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