Forth Worth
May 2010
“So, what were you doing in the hole, Sean?” I wished I could have taken notes or recorded our conversations. The prison authorities considered paper and pencil contraband in the visitation room, though. Tape recorders were out of the question. “Eight months is a hell of a long time to be in solitary confinement,” I said. “I didn’t even know it was legal to treat people that way.”
“Legal, my ass,” said Sean with a sarcastic smirk. “These people follow the law if and when it suits their purposes. Come on, you sound like a kid who believes the fairy tales his momma reads to him.”
“Yeah, I haven’t had much experience in the slammer, I’ll have to admit.”
“Keep it that way, Max. The enlightenment you gain is not worth the years you piss away. Can’t get that back. Trust me on that. I’ve been down for fifteen years.”
“And eight months of that in the hole?”
O’Keefe looked at me like a teacher looks at a slow student. “I said I spent eight months in the hole with Sloane. If you’re talking how much in all, I’d say three years two months and fifteen days, roughly. Lost count of the hours.” His piercing stare made me feel uncomfortable.
I tried to maintain my journalistic equanimity and keep my emotions out of the discussion. It wasn’t easy. “My God, over three years in solitary confinement?” I couldn’t begin to imagine the horror.
“That’s hard for me to reconcile with the man I see sitting in front of me, Sean. Why did they keep you there that long?”
O’Keefe stretched out his long, lanky legs and sighed. “The BOP always reminded me of my mother, God rest her evil soul.” He looked at me and grinned, and I wasn’t sure he was joking or not.
“My mother got it into her head that I didn’t like broccoli when I was about five years old. From then on, no matter how much I ate broccoli in front of her or told her how much I liked that horrid vegetable, she continued to believe I hated it.”
“And the BOP had a preconceived notion about you?” I asked, anticipating where O’Keefe was taking his thought.
“You astound me with your perspicacity,” said O’Keefe with his voice dripping with irony.
“Just listening, Sean,” I replied, trying to appease the grouchy old convict.
“The BOP will put you in the hole for a lot of reasons. They’ll put you in for your own protection if you’re a child molester or a snitch. They’ll segregate you from the general population if they consider you a threat, or they’ll do it to intimidate you or to make you crack if they want something.” O’Keefe paused and stared at me. I couldn’t tell if he was trying to intimidate me or not.
“Well, I’m pretty sure you didn’t fall into the first two categories, so what was it? Were you a danger to the other inmates?” I asked, thinking that in his youth, O’Keefe was probably something of a bad ass.
“Well, you know what business I was in, and back in the 1960s some of my competitors in the trade just happened to disappear. Their bodies were never found, and they were never heard from again. Had been heavyweights in the trade too. The feds figured they were murdered. Tried to pin it on me, but they had no evidence. The tag stuck, though. They figured I was a stone cold killer who ruthlessly eliminated his competition. Then there was the incident at Leavenworth.”
I’d never heard that story but waited for him to continue, not knowing if more prodding would bring out his impatience and more biting commentary. I was beginning to suspect that the violent side of him really did exist. We sat in silence for a few minutes. Sean smoked my non-filter Camels and inhaled deeply. When you’re 73-years-old and still have five years to serve on a 20-year sentence, you don’t really put health at the top of your priority list.
“My case was on appeal when I was at Leavenworth. There was a hack there that used to enjoy the strip searches. This was a long time ago, mind you. I looked a little better back then. Well, I was on the way to a visit with my attorney, and his strip search got a little too personal. He was enjoying it too much. I beat the fuck out of him with my handcuffs. Almost killed him, they said. See this nose? Three of the bastards came in and worked me over with billy clubs. They knew I was in the right, though. One of them even apologized later and said he didn’t blame me. In the slammer, a man’s got nothing but his self-respect and dignity. Got to protect it. I’d do it again if I had to.”
There it was. I’d talked to prison inmates before. They’d all made reference to the predatory atmosphere inside the wire. If it wasn’t the Mexican gangbangers: La ‘M,’ the Aztecas, or the Zetas; it was the guards, or hacks as most of the inmates called them. To the one, they all said that your survival in the Big House, and how much of your humanity was lost, was directly proportional to what you had inside. If you had a pair, you’d survive. If not, you’d fall victim to the sexual predators; you’d become a snitch or just a spineless piece of shit who’d compromise everything his mother ever taught him for an extra can of tuna or a smuggled joint. I could see that O’Keefe did just fine in the slammer, and I imagined that he got along well with Mako Sloane.
“Sean, tell me about seeing Sloane for the first time.” I had beaten around the bush for long enough, I figured. Visitation was ending soon, and I wanted some information on Sloane’s sojourn with the feds.
“Well, it was like I said, Max. I never saw his face. One night after lights out, this was back in 2002, I guess, they brought someone in. He was handcuffed and in leg irons like everyone who’s brought in from the outside, and they had thrown a coat over his head so nobody could see his face.”
“Even at night?” I asked.
“Yeah, I know it didn’t make any sense. The BOP is melodramatic. They like to imagine themselves as some kind of commandos, and it appeals to their sense of the theatric to pull this kind of stunt. In reality they’re scared shitless most of the time.”
“Did they really think that somebody in the hole might recognize him?”
“That’s what’s kind of comical, isn’t it?” laughed O’Keefe. “As if the gangbangers and snitches in the hole read the New York Times or theInternational Herald Tribune and had seen his photo. Hell, the only time they ever pick up a copy of Time magazine is to conceal a porn magazine they’re using to jerk off to.”
I had to laugh. O’Keefe was obviously educated and urbane, but the long years behind bars had hardened him and given him a curious way of expressing himself. Somewhere between a college professor and a pimp.
O’Keefe smiled then. I think he was glad someone understood and appreciated his sense of humor. “Yeah, I always wondered why they didn’t just leave him in Guantanamo if they were so concerned he might be recognized at Seagoville.”
“Guantanamo?” I was stunned. That’s certainly a topic for a front page story, I thought to myself. Better file that away for another day.
“Yeah, I remember we had one good-looking female hack. She was Latina. I think her name was Felicidad Lopez. So, she comes in the next morning and brings Sloane some things: sheets, pillow case, orange jump suit. And what do you think I hear? The bitch is giggling and speaking Spanish with Sloane. I can’t quite hear what they’re saying. I do speak pretty good Spanish after hanging out with the vatos for fifteen years, but I couldn’t quite make out the words. Then she comes walking back down that corridor still laughing to herself and covering her mouth in embarrassment. I’m thinking, who the hell is that new inmate?”
This was getting good. I was listening to a firsthand account of Sloane in federal custody following his supposed death in Afghanistan. I was spellbound.
“She comes by a couple more times on different pretexts, and I hear the same thing: muffled conversation in Spanish and here comes Felicidad again, walking back down the corridor, giggling like a high school cheerleader getting felt up for the first time. Finally, she makes one last trip, but this time the conversation dies. I hear the rustling of clothing and the sound of handcuffs falling to the floor. The hacks wear a pair around their belt. I take a piece of mirror I bribed one of the hacks for and stick it through the bean hole so I can see down the hallway. I almost shit my pants. There was Felicidad with her pants down around her ankles and her backside thrust up against the bean hole just gyrating pretty as you please.”
My mouth was agape. This was vintage Sloane, according to all accounts, but I still couldn’t imagine Sloane seducing a female prison guard just twelve hours after he arrived at Seagoville.
O’Keefe stopped laughing and said, “I got to tell you, I knew then that my neighbor in solitary was no ordinary inmate. That was my first introduction to Mako Sloane.”
“Did he ever talk about why he got arrested?”
“Oh, now that gets more complicated, and a little darker.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, believe it or not, Mako and I used to have a few drinks together in solitary. We convinced Felicidad to bring us both some prison-made hooch on Saturday nights, and we used to drown our sorrows together and talk. And I’ve got to tell you, Mako Sloane had some tales to tell.”
“Got any examples?” I asked.
“Don’t rush me now. This is where it gets a little dark. Mako said some strange things. Sometimes I didn’t know where to separate reality from hooch-induced hyperbole. I used to wonder how much they had tortured him at Guantanamo. How that had affected him. He talked about being related to Boris Yeltsin and about some crazy KGB project to create human clones. He didn’t make much sense when he got on that topic, and I used to just let him ramble.”
“A clone project? What was that about?”
“Not quite sure. When he got really lit, Mako used to speculate that he was arrested to keep him quiet about the project. Didn’t know what to make of that, really.”
I wondered if that was just a bit of garbled information, and that maybe O’Keefe’s memory was freelancing a bit. I filed that gem away for future reference. It sounded too fantastic to be true, but with Mako Sloane, you never knew.
At any rate, the announcement came too soon. Visitation was over for the day, and I wouldn’t see O’Keefe for another week. I looked at my watch and couldn’t believe the time had flown by so rapidly. I said my goodbyes to Sean and slowly filed out of the visitation room with the families and friends of the inmates. Some were crying. Others had tears in their eyes. I was happy as a lark and couldn’t wait to put what I had learned to paper. My project was back on track.