Savage Grace - Natalie Robins (54 page)

John Murray

Tony was madly in love with me. He asked me a couple of times if I would come to his cell at night, but I told him I couldn’t do it. Of course I could, I could go to anybody’s cell that I wanted to. I told it to him like this—I said, “Well, Tony, I have a lot of work,” because work was the only thing I could do to excuse me not responding, since I’m not gay, you know. I
was
working—in the receiving room. I wasn’t working as a mopper or something like that.

The receiving room is where you go when you come back from court or from anywhere or if you’re just getting in from the street. They strip you on a table and search you, then they tell you to put your clothes back on. I was sleeping down there and I was working out down there with weights. I had priority there. But the first time I went there I was treated like one of the savage slaves they have. You know, everyone is pretty much a slave there.

Tony wanted me to be with him wherever he was, that was the main thing. He wanted someone to be his friend, to more or less straighten him out. I was concentrating on his money, and I was also concentrating on his family case. We got a letter from Broadmoor Hospital in England saying that he’d have to see a few more doctors to say whether he was competent to stand trial or not.

J. Victor Benson

They used to call John Murray “Big John” in the receiving room, where he was working on the house gang or paint gang, which is made up of the sentenced inmates who have specific work assignments while they’re doing their time. They call it “city time,” which is a year or less.

There was
something
going on between Murray and Baekeland, although Murray wasn’t a true homosexual. But in jail some inmates will do anything.

John Rakis

Most of these guys are welfare kids from welfare families and have no qualms about taking money from someone. It’s just part of their nature. Once when there was a plane crash on Rikers, a lot of the inmates came and helped with the rescue efforts and most of them wound up getting reduced sentences or were allowed to leave altogether because of the heroics they showed. But later we discovered that they went and looked in the newspaper and found out the names of some of the survivors and wrote them letters or called them up, if they could get the phone numbers, and tried to extort money from them. They’d say, “Hey, I saved your life—don’t you think you owe me something?” To them this was just a normal way of life.

John Murray

Tony gave away money for protection and also just to be friendly. He did it for both reasons.

Ronald Arrick

He did give away some funds. Primarily it was to relatives of people he knew in prison who treated him like family, who brought him things, like clothes, books. Mothers of prisoners primarily. Because his own mother was not around. It was
not
protection money that he was giving out.

John Murray

He never gave away money in front of me, except once. He gave away something like fifteen hundred dollars in a check, to some kid, I don’t remember his name. He lent people their bail money, money for clothes, money for drugs, stuff like that. He lent other people money just so they could have money. He was lending out around three thousand dollars a person. Really. He gave away something like forty-two thousand, nine hundred and eighty-five dollars. I seen that number written down on a piece of paper that he had.

Also, you gotta remember Tony fooled around with guys—we both know that. He was fooling around with whoever was around. He wasn’t giving them cash money, but he was giving them stuff like for commissary, or he’d promise them cash money later, just for being in a relationship with him.

Word got around Rikers that he had money, so people were always coming up to him and saying, you know, “Can I borrow?” or “Could I have?” In other words, “Please may I?” You know. They’d get how much they could.

I told him many times not to do it anymore, but he kept on doing it. And then what really got me mad was when he tried to offer
me
money. See, ’cause I didn’t want money. I was his friend.

He was afraid of some people, and other people he just wanted to make sure he got along with because he liked them rather enough, you know. But the dangerous people, the ones who carried a shank, formed an organization and lived off Tony. Nobody ever tried to stop it. I was the only one who tried. Once, this guy wanted money and Tony wouldn’t give it to him. I heard about it in the receiving room and I was on my way over to help get the guy off Tony’s back. By the time I got there, a couple of the guys Tony had been giving money to rebelled against the new guy and said, like, “Hey, man, bug out, get out of here,” and they got rid of him. If I had had to take care of him, the C.O. probably would have let me fight him—and I would have won. I’d beat him up whether he had a shank or not.

Injury to Inmate Report, Department of Correction, City of New York, January 11
,
1981

Juan Martinez

There was a couple of people—we used to hang around together, like a little crowd, you know? I was in for five years. I was on the first page in a big newspaper when I got busted. You know, with a big picture, and a big smile on me.

Tony was a good friend of mine. We were together ever since he got in jail—we were like brothers. He told me all about his family. Things like that.

He was giving money out like crazy, you know? He gave money to Eddie Cruz, who’s in the street now—he was in for burglary. And Jackie Monroe, who’s doing eight years upstate now. Tony sent quite a bit of money to Jackie’s wife.

John Murray

He gave a really big check to this one guy with a mustache and a beard and long, shaggy hair. He was kind of young-looking and he was white, Spanish. He was in the quad. He had just got there. He borrowed a pair of shoes from Tony. Then there was another guy Tony was also helping out—Michael something. He gave him, I think, a big check to use when he got out on the street. The guy was going to use it for his mother’s house.

John Rakis

If an inmate had a check and gave it to a relative of his and said you can deposit this and draw on it, there would be no way for prison officials to track down that sort of extortion.

Howard Nabor

I was the warden at the Anna M. Kross Center when Tony Baekeland was there, and I think the money he gave out there he gave out to win friends more than anything else. I mean, you don’t give out checks for protection—if the inmates are running a protection racket they’ll take all the guy’s commissary or have his mother or his wife or somebody deposit cash in their account. Anybody can send cash to an inmate—all they got to do is just mail it to his name in an envelope and it goes. But a check is going to nail them right to the wall. All the guy has to do is go to the D.A. or the Department of Correction and say, “I’m being forced to pay protection,” and they say, “Can you prove it?” and he shows them the check. The inmates aren’t
that
stupid.

So one of the things we usually check on is the commissary. Our cashiers monitor that closely and if they see one inmate getting an exceptionally large amount of money from the same two or three people—and I don’t mean his mother or his girlfriend or his aunt Mary—then we know he’s either doing one of two things. He’s running a racket bullying people, right? Or else he’s selling something, he’s selling drugs or himself—he could be a homosexual selling his own body. If some inmate was running a game on Tony Baekeland, he wouldn’t be doing it with checks, because he wouldn’t want anybody to know about it.

John Murray

Sometimes Tony would try to offer the guards money but they wouldn’t take it. I don’t know what they said to him because they’d tell everyone to scram first.

Brooks Baekeland

Tony wrote me letters describing the vice, violence, and corruption in that prison. His homosexual seductiveness even involved the guards, and promises of money in large amounts to everyone who might satisfy his humors or desires—that was all in those letters.

Letter from Dr. Thomas Maguire to Cecelia Brebner, January 13
,
1981

Letter from Antony Baekeland to Nina Daly, January 14
,
1981

Cecelia Brebner

I took Nini to Rikers Island to see him and they would not allow us to cross the bridge—they said that an old lady in a wheelchair was not possible. So back we came. And the moment we got home, the telephone rang. It was Tony, and he started to scream at Nini—something about money. She said to me, “Will
you
speak to him, Celia?” I said, “Tony, just stop this nonsense of giving your money away.” And he said, “Get off the phone! I don’t want to talk to
you.
” And all those loving letters I’d had from him! “I want to talk to my grandmother,” he said. “Put her back on!”

John Murray

I was like a conscience to Tony. I would tell him, “You gotta get on top of it. You gotta take back all that money you lent out and you gotta leave yourself some. You just can’t give it all away because people keep asking you to until it nearly kills you.”

I promised to try to get his money back with my influence in the receiving room. I had access to prisoner inmate cards—where people are, where they’re going on the outside—and I was going to use a list that his lawyer had sent him with the amounts that people owed him.

Tony and I made real plans to go on a trip around the world together. We were going to go to Thailand first—go see the monks and all that. You can stay warm there, and then you can go in the mountains and cool off if you want. Tony told me he had been there. And then we were maybe thinking about going to Indonesia, and Turkey, and England, you know, and we were talking about going to, maybe, Russia or something like that. Tony thought he’d be getting out soon. I assured him that he would if he told the judge that the devious thoughts in his mind had left and that he’d seen the error of his judgment, you know?

J. Victor Benson

Tony did plan a trip around the world. Possibly it was with John Murray, but possibly it was with one of those listed on his visitors’ sheet.

John Rakis

Inmates are allowed three visits of one hour each a week. We have thousands of visitors. The average number per month for our entire system was twenty-eight thousand for the fiscal year 1983. So we can’t thoroughly check the credentials of each visitor.

J. Victor Benson

The essential requirements are that they have to be a relative or a close friend of the inmate’s. They have to show an affidavit of one sort or another—birth certificate, marriage license, and so on. Visitors are searched as they come in, but there’s not much checking on whether they are or are not, let’s say, an inmate’s cousin—first, second, third, or shirttail.

Approved Visitors Form, Rikers Island

John Murray

I think Vince Firenzi was in for holding a gun to his mother’s head. He was a short fellow, not really one of the dangerous ones, but
sort
of. He was in another quad and he was running a con game on Tony. He came back because he probably wanted more money. He’d hustle Tony, give him a little kiss on the cheek or something like that and say, “I need more money.”

Joanne Anastase was a skinny, pathetic-looking guy who used to be at Rikers. He dressed in women’s clothes and I think he had an operation. He sort of looks like a woman and he sort of looks like a man—sort of in between. He probably came back and said to Tony, “I need money for my boyfriend,” or “I need money for clothes to go to the disco,” or “I need money for drugs.” You know—if it’s not one thing, it’s the other. And Tony gave him what he wanted, he was afraid to say no because he was afraid that Joanne might send somebody to go after him. But then he stopped giving money to Joanne. He said, “I’m going to stop giving money away.” But then he wrote someone else a check for fifteen hundred dollars, and he wrote someone else one for, I’m not sure, I think it was two thousand. And he wrote
me
out a check for two thousand also. We had talked about me maybe borrowing a hundred dollars or something like that to get started when I got out. I gave the check to Mr. Benson to put in my account but I had a feeling I was never going to get that two thousand.

J. Victor Benson

Murray wanted me to take the check to the cashier, and I did take it personally to the cashier, mostly because I was interested in getting a check like that off the quad. They gave me a receipt and I presented it to Murray. But nobody would credit his commissary account with the check—and even the captain at the desk refused to handle it because it was so large. They thought there was something strange about it.

John Rakis

The check was returned uncashed by the prison officials to Tony Baekeland’s bank.

John Murray

My check from Tony fell through, and the parole for me fell through also. It just did, it just did, and I left Rikers on February 13th for Auburn State Prison upstate.

Juan Martinez

After John Murray left, I was trying to manage Tony’s affairs for him but he didn’t give me no time. I told him, “Wait up, man, give me some time, you know, and I’ll find out some way that you can get out.” See, I was going to the legal library every day for my own case.

J. Victor Benson

Juan was pretty much of a jailhouse lawyer. He was no dummy. He became knowledgeable about all procedures and all precedent cases. He was in for murder but was pleading insanity.

Note from File on Juan Martinez

J. Victor Benson

Juan had one of those special relationships with Baekeland, too.

Juan Martinez

We were together in court in February and I told him, “Give me some more time,” you know?

From the Transcript, The People of the State of New York Against Antony Baekeland, Defendant, Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York, February 19, 1981

From the Transcript, The People of the State of New York Against Antony Baekeland, Defendant, Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York, March 5, 1981