One might say that my period of confinement in the county jail could be divided into two parts: the part before I got the paper, and the part after I got the paper. My dear mother, feeling sorry for me, wanted to ease the pain of my incarceration, and so bought me a daily subscription to the local rag. Little did I understand at the time the social power of He Who Holds the Paper in jail.

The Dallas Morning News is probably no better than any other news periodical published by the Belo Corporation: a shallow Bread and Circus designed to make people feel as though corporate and government propaganda is actually a ‘Community Voice’, support corporate art, suppress independent art, help citizens rationalize war and classism, market unnecessary conspicuous consumption, manufacture consent of the governed, and of course, SPORTS SPORTS SPORTS SPORTS SPORTS SPORT SPORTS SPORTS SPORTS.

Of course, old timers in Dallas remember the Dallas Times-Herald, which used to compete with the Dallas Morning News, until it was bought out by its rival, thus creating a monopoly on printed news and information distribution in the Dallas market, which thankfully was made obsolete by the internet in the 90’s. After the Times-Herald was bought out, the only competing paper was the free paper, called ‘The Observer’, running on an advertising-supported business model. In the late 90’s, one of the star investigative reporters for the Observer parlayed her popularity into a mayoral candidacy, and Laura Miller served as mayor of Dallas for several terms, much to the chagrin of the nightlife and anyone who wasn’t on the payroll of wealthy real estate kingpins and fashion police, to whom she promptly sold out.

Before I started getting the paper in jail, I was nobody. The top tier of the prisoner’s social power structure is comprised of the long-timers. The inmates whose crimes are the worst, and those who are percieved to be the ‘baddest’. They have been there the longest, and they will be there longer than everyone else. In county, these are the hardcore convicted felons who are waiting to be sentenced and finally “catch chain”, which means to be assigned to a chain gang on its way to a different correctional facility. In other words, those who have been institutionalized, those to whom prison has become a way of life. They run everything in jail. The gambling tournaments, procurement of contraband, and the social pecking order.

And to them, I was nobody but a bratty little kid who bit off more than he could chew, and got locked up with a bunch of cons, by a crooked system. Though I was serving time for a petty crime, the unit I was in housed hardcore criminals, and in living amongst them for a few months, I had to be subject to their twisted ways. They stole my library books and deserts. They bullied me. They made fun of me in various ways. Then I started getting the paper, and everything changed.

Maybe the paper even saved my life. Maybe if I weren’t the guy getting the paper, something I said or did, some minor faux pas might have caused one of the other inmates to snap and bash my skull into a hard, 3-foot thick concrete wall, but because I had the subscription, maybe they thought better of it. What I figured out is that when it comes to reading material in jail, especially news of the outside world, there is a whole hustle that exists, and it’s all about chain of command. I could have had a whole paper pyramid if I had wanted, an empire of hustling founded by a simple subscription. He who controls the paper controls information.

What’s supposed to happen is, the guy who gets the paper sells it piece by piece for soups. Then the guy that buys it from him sells it, and on and on down the line. That’s how it’s supposed to work. I did things a little differently:

I identified the most powerful and dangerous people in my unit, and gave the paper to them every day, free of charge, after I was done with it. The only thing I usually did was read it and do the crosswords and then pass it down the line, starting with the heads of all the various prison gangs. I didn’t claim ownership of the paper as a means of exploitation, but instead donated it to the entire pod (cellblock) as a free public service. Knowing that the big dogs were simply going to bully everyone into letting them read it first, I just gave it directly to them, and they middled it out to the rest of the pod. This is one of many things that made me so popular in jail, because everyone who got to read the paper at no or reduced cost knew that it was from me.

And this is how I became more aware of the Texas Syndicate, an organization with which I had probably unknowingly done business with before, as a drug addict, due to the fact that they tend to act through intermediaries, and the top level membership use a lot of mules and errand boys so a street-level schmuck like me would never know who is really running the show, even if it happened to be someone I knew. As they said in the Godfather: “The Family has a lot of buffers.” But in the can, the game of ‘who do you know that I know’ is often played by inmates out of boredom or bravado, and it quickly becomes obvious how small the underworld is.

My cell-mate had been busted for armed trafficking of powders. It was his second offense. He was looking at ten years in the Fed.

Armed trafficking means you do Fed time, even as a shotgun behind the cash register is considered standard equipment for any liquor store. The image of drug dealers that is painted by the government and conveyed to citizens is one of aggressive, violent psychopaths, and not merely business owners trying to defend themselves from thieves. They want to create this idea that if someone is ‘armed trafficking’, they are literally putting a gun to their customers’ heads, forcing them to buy. When in reality, it’s just the game that forces you to strap up, and roll with the bad guys who can protect you. Membership in an organization like the Texas Syndicate is not always sought voluntarily, but is sometimes accepted as a necessary evil, for purposes of ‘protection’.

My cellmate had all of his legal paperwork and I read it over at his request. Motion for Discovery revealed that there was a CI involved in his case.

“Was anyone with you when you got busted?” I asked.

“My homeboy,” said my cellie.

“Well that’s your top suspect for the guy who ratted you out.”

This seemed to take my cellie by surprise. “Why would he get busted right along with me then?”

“Theatrics. They probably let him go right after separating you into different parts of the jail population. Trust me, bro, it’s always the person you least suspect. The one closest to you. I learned that from a broad who betrayed me in the same way.”

On his indictment, in the slot for ‘victim’, scrawled in pen was the word ‘society’. And the dark irony dawned on me, that ‘society’ could be used as a stand-in for an actual victim on an indictment, because there weren’t any actual victims of his crime. Not the users who voluntarily demanded and purchased a product the government told them they can’t have. Not the people who abstained from the product.

In a murder, rape, or robbery case, there is always a victim, but for drug cases they simply use this general concept of ‘society’ as a stand-in. And yet if my cellie were to stand in court and say that society drove him to his crime, and that he is actually a victim of society, this would not be taken seriously. So basically, in a court of law, you can’t blame society, but society can blame you.

I actually developed a lot of respect for this man. He was very intelligent, well-connected, Italian man, even if a tad low-brow, and I’m pretty sure that we had some friends in common on the outside.

There was another hustler in our unit, busted with both drugs and guns, a Jewish man, who probably worked for the same people. Lord knows, as long as there has been an Italian in business, there has been a Jew doing his books. Partners in crime all the way back to the Crucifixion.

Also, an old fence for the mob, who had gotten busted with a lot of stolen merchandise, but had refused to snitch. The old man was dying of harry-cell leukemia, which was going untreated by the jail. And I realized that all these people were doing time for the Mob or their street gang, while the real heads of these organizations, who collected all the profits, lived like kings and let their soldiers rot in jail.

The heads of these gangs, with their connection to Austin and even Washington politicians, people like Rick Perry or George W. Bush, for whom they arranged secret privileges like coke orgies, even maintained an anti-drug facade publicly, as a means of distancing themselves from those suffering the consequences of putting food on their table, to say nothing of the business advantages created by keeping their product illegal, and thus inflating its value via the black market.

And I knew that, if these bosses on the outside had wanted me dead, they would have figured out “Who do we have locked up in Collin County?” and they probably would have, from the outside, somehow contracted my own cellmate to kill me. Lucky for me I was nowhere near the top brass’s radar, even though we knew of eachother socially, from the scene.

The Texas Syndicate is very protective of its membership and those who ‘claim’ it, especially persecuting anyone who attempts to ‘claim’ affiliation to this gang surreptitiously. What started out as a Chicano gang has recently been taken over by Italians, whose financial infrastructure connections make it possible for street gangs to do things like launder money and purchase real estate. I witnessed the petty effects of this on the street level soldiers when I watched someone get beaten out of the gang, because he was deemed more loyal to the old Chicano regiments than the Italian. He had the symbol of the five-pointed, 3D star on his hand:

And after beating him and being confined to solitary for a week, my cellie claimed that the fight was over a personal dispute, and wasn’t gang related.

“Yeah it was,” said the guard who broke it up, too late to save the poor guy from a broken nose. The guard was smart enough to see these guys go in and out of jail all the time, enough to get a sense of the Cartel’s existence in the outside world, via simple, every day exposure to their incarcerated members.

And how could the mob let Texas vice be run by some Mexican kingpin? Of course they wanted a piece of it, and there were even elements of the establishment that would rather them have a piece than the Chicanos. And my cell-mate, being the loyal soldier that he was, even took this fight into the can with him, looking to clean out trash there, so when he was released back into the free world, he could claim his benefit from the gang he refused to tell on, yet still enforced even in jail. There are psychopaths in jail, and psychopaths outside of jail, and knowing that, I don’t feel safe anywhere.

I knew this gang from the outside, because I knew the heiress to it. Little miss spoiled punk princess, whose Daddy is the Godfather, but that’s a whole other story. One would think that a female heiress to a Mafia organization would cause the tactics and policies of that organization to soften, but instead, it had only made their internal politics pettier, and their business tactics more deceptive.

She ran the gang like a crooked despot, and I wondered how long it would last after the old man finally kicked the bucket, because she lacked the class he had finally managed to attain in his old age. Her whole family was splintered and in denial of being related to eachother, for legal purposes.

They owned nightclubs, recording studios, and head shops. They all had different last names, but their looks, their business practices, and their rhetoric were easy to identify. I’ve never had any official gang affiliation, as an independent free agent. I had had run-ins with this gang and a few others, but had no loyalty to it, or any gang. I had once tried to hang with them, but they burned me, just like they burn everyone. That’s my experience with these gangs: they’re exploitative, like the bully that steals your lunch money.

It was the Dallas Morning News that brought me word of the Presidential election, and I took a lot of solace in the fact that Barack Obama won despite the fact that I was unable to vote for him. Of course, there was a lot of political rivalry in jail, with a surprising number of Republicans in the general population. A testament to Southern brainwashing, getting people to accept politics that worked against their own interest.

“Politics is a sore subject in here,” said my cellie, “Most of us are convicted felons, and we can’t vote. We can’t vote to change the oppressive laws we broke, but never got a chance to vote on, because they were implemented before our time, by people in a higher class and of a different culture. We’ve been repressed politically and culturally, and we are all too aware of it. But all the cons with a liberal political awareness are on Obama’s side, because he wants to reduce the percentage of sentence time that federal prisoners do, as a means of reducing spending.”

In the time since my incarceration, Attorney General Eric Holder, acting under direct orders from Barack Obama, has implemented an agenda of clemency for drug offenders, holding many parole hearings for people incarcerated on drug charges, and letting them out of prison. And that’s why, those guys are my heroes. Obama didn’t say anything about this during either election, but instead acted as a sleeper agent in his second term. Even though he isn’t outspoken of it, he obviously has an anti-Prison Industrial Complex agenda, and has done much for the cause. I don’t think his agenda is solely focused on reducing spending, but also on social justice.

Until next time, stay informed, readers.