for real”?’ I asked him.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘it’s never crossed my mind.’

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘You’re kidding me. Make a break for it now and I’ll go the other way.’

  This was surreal: I was on the run from America’s most notorious prison with a murderer who didn’t want to leave. I was determined to see just how long we could avoid capture. First we heard the whistles and then the barking. When we could hear the dogs panting, we knew the game was up. It was all of 15 minutes before Leroy and I were trapped. My efforts at escape were pathetic but I hoped that if I had spent 20 years there, I would have made a better effort, having had more time to think about it.

  Colonel Joe Norwood is in charge of the search team. He is a slender man, about 5 ft 10" with a tidy black moustache and church-going hair. ‘It’s our job to get the bloodhounds out, to get behind the inmate and apprehend them,’ he tells me. They have twenty dogs, a helicopter, thermal detectors, night-vision goggles and infrared gun sights as part of their basic bag of tricks. It’s not exactly an evenly matched contest.

  ‘What happened to the last person who tried to escape?’ I asked him.

  ‘He was caught in about 30 minutes,’ Norwood said. ‘There is nothing like hunting down a human – a manhunt, that is. It’s the thrill of the chase, mano a mano.’ I was slightly uneasy about the way he seemed to savour the idea. His family has been in the manhunt business for generations and he has followed in his father’s footsteps. Joe and his tactical unit wer
e called upon to help return law and order to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

  ‘We are called out for breakouts or chases all across the state. It can get dangerous and people get killed. That’s what we expect and that’s what we try to prevent.’

  This is a man with only certainties in his life. There are the hunters and the hunted, the guilty and the innocent. He is not paid to see grey areas.

  Shortly after my visit, an inmate attempted to escape. Henry Smith had been a well-behaved prisoner for years and had earned himself the privilege of a job on litter detail. ‘You never know when they are going to run. They can be model inmates for years, decades, and still bolt,’ Col Norwood explained.

  Smith’s escape caused the entire prison complex to go into lockdown. For five days, nearly a thousand correctional police officers and the prison’s tactical team searched high and low in the woods and along Route 66, the main arterial route out of the area. After a $500,000 search effort and thousands of manhours, it was Col Norwood’s team that caught up with the convicted murderer, who was serving the twenty-eighth year of his life sentence. Smith was found in the woods about four miles outside the prison perimeter, in a dried-out riverbed. He had hidden in a field of briars, which protected him from the bloodhounds and the team of manhunters. He told the warden that he ‘enjoyed being out in the woods and hearing the birds sing’. He had survived on berries and some candy he had taken with him from the prison.

  It transpired that Smith’s only friend at the prison had recently died of a heart attack. He had not had a visitor in about three years and had not had a phone call in three months. It appeared that he was attempting ‘suicide by cop’, whereby a prisoner tries to provoke a fatal shooting to avoid having to take their own life.

  Smith was placed in solitary confinement and it will take him at least 20 years to build up his privileges again. Even if he manages to do that, he is unlikely to be allowed to walk around the grounds without leg irons ever again.

  ‘I want the people of Angola to know that they are not going to get away from us. I want the people out there to know we’ve never lost one in the 15 years I’ve been here,’ Prison Warden Burl Cain told the media in the aftermath of the escape.

  The escape had brought unwelcome media attention to the prison, and Cain was eager to point out that he had the situation under control. He took charge of the institution in the mid-1990s and cut through the prison like a whirlwind. In the previous decades, Angola had been dubbed ‘the bloodiest prison in America’. Gangs of armed prisoners ran amok and controlled the penitentiary with intimidation and violence. Prison budgets were cut and regular officers had their hours and duties curtailed. In one three-year period, from 1972 to 1975 over 40 prisoners were murdered. Wilbert Rideau, prisoner and editor of the Angolite, wrote: ‘The pursuit of survival fuelled a heated arms race among the prisoners for the superior weapon: a sword over a knife, a broad axe over a sword and a gun over everything.’

  Every decade or so, some scandal would provoke an inquiry but little changed until Warden Cain took over and imposed his own values on the prison. The key to change was the rejection of the discredited ‘trustee system’ in which inmates were used by staff to control their fellow prisoners by doling out beatings and worse. Until the 1970s some privileged inmates even carried guns. After legal action, civilian guards were brought in and reform of the prison began apace.

  That was then, and it was a world away from the regime in place today.

  * * * * *

  I had arranged to spend a night as an inmate in the most detested cell in the entire penitentiary: the death cell. My introduction to it was from one of the few prisoners who had experience of it and lived to tell the tale.

  Lane Nelson, Prisoner 100076, was convicted of first-degree murder for killing a hitchhiker and spent nearly eight years in solitary confinement and two years on Death Row. A judge later overturned his death penalty, accepting that he had received poor legal advice. He was granted the unprecedented pardon just five days before he was due to be executed and a release date was set for April 2011.

  Lane entered Angola as a fresh-faced young man. Now he had the look of a librarian about him, studious and composed, his thick brown ponytail replaced by thinning white hair.

  ‘I was on Death Row in the Summer of 1987 when eight guys were electrocuted in 11 weeks. I was already fasting,’ he told me. ‘But I wasn’t going to walk to my own death [as an innocent man]. I was going to let them carry me. I wasn’t going to fight because there was no sense in that. But I wasn’t going to walk to my own death.’

  He was defiant to the end. Others on Death Row refuse to give the state the satisfaction of killing them. ‘I know of a guy who was so serious about killing himself that he ate his veins out – just simply chewed his veins,’ said Lane.

  He told me about the tiny cell where I was to spend the night. ‘You are going to be staying in a cell where guys have stayed for the last minutes of their lives. They knew it and were counting down. Their last breaths were here.’ He suggested I get into the role: ‘Make it meaningful, and also think about staying there for decades! Take care.’

  Lane’s words had quite an impact on me. I imagined what it would be like if I only had a few hours to live. A prison guard brought me into the cell. It is the most basic of accommodation: there is a concrete-framed bed, a single mattress, a pillow and a white sheet. There is a sink and a toilet and a single shelf for books and toiletries. That’s it. No TV, no radio, not even a window. If this was my last night, it would be a terrible sendoff, but the thought of spending years in solitary confinement here was simply unthinkable.

  I was jet-lagged and exhausted, yet I couldn’t fall asleep on the narrow, uncomfortable mattress. Men have been known to hang themselves on the leg of a bed in these cells. The desperation to avoid death by someone else’s hand can inspire great ingenuity. To face a lifetime here would be very bleak prospect and I can fully understand how suicide would seem like a release. I lay awake for hours, thinking about my family and how they would feel if I was condemned like the others who have slept here. I finally managed to get some sleep, but at 6 a.m. I was abruptly awoken. Breakfast was served. My ‘last meal’ was a veritable feast of porridge, eggs, cornbread with jam, and coffee.

  After breakfast the charismatic Burl Cain walked me to the death house, where prisoners are killed on the State’s orders. What shocked me was the banality of the building. It looked for all the world like an old folks’ home or a social security office. Inside, the walls were a tired magnolia colour and there were Formica tabletops and Radio Shack speakers. I had expected the place to look more significant, to express the gravity of its purpose in its architecture. But the building failed to impress, much less intimidate.

  At the time there had been six executions on Cain’s watch and over 80 men remain on Death Row in Louisiana.

  ‘I think they think it is not going to happen until it does. They keep thinking they will get a stay or something,’ Cain told me. He was rather matter-of-fact about it. ‘Every person we executed here has been guilty,’ he said with certainty. I wondered how he could be so sure. ‘Well, God help us if they weren’t,’ he added, eventually.

  I asked him how executing the men had changed him.

  ‘It made me hate crime and made me want to rehabilitate these guys.’ His tone was sincere. You get the impression that Cain wants to improve people, to morally enhance them, if only so that they are sent to heaven rather than hell.

  In 1991 Angola replaced the electric chair with the lethal injection. Once the condemned man is settled on the leather gurney in the shape of a cross, two intravenous tubes are inserted into each arm to inject three drugs. The first acts as an anaesthetic, the second stops breathing and paralyses, and the third induces a heart attack.

  A group of six senior officers called the ‘strap-down team’ escort the condemned man to the death chamber. The death gurney has five lock-down points: two leg and two wrist manacles, a
nd one crisscrossing leather strap around the chest. If the prisioner has to be carried, each member of the team takes responsibility for a body part during the short walk to the gurney. There is safety in numbers; the group can share the psychological burden of carrying a man to his death between them. One veteran member of the team said: ‘We each have a small role to play. We have a duty to do it as efficiently as we can.’ Efficiency is not something I had associated with capital punishment but it is a way of coping for those involved in the process, and, at the end of the day, they have a job to do. ‘My goal is that we don’t have to carry him in there. We want him to walk, because it’s more traumatic for everyone [if he has to be carried],’ Burl Cain told me.

  Shortly after I left the prison, Cain presided over his seventh execution. Gerald Bordelon had kidnapped, raped and murdered a 12-year-old girl, and his punishment was a lethal injection. He had waived his right to appeal his death sentence. His last meal included peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and cookies. He apologised for his crime as the victim’s family looked on and saw him take his last breath. I wonder if it gave them any real satisfaction.

  * * * * *

  Although Angola is chiefly a prison, it is also a working farm. Every day a thousand, mostly African American, prisoners are marched out with hoes and buckets to work the fields, picking cotton, squash and corn. It’s the first job inmates are assigned when they come here, but some have chosen to continue doing it for over 20 years. They earn four cents a day for doing this backbreaking work in the heat of the Louisiana sun. The preferred inmates get to drive the tractors.

  I headed out to one of the farm lines. The inmates begin work at 7 a.m. and work until 3 p.m. I was paired up with Roy Morgan, who was sentenced to life on a first offence of rape when he was 22. He was resigned to spending the rest of his life in prison and had already served 27 years here. ‘Have you served your time for your crime?’ I asked him. ‘Over and over,’ he said.