by Jeff Siebold
“You’re wrong,” said Cappy. “I loved her.” Tears swelled in his eyes and he started to sob.
* * *
“When I was transferred to Cumberland I already had a taste for the work. It wasn’t a leap for me to keep it up. But the Disciples told me to keep my head down. They bribed some guards to make me a trustee, and I’ve been playing that role ever since.”
“You’re saying that the killings were ordered?”
Cappy said, “Yeah, sure.”
“By the Devil’s Disciples?” Zeke confirmed.
“Had to do it. Those had to die. They disrespected the Disciples, ya know?” He said it like it was a challenge.
“And so you killed all five of them?” asked Zeke.
“I did. It had to be done.”
“Who ordered the killings?” asked Zeke.
“I can’t say. If I do, I’ll be the next one to die,” said Cappy. He looked at Zeke with his eyes wide open, unblinking. “Besides, you can’t touch me in here.”
* * *
“What actually happened at the robbery of the drug house in New Jersey?” asked Clive.
“I doubt we’ll ever know for sure,” said Zeke. “The perpetrators are all dead. The victims, the gang members that were robbed, well if they wouldn’t testify at the trials, it’s highly doubtful they’d talk now. If we can even find them,” said Zeke.
“True,” said Clive. “Gang members are fairly tight lipped, aren’t they?”
“But we can speculate, some,” said Zeke.
* * *
The house was an old, nondescript two-story with shutters and a narrow front porch a step up from the Lewis Street sidewalk. Window air conditioning units hung out of two of the front windows, busily humming and exchanging air. The house, like many of its era, was just a sidewalk width away from its two closest neighbors in this tired New Jersey town.
“No one’s come in or out since early this morning, then?” asked James Williams. “That’s right,” said Trevor Brown. They were parked one street over on Dugan Alley and could see the front of the Lewis Street house across a deep but narrow vacant lot.
“Have you seen any signs of life?” asked Williams.
“Nope. I’d bet they’re in the basement, mixing up another batch of meth,” said Trevor.
Williams nodded.
“What’s happening with Ernest and Kadin?” asked Trevor.
“They’re ready. I’ll text them and we’ll take the house as soon as it gets dark.”
“Just like we planned?” asked Trevor, nervous now.
“Just like.”
* * *
James Williams eased the passenger door open and stepped out of the work van. Clouds had covered the setting sun on the horizon and a dull grayness had invaded the city.
Williams paused to text a short message and then he straightened, looked ahead, and crossed the street. He and Trevor Brown were wearing blue jumpsuits with ‘City Water’ stenciled on the back.
Trevor Brown said, “We ready to go?” He was holding a large Glock in his left hand as he exited the vehicle.
“Put that away,” snapped Williams. “Somebody’ll see your ass and call the cops. We don’t need that.”
Brown said, “Ernest and Kadin ready?”
“They’re over there, behind the corner of that white house. They say the sentry just went to the john.”
“OK, then, just like we practiced it?” said Brown.
“Just like.”
They stood on the narrow front porch and Williams pretended to ring the doorbell. The two men waited a moment, then gestured toward the front door and pulled the screen door open, as if they’d been invited in.
Trevor took a wrench from his tool bag and levered the door handle, quickly twisting it and destroying the lock. The two men stepped inside.
The house was small and shoddy, with a living area and a dining room next to the kitchen and bath. Ernest Gleason was already waiting outside the bathroom door. It opened and the sentry, a large hairy man, stepped out. James Williams stuck his Uzi in the man’s face and said, “No sound.”
Simultaneously, Gleason tased him, and the sentry fell to the floor, stunned and twitching. Gleason attached zip ties to bind the man’s wrists and ankles, and wrapped duct tape around his head to gag him. Kadin Hart took a position standing near the sentry and within sight of the stairs, while the other three started down the steps.
Williams held up a hand, stopping the men behind him, and threw a stun grenade down into the basement. The basement lit up like a spotlight and reverberated with one hundred seventy decibels of sound, and five seconds later, the three men stood on the basement floor, guns pointed and ready.
The basement was partially finished with brown paneling and two by fours, and against one wall was a long table. On it was the lab equipment necessary to manufacture the drug, plastic bags filled with what looked like meth, and a large pile of money.
In one corner of the basement two large gray rubber waste cans were overflowing with empty red, white and yellow Sudafed boxes. On the end of the table three piles of white crystals were arranged near boxes of sandwich bags. Five large men with full beards looked stunned and disoriented, holding their eyes and ears in the enclosed space.
One man struggled to pull a gun from his belt and Trevor hit him above the ear with the wrench that he’d used on the front door. He went down like a bag of rocks.
“Don’t move or we’ll kill you,” said Ernest Gleason. He shot a quick burst from his Uzi.
The men, still stunned, held their empty hands out at shoulder height.
“Get on your knees,” Gleason continued.
“You don’t wanna do this, man,” said one of the bearded men. “This stuff belongs to the Disciples…the Devil’s Disciples…”
“Shut up,” said Gleason. “Get on your stomachs.”
“I guess they don’t believe somebody’d rob the Disciples,” said Trevor, excited.
“You’re dead men walking,” said another of the men.
Trevor applied handcuffs to the men while James Williams covered them. Ernest Gleason walked to the table and began dropping the bagged crystals and the money into his empty tool bag. Then Trevor gathered up the automatic weapons stacked in the corner under the basement stairs, rolled them in a tarp and carried them out to the work truck.
* * *
Outside the small house the four robbers went directly to the City Water work van and hurriedly got in. Trevor Brown drove again, with the others crouched in the windowless back of the van.
“That went well,” said Kadin Hart.
“Now we split up,” said Ernest Gleason. “Drop us back at that lot where we parked our cars.”
An empty lot four blocks away was being used by the neighborhood as a used car lot, with a handful of vehicles facing the street, each with a mismatched “For Sale” placard in the window. The men had parked their cars, with placards, in the lot earlier in the day. Trevor pulled the truck into the lot.
Ernest Gleason said, “We’ll split up the drugs and money between Trevor and me, in case one of us gets stopped.” He unzipped the tool bag and took out some of the drugs, putting them into a second yellow and black canvas tool case. Then he laid a folded towel on top of the bagged crystals.
James Williams and Kadin Hart got out of the work truck and went directly to their vehicles. They started them simultaneously, took the placards out of the windows, and drove off.
Ernest Gleason took the lighter of the tool bags, hefted it, and stepped out of the van. He came back for a second trip and took the weapons wrapped in the tarp.
“I’ll get rid of these, too,” he said.
He walked to his car, got in, and drove off without another word. Trevor Brown waited until Ernest was out of sight before he turned the work truck around and started in the opposite direction.
* * *
“Up to that point, it seemed like everything was going their way,” said Zeke.
�
��What happened after that?” asked Kimmy.
“It pretty much fell apart,” he said. “Trevor Brown was arrested trying to sell some of the meth to an undercover cop. It was a pretty dumb move, actually, and completely unnecessary. They’d agreed to lie low and wait a couple weeks, then get back together and divide everything up. But Trevor got impatient, I guess. They got him for ‘possession with intent to distribute’.”
“And so it starts to unravel…”
Zeke nodded. “He gave up James Williams and Kadin Hart right away. He kept quiet about Ernest Gleason, probably because they were friends the longest.”
“And maybe he was afraid of Gleason,” Kimmy added.
“That’s possible,” said Zeke.
They were sipping coffee at an outside table at a Starbuck’s knock-off in downtown Cumberland.
“So the cops went after Williams and Hart. One at a time. They tried to arrest James Williams in a traffic stop, but he abandoned his car and ran into a nearby house. The only one inside was a seven-year-old boy watching TV, and Williams holed up in there with the boy as a hostage. It didn’t take very long to get him to surrender. They charged him with home invasion and kidnapping,” said Zeke.
Kimmy nodded. “Not well thought out. What about Hart?”
“Same sort of deal. Hart saw the cops waiting for him when he came out of the grocery store, so he panicked and stole a car. Bad news is that it had a woman and her child in it. He didn’t get far either, and they convicted him of carjacking. That’s also a federal offense.”
“And the fourth one, Ernest Gleason?” she asked.
“The robbers’ good fortune was headed south by then. It happened several days later. Ernest was stopped by a Highway Patrolman in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, about ten miles from the home they robbed. He had a broken taillight, and the cop saw a bag of the meth in the front seat. Trouble was, he had a lot more in the trunk. And the robbery took place in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, but he was stopped…”
“…across the state line,” finished Kimmy. “Which also makes it federal. Transporting illegal drugs across state lines.”
“Exactly,” said Zeke. “And like I said, they were each tried for the crime that the US District Attorney felt he had the highest probability of winning. And they were all tried at the federal level, convicted, and incarcerated at Cumberland FCI.”
“Isn’t it unusual that they’d all go to the same prison?” asked Kimmy.
“It had to do with the federal prison populations at the time of their conviction. Apparently Cumberland was in a position to handle a few more prisoners back then.”
“That was a couple years ago, right?” asked Kimmy.
“Yes, the crimes took place about four years ago, and the trials about a year later. They’d all been in prison for between two and three years,” Zeke added.
* * *
“So the Devil’s Disciples were behind the killings?” asked Kimmy.
“They were. They found out that there had been a couple of drug busts, crystal meth, and they figured it was the stolen drugs,” said Zeke.
“Was it on the news?” asked Kimmy.
Zeke nodded. “I suspect they also have eyes and ears within the police department. Money makes that pretty easy.”
“So they kept track of the four prisoners. And when all four ended up in Cumberland FCI, it was just a matter of taking them down, one by one,” Kimmy added.
“They contacted their assassin, and he set about killing the four prisoners. One by one. But he used the same M.O. and the same weapons, so there’d be no question that they were all killed by the Devil’s Disciples. It was sort of a signature, the steak knives,” said Zeke.
“How did Cappy get them?” asked Kimmy.
“My guess is that either someone brought them in, like with the bananas,” said Zeke, “or they used a drone to fly them into the prison yard.”
* * *
“What about O.Z.’s murder?” asked Kimmy.
“I admit, it doesn’t seem to fit with the others. O.Z. wasn’t involved with the drug house robbery,” said Zeke. “But Sally tracked it backwards and found the link.”
“Which was?”
“O.Z. was involved in a different way. Apparently, Ernest Gleason, the one who escaped to Bethlehem, sold O.Z. the stolen automatic weapons from the drug house. O.Z. was a fence who Ernest knew from his past. Ernest called him, O.Z. met him in Bethlehem, and he bought the assault rifles.”
“And later Ernest flipped on him for a reduced sentence? He gave O.Z. up?”
“Which may be why Ernest had some trouble adjusting when he first got to Cumberland,” said Zeke.
“Is buying stolen goods a federal crime?” asked Kimmy.
“It is if the merchandise is worth more than $5,000, and you take it over the state line. Absolutely,” said Zeke.
Chapter 27
“We understand that you’d like to handle the problem, Warden,” said Clive. “But we’re not certain that’s a good idea. Actually, we advise against it.”
Warden John Clark sat behind his desk in his office, his hands palm down on the desktop in front of him. He was wearing a scowl.
“That’s not what I want to hear, you know,” said Clark.
“I understand. The problem lies in the personnel,” said Clive. “The very men you would employ to correct the problem are, in fact, responsible for it.”
“How do you mean?” asked Clark.
“Well, we’ve mentioned that at least three prison guards are involved. Dix, Cornfeld, and Simpson. You agreed that it could be a big problem. We think there’s more to it, though. We also think some of the guards have arranged for the BMF gang to manage the prisoners for them,” Zeke added.
“What? How does that work?” asked Clark.
“It’s deceptively simple,” said Zeke. “The guards arrange for the gang to oversee the other prisoners. Some of the guards are members of the gang, and that just makes communications easier and facilitates the process. The prisoners take much of the guards’ workload, maintaining order in the prison, and in return they’re given privileges and favors. For example, we think that’s part of the reason there are so many cell phones inside the prison walls.”
Clark was still.
“So the gang maintains order in the prison and it makes the guards look good, while the inmates are granted extra privileges. Discipline is maintained by the gang, which in most cases commands more respect than if the guards were doing the disciplining. The gang doesn’t have to follow prison rules.”
Clark scowled again. “What do we do, then?”
“Unfortunately, we believe the solution starts with a change of personnel. The guilty guards have got to go. Then, you can start to wrestle the prison back from the BMF gang.”
Clark nodded slowly. “I see,” he said.
* * *
“Officer Dix, you’re wanted in Administration,” came the announcement over the guards’ radio.
Dix, in the yard talking with the leader of the Black Monkey Gang, said, “Hold on, I’ve gotta see about this.”
“OK, but don’t forget our agreement,” said the inmate. “We need to get the next shipment of Oxy in here soon.”
Dix said, “I know. It’ll be here. We’re working on it.”
“Don’t wanna come up with short supply,” said the man, persisting. “You’ll have a riot on your hands.”
“I know,” Dix repeated. “Relax, we’re good.”
He walked briskly to the prison building and through the steel door that separated the yard from the closest cell block. Once inside, Dix signaled Cornfeld, who joined him on the way to administration.
“Everything OK?” asked Cornfeld.
“Sure, as good as it can be,” said Dix. “Have you heard from Kirby today? We need that shipment of Oxy pretty damn soon.”
They proceeded directly through the cell blocks to the central guard station and, passing through several locked doors, arrived in an area marked ‘Adminis
tration Office’.
Dix led Cornfeld through the door, his manner brisk and preoccupied. There was no one in the office.
“This is odd,” said Dix, stopping short.
Cornfeld nodded from behind Dix.
Dix activated his lapel mic. “This is Dix. We’re in Administration. Who are we supposed to see?”
“You’re supposed to see me,” said Carl Turow. He stood up from behind a filing cabinet and pointed a Glock handgun at the guards. Carl was dressed in fatigues and wore full body armor marked “POLICE” across the front in large yellow letters. He immediately moved to the unarmed guards and said, “Get on your knees!”
Zeke approached Dix and Cornfeld from behind at an angle, out of the line of fire. His Walther PPK was in his right hand. Zeke had been hiding behind the open door to the administrative area.
“You’re both under arrest,” said Carl, “for quite a number of things.” He clamped handcuffs on the two kneeling men.
“Feels good to be back in charge,” said Carl.
* * *
“We’ve taken Carl out of the prison, as you’d expect,” said Clive. “But his information about the guards and the gangs was most valuable.”
“The FBI has Dix and Cornfeld in custody,” said Zeke.
“And Simpson and Kirby, the ex-guard,” said Clive. “They rounded those two up outside. It was Simpson’s day off.”
“What about the Black Monkey Family gang inside the prison?” asked Kimmy. “Are they still running things?”
“Warden Clark called in a new team of federal guards. He feels like they’ll have everything under control very shortly, maybe in two to three days.”
“Is the Warden going to take the prison back from the gang?” asked Kimmy.
“That’s the plan,” said Clive. “And he gets to do it, so he keeps his credibility. It’s a win-win.”
