Chapter 6: "You're dead punk." I waited to be dead. Dead was better.

San Francisco & Tacoma, Washington
February-August, 1968

The ambulance arrived and I was taken to San Francisco County Hospital to be treated for the gunshot.  That was a circus.  The media was all over me.  Newspapers, television, this was the event of the day in San Francisco.  I made the front page of the Chronicle but they had my name wrong.  My current identity was Kevin Fortier.  After treating my leg, I was taken to City Prison and booked.  I'm sticking with Kevin Fortier and hoping I can make bail before my prints come back.  As I'm standing in front of the booking desk, a parole agent who happened to be there made me.

"You're Windes", he said.

"No I'm not", I said, "my name's Fortier".

"No.  You're Kenneth Windes", he said excitedly.  He looked like he'd just had an orgasm.

"Place a parole hold on him", he instructed the desk Sargent as he made a beeline for the phone to call the parole office.  So much for bail.

They took me to a cell.  In the cell already was Moon, who worked for me, and three other runners.

"What happened?"

Moon replied, "The guys had just come by to make a pickup and I told them you would be back soon so they were hanging around.  There was a knock on the door and I asked who it was. Somebody said  'Federal agents' and I thought it was somebody kidding.  I picked up the .32 and opened the door.  There were two of them standing there with big guns pointed at me.  So I dropped my gun and here we are. Then they tore the place apart looking for counterfeit money.  They found the dope but no money.  So what’s going on?"

I told them about the morning's events and we started trying to figure out where the money had come from.  I thought it had been passed on to one of the runners, but they all said no to that.  Finally Moon told me that he'd lied about only giving drugs to runners.  He'd also sold to Dennis a friend of his, because he and Dennis had been tight in Quentin.  So we now knew where the counterfeit money had come from.

The next day, we were all going into withdrawal from heroin.  The whole cell was sick.  I had a heavier habit than any of them but I wasn't going to act like a sick junky in front of my employees so I was just toughing it out while they were acting like something out of a bad movie.  I'd seen "The Man With The Golden Arm" when I was a kid.  Frank Sinatra player a junky card dealer and there were scenes of him kicking cold-turkey that were very dramatic.  I'd kick a couple of small habits before and had gone through all the histronics that I'd seen Sinatra play.  I thought that was what you were supposed to do but I wasn't going to do it this time.  At least, not yet.  I wasn’t that sick yet. That afternoon, the short parole officer from the "special parole" department showed up in front of the cell.  He had the bullets from my .25 automatic.

"Dum-dums", he said.  "You were serious".  I didn't say anything.

"You look like you're in withdrawal", he continued. "Have you been using?"

I still didn't say anything.

"I'm taking you downstairs for testing," he said, and signaled a guard to let me out of the cell. They escorted me to the drug testing clinic in the basement of the jail and the doctor gave me a shot of Naline and measured my eyes.  If you had opiates in your system, Naline would counter them and put you into mild withdrawal and your eyes would get big.  They waited 15 minutes then measured my eyes again.  They were very big.  The parole officer commented that I had a heavy habit and told the doctor to give me a shot of morphine.  That got me well for a few hours.  They took me back upstairs.  I still hadn't said anything. Over the next few days I kicked the habit cold-turkey, standing up.  I learned something.  Kicking heroin is like having a bad case of the flu.  A really bad case but still just the flu.  Your nose runs and your body aches but the histronics aren't necessary.  It ain't that bad.

The feds finally bought that none of us knew anything about the money and they cut the runners loose.  Jimmy was charged with Possession of Heroin.  I was charged with Kidnapping a Federal Agent and Assault with a Deadly Weapon on a Federal Agent.  We both also had parole violations.

I worked out a deal with the federal prosecutor.  I would plead guilty to Assault with a Deadly Weapon on a Federal Agent and they would drop the Kidnapping charge.

I also worked out a deal with the California authorities.  I had served a total of about four years on convictions for Burglary and Forgery.  They carried an indeterminate sentence of 1 to 15 years.  The court gave you the indeterminate sentence and the California Adult Authority, which was the prison and parole board, decided how much time you would serve on that sentence.  Mine had originally been set at three years, 18 months in and 18 months on parole.  But I had immediately violated parole and it had been reset to five years, 30 months in and 30 months on parole.  Now it was back to fifteen years and I still had 11 to serve.

The Adult Authority told my attorney that they would dismiss the remaining 11 years if I got a reasonable sentence on the federal charge.  Reasonable meant eight to ten years.

I entered a guilty plea and asked for immediate sentencing.  There were no objection from the prosecutor so the judge sentenced me to five years in a federal prison.

"Your Honor", I said, "you have to give me more time than that."

"Why?", he asked.  So I explained the arrangement I'd made with California.  He asked my attorney if he was OK with this and then changed the sentence to ten years.  On ten years, I was eligible for parole in three and, if I didn't get a parole, with good time I could walk out in six.  I was good at getting them to parole me though.  I had a lot of experience.  I figured I'd do three or four years and that I was not in bad shape, all things considered.

There was a news reporter in the courtroom and the morning paper carried the conversation between the judge and me on the second page.  They got my name right this time.  The Adult Authority was embarrassed about having the deal advertised in the newspaper.  My attorney informed me they had reneged.  I still owed California eleven years and they would be waiting for me when I completed the federal sentence.  Now I was in bad shape.                              

In the morning a few days later, I was told get my stuff together and taken to a holding cell.  There were two other convicts in the cell.  They told me U.S. Marshalls were picking us up for transfer to McNeil Island Penitentiary.  McNeil Island was an island in Puget Sound in the state of Washington.  The convicts were Joe Crispo, who I didn't know, and Juan, a mexican who been in San Quentin with me.  Juan and his partner, Johnny Van, had gotten 20 years for robbing a bank after they got out of Quentin.  Johnny was already at McNeil Island.

Joe Crispo introduced himself and told me his story.  He'd been serving 20 years in Leavenworth Penitentiary for Bank Robbery when they found another bank he'd robbed in Sacramento, California.  He'd been transferred to the Sacramento jail to stand trial.  When he went to court, he was found 'not guilty' of that robbery.  When they took him back to the jail after the trial, the Deputy read the court document down to where it said 'not guilty' and saw the order releasing Joe on that charge.  So the Deputy released him.  Joe found himself standing outside the jail, free.  He got out of town before they realized their mistake.

He went to L.A. and hooked up with a friend named Tommy and they started on a spree of bank and supermarket robberies that lasted about a year.  Tommy had gotten busted on a supermarket and was in San Quentin doing 5 to life.  They'd gotten Joe a couple of months later coming out of a bank.  He now had eighty years to serve and was on his way back to Leavenworth via McNeil Island.

As we talked, it turned out that Joe's partner, Tommy, was an old friend of mine who'd grown up with me in the reform schools.  I hadn't seen him in a few years but we had been tight as kids.  So Joe and I had some rapport.

"If I get a chance, I'm going", said Joe.

"Me too".

Juan said, "I got an appeal going so I don't want to escape but I won't get in the way."

After an hour or so, the Marshalls arrived.  They handcuffed us to body chains wrapped around our waists, put us in the back seat of a private automobile and we took off.

It turned out that the driver was a U.S. Marshall and his companion was his next door neighbor.  The Marshalls were permitted to employ anyone to serve as guards while transporting prisoners and his neighbor was a plumber who was out on strike so the Marshall was doing him a favor and giving him a few days of work.

The plumber looked like a wimp so I wasn't concerned about him.  The Marshall, on the other hand, looked like a tackle off a football team.  He wouldn't be so easy.  We were riding comfortably in the back seat and the Marshall was open and friendly.  Joe and I kept a running conversation going with him to build a little rapport and put him at ease about us.  We were both trying to work our hands out of the handcuffs but, while they weren't uncomfortably tight, we couldn't get loose.

The way prisoners were transported around the country was the way we were being transported.  You were chained up and put in the back seat of a car.  They drove as far toward the destination as they could in one day, then booked you into a local jail overnight.  You'd get a meal that night, a bed to sleep on, then breakfast in the morning.  They then picked you up, put you back in the car, and you drove on.  This continued for as many days as it took to get you where you were going.  Our trip was scheduled to take two days.

That night we were booked into the jail at Roseburg, Oregon, a small town with a small jail.  As we were being booked in, I stole a ballpoint pen from the booking desk.  They fed us a great hot meal in a warm comfortable cell.  Small town jails are usually pretty homey.

After things had settled down that evening, Joe and I went to work.  We took the metal filler from the ballpoint pen and, using a pair of fingernail clippers as a tool, we fashioned the filler into a key for the handcuffs.  Handcuff keys were simple but you had to have something with a hole in it to fit over a little metal pip in the middle of the keyhole.  The pen filler was perfect.  We didn't have any handcuffs to try it on so we just did the best we could and came up with a key that was about an inch and a half long.

After breakfast the next morning, Joe put the key under his tongue because we had to go through a strip search.  Then we were back in the car, travelling north to Washington.  Joe hassled with the key for a couple of hours, reworking it in the back seat with the fingernail clippers.  He finally got it to work and got his cuffs open.  I had been carrying on a running conversation with the Marshall and the plumber to keep them distracted from Joe.  He'd chime in once in awhile.  Juan was aware of what was happening but he was sitting quietly on my left.  I was in the middle which put Joe on the right, behind the plumber.

He passed me the key and I started working with it.  It took about three hours for me to get the cuffs open but I finally did it. We kept the cuffs loosely about our wrists so it looked like we were still restrained.  Then we waited for an opening.

After a while the Marshall said, "We're about five miles from the prison.  Would you guys like a hamburger and a cup of coffee before you go in?"

"Sure", we said. He pulled into a roadside hamburger stand.

Joe and I just ordered coffee.  I was thinking we have to make a play soon.  Five miles isn't very far.  The plumber got the food and coffee and came back and handed the coffee to us over the back of the seat.  Juan got a hamburger with his.  We had to accept the coffee carefully so the cuffs didn't fall off.   The Marshall had stayed in the car, behind the wheel.  He started eating his hamburger.

I thought this was the best it was going to get so I said something to the Marshall.  He turned around to look at me and I threw the hot coffee in his face, grabbed him around the neck and reached across him take his gun.  The plumber panicked and started trying to get his door open.  Joe was also trying to get the back door open.  Juan was squeezed down in his seat, trying to stay out of the way. The Marshall reached up and grabbed my arm, freeing himself, and rolled out of the car.  His door had been ajar.  He came up off the ground, pulled his gun, reached in and put it against my head and cocked it.

"You're dead, punk", he said.

And I sat there waiting to be dead.  I felt very calm about it.  My sentences totalled twenty-one years.  Dead was better.

I don't know what went through his mind but he didn't pull the trigger.  He had the plumber get a bunch of chains from the trunk of the car.  Joe had managed to get his cuffs refastened around his wrists and he's sitting there looking as innocent as possible.  The Marshall didn't buy it.  He chained both us with leg irons and several sets of handcuffs.  He put leg irons on Juan too.

We drove the rest of the five miles with him cussin' and threatening me.  He was pretty mad.  We got to the ferry landing and had to walk a hundred yards from the car to the ferry to make the trip to the island.  Leg irons hurt when you're walking.  And he was making us walk fast, which was really painful.

When we got to the Island, all three of us were put in the hole.  Juan was released a couple of days later because they determined he had nothing to do with the escape.  I told them Joe had nothing to do with it either but the Marshall had seen Joe free of the cuffs.  We were in isolation for about 60 days, with a couple of trips over to the city of Tacoma where we were tried in federal court for Attempted Escape.  I had an additional charge of Assault on a Federal Agent.  I got on the stand and swore Joe had nothing to do with it but they convicted us both anyway.  I got an additional five years.  Total: 26 years.

After the sentencing we were released into general population.  I moved into an eight man cell with some guys from California.  Joe and I were on Maximum Custody status which meant that we couldn't be out of our cells at night and, during the day, we had to report to the yard Sargeant every hour.

McNeil Island didn't look that tough.  It was foggy a lot.  There was only one fence, with guntowers spaced around it.  But in the fog, they were blind.  I couldn't see that getting out of the prison would be that hard.  The problem was that it was two miles to shore.  But I could swim well.  I started jogging in the yard everyday to build up my stamina.  It was July, middle of the summer.  The cons who'd been there awhile told me that the fog was very heavy in the fall and winter so I figured I had a few months to get into shape.

Joe was very impressed with the way I'd tried to take the fall for the escape by myself.  I'd never been in a federal pen so was relatively unknown.  Joe was well regarded so I was getting good words said about me.  That's always helpful.  There were a few people I knew from the California prisons and I was making contacts and settling into the routine of prison life while getting ready to go for a swim in the winter.

I had been out of isolation about two weeks when I learned I was being scheduled for a transfer to the U.S. Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois.  Some of the guys began telling me about Marion.  It didn't sound like any place I wanted to be.  I talked to a couple of guys who had been there and they told me to forget about escaping from Marion.  If they got me there I was going to stay there.   I put in a request to see the Warden.

"Sir, I'd like to be allowed to do my time here at McNeil.  If you send me to Illinois, I'll never be able to see my family.  I've lived in California all my life and at least here I know a few people."

"Windes," he said, "you assault federal officers and you're intent on escaping.  Marion was built for you."

"I can't escape from here.  I don't even know to swim," I replied.  "And", I continued, "You've got some good vocational programs here that I'd like to take advantage of.  I hear Marion isn't big on vocational programs."

"You're right", he said with a laugh, "Marion isn't big on vocational programs.  You'll have to find some other way to occupy your time."  End of interview.  I was going to Marion.

I was now twenty-five years old and had twenty-six years of sentences to serve at the most maximum security prison in America.

Copyright 1994-2010 Liana Di Stefano & Ken Windes

Chapter 5: “But Officer I’m innocent. I didn’t know the drug money was counterfeit”

February, 1968

Bobby had to go to jail.  His court date had come up.  His brother had been paroled while I was in Soledad and he and Bobby had been pulling burglaries around the city.  One of their favorite things was to work the obituary columns in the newspaper.  They'd look up when someone was getting buried, then rip off the dead person's house while the funeral was going on, figuring everyone would be at the funeral. One of the places they hit was a retired cop who had died.  When they ripped off his house, they brought a lot of heat on themselves.  Every cop in the city was outraged and put a lot of attention on busting the operation.  The police figured out the pattern and set a trap.  Bobby and his brother walked right into it.  The brother, John, was on parole from a five to life for Armed Robbery.  Since he already had a life top, they didn't prosecute him but just revoked his parole and sent him to Folsom State Prison, the most maximum joint California had at that time.  Bobby was charged with second degree burglary.  He had no prior record so would normally have gotten probation as a first offender.  But, as I said, he'd ripped off the wrong house and the cops wanted him to do time.

With Bobby down for a year, I was on my own.  It was January 1967 and I had been out about five months. My record for being out of prison was ten months but I got arrested three or four times during that period and spent a few days in jail each time.  So five months out of a cell was a long time for me.



The money was now rolling in regularly from the drug business.  I was making the flights to LA once a week and everything was smooth.  I'd stopped the credit scam after Christmas was over and the runners were picking up dope and dropping off money everyday.  Lippy had finished the dry out and was back in business.  Maria had wanted me to begin scoring through Lippy but I told her I didn't want to pay the mark up.  Since I was doing good volume, she agreed to leave things the way they were.

I'd connected with a ring of "boosters" or professional shoplifters. One of them was a Mexican woman about 28 years old who had a wooden leg and was about 7 months pregnant.  She and her husband scored smack and crank from me regularly.  She'd gotten into the habit of dropping by my apartment each day and taking an order from me.  I'd order clothes or whatever items I wanted and she would spend the day boosting them from stores all over the city.  She'd deliver the stuff to me the next day in return for dope.  If she had an unsuccessful day, she'd trade me a blow job for the dope.  I'd sell the merchandise she got for me to a fence.  I'd gotten a new fence that had a TV store a couple of blocks from me so it was convenient.  He paid OK and took almost everything I brought him.



Bobby had left me a set of keys to office buildings in the city. I also had a set of keys for the San Francisco parking meters that I rented out.  The convicts made the keys at the county jail in San Bruno.  Almost everybody coming out of San Bruno had a couple of meter keys.  I had keys for every section of San Francisco. The county didn't give "gate money" when they released you so the keys were the equivalent of "gate money". You just walked down the street emptying parking meters.  For some people this was their whole hustle.  They would stake out a block or two and rent a hotel room where they could observe it.  They would wait for the meters to get full and hit them just before the city meter man was due to empty them.  They guarded them jealously.  If you tried to work the meters, they be down on you quick, willing to kill.

So everything was working kind of automatically.  The systems were in place and working and I had a lot of time on my hands.  I had begun reading books on investing and motivation.  One of them said that if you want to be rich, you have to develop a rich attitude.  It suggested going to a luxury hotel and sitting in the lobby, smoking a good cigar and reading the Wall St. Journal.  So I had started a routine of spending a hour a day in one of San Francisco's finest hotels, sitting in the lobby, smoking an expensive cigar and reading the Wall St. Journal.  Now that the money was rolling in, I wanted to learn the lifestyle.

I was also spending a couple of hours a day in a broker's office in the financial district watching the tape.  I didn't understand anything about the stock market but I was reading books and getting the idea that the market was where you got really rich.  So I'm hanging out there, trying to understand it.  I still had the office in the financial district I had rented a few months before and was trying to find a use for it.  I was keeping it so that, if I wound up back in prison, I could tell the parole board that I had operated a legitimate business with an office, etc.  I wasn't planning on going back to prison but, given my life experience up to this point, even with my gun and my commitment to die first, I couldn't entirely dismiss the possibility of prison.  It was imbedded in my psyche.

I was thinking about getting off of drugs.  My addiction had gotten outrageous.  It didn't cost me anything but I was beginning to visualize a new life and drugs didn't fit in the picture.  For the first time in my life, I could actually conceive of converting everything to legitimacy.  I'd have to continue with a different name but I could see how I could make everything legal and not have to risk at the level I had been risking.



Bobby's girlfriend in Oakland was named Linda.  After Bobby went down, I had started taking her to dinner or a show occasionally, just to keep her entertained until Bobby got out.  She was beautiful and we wound up in bed together.  So now I was having an affair with her while Bobby was in jail.  I justified it in my mind by saying that I was just taking care of her until Bobby got back.  It's amazing what lies we can tell ourselves and get away with it.

I called Linda and invited her to go to Las Vegas with me.  She agreed and we set up a trip to Vegas. I'd never been to Las Vegas before.  I'd only been out of California once and that was when I was four years old. 

Linda and I flew over to Vegas on a Friday because she had the weekend off.  Linda was a California blonde, about 5'6 and, as I mentioned, beautiful.  She was 24, divorced and had a 4 year old son.  She worked as a medical secretary and was completely straight.  No drugs.  No crime.  I didn't know why she was hanging out with losers like Bobby and me.  The only thing in our future was jail or death.  A lot of people are fascinated by criminals though.

We spent two days gambling, saw a show and ate in the gourmet room.  I lost a few hundred dollars playing Blackjack which I didn't know how to play, but I had a good time.  We stayed at El Rancho Vegas which was one of the earliest hotel casinos built on the Las Vegas Strip, following closely on the heels of Bugsy Seigal's Flamingo.

On Monday morning, we caught a 6am TWA flight back to San Francisco and then Linda took the bus back to her home.

The sun was out and the temperature was nice for February.  I had on a light sport coat and was comfortable. It was only 9:30 and the bank didn't open until 10am so I did some shopping, buying a pair of slacks at a men's store and picking up a couple of items at a drugstore.  That took up the half hour and I went into the bank and got in line for a teller to make the deposit.



When I got to the teller I handed over the deposit slip and the money.  The teller began counting the money and then picked it up, along with the deposit slip, excused herself and walked away.  I was standing there zoned on drugs, not realizing that something was wrong.  I was still standing there a few minutes later when two secret service agents show up beside me.  One of them said that some of the money I was depositing was counterfeit and they'd like to talk to me.  As he said this, he was lightly running his hands over my body to check for a gun.  My gun was in my left pants pockets and I indignantly twisted away so his hand didn’t touch it.  Then we went into the manager's office.

"Where did you get this money" one of the agents asked.  He was about 6'2 and had a sandy crew cut.  The other one was shorter and darker.

"I just got back from Vegas. I took some money with me and won a little so I was putting it back in my account.  Here, here's my airline ticket."  I took it from the inside of my coat and handed it to him.


He looked at the ticket, then said, "I doubt that you got these bills in Vegas.  They handle a lot of money there and these wouldn't have gotten past them.  Look at it."

He held up a twenty dollar bill. 
He was right.  It wouldn't have got passed me if I hadn't been stoned when I counted the money.  The ink was too dark and the printing was crooked.  Someone had done a very poor job.  It had been just good enough to get me busted.



I was still explaining that I didn't know where they came from and I wasn't a counterfeiter.  I made up a story on the spot about a business I owned and said that maybe the bills came from there. They noticed my packages and asked if I'd paid for the purchases with $20 bills.  I said I had.  They seemed to be doubtful about my guilt.  I was playing victimized citizen but I didn't think it was going to play long and I was trying to figure a way out of this when Crewcut told his partner to go check the cash drawer at the men's shop while he took me down to federal building for questioning.

There were no handcuffs.  I wasn't placed under arrest.  I was just requested to drive down to the federal building with him to answer a few questions.  We went out and got in the car.

 There was no way I could answer any questions.  I had a gun in my pocket, warrants out for my arrest, and I got the counterfeit money in a drug transaction.

"Do you get a lot of cash in your business?" Crewcut asked, referring to the fictional business I had made up in the bank.


"Yeah it's a retail store and we take in $200 to $300 a day.  I don't know how my clerk could have taken such poor quality bills though.  That stuff's really bad".

I took a cigarette out of my shirt pocket and patted my right pants pocket as though looking for a light.  Then I patted my left pants pocket with my right hand, made as though I discovered the lighter, reached in and pulled out the .25.

Crewcut looked down, saw the gun pointed at him and said, "Oh shit".


I held the gun in my lap, pointed at him, and put my left arm across my leg to cover it so he couldn't reach over and knock it away.


"Take it easy.  I don't want to hurt you".


"Passing counterfeit doesn't carry a lot of time", he said, "this is making it a lot worse."

"I really don't know anything about the money but I got it in a drug transaction and I'm on parole from San Quentin". 



He got the "OH shit" look on his face again.  I could see he had just realized how serious I was.  We were driving up Powell Street. 



"Turn right on California," I told him. 

He turned right.  Traffic was heavy.  It took us about five minutes to get to the bottom of the hill.  I continued to reassure him that I wasn't going to hurt him and that all I wanted was to walk away.  I also told him that the bullets in the gun were dum-dums so he wouldn't disrespect the small caliber of the gun. Some people are willing to go up against a .22 or .25 and take a bullet, knowing that it probably won't be fatal.  I didn't know if he was hero material or not but I let him know that the odds were different than they looked.



We had stopped at a red light at Kearny and California.  My office was at 225 Keary, about a block away.  The streets were packed with people.  I decided to leave him at the light, blend into the crowd and get to my office.  I could plan the next step from there.  I figured if he had a gun, he wouldn't shoot into the crowd.

Opening the door, I said, "I'm leaving now.  Stay in the car".

I got out and ran into the crowd on the sidewalk. He got out of the car, pulled a gun and shot me.  So much for not shooting into a crowd. 

The bullet hit my leg and knocked me down.  My gun went spinning in the street, landing about 6 feet away.  The next thing I knew, his foot was on my back and his gun was at my head.  I couldn't move if I wanted to.  He cuffed my hands behind my back and radioed for backup and an ambulance. The Secret Service backup arrived before the ambulance.  They searched me while I was lying in the street.  My current identification had the address of my apartment on it, so they were going to find the dope. 

I knew the parole board had just passed a new ruling that any parolee caught with a gun wouldn't be eligible for parole for a minimum of five years.  They wouldn’t even talk to you for five years.  The two ounces of heroin in my apartment was good for another five.  So I was laying there in the street with a bullet in my leg facing at least ten years inside.

Copyright 1994-2010 Liana Di Stefano & Ken Windes

Chapter 4

Ken Windes
San Francisco, California
February 1968

I went to San Francisco and reported to my parole officer. The only reason I reported to him was to pick up my ‘gate money’, sixty dollars which paroled convicts were given to live on until they could get a job, or rob somebody.

“Windes, you’re a ‘high-risk’ parolee and you’ve been assigned to a Special Parole Unit,” Samuels the parole officer barked at me. The parole officer was short, about 5'4", and tried to make up for it by talking tough.

“What’s a Special Parole Unit?” I asked naively, as though I couldn’t guess.

“It means you’re under intensive supervision. You’re moving into the hotel next door. I want you in here at eight each morning until you find a job. If you’re even ten minutes late, you go back to the joint” he said still trying to sound like a Marine Corps sergeant, “and you show up for drug testing twice a week and go to a counselling program. Flunk the test, you’re on the next bus to San Quentin. You’ve violated parole nine times. Last time you stabbed someone in a fight. You use drugs. You’re a violent offender with a drug history. You don’t get any passes coming. You fuck up, we lock you up,” he said.

I felt like slapping the wimp but this wasn’t the time or place. The funny thing was he looked like he actually believed I would do what he was demanding. Then he gave me the money and I walked out of his office and disappeared.

I went over to the East Bay and hung out with an old girlfriend Peggy, a junkie and occasional prostitute, for a few days, smoking opium and getting laid. Once I got tired of her, I grabbed a bus north to Santa Rosa to visit my mother.  She'd just remarried for the third time to a Japanese American named John so I went up to meet him.  He was a produce manager for a grocery store and a friendly guy who seemed to love my mother and liked me right away.  I spent one night with them and John sold me a 1966 Buick for $200.00 and said I could pay him later.  My mother objected, telling him that I would be back in jail in a few weeks and he’d never get paid. I couldn’t argue, that was her experience of me, but he sold me the car anyway.

I jumped in the car and drove back to San Francisco.  When I pulled up to the toll booth at the Golden Gate Bridge, the car stalled.  It had over-heated.  John had warned me that it had some problems.  I waited an hour for it to cool off, then drove into the city and looked up Bobby, a friend of mine. He had a house on Potrero Hill.  It was a green two story San Francisco gingerbread house with bay windows. He was living in this big place alone and invited me to crash there for awhile, so I moved into his spare bedroom.  I'd met Bobby at the state hospital the last time I'd been out on parole.  I'd been out for about three weeks and had overdosed on speed and flipped into a drug psychosis.  I got picked up by the police while wandering around the streets, paranoid.  They'd booked me into the psychiatric ward at the county hospital.  The drugs wore off after a couple of days and I was fine but I'd violated parole.  My parole officer visited me at the hospital and offered me the choice of going back to San Quentin to dry-out for ninety days or committing myself to the drug program at the state hospital for ninety days.  I'd just gotten out of San Quentin so I opted for the state hospital.  Bobby was there at the same time doing ninety days in drug rehab, kicking a heroin habit.

I rang Bobby’s doorbell and he opened the door. 

‘Hey Kenny,’ he welcomed me, ‘when did you get out?’

‘A few days ago, what’s been happening?’

‘Same-o, Same-o’, he said. He looked thin and wasted and I guessed he was using smack. ‘I got some good Mexican Brown,’ he said smiling, ‘wanna get high?’

‘Yeah, do you have any crank to go with it?’ I didn’t like heroin by itself. It was a sleepy high, just sitting around and nodding out and mumbling to each other.

‘I got some crank somewhere here,’ he said with a frown, ‘but I don’t like that stuff, Kenny. It drives me crazy. I get paranoid behind it.’

We got high and began catching up with each other.

‘I’m dealing a little smack,’ Bobby mumbled, ‘but otherwise keeping low ‘cause I’m out on bail.’

‘What for?’, I asked, surprised because Bobby had never been busted before.

‘My brother, John, got paroled from Folsom just after you went back in and we started pulling burglaries together. We were working the obituary section of the newspaper. We’d see when someone was being buried and then rip off the dead person’s house while everyone was at the funeral. One day they were burying a retired cop and we ripped off the house. Every cop in the city got pissed off. They figured out what we were doing and were waiting for us the next time. John already had a Five to Life for Armed Robbery so they just shipped him back to Folsom on a parole violation but I have to show up in court.’
‘That shouldn’t be rough, you’re a first offender and you’ll get probation.’

‘My attorney says they won’t go for probation ‘cause they’re really pissed off about it being an ex-cop and all. He’s says I’m going to have to do time,’ he mumbled with his head nodding on his chest.

‘We can probably do something about it if you do.’ I said ‘let’s see what happens’.

‘Where are you crashing, Kenny’ he asked

‘Nowhere, I’m homeless today.’

‘Move in here,’ he offered, ‘I’ve got three extra bedrooms.’

‘Ok, thanks’

When I came out of Soledad this time I'd decided that I was tired of being in prison.  I'd already served eleven years and I couldn't see a future that didn't include more prison.  So I decided that I would get a gun and, when they came to arrest me the next time, I would shoot it out and either get away or die. I didn't really care which it was. I wasn't a gun person.  I'd never carried one or owned one but I decided that dead was better than prison.  I was just tired of doing time. I'd been out about a week and I knew a warrant for Violation of Parole had already been issued so it wouldn’t be long before the cops were looking for me. 

‘I need a gun. Have you got anything?’ I asked Bobby.

He had .22 caliber Derringer, that he gave me for seventy five dollars, saying I could pay him back later.  It was a weird gun.  It had four barrels.  Two over and two under.  The firing pin revolved when you fired it.  I'd never heard of anything like it but, I wasn't very sophisticated about guns.  I did know a .22 didn't carry much fire power so I took a file and cross-hatched the nose of the bullets, turned them into dum-dums, so they would explode on impact.  Then I had dipped them in garlic.  I had read somewhere that doing those things vastly increased the fire power of a small caliber weapon.

I spent the next few weeks working a few scams to pick up some money. I’d run into a friend of some friends and we’d begun a check-kiting scheme on some banks to finance buying twenty thousand dollars worth of some good counterfeit twenty dollar bills he said he had access to. I was also working credit cons on some store and finance companies. I’d gotten a new set of ID right away because of the warrant for Parole Violation, and I was changing it every week or two.  I was establishing credit and buying merchandise with little or no down payment, then selling it to a fence Bobby had introduced me to. I was also helping Bobby in his drug operation, which was really small-time. Bobby was scoring from ‘Lippy’, an old convict, and dealing to a few junkies, mainly supporting his own habit.

By now I was using everyday.  I had a small habit going, just enough to feel uncomfortable if I didn't have the drug.  When I shot heroin, I would sit around doing nothing, which wasn't my thing.  I liked hustling, creating, moving.  I really preferred Speed to Heroin. Speed would put me into overdrive.  I could go days without sleep, moving here and there, with energy to do anything.  The problem with Speed is that, if you go without sleep, paranoia creeps in and psychosis occurs.  My solution to this was to "highball" or mix methamphetamine, called "crystal or crank", and heroin or "smack".  Methamphetamine would speed me up and heroin would mellow me out so I had the energy to hustle without the danger of paranoia and psychosis. I also slept regularly. I got into a routine of getting high and hanging out with Bobby and some other junkies.

One day three Hippys  showed up from the Haight Ashbury district, wanting to score some dope.  They showed me a cashiers check they had just stolen from a mailbox.  The woman it belonged to had just gotten married and left for Europe on her honeymoon.  It was for $3000 and drawn on the California Street Branch of a foreign bank.  They asked me if I could do anything with it.  I told them I'd handle for 75% and they agreed.  They drove me over to Oakland in a little yellow Volkswagon Beetle.  Four of us filled up that car.  There was a branch of the bank in Oakland and I wanted to cash the check there.  Since I didn't have a copy of the woman’s signature, I wanted to cash it someplace where there wouldn't be a signature card on file. 
I walked into the bank, went up to a teller and said with a smile, "Is this any good?" 

She laughed and said, "Well, it better be," since it was a cashier's check drawn on their bank. 

One of the Hippys was a girl and I'd had her endorse the back of the check so it would be in a woman's handwriting.  The teller didn't have enough money in her cash drawer to cash the check so she went into the safe and came out a couple of minutes later with a handful of hundred dollar bills.  The manager walked over and asked what was happening and she showed him the check.  He came over to me and asked a couple of questions and then said he would have to call San Francisco to make sure the check was good.  I said OK and stood there while he made the call.  He got off the phone and said that the check was good but it would have to be cashed at the San Francisco branch so they could check the signature against the signature card.

I got back into the car with the Hippys and discussed the situation.  I figured that the worse that could happen would be that they would refuse to cash the check.  It hadn't been reported stolen so there was no heat on it.  We drove to San Francisco.

I walked into the bank and did the same number with a young woman teller.  She called a manager over to get approval and the manager was hesitant.

"Why do you have this check", he asked.

"She owed me some money and paid me with this.  Don't tell me it's no good".

"No," he replied, "it's good but it's made out to her and she needs to cash it herself."

"She endorsed it", I said, "and told me that was all that was needed.  I can't have her come in and cash it.  She got married and left for Europe on her honeymoon.  She's owed me this money for a long time and I need it in my business right now.  She won't be back for a month.”

We talked a bit more and he finally agreed to cash it and told the teller to pull the signature card and check the signature.  Then they couldn't find the signature card because the account had been closed.  I was breathing a sigh of relief about that but now the manager was balking about cashing the check again.  I explained how desperate I was for the money, pointed out it was a cashier's check that is supposed to be the same as cash, and continued to be as charming as possible. Then they found the signature card in the "closed accounts" file.  The signatures didn't match but they weren't that far off.  We had a discussion about that.

"Look, she just got married,” I finally said, “that creates a lot changes in a person.  The signatures aren't that different.  She's probably just reacting emotionally and it's showing up in a slightly altered signature."

The young teller who had been handling the transaction said to the manager, "That's true.  My signature looked different when I got married." 

I couldn't believe she'd said that.
The manager looked at her, then looked at me, and said, "I hope there's nothing wrong here".  Then he told her to cash the check.  I walked out with $3000 and a real good feeling about myself.  I felt proud.  I gave the Hippy's their $750 and they drove me back to Bobby's place.

After I told Bobby about the score I'd made, he told me that he had a connection in Mexico for Heroin.  We could score ounces, cut it five times (into five ounces) and deal it for $20 a spoon.  There were twelve spoons in an ounce and the original ounce would only cost $325.00.  That was sixty spoons for a gross of $1200.00.

Bobby's connection was THE connection in California at that time. They were brothers who were dope dealers. Both had served time in California prisons.  The younger brother, was parolled from San Quentin.  He stopped in L.A. long enough to pick up his wife, and then went to Tijuana, Mexico and set up a drug operation. The older brother was parolled later and he joined them. They had set it up really well.  They sold ounces of Heroin.  You could score kilos too but ounces was their main business.  It was all "arms length".

To purchase heroin, you wired the money, in advance, to Mexico.  Then you flew to Los Angeles, called Mexico and gave them the phone number where you could be reached.  Within 24 hours you would receive a call, directing you to go to a gas station, restaurant, etc., where your merchandise would be taped inside a toilet, under a public phone or hidden somewhere.  Nobody ever saw anybody.  There was no personal contact. Lippy, the old convict, had the franchise for San Francisco with the brothers.  He'd served time with them both and had the relationship.  If you wanted to score heroin through this channel, you had to deal with Lippy at a big mark up.

Bobby told me that Lippy had just gotten busted for a parole violation and was in San Quentin for a "dry out".  A "dryout" was a 90 day sentence on the ranch at San Quentin for parolees who were found using drugs.  They didn't revoke your parole but just sent you to the ranch to "dry out", i.e. get the drugs out of your system.  I'd done a dry out a couple of years earlier but had assaulted someone while I was at the ranch so I got sent inside the walls for a year. Bobby and I had decided to go into the heroin business together.

My identity was hot from the bank scam so I went to another Department of Motor Vehicles office and got a new driver's license and picked up another social security card at the social security office in Oakland. I'd also rented an office in the financial district and installed a phone so I could verify my own employment when applying for credit.  I was continuing the credit scam at retail stores, picking up clothing, jewelry and appliances that I sold to the fence.  It was the Christmas season and easy to justify making multiple purchases of diverse items.  I'd also gone into a couple of small finance companies and gotten a personal signature loan for $300.00 dollars in each, explaining that I needed the money to make christmas for my family.

Once we were set up, I called the brothers in Tijuana.

"Bueno", a woman answered.

"Is this Maria?", I asked.  I'd never met the brothers and was calling cold. 

"Yes", she responded.

"My name is Kevin, I'm a friend of Lippy's.  Lippy's down. He's doing a dryout at Q.  I'd like to do business with you."

"How long will Lippy be away?" she asked. 

"Probably 90 days".

She asked me how much I wanted and I ordered 3 ounces.  She explained where to wire the money and told me to go to LA and call her with my phone number.  As simply as that I was doing business with the top heroin dealers in Mexico.

Bobby and I wired $975.00 to Tijuana from the Western Union on Market Street, drove to the airport and purchased two round-trip tickets to LA for $29 apiece.  When we got to LA, we caught a taxi to a motel about a mile from the airport, checked in and called Maria to give her the number.

We didn't have any heroin left and Bobby had been going into withdrawal before we left San Francisco.  We were in the hotel room for 24 hours, waiting for the call.  He was in misery, eating candy bars, taking hot showers and doing the other things a junkie experiencing withdrawal does to alleviate the discomfort. Mostly bitching a lot. I wasn't using that much heroin so I wasn't too uncomfortable.

The call came and we went to a small cocktail lounge a couple of miles away.  We went into the toilet and lifted the top of the tank.  Three packages were taped inside.  We took them, went back to the motel and sampled the product.  Bobby got well and we checked out of the motel and flew back to San Francisco. The heroin was 28% pure.  That meant we could step on it, cut it with lactose, five times.  One ounce became five ounces of about  5% heroin.  5% was the normal purity of street heroin in San Francisco. In Los Angeles, it was two to three percent.  The rest was milk sugar.  Bobby suggested that we only make four cuts and put out a stronger product but I vetoed it.  I been in San Quentin a couple years earlier and met a dealer named Manny Gomez.  He was serving five years to Life for a couple of Armed Robberies and had also gotten an additional five to life for 2nd degree murder.  He told me that he had put some 10% dope on the street and a couple of people had died from over doses. Since he'd sold them the dope, he'd been charged with murder and convicted.  I didn't want to make the same mistake.

We moved the dope in a week and were back in LA scoring again.  We began developing a small organization of runners who took the dope on consignment and sold it on the street.  That put a layer of protection between us and the junkies.  We were also keeping some of the 28% pure for our own use and I was getting heavily addicted even though I was mixing it with crank.  I had what was called a "dealer's habit".  The dope didn't cost me anything and it was high quality. Money was rolling in.  I was stashing it in accounts in banks under various names all over the city.  I was changing identities about once every two weeks and that included getting a different car every two weeks.

There were a couple of bi-sexual women living around the corner from Bobby's who were lovers.  They occasionally scored drugs from me and we had a loose sexual relationship.  One night I got a call from one of them, Laura.

"Kenny", she said, "Would you like to go to a Sexual Freedom League party?"

"What's a Sexual Freedom League party?"

"It's this bay area organization that rents a house for an evening and throws a big orgy", she replied. "You have to  go with a partner and I've got a girlfriend who wants to go but her partner can't get there until midnight and she wants to go earlier.  If you go with her, you can go from eight to midnight but you have to leave when her boyfriend gets there."

With all the drugs I was pumping into my system and the time I was spending hustling and running the drug operation, I didn't have much of a sex drive.  But I'd never been to an orgy so it sounded like fun and I agreed.  I picked up the woman at an apartment on Geary St. that night and we drove out to a two story San Francisco gingerbread house in the Haight Ashbury, near the park. We were met at the front door by a guy who was acting as host/doorman. He asked if were over 21 and we said yes; then he asked if we were affiliated with any law-enforcement agency and whether or not we were in possession of any illegal drugs.  We answered "no", paid two dollars apiece and walked inside.

The downstairs living room was full of nude people, standing around talking and drinking.  About 50 of them.  There was a small room to the right of the entrance that had clothes hanging from hooks and piled on the floor.  The woman I was with began undressing so I did too.  Then we joined the crowd.  She wandered off and I was standing there by myself, naked in a crowd of naked people.  I was feeling awkward, not sexy at all.  There was an old style claw-foot bathtub in the middle of the room filled with ice and soft-drinks.  And there was a bar set up in a corner.  I got a coke from the bathtub and started joining little groups and talking.  After a while, I started exploring the rest of the house.  It had five or six bedrooms but there was no furniture in the entire house except the claw-foot bathtub in the living room.  They'd rented it unfurnished.

I opened the door to one of the bedrooms and walked into an orgy.  The room was about 10' by 10' and packed with people connected to each other every way they could be.  I jumped in.  But couldn't do anything.  The drugs in my system, combined with the awkwardness I was feeling about being in a room full of naked bodies frantically fucking each other, kept me limp.  Several people did their best to help me get it up but nothing worked so I left after about 30 minutes and went back downstairs. After another couple of hours of cokes and conversation, I went home. I could now say I had attended an orgy.  My conclusion about orgies was that sex is best with one or two friends.              

Copyright 1994-2010 Liana Di Stefano & Ken Windes