The Devil and Sherlock Holmes (35 page)

Once you were on base, Henderson said, the next step was taking a lead. Most players, he explained, mistakenly assume that you need a big lead. “That’s one of Rickey’s theories: Rickey takes only three steps from the bag,” he said. “If you’re taking a big lead, you’re going to be all tense out there. Then everyone knows you’re going. Just like you read the pitcher, the pitcher and catcher have read you.”

He spread his legs again and pretended to stare at the pitcher. “O.K., you’ve taken your lead; now you’re ready to find that one part of the pitcher’s body that you already know tells you he’s throwing home. The second you see the sign, then, boom, you’re gone.” He lifted his knees and dashed toward second base. After he stopped, he said, “I’ll tell you another of Rickey’s theories.” Nearly all base stealers, he explained, begin their run by crossing their left foot in front of their right, as they turn their bodies toward second. That was also a mistake. “If you cross over, it forces you to stand straight up to get into your stride,” he said. “That’s the worst thing you can do as a runner. You want to start out low and explode.”

As Henderson was conducting his demonstration, members of the opposing team arrived and began to look on. He said that the final touch was the slide. Before Henderson, the great base stealers typically went feet first. Henderson decided that it would be faster—not to mention more daring and stylish—to go in head first, the way Pete Rose, who was never a major base stealer, occasionally did. Yet each time Henderson tried the head-first slide he would bounce violently, brutally pounding his body. Then, one day, while he was flying to a game, he noticed that the pilot landed the plane in turbulence without a single bump. Henderson recalled, “I asked the pilot, I said, ‘How the hell did you do that?’ He said the key is coming in low to the ground, rather than dropping suddenly. I was, like, ‘Dang. That’s it!’” After that, Henderson said, he lowered his body gradually to the ground, like an airplane.

Henderson concluded by saying that if the base runner studied the pitcher, made a good jump, and slid well, he should beat the throw nearly every time. And, if for some reason he was caught, the moment he got back on base he should try to steal again. As Henderson put it to me, “To steal a base, you need to think you’re invincible.”

  “Look at your head,” the Surf Dawgs’ hitting instructor said to Henderson one July afternoon. “You’re dropping it down.”

“I know it,” Henderson said, stepping back in the batting cage. He took several more swings, but nothing seemed to be going right. “Come on, Rickey, you’re better than this!” he yelled.

That month, his batting average had plunged from .311 to .247—one of the lowest on the team. In May, he hit only one home run; he had none in June. “He still sees the ball well,” Kennedy, who was leaning against the cage, said of Henderson. “But he doesn’t have the bat speed to get around.”

After a dismal series against the Samurai Bears, an all-Japanese squad that had the worst record in the league, Henderson began staring at the ground in the outfield. Kennedy turned to his coaches and said, “I think we’ve lost him.”

Kennedy, believing that Henderson was ready to quit, later called him into his office. “I understand if you’re through,” Kennedy said.

“No, man, it’s not that. It’s just my damn hitting. I can’t get it straight.”

As the weeks wore on, it became clearer that the defiant mind-set that had made him a great base stealer had, in many ways, trapped him in the Golden Baseball League. He was forever convinced that he could do the impossible. “When I went to play with the Newark Bears, I was sure I would be there for only a few weeks—that a major-league team would call me,” he said. “But one week became two weeks, and now it’s two years and I’m still waiting for that call.”

Trying to improve his average, he started to experiment with his trademark crouch; he stood straighter at the plate, until he was an almost unrecognizable figure. “I remember at the end of my career I began to doubt my ability,” Kennedy said. “I knew what I wanted to do, but my body wouldn’t let me do it. And I called my father and said, ‘Dad, did you ever start to think you weren’t good enough to play this game?’ And he said, ‘I did, and once you do you can never get it back.’”

During the game against the Scorpions in late July, after Henderson had singled and was on first, he got into his three-step lead. I had been travelling with the team periodically throughout the season, waiting to see him steal. The crowd implored him to run, and several times the pitcher threw to first to keep him close. “Here he goes!” a fan yelled. “Watch out!” But, when the pitcher went into his motion, Henderson didn’t move. He stood there, frozen. “What’s wrong, Rickey?” another fan yelled. “Can’t you steal anymore?” On the next pitch, Henderson took his lead again and wiggled his fingers. The pitcher seemed to dip his shoulder when he was about to throw home—his tell—but Henderson didn’t break. After several more pitches, the batter hit a ground ball to short and Henderson was easily thrown out at second. As Henderson returned to the dugout, he shouted, “Goddam cocksucking sun was in my eyes. I couldn’t see a goddam motherfucking bullshit thing.” He sat in the dugout with his head bowed, and for the first time since I had seen him play he didn’t say a word.

Two weeks later, in the middle of August, as the Surf Dawgs’ season was nearing its end, word spread in the clubhouse that the Oakland A’s had just phoned about a player. Kennedy came out and told the team the good news: a Surf Dawg was being called up to Oakland’s AAA farm team. It was Adam Johnson, the pitcher. Afterward, Henderson told me, “I’m happy to see one of the guys get out of the league, to get a chance to move on.” He seemed genuinely glad for him and refused to mention his own circumstances. On another night on the field, however, he pointed to the Surf Dawg logo on his jersey and said, “I never thought I might end my career in this uniform.” I asked if he would retire at the end of the season. “I don’t know if I can keep going,” he said. “I’m tired, you know.” As he picked up his glove, he stared at the field for a moment. Then he said, “I just don’t know if Rickey can stop.”

—September, 2005

After the 2005 season, Henderson quit the Golden Baseball League, though he continued to hope that he would get a call to play again in the majors. In 2009, at the age of fifty, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame. He still insisted, “I can come back and play.”

Part Three

“A thick, black cloud swirled before my eyes, and my mind told me that in this cloud, unseen as yet, but about to spring out upon my appalled senses, lurked all that was vaguely horrible, all that was monstrous and inconceivably wicked in the universe.”

DR. WATSON, in “The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot”

The Brand

THE RISE
OF THE
MOST DANGEROUS
PRISON GANG
IN AMERICA

On a cold, damp December morning in 2002, after weeks of secret planning, the United States Marshals launched one of the most unusual dragnets in the organization’s two-hundred-and-fifteen-year history. As the fog lifted on a small stretch of land in the northwesternmost corner of California—a sparsely populated area known primarily for its towering redwoods—nearly a dozen agents, draped in black fatigues and bulletproof vests, and armed with assault rifles and walkie-talkies, gathered in a fleet of cars. The agents sped past a town with a single post office and a mom-and-pop store, and headed deep into the forest until they arrived at a colossal compound, a maze of buildings surrounded by swirling razor wire and an electrified fence that was lethal to the touch. A gate opened and, as guards looked down with rifles from beneath watchtowers, the convoy rolled inside. The agents jumped out.

After entering one of the buildings and walking down a long corridor lined with surveillance cameras, the officers reached their destination: a fortified cellblock in the heart of Pelican Bay, California’s most notorious prison. They could hear inmates moving in their ten-by-twelve, window-less cement cells. Pelican Bay housed more than three thousand inmates, men who were considered too violent for any other state prison and had, in the parlance of correctional officers, “earned their way in.” But the men on the cellblock, which was known as the Hole, were considered so dangerous that they had been segregated from this already segregated population.

Four prisoners were ordered to remove their gold jumpsuits and slide them through a tray slot. While some officers searched their belongings, others, using flashlights, peered through holes in the steel doors to examine the inmates’ ears, nostrils, and anal cavities. To make sure that the prisoners had no weapons “keistered” inside them, the guards instructed them to bend down three times; if they refused, the guards would know that they were afraid to puncture their intestines with a shank. Once the search was complete, the inmates were shackled and escorted to a nearby landing strip, where they were loaded onto an unmarked airplane.

All across the country, agents were fanning out to prisons. They seized a fifth inmate from a maximum-security prison in Concord, New Hampshire. They took another from a jail in Sacramento, California. Then they approached the Administrative Maximum Prison, in Florence, Colorado, a “supermax” encircled by snow-covered ravines and renowned as “the Alcatraz of the Rockies.” There, in the most secure federal penitentiary in the country—a place that housed Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, and Ramzi Yousef, the man behind the bombing of the World Trade Center, in 1993—agents apprehended four inmates who were allegedly responsible for more than a dozen prison murders.

Before long, the marshals had rounded up twenty-nine inmates—all of whom were among the most feared men in the American prison system. One had strangled an inmate with his bare hands; another had poisoned a fellow-prisoner. A man nicknamed the Beast was thought to have ordered an attack on an inmate who had shoved him during a basketball game; the inmate was subsequently stabbed seventy-one times and his eye was gouged out.

Then there was Barry Mills, who was known as the Baron. Soft-spoken and intense, with a gleaming bald head, he was described by one of his former prosecutors as a “cunning, calculating killer.” He liked to crochet in his cell and, according to authorities, compose lists of enemies to kill. In a previous court case, he testified that “we live . . . in a different society than you do. There is justified violence in our society. I’m here to tell you that. I’m here to tell all you that.” He was not, he conceded, “a peaceful man,” and “if you disrespect me or one of my friends, I will readily and to the very best of my ability engage you in a full combat mode. That’s what I’m about.” Once, at a maximum-security prison in Georgia, Mills was found guilty of luring an inmate into a bathroom stall and nearly decapitating him with a knife.

Along with the Baron and the other prisoners, five women on the outside were also seized, as well as three ex-cons and a former prison guard. Most of those apprehended—there were forty in total—were transported on a Boeing 727, with their legs and arms shackled to their seats, while guards patrolled the aisles, their rifles sealed in compartments out of arm’s reach. Days later, the prisoners ended up in a Los Angeles courtroom, where they were accused of being members of an elaborate criminal conspiracy directed by the Aryan Brotherhood, or the Brand. Authorities had once dismissed the Aryan Brotherhood as a fringe white-supremacist gang; now, however, they concluded that what prisoners had claimed for decades was true—namely, that the gang’s hundred or so members, all convicted felons, had gradually taken control of large parts of the nation’s maximum-security prisons, ruling over thousands of inmates and transforming themselves into a powerful criminal organization.

The Brand, authorities say, established drug-trafficking, prostitution, and extortion rackets in prisons across the country. Its leaders, often working out of barren cells in solitary confinement, allegedly ordered scores of stabbings and murders. They killed rival gang members; they killed blacks and homosexuals and child molesters; they killed snitches; they killed people who stole their drugs, or owed them a few hundred dollars; they killed prison guards; they killed for hire and for free; they killed, most of all, in order to impose a culture of terror that would solidify their power. And, because the Brotherhood is far more cloistered than other gangs, it was able to operate largely with impunity for decades—and remain all but invisible to the outside world. “It is a true secret society,” Mark Hamm, a prison sociologist, told me.

For the first time, on August 28, 2002, that world cracked open. After more than a decade of trying to infiltrate the Brand’s operations, a relatively unknown Assistant United States Attorney from California named Gregory Jessner indicted virtually the entire suspected leadership of the gang. He had investigated hundreds of crimes linked to the gang; some were cold cases that reached back nearly forty years. In the indictment, which ran to a hundred and ten pages, Jessner charged Brand leaders with carrying out stabbings, strangulations, poisonings, contract hits, conspiracy to commit murder, extortion, robbery, and narcotics trafficking. The case, which was expected to go to trial in 2005, could lead to as many as twenty-three death-penalty convictions—more than any in American history.

One morning in 2003, I visited the United States Attorney’s office in downtown Los Angeles, where the prosecution was preparing to arraign the last of the forty defendants. As I waited in the lobby, a slender young man appeared in a gray suit. He had short brown hair, and he carried a folder under his arm as if he were a paralegal. Unlike the attorneys around him, he spoke in a soft, almost reticent voice. He introduced himself as Gregory Jessner.

“I’m forty-two,” he told me, as if he were often greeted with similar astonishment. “Believe it or not, I used to look much younger.” He reached into his pocket and revealed an old office I.D. He looked seventeen.

He led me back into his office, which had almost nothing on the walls and appeared to be decorated solely with boxes from the case, one stacked upon the other. On his desk were several black-and-white photographs, including one of an inmate who had been strangled by the gang.

“An Aryan brother went in his cell and tied a garrote around his neck,” Jessner said. He held out his hands, demonstrating, with tapered fingers, how an Aryan Brotherhood member had braided strips of a bedsheet into a noose. “This is a homicidal organization,” he said. “That’s what they do. They kill people.”

He was accustomed, he explained, to murder cases, but he had been shocked by the gang’s brutality. “I suspect they kill more than the Mafia,” he said. “They kill more than any single drug trafficker. There are a lot of gang-related deaths on the streets, but they are usually more disorganized and random.” He paused, as if calculating various numbers in his head. “I think they may be the most murderous criminal organization in the United States.”

There are hundreds of gangs in this country: the Crips, the Bloods, the Latin Dragons, the Dark Side Nation, the Lynch Mob. But the Aryan Brotherhood is one of the few gangs that were born in prison. In 1964, as the nation’s racial unrest spread into the penitentiaries, a clique of white inmates at San Quentin prison, in Marin County, California, began gathering in the yard. The men were mostly motorcycle bikers with long hair and handlebar mustaches; a few were neo-Nazis with tattoos of swastikas. Together, they decided to strike against the blacks, who were forming their own militant group, called the Black Guerrilla Family, under the influence of the celebrated prison leader George Jackson. Initially, the whites called themselves the Diamond Tooth Gang, and as they roamed the yard they were unmistakable: pieces of glass embedded in their teeth glinted in the sunlight.

Before long, they had merged with other whites at San Quentin to form a single band: the Aryan Brotherhood. While there had always been cliques in prison, known as “tips,” these men were now aligned by race and resorted to a kind of violence that had never been seen at San Quentin, a place that prisoners likened to “gladiator school.” All sides, including the Latino gangs La Nuestra Familia and the Mexican Mafia, attacked each other with homemade knives that were honed from light fixtures and radio parts, and hidden in mattresses, air vents, and drainpipes. “Everything was seen through the delusional lens of race—everything,” Edward Bunker, an inmate at the time, told me. (He went on to become a novelist, and appeared as Mr. Blue in “Reservoir Dogs.”)

Most prison gangs tried to recruit “fish,” the new and most vulnerable inmates. But according to interviews with former gang members—as well as thousands of pages of once classified F.B.I. reports, internal prison records, and court documents—the Aryan Brotherhood chose a radically different approach, soliciting only the most capable and violent. They were given a pledge:

An Aryan brother is without a care,
He walks where the weak and heartless won’t dare,
And if by chance he should stumble and lose control,
His brothers will be there, to help reach his goal,
For a worthy brother, no need is too great,
He need not but ask, fulfillment’s his fate.
For an Aryan brother, death holds no fear,
Vengeance will be his, through his brothers still here.

By 1975, the gang had expanded into most of California’s state prisons and was engaged in what authorities describe as a full-fledged race war. Dozens had already been slain when, that same year, a fish named Michael Thompson entered the system. A twenty-three-year-old white former high-school football star, he had been sentenced for helping to murder two drug dealers and burying their bodies in a lime-filled pit in a back yard. Six feet four and weighing nearly three hundred pounds, he was strong enough to break ordinary shackles. He had brown hair, which was parted in the middle, and hypnotic blue eyes. Despite the violent nature of his crime, he had no other convictions and, with a chance for parole in less than a decade, he initially kept to himself, barely aware of the different forces moving around him. “I was a fish with gills out to fucking here,” he later said.