When I finally got sentenced the prisons were so over-crowded they were moving people around, shuffling them around the different prisons. The first place I spent time in was in Suffolk County, New York because that’s where it all happened, on Long Island. Then I did the tour. I had O.C. next to my name because I was associated with organized crime and they didn’t keep us in one spot too long because you were apt to meet people in the same boat. They didn’t want us to be together so they kept on shuffling us around. I went to three or four different prisons in two years, which wasn’t bad.
Actually Sing-Sing was first but it was just processing, it wasn’t a full-blown prison, it was a reception center. Before you went to do your time you would be processed at Sing-Sing. Nobody was really staying there. All your paperwork, your medical exams, everything would be done there and then you’d go to a certain place, a prison, wherever they wanted to send you in the state of New York. I was at Sing-Sing maybe about four, six weeks, something like that. They had reconditioned a lot of stuff there, electric gates and stuff. They weren’t electric years ago, they were all powered by levers. It was amazing how they did it. It was noisy but you got used to it. But then these hacks, some of them were assholes, and at night they’d come down and take that big key and they’d run it across the bars and they’d wake you up. You never had a good night’s sleep in those damn places, between that and the fucking rats eating my commissary if I left it in a bag on the floor. You’d hear them in there scratching around, the mice and the rats and the roaches. I’d wake up and peel the roaches out of my hair. The Long Island institutions were filthy, the New York institutions in general were filthy. Sing-Sing was okay because they just rehabbed that.
They tried to segregate the psychos from the normal people, they put them on a certain tier they call it but it didn’t always work out. You always got somebody in there that’s going to aggravate you. Everybody’s on edge, I mean it’s not a very happy place to be. You make the best of it. That’s what I used to tell guys that were all nervous and stuff, afraid they might get killed. “Well, it’s easy for you to talk, you’re six foot six”. I’d say, “Yeah, it’s not very easy for me to talk because if a big chunk of metal hits me in the head it could knock my six foot six body down and kill me.” Or a shank. There were plenty of shanks in there but I never had one. Never wanted one. They could search my cell ‘til the cows come home and they wouldn’t find shit. I used these, my fists, you know, that was it. I had shanks pulled on me and I pulled them out of people’s hands believe it or not. My reflexes were good, take it right out of their hand like nothin’. You know, I got stabbed a couple of times in my life, in the hands, but whatever.
I went to one prison in upstate New York I really liked. Erie County Penitentiary. It was supposedly a Civil War prison. Architecture-wise it looked like a castle, a fortress and it was absolutely spotless. They were very clean up there, you could eat off the floors. And the food was great because they had all this property. They were in upstate New York and they had their own cows, their own chickens, their own pigs and they had their own slaughterhouse and they had their own butchery so you ate really fresh food. And they had farms with vegetables fresh right out of the ground. And there were decent guards up there. They were really cool, different than the ones in Long Island where they treated you like a piece of shit. These people treated you like human beings up there. It was very good. It might have been an old prison but they had new ideas.
It was very close to the Canada border and in the winter all you would see was white. Look out the bars, the window and you see the yard was about six feet high in snow. They had an indoor yard where you could get your exercise. They called it the indoor yard, the indoor facility because in the winter you couldn’t go outside because of the snow. The yard was filled with snow so they had an indoor thing to get your recreation. They had pool tables up there, it was really neat. Church services and AA meetings with cake. They loved me there because I was so neat with my cell. Oh, you’re so neat. We like people that are neat.
guy wouldn’t get off and I was supposed to call my girlfriend at the time at a certain time and he said, “Fuck
you, I’m not getting off this phone.” So I grabbed the receiver out of his hand and I broke his nose with it
and split his lip. I made my call, you know and they were pretty cool about it. They just said this was a
skirmish and this was a warning and one more time there would be trouble but I didn’t cause much trouble
up there.
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