Blow (17 page)

The highway landings obviated the problem of spies, since George moved them around to various roads in the northwestern part of the country. Greg was brought in to fly these jobs, because landing an airplane on a strip of road pocked with potholes and barely wide enough for two cars to pass did not hold much appeal for Here-We-Go Bob. The last and the most memorable of the landings occurred right on Route 15, the main highway from Mazatlán to Culiacán in late August of 1972, about when President Nixon was making a campaign speech in Kentucky promising “peace with honor and not peace with surrender” in Vietnam. Greg had flown down to the Mazatlán airport, and George drove him out to inspect the highway. To keep cars away during landings, George customarily blocked off the road with vehicles at both ends of a few-thousand-foot length, while a couple of Manuel's
banditos
stood around holding guns and staring in an unfriendly manner at anyone who approached. About ten miles north of town they found a smooth-enough stretch, but Greg didn't like all those high-tension power lines strung alongside the northbound lane. Given the slightest miscalculation on his part, his wing tip could nick into a pole or hit a wire. Noting that the poles were wood, George told him not to worry about the power lines. They wouldn't be there when Greg came in for the landing.

It was a little misty that day, with a light rain falling, when George and the bandits pulled up at the landing site with a Winnebago full of pot. The men blocked the southern access of the road, and George stood by the van at the north. Suddenly, down the highway came a station wagon. It bore Arizona plates, a middle-aged man and woman in front and a couple of boys, twelve or thirteen years old, in the back, and suitcases strapped on top—an American family on vacation. George, his cowboy hat lowered over one eye and a cigar in his mouth, stood in the road and put up his hand for them to stop. They did as he bade, probably because he was carrying an M-16 semiautomatic rifle, as well as having a revolver tucked in his belt. “Excuse me, sir,” he said, leaning over to see into the car. “We're just doing a little drug operation, and you'll have to wait here a minute. Just be patient and you can go on your way very shortly, after the plane leaves.”

Just then, Greg called in on the radio to say he'd be touching down in a few minutes and remember the power lines, George. With the vacationers staring in wonder, George ran over to the camper and withdrew a McCulloch chainsaw he'd gotten in a Mazatlán hardware store, ripped at the starter cord, and one by one he lopped off a half-dozen or so of the poles. He made sure to cut them on a 45-degree angle, right to left, so they would topple over away from the road. Radioed the all-clear, Greg then brought down the plane. Quickly the
banditos
helped load it up, Greg spun the craft around in a 180-degree turn, gunned the motor, and took off whence he came, soon appearing as just a receding dot in the distant sky.

George waved the station wagon on through before climbing into the camper and heading back to town. It was dusk when he reached the city limits, and strangely dark. For some reason the streetlamps seemed to be out. Traffic signals weren't working either. When he got to the bar at the Shrimp Bucket, the place was illuminated with the eerie glow of candles, and Gordo, the bartender, was passing out free Cocos Locos. Gordo said he didn't know what it was, but something had happened a little while ago and the lights died suddenly, all over. It was only then that it dawned on George, and was confirmed by a page-one story the next day in the newspapers, that for the sake of providing Greg a safe place to land he'd succeeded in knocking out the power to the whole northern half of the city of Mazatlán.

FIVE

Danbury

1974–1975

Nothing was meant to be. You are the designer of your life. If you want something, you can plan and work for it. Nothing is easy, but nothing is impossible either.

—
FROM A PLAQUE OUTSIDE THE COUNSELING CENTER AT THE
F
EDERAL
C
ORRECTIONAL
I
NSTITUTION
, D
ANBURY
, C
ONNECTICUT

O
NLY TWO MONTHS ELAPSED BETWEEN
G
EORGE'S
lights-out highway landing in Mazatlán and his equally memorable encounter with the hooker who looked like Britt Ekland—and his arrest—in the Chicago Playboy Club later in the fall of 1972. It would be still another eighteen months, and after the collar by Agent Trout in his childhood bedroom, before the federal marshals would finally get George to a Chicago courtroom to face the music.

Technically, he could have been sentenced to up to five years for the bail jumping alone, plus another fifteen on the marijuana charge. But with his lawyer's nudging, the hugely overburdened U.S. attorney's office in Chicago proved amenable to going along with a term of three years. This meant George would actually do only twelve months in a federal prison if he behaved himself, and that in a low- or medium-security facility, where time passed more or less agreeably.

At 6:00
A.M
. on March 14, 1974, federal marshals picked him up at the Cook County Jail and escorted him into the holding pen in the U.S. District Court building, where his lawyer again went over the deal worked out with the U.S. attorney and coached George on the little speech he should make before Judge James Austin, who would be presiding. Tell him you're sorry, the lawyer said. Tell him you made a mistake and you're going to change your life. Describe your plans for the future. Whatever you tell him, be sure you do it in a way that convinces him you're contrite, repentant. The marshals who brought George over also tried to be helpful. This judge was a son of a bitch, but fair, they said. The best way to deal with him was not to give him any shit and not to talk too long.

At midafternoon George finally found himself standing before the bench. A man in his sixties with glasses and a gray, balding head was looking down at him in an impassive manner. The assistant U.S. attorney reviewed the case and said the bond-jumping charge would be dropped and that a term of three years on the marijuana sale was acceptable to the U.S. government. George's lawyer confirmed the arrangement and larded in some details about Mr. Jung's plans for going back to college after prison, taking some business courses, maybe getting into advertising. The judge then turned his gaze to George and asked him what he had to say for himself, which was when the whole thing slid off the track.

It was the old problem George had when it came to authority figures. George didn't tell his lawyer, but he had a feeling right when he entered the courtroom and saw the federal judge sitting up there that he wasn't going to do the speech they'd agreed on. “I had it all planned, what to say, but when I got in there, something came over me,” he recalls. “Suddenly I got this feeling, I became very hostile, because I really didn't believe that what I did was wrong. I mean I was selling stuff that people wanted, it wasn't hurting anyone, people were calling it ‘God's herb,' and it was all going to be legal anyway someday.” What he actually told the judge was: “Your Honor, I realize I broke the law, but I want to tell you in all honesty that I don't feel it's a crime. I think it's foolishness to sentence a man to prison, for what? For crossing an imaginary line with a bunch of plants?” George found himself expressing other general thoughts as well. He mentioned the Vietnam War, and something about how none of the real criminals in the world ever end up behind bars, a little distillation from the oral philosophy of Bob Dylan.
You say that I'm an outlaw, you say that I'm a thief. Well, where's the Christmas dinner for the people on relief?

There might have been more, but what he remembers next is his attorney giving him a stamp on the foot, which the judge couldn't see, and the eyes of the court officers lifting up to search the ceiling. George remembers Judge Austin smiling down at him in a way that made him think at first he might just have pulled it off, said things that had gotten through to the old man. “That's an interesting concept you have, Mr. Jung. Very interesting,” he recalls the judge saying. “Unfortunately for you, the imaginary line you crossed is real, and the plants you brought with you are illegal, and what you did constitutes a crime.” And after hearing the speech, he told George he just might also have a little attitude problem, in view of which the judge didn't think he was of a mind anymore to go along with the three-year deal. Mr. Jung was now going away for four.

*   *   *

As a Level 2 facility—federal prisons are rated on a scale of 1 to 6, 6 being the designation for an end-of-the-line joint, such as the one in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, or Marion, Illinois—Danbury was designated as a “correctional institution” rather than a “penitentiary,” which meant that its inmates had been given relatively low sentences for crimes that entailed no violence. From a quick look at the celebrity roster, they also promised to afford engaging company. George just missed the two Father Berrigans, Dan and Philip, who had been released after doing a year each for pouring bottles of blood plasma over Selective Service records in Baltimore as a protest against the war. But Clifford Irving was around, the author who had made the headlines for his hoax biography of Howard Hughes. From the world of sports came Johnny Sample, the defensive back for the New York Jets whose terrorizing of would-be pass receivers helped his team to victory in Super Bowl III back in 1969. He was now working off his sentence for cashing some fifteen thousand dollars in stolen U.S. Treasury checks as a prison recreation aide, laying down the lines for the ball field, making sure the weight racks were set up properly. Representing the Nixon administration was G. (for George) Gordon Liddy, the unrepentant Watergate defendant, who at the time George arrived was awaiting sentencing on two counts of burglary, two of intercepting oral communications, and one of conspiracy. From his first day, Liddy had made a big hit with the other inmates for the way he turned prison conditions on end and in general made life more difficult for the administration. In the crowded orientation dorm, for instance, where there were only three toilets for one hundred inmates, he succeeded in reserving one for his exclusive use by putting up a fake memo on the bulletin board informing inmates about the myriad of ways they could catch venereal disease, then posting an official-looking sign over one of toilets announcing
V.D. ONLY
. Using his knowledge of surveillance techniques, he actually managed to bug the administration's telephone lines and drove the guards crazy by spreading the word among prisoners about which guards were sneaking around having affairs with other guards' wives. He also won a lawsuit against the warden that forced guards to honor due-process rules before putting prisoners into solitary for disciplinary infractions. George would encounter Liddy at the weight rack now and then, where he could outpress Liddy by about twenty-five pounds. He determined against trying to make friends with him, however, after Liddy announced one day that in any country given over to him to run he'd put a quick end to drug smuggling by categorizing the offense as a capital crime and doing away with the bastards.

The prison also held an assortment of city and state officials doing time on corruption charges, among them a one-time mayor of Atlantic City and a former head of the New Jersey State Highway Department, as well as a large complement of doctors and business executives convicted for variations on the theme of stealing money. For the untruths he told the Internal Revenue Service, Old Man Grossinger from the famous Catskill hotel family was there working as a gardener, tending the rose beds outside the warden's office and complaining to George that he'd offered to pay the money back but that the government would rather see him die in prison.

*   *   *

During their first two weeks at Danbury inmates attended the prison's orientation program, which consisted of lectures by staff members for four hours every day. Among other objectives, the handbook said, the program was geared toward “helping inmates develop a positive and meaningful attitude toward institutional staff.… During this phase, the inmate is encouraged to take an active and realistic part in his program planning. He should express his needs as he sees them.”

The quality of an inmate's life in prison depends not on whatever he gets from the staff but on the bounty of one's fellow prisoners, who really run the institution. They operate the laundry, so they're the ones you see to get pants that fit right and a razor-crisp shirt. They run the kitchen and the dining room, so you go to them if you want a tender cut of meat, some special piquancy added to your spaghetti sauce, or a table over in the corner for you and your buddies. They do the clerical chores in the health service, so they're the ones who can provide you a day off from the work detail, on account of the terrible cold you have, the back acting up again, whatever. Two realities prison shares with the free world, however, are that there's no such thing as a free lunch, and altruism exists in pitifully short supply. On the other hand, inmates can nearly always be relied upon to deliver on what they promise, as long as they get something in return.

One of the most lucrative of the prison jobs was clerking in the warden's office. This was where the files were kept containing interesting facts about fellow inmates that held high value as articles of trade. The most salable piece of information was the name of a snitch—someone who had sold out a former acquaintance in exchange for easy time, and maybe not so much of it, in one of the less onerous prison settings (Danbury being a prime example), while the buddy he'd done in was languishing less happily, for a longer period, in some other institution. The identity of the snitch, and the nature of his helpfulness to the authorities, went for a high price at Danbury—payable in cigarettes, money, friendship, or favors. For example, Inmate A in Danbury has a good friend, Inmate B, doing hard time somewhere else. The two of them had a relationship on the outside, and will again someday. Inmate A would give a lot to find out the name of the fucker who turned his friend in.