ROLL CALL ~ A Prison List (True Prison Story) (50 page)
Read ROLL CALL ~ A Prison List (True Prison Story) Online
Authors: Glenn Langohr
“I told you how I feel about it. I think you’re just asking for trouble.”
The next morning I heard a caravan of vehicles pull up. I got to the door and saw twice as many vehicles as last time. I counted eight undercover vehicles and saw detective Pincher and what had to be half of the gang task force dressed in raid gear holding guns. My parole officer was behind them.
“Hands behind your back Benny! We’re searching your entire residence.”
I looked at my Dad’s shocked face and told him, “You don’t have to let them search your room. They only have a right to search the common areas.”
Detective Pincher asked, “Is that where you’re stashing the drugs Benny, in your Dad’s room?”
“I’m clean! I’m telling my Dad that so he knows his rights and I don’t get kicked out of his house from you abusing them!”
I watched the detectives search my room. They dumped everything in the drawers on the ground and tossed everything upside down. They did the same thing in the bathroom. My Dad let them in his room. They were in and out without making as much of a mess. Downstairs the detectives unzipped all of the cushions on the couches, searched the kitchen and then the garage.
I felt like telling detective Pincher that this is the third time I’ve been searched and come up clean and that next time he should bring the dogs so the place wouldn’t need three hours of work to put back together, instead, I looked at my parole officer and said, “This might get me kicked out of here.”
“Benny. I’m deciding if I should take you to prison for a violation right now. You should have reported that you had police contact last week.”
“I reported it to my insurance agent.”
While explaining what happened I thought about my limo business. I’d never asked permission to start it. As soon as I realized I wasn’t going to get violated, I asked.
He listened thoughtfully and responded, “I’m not going to stop you from working.”
Two hours after they arrived, my Dad and I followed the raiding party outside. All of our neighbors were in front of their houses watching. The task force and my parole officer drove away and my Dad looked at me and said, “You have to move out.”
“Dad I just put almost $15,000 into my limo business.”
“You shouldn’t have started it. You’re in no position to do so and you don’t listen to my advice.”
“At least give me a little time to figure something out.”
“You’ve got a week.”
The next day I got the authorization from the P.U.C. to do business as Prestigious Transport. The D.M.V. gave me livery plates that read PRESTO 1 and I was off and running. I woke up every morning at 4 a.m. and sat in front of the Marriot to transport. Immediately luggage went into the trunk and I was in motion to L.A.X.
The rest of the week I touched every other So Cal. airport until my shift at the restaurant.
Joe Costello came to the rescue again. He let me move in. They only had a two bedroom condo and his Mom was in one room and he and his wife were in the other room. There was a bonus room upstairs where I had the choice of sleeping on a couch or a ledge eerily similar in size to a prison bunk. The couch cushions slid off too easily, so I chose the ledge. He also had Siamese cats. They were used to the bonus room and let me know by spraying everything.
The preacher said to give all the glory to God so I did and Prestigious Transport and the Italian restaurant gave me 80 hours of work a week. I called my parole officer and reported the progress to him. “Mr. Heimrick, I can prove to you by the amount of hours I’m working that there just isn’t enough time for me to do anything else.”
Being locked in a cell taught me about the saying “Out of sight, out of mind” so I made my prestigious presence felt by perching in front of the Marriot so they could see me at all times. When business was slow I read the newspaper. Articles about the three strikes law appeared and I learned that proposition 66 was a draft to help define the strike law to target violent offenders and give the non-violent offenders relief. I remembered what Shotgun had said and read about the senator from Santa Maria, Mr. Claus. Even though his daughter was the victim that got the ball rolling on the three strikes law he was admitting that the law was targeting too many non-violent offenders. He pointed out that a large percentage of those non-violent offenders were drug users and that he felt it was more humane to give them treatment rather than incarceration. His opinion was that if we incarcerated them we could expect them to get built into bigger, more violent criminals. I thanked God for such a smart and caring man.
Another article I read was against Proposition 66. It was pure lies and propaganda. It was endorsed by the California Prison Union, parole, probation and the Sheriffs. They were using terror tactics on the public and warning that if the three strikes law changed, CHILD MOLESTORS, RAPIST AND MURDERER’S could be released! I reread the other articles and verified that only non-violent offenders would be affected! I went inside the Marriot and looked at their T.V. in the bar and watched the T.V. ads start.
Mr. Claus represented that Proposition 66 was only meant to take two non-violent felonies off the strike-able list. One being ‘Petty theft with a prior’, and the other one being certain residential burglaries where the burglar just went into a garage and there wasn’t a chance of violence. He pointed out that the law was targeting a class of drug addicts whose crimes weren’t violently inclined. He pointed out that if we institutionalize them we’ll be responsible for building them into bigger, more violent criminals. He pointed out that the prison union in California was so big that they had enough control to give themselves raises to the point they could make up to $130,000 a year and that it was in their interest to keep the three strikes redefinition from passing. He pointed out that they were going to try and terrorize the public with many more ads on T.V. than theirs.
I watched him proved right. For every one of his ads, there were ten against the law getting redefined. In one dramatic commercial that seemed to come on every ten minutes it showed prison guards walking with gun towers behind them, with a caption that they walked the toughest beat, then prison bars closing dramatically and the bars clanking shut, then the governor’s face saying, “If this three strikes law changes, CHILD MOLESTORS, RAPIST AND MURDERERS will be released.” Then there was the caption that said the California prison union, Sheriffs, parole and probation department endorse the ad. I walked back to my car shaking my head.
Sitting in my Lincoln Town Car I thought about it and did some math. With close to 250,000 incarcerated souls in California’s prisons there had to be four times that amount who had been incarcerated at one time. I considered their families and imagined a pretty substantial voting bloc. Then I considered how big California government was with the prison union, parole, probation, Sheriffs, D.A.’s and their families. I decided their voting block was just as substantial. So who could lead the rest of the sheep on the side lines to vote their way. Whoever spent the most money on ads. I knew the terror tactics by big government that CHILD MOLESTORS, RAPIST AND MURDERERS being released was going to win more support.
Over the next few days I watched the poll numbers go from 65% in our favor of defining the law more clearly, to 60%, and then to 55% on the last night until the polls closed. The next morning I read that it had gone down to 49%, big government won in the bottom of the ninth inning! The sheep were led astray. I kept reading the article. A chairman for a big chip maker, Chipcom, local to our area was responsible for funding the ad with the lies. He lived in a gated community nearby.
Another newspaper ad that got my spirit restless had to do with the top law enforcement official. His son, Hadley, had video footage of him and his friend’s gang raping an underage girl the media referred to as Jane Doe. In the video, the article said it looked like Jane Doe was on drugs to the point she didn’t look completely conscious. She was positioned on a pool table and the son and his friends took turns using her with their own bodies and foreign objects. The article said they were making a party of it with rap music in the back ground. Other evidence came out that the junior Hadley admitted to slipping date rape drugs in Jane Doe’s drink. The articles that followed mentioned the son getting in more trouble while out on bail and law enforcement getting caught trying to cover for him. In one of a couple run-ins with the law after being released on bail, the junior Hadley was arrested with some pot in his pocket with his car keys and drivers license. Then, when some of the department realized this was the top official’s son they tried to cover up the pot charge, but, it was too late because the original deputy had already reported the incident on the police airwaves. Other articles mentioned the father hiring a team of high powered attorneys to defend his son. These attorneys hired a team of investigators and medical experts and came up with a defense. Investigators interviewed Jane Doe’s friends and stated that Jane Doe had claimed to want to be a porn star when she grew up and that she was just living out her dream. They stated that she was already a promiscuous girl and hinted that what happened on video could only be expected. The medical expert stated that in the video Jane Doe might not have been completely unconscious and noted that her eyes seemed to slightly open a few times. In his expert opinion she probably knew what was going on and wasn’t completely unconscious.
The next time I reported for parole at the Sheriff’s substation to drug test, while waiting in the line of other parolees, I saw detective Pincher staring at me. He was standing next to the open door to the bathroom with another gang detective. The line moved and I stood next to him awaiting my turn to pee in a cup. I saw my parole officer wave me in.
He handed me the plastic cup and said, “Benny you’re doing really good. Keep it up and you’ll get off parole and this will be behind you. I spoke on your behalf in our Tri-County briefing. You’re not going to get harassed as much.”
I walked out and passed detective Pincher. He followed me to my Town car and stood on the curb.
“B.J. you picked a fight that I’m going to finish.”
I looked at him and said, “Man I’m just trying to survive, why don’t you leave me alone.”
Business picked up enough and I realized I had enough coming in to shop for a condo. At first I couldn’t find anything I could afford, and then I found a one bedroom studio in San Clemente going for $106,000 in a H.U.D. complex. I checked it and was sold before even seeing it when I realized it came with an unattached garage to put my Town Car in to keep it out of the weather.
At the same time, while picking up a client at the Saint Regis for the first time, I saw Sarah, A.K.A. Piper! Sarah approached me and I was instantly intoxicated by her long brown hair, exotic eyes, pretty face and sexy bone structure. We started seeing each other and our passion pulled us closer and closer.
I found a real estate agent and went over my documented income via my credit card machine. The thing I was worried about was my credit so I put all of my cash together that came to $25,000 for a down payment. It was enough to get a loan processed! My mortgage was only $598 a month, a few bucks less than my Town car. I thought back to the advice Joe had given me about credit, I thought about the preacher’s advice to be bold and was overwhelmed with emotions that I was making it. I ran around giving the glory to God like my preacher had said and counted my blessings. That Sunday I was too busy to make it to church for the first time.
I managed to talk Sarah into moving into the condo with me. As soon as we entered, She pointed out that I’d bought a cave. It was only 600 square feet. From the front door you could see the whole condo cramped together with an open bedroom, the bathroom didn’t have a window and on and on. I looked at it through her eyes and realized she’d grown up in a mansion on the top of hill overlooking Laguna Beach, Dana Point and San Clemente before getting raped and going on a run that took her to hell and back until she made it back to her Dad’s. I laughed to myself that to me the condo was the Promised Land; I was off the ledge the cats were spraying.
My first 13 months of parole came and I had my fingers crossed that I would get discharged from parole. I thought, I haven’t turned in a dirty drug test and I work 80 hours a week, maybe I’ll get blessed. Then I told myself, don’t count on it with all of the noise in my file, expect to stay on parole for three years no matter how clean a program I run.
My parole officer confirmed that the board of prison terms denied discharging me. I got over it and got lost in a blur of 80 hour work weeks. My Dad showed me some love by actually encouraging me for the first time and paid for six months of advertising in our local yellow pages. My limo business picked up so much that I had to quit my job at the restaurant. I learned that the only way to make the limo business worthwhile would be to go big and buy an extravagant Hummer, Navigator or Expedition limo. They brought in rates of $150 an hour, whereas regular limos only brought in $65 hour. With all of the overhead and California “fuck you” fees you couldn’t scratch much profit.
For the next year I drove clients all over Southern California in a perpetual blur of my version of Nascar Town Car and put over 100,000 miles of pavement pounding on the limo. Sarah stopped getting any satisfaction out of her job at the Saint Regis and I noticed the transition for her from a mansion to our cave was taking its toll. I also noticed what a rad girl friend she was in that she understood how hard my life had been and supported my efforts, spoke up for me and enthusiastically responded to my sexual hunger from being locked up for five years. I wasn’t complaining.