Surviving the Mob - Dennis Griffin [42]
“Sammy wound up getting convicted of hindering prosecution and got sentenced to thirty days on Riker’s Island. Even so, I felt good knowing he was under a death sentence from Anthony and Mike. With that thought, and a smirk on my face, I was taken away to the Brooklyn House of Detention to await sentencing.”
WELCOME WAGON
Andrew’s first 24 hours in the House of Detention were memorable. He found himself to be the only white man on his tier.
Just a few weeks earlier on August 23, a 16-year-old black male named Yusef Hawkins had been killed by a gang of white youths in Bensonhurst. Hawkins and three friends had gone to the area to inquire about a used car. Unfortunately for them, the gang was prowling the neighborhood looking for blacks or Hispanics who were believed to be dating white girls living there. When they saw Yusef and his friends, the whites attacked and Yusef was shot dead. Racial tensions were running high both on the streets and behind bars.
“I’d never been a prejudiced guy,” Andrew explains. “I always judged men individually by their merits. But you can go into prison that way and very easily come out a racist because of what goes on inside the walls. The House of Detention was my first real taste of it.
“I was in a pretty rotten mood to begin with. I was sitting on the bunk in my cell thinking about a lot of things when the welcome wagon showed up. The black inmates on the tier were there with their greeting. They started in on me, busting my balls. They even said I looked like one of the white boys that murdered Yusef Hawkins. I told them I wasn’t part of their problems and to leave me the fuck alone.
“That night I had to make a phone call to my house. For prisoners, the phone is a lifeline. They’ll fight for the phone and even kill over it. I was on the phone and this black inmate told me it was his phone time and I had to hang up. I answered him that I wasn’t giving up the phone. I said I’d just been convicted of a major crime and I needed five minutes on the phone to take care of some important stuff. After that, it was all his. That didn’t satisfy him and we started fighting right then.
“A white guard came in and broke us up. There were thirty of us on the tier and he locked us all in our cells. I sat on my bed listening to all the chatter from the blacks. ‘You’re dead, white boy,’ and shit like that. Somebody called me a racist motherfucker and that he was gonna get me for killing Hawkins. I said, ‘I didn’t kill Hawkins, but I’m gonna kill you when they open this fuckin’ door.’
“The white correction officer came over to my cell and said, ‘A white guy with heart. I love that.’ Then he said, ‘By the way, thanks for loaning me that pen,’ and he handed me a ballpoint pen. He asked me if I knew what to do with it. I said, ‘Just open this cell and you’ll see what I do with it.’
“About a half-hour later, they cracked open all the cells. As soon as I got outside the same black kid and I got into it again. This time when they broke us up, they took me over to another tier. I could hear the black guy hollering to his buddies over there, ‘Kill that white motherfucker.’
“In the cell next to me was a Hispanic guy. He couldn’t speak English and didn’t have a tooth in his head. Through sign language and a word here and there that he understood, we made friends and started hanging around together. He was a barber and cut inmate’s hair. I found out he was a triple murderer waiting to be sentenced. We hit it off good. He was a tough guy and he watched my back.
“Other white guys came in from time to time. But they were mostly there for drug stuff. Some of them had mental issues and would go to the psych unit and you wouldn’t see them again. It was tough to develop any solid relationships with those guys, because they tended not to be around that long. Because of that I hung around mostly with the Hispanics.”
At the end of September, Andrew was