Gang of One: One Man's Incredible Battle to Find His Missing (16 page)

‘That’s how they like it,’ Chief told me. ‘The prison is really policed by the gangs.’

‘How do I find out about them?’ I asked.

‘They’ll find out about you. They’ll know already you ain’t running with the ABs. They’ll come to you soon enough,’ he continued, this time without a smile.

By now I’d reached information overload. Kola was going for a walk at the top of the Yard but I was drained and wanted just to head back to the Range and to try and sleep. That felt like the safest option. Chief came back with me and returned to his drawing. I envied the solitude he seemed able to find, as I lay silently on my bunk and thought as little about Big Spring and as much about home as I could. Chief had confirmed to me that it would take at least three or four weeks before I’d be able to make a telephone call as all my numbers had to be submitted on a set form each Tuesday (today was Wednesday), then pre-approved before I could dial them. I had already told Calum I didn’t want him to come and see his father in this place and I was glad now I had made that choice. Letters and phone calls would probably be my only contact with the outside world. The pre-approval process involved the prison calling the number to ask the householder if they wanted to accept a call from you. Chief told me that was often the moment a new inmate would find out his relationship was over, or that friendships you thought would endure had not. ‘Shit, that’s the day some dudes find out even their own mothers don’t want nuthin’ to do with them no more,’ he told me whilst shaking his head.

In the same way, it would be a few weeks before my ‘account’ would be open, allowing me to use the prison shop on my one allotted time per week (also a Tuesday) and obtain vital supplies like paper and pens, stamps, tea, coffee, toiletries and shower shoes. I thought again of SlumDawg and more wistfully of the chocolate and other goodies they’d offered me. It seemed strange that the prison authorities would ensure that you had absolutely nothing and were so isolated for the first few weeks on entering prison just when you were most vulnerable to extortion – a situation that played right into the hands of the gangs and must bolster their power. Surely they must realise that this was how things worked? But then I was already beginning to sense an uneasy truce between the guards and the gangs – almost a ‘live and let live’ approach.

Too intimidated to try the TV room, and with nowhere else to sit, I lay back down on my bunk. My bed was narrow and rock hard, and I wondered if I would roll off the top bunk during the night and fall the six feet to the concrete floor below. I needed the bathroom again, but couldn’t face making that trip and having to deal with the next nutcase or psycho. I may have started drifting off to sleep, when I felt a nudge and saw two grinning Indians looking up at my bunk.

‘Here Scotland,’ they said, ‘it’s not much,’ before offering me a coffee and a few broken biscuits, some writing paper and a pen. ‘And before you ask,’ added Kola smiling, ‘no, you can’t join the Natives’ gang!’ Before I could thank them, they had turned and headed back to their bunks. I wondered, as I drank the coffee and demolished the biscuits, if I’d ever been given a more beautiful gift. With that thought, though, came a sense of unease. I wanted prison to be black and white for me, full of bad guys that I could keep my distance from, convinced in my mind that I wasn’t like them. That would make it so much easier to get through my time here. Acts of compassion or generosity just complicated things. I was starting to like these guys already, which was the last thing I wanted.

The nine o’clock count came and went and no one else approached me. No one noticed me as I lay there wondering how life could take such twists and turns and lead you to a moment such as this. I tried to block out the incessant noise and wondered again how I’d cope as the Range filled up. At ten o’clock exactly, the lights went dim, but they did not go out, and an uncanny quiet descended upon the room. I sat up on my bunk and looked around and watched the overhead lights flickering weakly. So the lights never went out in Big Spring. I smiled to myself as I thought how that was one fear I didn’t have to face. There would always be at least a little light, a little hope – a simile for my life here, perhaps. Maybe one day I’d get my life back, get back to my children. It was surprisingly chilly at night as the air-conditioning seemed to finally kick in, and that was a welcome respite. I pulled both my thin blankets around my shoulder and repositioned my pillows. I turned to face the wall and started to count ten good things from this most traumatic of days. And I found them, more easily than I found sleep.

9

TOILET CLEANING

‘
M
ULGREW
!’

‘Yo!’ I shouted, quite impressed with my response.

An officer with a clipboard was standing near the centre of the room as I leapt down from my bunk. After a restless and difficult night, I’d been awake for a few hours watching the other inmates get dressed and head off to work.

‘I’m Mulgrew,’ I said moving towards him while hanging onto my huge pants. He barely looked at me, instead just offering up a bucket with a couple of tired-looking brushes in it.

‘Latrine duty!’ he said matter-of-factly, as I took the limited cleaning equipment off him.

‘Oh, right,’ I said trying not to sound too crestfallen.

‘$7 a month pay, until further notice. Sign here for the equipment and remember to return it when you’re done,’ he said brusquely.

I signed an official form stating that I acknowledged that the loo brushes and detergent were Federal Government property and that I faced at least another 140 years’ imprisonment if I dared pinch any of it. With that, the officer was gone and my on-the-job training was over. Most of my other ‘roomies’ had already departed and I was alone, other than a few waifs and strays, and a small group of Hispanics down near the end of the room who never seemed to actually work. Among them was the fearsome Joker, who I could see was rubbing his big hands together, laughing and joking again.

I tied up my balloon pants as tight as I could, rolled up the legs and headed over to one of the two toilet rooms. It seemed the air-con was ineffective during the day, so the heat was oppressive. I wasn’t wearing my ridiculously tight T-shirt, having already decided I had to go bare-chested if I was going to survive the heat for even one day in this room. That made me feel more vulnerable, but many others in the room were bare-chested and it was just too sticky to put my tight T-shirt back on.

My cleaning equipment consisted of a bucket, a scrubbing brush that you would typically use to wash dishes, and a heavy, hard brush for scrubbing those particularly tricky spots. In addition, there were about ten small packets of some kind of powder – maybe ammonia or bleach or some combination of the two. With that I was good to go. I stood there for a moment trying to figure out where to start, when a Hispanic guy I had noticed the night before came up and spoke to me.

‘Hey Escosais. You want to clean this one or the other one?’

‘Are they any different?’ I asked, to which he smiled and said, ‘I think the other one sees more action from
el gordo hombres
.’ The fat guys.

I smiled back. ‘I’ll do this one then.’

‘
Tu habla español?
’

‘A little,
un poco
,’ I answered, annoyed at myself for letting that slip.

‘OK, I will start in the other one. Don’t fuck around with me, Escosais,’ he added, his smile suddenly gone. ‘If you don’t clean good, I have to clean after you.
Comprende?
’

I nodded, nervously. He was maybe around thirty, well built, with a handsome face and a decent bushy moustache. Like me, he wore no top, but he had shorts on and some decent shower shoes. He had a couple of tattoos on his muscular forearms but I couldn’t see them properly without staring.

‘Should take no more than two hours then we done for the day, but don’t ask for the mop until later so the cops don’t know we’re done. OK, Escosais?’

‘OK, I got it,’ I said relaxing a little. This was getting easier. I could do ‘cool’, I was Escosais, Scotland, the new cool kid on the block. ‘Hey man, what’s your name?’ I asked trying to move a step forward, wondering if I should have used the word ‘man’.

He smiled. ‘They call me Gateau,’ he said raising his fist into bump mode.

‘Oh, like the cake!’ I said, way too quickly, thinking French, not Spanish.

‘Erm . . . no.
Gato
, like the Spanish word for a cat,’ he said, giving me a dubious look, and turning his fists around to show a huge cat tattoo on each forearm.

‘God, you’re a diddy,’ I thought as I mechanically bumped his fist. So much for trying to act cool. Who the hell would call themselves ‘the Cake’ in prison, unless perhaps the Pillsbury Doughman got banged up? The two huge tattoos of cats on his forearms, I learned later, were the mark of a renowned burglar. No building or bank was too difficult for the man I’d called ‘the Cake’ to enter. I shuddered to think what kind of tattoo I deserved.

I’d had loads of different jobs in my life. I started selling rolls in Dormanside Road with Joe at the age of nine, before we graduated to the newspaper run together. After I had been indicted by the Americans in 2002, Joe and I – still the closest of friends – bought a building company in Lewes called Allen & Joy, giving it a legal name of ‘Dormanside Rd Limited’. Ironically, NatWest ended up lending me more capital to set up my new business ventures than I was ever supposed to have stolen from them in the first place. All this in spite of my indictment being plastered all over the Internet and attracting so much publicity. That’s what I call a loyal bank.

Throughout my life, whenever I did any job, I tried to do it well, no matter how horrible or boring it was. I took the same attitude with the latrines. I had always worked. I’d even spent a whole summer shovelling shit, so cleaning the bogs for eighty inmates wasn’t going to faze me. It was, of course, quite a contrast from my time spent working in the City, then New York and Tokyo. I’d worked throughout Asia, Europe and Latin America, at one point becoming NatWest’s youngest Managing Director, with a few hundred people reporting to me. I’d made it to the so-called top from a very low starting point, but now here I was, cleaning toilets in a Texas penitentiary. ‘So be it,’ I thought, because deep down I felt in some ways I deserved it. It was six years since they had indicted me, and although I didn’t believe what I was supposed to have done constituted a crime, in time I had considered that in some ways it was a moot point. There was a greater wrong there; a wider offence against society. Despite my humble upbringing, somewhere along the road to success I had taken a wrong turn. The one benefit of a poor childhood should have been a heightened sense of responsibility towards the less fortunate. Instead, by the peak of my career, I ran a group whose one purpose was to take the accounting or tax rules and find ways to ‘mitigate’ (or avoid) them for the benefit of our clients.

New rules would come into play, designed to ensure that big corporations paid the appropriate levels of tax. The assembled geniuses in my group, managed and cajoled by me, would then spend all their time figuring out how to get around those rules while still staying on the right side of the law. At some point someone in Enron decided to go a step further but that was just the step into illegality – the step into immorality had been taken by all of us, myself included, some time before.

The more tax or accounting benefits we gleaned for our clients, the more we were paid. The more we bent the rules, the harder people would try to straighten them, until we found kinks in them again. We were producing nothing, making a negative contribution to society, just making ourselves and our already rich clients even more wealthy, and deluding ourselves that we were of value. Hardly any of us ever thought through the consequences or gave consideration to the morality of these actions – in the world of banking, such an approach would have been thought suspect. You had to be in that industry to win – otherwise someone else would quickly take your place.

But I did think about it. And I should have known better. I was from a different background – I understood that when one group gets ridiculously rich, another gets catastrophically poor – yet because I was on the right side of the line this time, I played along. The truth of it was that when I got paid the big bucks I enjoyed it – not so much for the money itself, but for the validation it gave a working-class boy from a children’s home in Glasgow. It felt like I had beaten the system, managed to stand up for myself and achieve something in a world where people like me didn’t belong.

But now at the end of it all, I stood in a Texas prison, looking at the urinals with my bucket and brushes in my hand, with an overpowering sense that I’d been found out, and placed where I really belonged. Maybe I deserved this prison after all; maybe I deserved a lot worse. I had climbed the ladder of success only to realise I’d perched my ladder against the wrong wall. One thing I didn’t feel – didn’t allow myself to feel – was sorry for myself. The sad thing was I was boxed in. I knew if I lived my life a hundred times over, I would still have needed that success, that validation, that sense of achievement and belonging. I would have done the same thing over and over again. All the roads led me here.

I walked over to the urinals and got down on my hands and knees and started to scrub, with an intense sense of starting all over again. This was the beginning of the way back, the nadir, the low point. I gave them a pretty decent scrubbing using the magic powder supplied in each of the packets. They weren’t too bad, other than an initial scuttling of cockroaches as I disturbed them, and I was grinding along thinking I would be easily finished within an hour. That changed a bit when I got into the first cubicle. Getting down on my hands and knees again I started scrubbing hard. Then I looked under the rim and saw that it was total carnage.

‘Man, this hasn’t had a good scrub in a long time,’ I thought as I started applying a little elbow grease to my work, part of me perversely amused by how eagerly some journalists would have leapt on this final fall from grace. I could imagine the headlines and that amused me further. To keep my mind off how disgusting the job was, I challenged myself to come up with some other positives about my new position while I kept scrubbing. I thought of my commute first of all. I had a good – no actually, change that – an outstanding commute. I used to travel up to an hour and forty-five minutes to get in and out of the City, now I only had to walk about forty-five steps to the urinals. Instead of having responsibility for a few hundred employees and the good name of the bank, I now only had to be sure not to piss off ‘Gato the Cat’.