Mr Nice

by Howard Marks

  ‘I am sure, Judge Paine, you have sensed the Government’s urgency for you to unflinchingly execute the severe punishment they want you to put upon Mr Marks. They have recommended that you sentence him to forty years in prison. Forty years in prison on a guilty plea to a marijuana offence. It is bizarre that we are giving any credence whatever to the notion of a forty-year sentence. Forty-year sentences should be reserved for the thoroughly evil and violent of our species. Intellectually, they know that. I know that, and I believe you know that, Judge Paine. Judge, I myself have represented scores of marijuana smugglers on a scale much larger than Mr Marks, and I know many other such defendants. None that I am aware of has received the Draconian punishment after pleading guilty that the Government wants you to inflict in this case. For a marijuana smuggler who has pled guilty, forty years is inconceivable.’

  The Honourable Judge James C. Paine said: ‘Mr Marks, would you please come forward and receive your sentence. Mr Marks, there is no doubt you are a person of superior intelligence, and you had an excellent education. It is apparent that you enjoy an enviable relationship with relatives, business, academic associates, and friends. Your biographical data discloses a personality which enjoys intellectual challenge, games of strategy coupled with a general feeling of disenchantment with conventional society.

  ‘The letters of support for Mr Marks do not proclaim his innocence. They do cite his many admirable qualities so as to counter-balance his errors. After defining the defendant’s many and varied talents, some of the letters of support indicate that it would be a shame to require him to expend many years of his life in prison at a cost to the public when he could contribute greatly to society. No doubt, that would be a shame. The problem is that on the basis of past experience, society cannot count on his making commendable contributions. On balance, his contributions have been negative rather than positive.

  ‘It is apparent, Mr Marks, that you regard the use of marijuana and its derivatives as consistent with sound moral principles, and it is also apparent that you have been quite willing to violate laws which prohibit or control use, possession, or commercial transactions with respect to marijuana. You have been quite willing to ignore, or studiously violate, the laws of many countries. You have demonstrated that you have little respect for the rules of society as expressed by criminal laws which do not conform to what you believe to be acceptable conduct. While there is a large body of opinion that use of marijuana is not addictive, does not impair health in an unacceptable way, and should not, therefore, be illegal, there is, also, a large body of opinion to the contrary as to these matters. Further, and more important, federal statutes prohibit trafficking in marijuana. These statutes have been enacted by the Congress of the United States, and are enforced by the executive branch of the Government by initiation of court action and otherwise. I have taken an oath to administer justice, perform all duties agreeable to the laws of the United States. So, even if I agreed that laws controlling use and sale of marijuana are inappropriate, even foolish, I would have to abide by them until Congress has repealed them. These are rules of society which the courts are bound to apply – whether you agree or not that these laws should be in place.

  ‘The fact that the governments of many European countries and people of Europe are more tolerant of marijuana than is the Government and population of the United States is irrelevant to the matter at hand. Should the foregoing actually be a fact, it seems strange, Mr Marks, that you didn’t confine your activity to the European market, thereby reducing your risk of harsher punishment. You were apparently willing to accept this risk.

  ‘I must say I have some difficulty in characterising as candid the information you have offered with respect to your current financial condition. It is true the Government has offered no documentation that you are able to respond to a substantial fine. Despite this, I find it difficult to conclude that your net worth is zero.

  ‘Having considered the foregoing, I impose this sentence. As to Count 1 of the indictment, it is adjudged that the defendant is hereby committed to the custody of the Attorney General of the United States or his authorised representative for imprisonment for a term of ten years. As to Count 2, the defendant is hereby committed to the custody of the Attorney General of the United States or his authorised representative for imprisonment for a term of fifteen years. The sentence as to the second count is to run concurrently with the sentence as to the first count. I will recommend that because you are a citizen of the United Kingdom, it is recommended within the policies and procedures within the Bureau of Prisons that you be considered for a transfer to serve an appropriate portion of your sentence in an institution in the United Kingdom.’

  In stunned silence I was taken from the courtroom to the court’s holding cells. What a wonderful judge! I’d been given a total of fifteen years, not the forty years that the might of the US Government was demanding. With maximum parole, I’d have to do a total of only five years. I’d already done almost half of that. A year or so more in American prisons plus a year or so in a British nick and I’d be a free man. End of story. What on earth had we all been panicking about? I knew that at that very moment, Julian Peto would be ringing my wife, children, and parents with the news. They would be ecstatic with joy.

  The cell gate opened, and I was taken back before Judge Paine. He said: ‘Let the record show that I asked for all interested persons to be reassembled because I simply made a very serious error in stating this sentence. I said that the sentences as to each count were to run concurrently. I misspoke without realising I had done so and should have said consecutively. I said concurrently and I meant consecutively, and that was my clear intention within my mind. Somehow I substituted the word concurrently for consecutively when I stated the sentence. I am quite embarrassed about it. I apologise to each of you. There were a number of people in the courtroom who are not here, and it is undoubtedly going to be the source of confusion in newspaper reports about the matter. The fact is that I simply used the wrong word. It seems inconceivable I have done that, but I did. I must restate the sentence. There is no change in it whatsoever except the word consecutively must be substituted for concurrently.’

  A surreal nausea overtook me. I’d suddenly been given another ten years. Now I was serving a twenty-five-year sentence. God! For a few minutes, I’d been so happy.

  Hours later, at Miami MCC, I settled down. The sentence wasn’t that bad. With maximum parole, I should be out in just over six years, and most of that six years might be served in Britain.

  The media descended on the prison. Cameras, microphones, and lights littered my cell. I gave dozens of interviews and continued to get off on the glamour and notoriety. As Bronis had told the judge, the BBC documentary, The Dream Dealer, was screened by PBS. The entire prison watched it. I loved it and thought it well done. It became Britain’s entry for the Montreux TV festival, but won no prizes.

  Lovato had been interviewed extensively and didn’t come across as a nice guy. I did, to the prisoners, anyway. Lovato accused my wife and children of uttering anti-American vulgarities at him when he arrested Judy and me. He said that I was so ruthless I even laundered money through a foreign charity. What in fact he was referring to was the few thousand dollars I had given, at Sompop’s request, to the charity for handicapped children in Bangkok.

  A written confirmation of the judge’s sentence quickly followed. He added a $50,000 fine and a recommendation that I serve the American portion of my sentence in a special prison in Butner, North Carolina, which was particularly suited to prisoners wishing to study when incarcerated. It was affiliated with North Carolina University and Duke University and was probably the best joint in the federal system. Doing time there was known to be easy. I just had to wait in Miami MCC for a month or so until the authorities were ready to move me.

  The regular guard came into our cell early one evening.

  ‘Marks. Get your shit together. You’re leaving. You’re an escape risk, so we’re processin
g you first. You’ll be blackboxed.’

  There was no point arguing. A black-boxed prisoner was chained, shackled, and handcuffed. Hands were rendered further immobile by a black metal box. He was segregated from other prisoners while being transported.

  ‘I don’t think you’ll appreciate Indiana, Marks.’

  ‘Indiana? I thought Butner was in North Carolina.’

  ‘It is. But United States Penitentiary, Terre Haute, is definitely in Indiana. I’ve been there.’

  ‘I’m not going to Terre Haute. I’m going to Butner.’

  ‘Marks, you’re going to Terre Haute. It’s a very rough joint. Someone in the US Government obviously doesn’t like you. You’ve been no sweat to me, though. Good luck, buddy.’

  Seventeen

  DADDY

  There are fifty states in America. Each has its own administration of justice. So does Washington and the rest of the anomalous District of Columbia. So do Guam, the Virgin Islands, and other US overseas possessions. These combined authorities keep well over a million people incarcerated for offences such as murder, possession of drugs, rape, and child molestation. No other country imprisons anything like that number. In addition, the United States Government has created its own federal justice system, which envelops all the above jurisdictions and imprisons a further 100,000 individuals. Typical federal offences are crimes which threaten national security, involve federal employees, involve institutions which are federally insured, are committed on Indian reservations, involve two or more states of the United States, or are related to drug smuggling. Sixty per cent of federal prisoners are drug offenders. Generally, federal offenders get housed in federal prisons. Exceptions occur for short stays during the federal prisoner’s court appearances, when the Feds want to isolate a prisoner to turn him into a snitch, or when the Feds want to inconvenience a prisoner by subjecting him to ‘diesel therapy’ (continual shunting around from one state jail to another for no reason). To accommodate these circumstances, some sections of some state prisons (including county jails) are permanently designated for the use of the federal authorities. North Dade was a typical example. Similarly, state offenders are generally housed in state prisons. The only exception is when a particular offender is too troublesome for the state authorities to handle. The Feds will take care of him. A federal prison, therefore, will house Indian braves, terrorists, bank robbers, presidential assassins, spies, interstate hooker transporters, dope smugglers, and any state convict too butch for the state authorities to handle. To house its broad spectrum of offenders, the United States Federal Bureau of Prisons operates institutions of several different security levels, based on such features as the presence of external patrols, gun towers, walls, fences, detection devices, staff-to-inmate ratios, and the conditions of confinement. Of its more than one hundred institutions, six were classified as the highest security level, built to house America’s most violent and dangerous criminals. They are referred to as United States Penitentiaries (USPs). One of these six, the one with the worst reputation for slaughter and gang rape, was at Terre Haute, Indiana. Known as ‘Terror Hut’, it was America’s ‘gladiator school’ and provided an arena for tough redneck US Government hacks, Black innercity gang leaders, bikers, and psychopaths. Half of those imprisoned there would never be released. It promised to be different. I was terrified.

  Fear is an emotion best not displayed, so I was putting on a brave face as one of ten chained and shackled federal inmates shuffling on board the prison bus in below-zero temperatures at Hulman Regional Airport, Indiana, on January 10th, 1990. An identical bus was alongside loading a handful of prisoners bound for one of the other USPs, situated at nearby Marion, Illinois. We were 200 miles from Chicago. Six weeks had elapsed since I had left Miami MCC on a sixteen-hour bus journey to Atlanta, Georgia. In the USP at Atlanta, I was stuck in the hole for five weeks because my record stated I was a high escape risk. Then, along with a hundred others, I was flown by a United States Federal Bureau of Prisons aeroplane from an air force base in Georgia to Oklahoma City Airport. After a night on the floor in the snowbound federal prison at El Reno, another prison aeroplane had brought me here. There was one other ‘blackboxed’ prisoner. We sat together. He was Gennaro ‘Jerry Lang’ Langella, the Mafia boss of New York’s Colombo crime family. Despite doing a life sentence in prison, he was ranked the fifth most powerful crime figure in the world. Jerry had no release date. The US Government had buried him alive. As he was telling me this, the bus drove slowly past the first of USP Terre Haute’s facilities: the cemetery, the graveyard of those who are forgotten before they die.

  At the reception’s holding cells we were, for the seventh time that day, thoroughly searched. Yet again we were photographed, fingerprinted, and medically examined. We were give plastic cards to serve as identification. They could also be used to buy junk food from vending machines if one had money in one’s inmate account. We were led to our respective cells.

  Built in 1940, and holding a twenty-year escape-free record, USP Terre Haute resembles an enormous insect whose outside skeleton is razor wire, whose body is the main thoroughfare, whose legs are cell blocks for prisoners, whose claws are holes for administering torture, whose arms are mindless facilities for its 1,300 inhabitants, whose compound eyes are TV cameras, and whose head is a gymnasium. The razor-wire insect sits in a razor-wire-enclosed adventure playground containing tennis courts, basket-ball courts, at least a hundred tons of weightlifting equipment, racquetball courts, handball courts, bowling pitches, football pitches, baseball pitches, throwing-horseshoe pitches, jogging track, outside gymnasium, covered casino-type card-playing area, and an eighteen-hole crazy golf course. Close to the casino was the Native American Indian sweat lodge and sacred area. Close to the totem pole was a prison industry factory, Unicor, where prisoners slaved away for pittances making government-issue materials and surreptitiously fashioning ‘shanks’, home-made but lethally sharp knives and swords. Facilities provided inside the insect included a chapel accommodating every conceivable religion, a law library with photocopying machines and typewriters, a leisure library, a cafeteria, a pool hall, two recording studios, a cinema, a school, a hobby shop, a supermarket, and thirty television rooms. Each cell block differs from the others in terms of type of accommodation: dormitories, single cells, multi-prisoner cells. Movement between cells within a cell block was permitted most of the day. Movement between one’s cell block and common areas was allowed for ten-minute periods at specific times. My assigned cell already had three occupants: a redneck who was dying of liver cancer, a Lebanese heroin smuggler, and a Black crack distributor. Conversation was surprisingly easy. They were incredibly friendly and considerate towards me.

  USP Terre Haute had one major advantage: one couldn’t be transferred anywhere worse. At a non-penitentiary, one could be threatened with transfer to a penitentiary. At one of the other penitentiaries, one could be threatened with Terre Haute. Apart from the hole, which had long lost its bite due to frequency of imposition, there was no threat available to the Terre Haute prison authorities other than dishing out more prison time. For those doing life without parole, this was hardly relevant. There was plenty of illegally distilled alcohol, plenty of dope brought in by bent hacks, and largescale gambling was endemic. Although most of the time the prisoners were content either to play basketball or to watch it on television, the lack of any effective deterrent often resulted in periods of mindless mayhem. At least one prisoner was ‘shanked’ every day. There would be several vicious and messy fights every day. There were plenty of murders and immeasurably more maimings. Most were gang-related, but some would result from petty individual squabbles.

  Most of the gangs were Black Muslim-based. One of the most formidably powerful street gangs ever is the El Rukhn gang of Chicago. Originally the Black P. Stone Nation, formed in the 1960s by an amalgamation of the Blackstone Rangers and other Chicago street gangs, and shrewdly financed by Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi, the El Rukhn gang had a membersh
ip in the tens of thousands and large real-estate holdings acquired through a wide range of criminal operations. Other Chicago gangs had sprung off from the Blackstone Rangers, including the Vicelords, who under the leadership of Roosevelt Daniels, later to be brutally murdered in the prison cafeteria, had, at that time, the stranglehold on prison life in Terre Haute. Sometimes the Vicelords got on with the El Rukhns at Terre Haute. Sometimes they didn’t. Many members of Los Angeles’s two notorious rival street gangs, the Bloods and the Crips, were too much for the Californian authorities to handle: they were sent to Terre Haute. In Washington, DC’s infamous Lorton prison perennially fighting Blacks had proved to be uncontrollable: they were sent to Terre Haute. Neither the Vicelords nor the El Rukhns got on with the Crips or the Bloods or any of the DC gangs. Each gang had its own peculiarities of vocabulary, its own colours, and its own system of elaborate hand signals. Different from the American city street gangs and hating them with a passion were the Jamaican Posse gangs, some with dreadlocks, some without.

  There were White prison gangs too: the fanatically racist Aryan Brotherhood, the equally racist Dirty White Boys, the rednecked Dixie Mafia, the Mexican Mafia, innumerable Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Colombian syndicates, and various biker gangs. Although rival biker gangs such as the Hell’s Angels, the Pagans, and the Outlaws would kill each other almost on sight in the street, in prison they would sensibly call a truce and allow their conflicting ideologies to coexist peacefully. One of the most famous bikers ever, James ‘Big Jim’ Nolan of the Outlaws, resided at Terre Haute, scheduled for release in 2017.