Straight Life - Art Pepper [171]
Some people who run up a big debt aren't lucky enough to have a mother like that, so if they can't pay they get killed right out in front. And that's where the loaners come in. They loan cigarettes or cash money. You can't hide too many cigarettes but you can hide cash. There are people that have five or six hundred dollars stashed in their cells, and they lend it out.
The little drugs, that's cigarettes; heroin you get with cash unless you have access to an outfit. You can get a taste for carrying an outfit from one block to another. But if somebody wants to buy some stuff he'll go to a money loaner. If the loaner gives him twenty dollars he has to give back thirty. The big moneylender has a guard running for him. The guard takes the money out and mails it to the guy's family or to whoever he's getting the dope from, or he drops it someplace. There's a million different ways you can get money in and out. But people who don't have anybody on the outside are in trouble if they get in debt to the loan sharks and can't pay because then they have to face the collector.
The loan shark can't do anything violent because he has too much money stashed away. He can't afford to be suspected so he has a collector, a guy that's real tough and hasn't any fear. The loan shark tells him, "So-and-so owes me so much." If the collector collects it, he gets a certain percentage. So he goes to the borrower, puts a shank on him, and tells him he's dead unless he gets the cash or the cigarettes within a certain amount of time. If he doesn't get the money, the collector has to stab him. He has to kill him if it's a big enough debt-to preserve his reputation. In order to make people fear him, the collector has to do a certain number of stabbings.
And then there's ordinary borrowing. Say somebody borrows three packs of cigarettes from you, which is nothing, and he doesn't pay you back. Well, you have to go to the guy and make him pay because if you don't, word gets around that you didn't collect and then everybody burns you. Everybody runs all over you unless you show that you're strong. People have been killed for one or two packs of cigarettes because the person that did the lending had to collect for the sake of his reputation. During all the time I was in San Quentin I rarely borrowed or loaned cigarettes and then only with people I knew real well. I never played even one game of dominoes.
As I said, nearly everyone was in some kind of group. The whites and the Mexicans were all broken up into little splinter groups. A Mexican might have a cousin that lives a couple of blocks away; maybe one guy lives in Monte Via and the cousin lives in White Fence. These guys will be in separate groups that fight each other, plus all the other Mexican groups, plus all the white groups, plus all the blacks. The whites were the same: you had the white armed robber clique, you had the white dopefiend-armed robber clique.
. There's one white group. that does stick together. It's the Nazi party. It's a very small group. They spend their time plotting what black guy is the most obnoxious, the ugliest, or the most popular, or the one that they might fear the most, and then they start a small but severe campaign. You couldn't reach a person's bed through the bars with your arms, so they might get a stick with a wire on the end of it and put it underneath their coats, and they'd use that device to put notes on the guy's bunk. They'd do this for a long time. They'd drop off a piece of paper with a little drawing showing a black guy laying on the floor with a knife sticking out of him, and they'd draw red blood on it and put Nazi marks all over the paper. They'd say, "We are watching. You will die at such-and-such a time." They'd make up little poems. They'd keep this up until the guy was really panicked, and then