The Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick Maker(Michael D. Warner) THE BUTCHER THE BAKER AND THE
CANDLESTICK MAKER

By Michael D. Warner

Copyright 2013 by Michael D. Warner All rights reserved.


A cold wind whistled through the bare branches of one-hundred year old grand oak trees lining each side of the residential street parallel to and about sixty yards distant from the prison camp fence. Turning his back to the wind, the average sized thirty-five year old man pulled up the collar of the cast-off U.S. Air Force olive drab field jacket given all inmates for winter wear. The stiff breeze stirred his medium length brown beard.

"Nice to be back down South," he told himself, pulling his arms closer to his body.

The new arrival had been assigned litter pick-up detail alongside the two-hundred yard stretch of black-topped pavement separating three blocks of two-story brick residences spaced evenly along either side. The yards were free of leaves, the close cropped brown grass lay flat and lifeless. Bushes and shrubbery were well manicured, waiting Spring awakening.

Spotting a stray piece of paper on the edge of a lawn, he jabbed it with his weapon, a four-foot sawed off broom handle tipped with a pointed nail. Retrieving the small scrap, he placed it into the large brown canvas sack hanging by a wide strap crossing his left shoulder.

Continuing his patrol, he thought back to the morning's assignment.

PAUSE

The hack, a black prison officer, had called: "Ron Stokes?"

A dozen or so inmates sat quietly on gray metal benches placed against the walls of the brightly lit room.

"Yeah," he replied. "That's me."

The prison guard had handed him the lance, escorted him to the camp gate, explaining his assignment as they walked, then pointing toward the street and simply said, "Get started."

Upon being left alone he immediately realized the minimum-security prison camp at Montgomery actually was a "walk-away" place just as he had heard from the cons back at Lompoc. All he had to do was to get past the chain link fence which had no razor wire topping it, get across the river somehow, then vanish in downtown Montgomery, the state capitol.

Ron frowned, assessing his future. For a long time he had only been able to plan, to dream, to imagine, to suppose, to hypothesize the perfect escape. No, he would be patient. Sit tight. This seemed far and away too easy. An idea would come, carefully thought out. He would act when he considered it foolproof.

He stabbed another piece of crumpled paper, retrieved it and deposited it into his sack.

PAUSE

Having recently been transferred from Lompoc Federal Prison in California, a bleak class-five high-security facility, to the low-security Maxwell Federal Prison Camp just outside Montgomery, Alabama, he was struggling to make the adjustment.

His last hard-core joint had boasted thirty-eight inmate murders in one calendar year competing against the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary which had experienced only thirty-six. To some of his former co-inmates, beating out Atlanta's murder rate was like winning the World Series. But at Maxwell, he found the incarcerated were urbane, like office worker people, non-violent, having soft pink hands, like bank vice-presidents, accountants, lawyers, construction company executives, income tax evaders, drug smugglers, loan company managers, former politicians, even one of New York's finest, an ex-cop.

This facility had no guard towers, no armed guards for that matter, no spiraling razor wire topping the fences and inmates were housed in barracks type buildings rather than locked up in steel barred cells.

Perhaps the most famous inmate to be incarcerated at Maxwell Federal Prison Camp just before Ron's arrival was Ex-president Richard Nixon's attorney general: John Mitchell, who had held that post as the country's top law-enforcement official. Ron recalled something about the cabinet official's wife Martha, reportedly imploring John to wash his hands of the crooked Nixon administration but to no avail. (Nixon's vice president, Spiro Agnew already had been convicted of accepting bribes from Maryland contractors to issue multi-million dollar state highway contracts, and had resigned.)

Martha had died mysteriously in a hospital in Colorado just after her comments criticizing the administration had been blatantly publicized. The official reason given was 'cancer'. Some people have doubted this explanation and have suggested it was more likely a part of the cover-up plot hatched by Nixon and his chief-of-staff.

When ex-attorney-general Mitchell arrived at the camp, the inmates present on the grounds had given him a sarcastic standing ovation. The former U.S. attorney general, forcing a smile, had merely waved limply toward the crowd, then followed the hack to the clothes locker to be outfitted with prison garb.

PAUSE

Ron turned to stare at the swollen Alabama River running just beyond the low brick wall protecting the street's dead end about one block distant. The tormented surface loomed cold and gray. Watching water jostling in sheets of spray from waves generated by the gusting wind, he recalled the indoctrination officer, a large seemingly mellow black hack, advising him not to try escaping by swimming across the wide waterway. "There's great big water moccasins in there," the hack had warned in his booming bass voice, then added smiling, "I'd not stick even my little toe in that water."

Ron had assessed the hack. He was taller by a good four inches than himself, wore a neatly trimmed mustache, had close cropped black hair, smiled easily and didn't seem to act like someone who felt superior to a common inmate. After Ron had told him about being an Air Force cold-war vet, he learned the hack was a Viet Nam veteran and had survived shrapnel wounds in his legs. If fact, the officer seemed almost friendly toward Ron, but Ron could not trust feelings like that. Facts were facts. He's a hack and I'm an inmate, he reminded himself.

About being warned of the large snakes Ron had simply shrugged thinking, "Yeah, I bet."

PAUSE

Weeks passed. Spring filtered slowly into the southern tier of states. Ron managed to get assigned to a landscaping crew. Each morning, the crew jumped into the back of a large 'six-by' Air Force canvas covered truck and was driven onto the main base to a maintenance area. There they loaded, shovels, hoes, rakes, chain saws and lawn mowers onto the flat bed trailer towed behind the truck.

The civilian supervisor was a tall graying black man employed by the Air Force Base. As such he was a government employee having all the benefits and security his job allowed. He was fifty-two years of age and boasted numerous grandchildren. Dawsey supervised inmates that were assigned to him, righteously performing all duties required in maintaining his assigned area of grounds consisting of two rolling sub-divisions of base housing for Air Force officers and their families. Additional areas belonged to Dawsey's crew, such as the bushes and lawns surrounding a suite of tennis courts and a portion of the base's eighteen hole golf course.

The grounds were considered "historic" mostly because of the ancient great oak trees overpowering the scenery. Nearly all had lightning rods attached to them, the copper grounding cables planted securely in the ground beneath.

PAUSE


West Georgia, August 1977

A jury in U.S. Federal Court handed down a guilty verdict convicting twenty-one persons of stealing gasoline from the Colonial and/or Plantation pipeline companies, tapping the line at three locations extending from Tallapoosa, Georgia into eastern Alabama.

These locations were on private land roughly paralleling the present site of Interstate 20 in Georgia then across the state line into Alabama.

Appeal decision 1978 586 F.2d 593 No. 77-5562.

United States Court of Appeals,
Fifth Circuit. (court)

Dec. 21, 1978.

The instant case has its genesis in events surrounding an earlier action known as the Talapoosa Pipeline case, United States v. Black (Cr. No. 77-15N; N.D.Ga.), Aff'd sub nom. United States v. Chandler, 586 F.2d 593 (5th Cir. 1978). In that case, Dorman Wilson Chandler, appellant here, was tried and convicted of conspiracy to steal, transport, and receive gasoline from an interstate pipeline and of the substantive offenses of theft and interstate transportation of gasoline from interstate pipelines.

The prosecution's key witness in the Talapoosa Pipeline case was Millard Mann, an indicted coconspirator who testified against Chandler and his cohorts in exchange for the government's dismissing the charges against him and his two children.

Chandler appealed his conviction in the Talapoosa Pipeline case and, while the appeal was pending before this court, hired one Kenneth E. McEachern to kill Mann in order to prevent him from testifying again in the event that we should reverse the judgment and remand the case for a new trial.3 For this activity, Chandler was indicted for conspiracy to violate Millard Mann's civil rights under 18 U.S.C. § 241, for obstructing justice under 18 U.S.C. § 1503, and for various firearm violations under 26 U.S.C. §§ 5811, 5861(d) and (e), and 5871.

Tried by a jury, Chandler was convicted of obstructing justice by his endeavor to have Mann killed. Chandler moved for a judgment of acquittal notwithstanding the verdict on the ground that Mann was not a "witness" protected by 18 U.S.C. § 1503 at the time he attempted to have Mann assassinated. The district court denied the motion, and Chandler appeals, arguing that the motion was erroneously denied.

PAUSE

Ron finished reading the article then handed the dog-eared copy of the Atlanta Journal back to the grinning inmate seated across the chow hall table. Shaking his head, he blew out a long breath. "Looks like the whole town was in on it," he said. "The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, and the mayor and even the police chief."

The inmate, Willard, pushed back from the table, came to his feet and smiled. "Yep," he said. "There was a bunch of us. Most of us is right here, too. Cuttin' grass, doin' laundry, workin' in the office. One of 'em works as a medic over in sick bay."

"Which one are you?" Ron asked.

"I drove one of the trucks. I'm a driver for a livin'." He glanced down at his shoes. "Well anyway, I used to be. They pulled my license. Now, I'm here."

As Ron stood up, he surveyed the chow hall, still not used to eating from real plates, instead of plastic trays, and using regular metal knives and forks, rather than a plastic fork or plastic spoon as were the only utensils allowed in mess halls in the Class Five joints.

Another thing curious to Ron was the way the men behaved around the hacks, saying, "Yes Sir," and "No Sir." That seemed really strange until he began realizing from listening to the others that none of them had been incarcerated in a 'real' federal prison. No, these 'fraidy cats' had only the experience of Maxwell, known throughout the inmate world as a 'pussy camp'.

stranger still, he had yet to see men fighting. Rarely had he heard a loud word. "Pussy camp is right," he told himself. "These men are scared to death that they're gonna screw up, get into some kind of trouble then find themselves sent away to a real federal joint".

Ron himself had been a non-violent first-offender yet had been sent to two of the prison system's hardest time joints, Leavenworth and Lompoc. He had been an airplane pilot, usually attired in slacks, shirt and tie. He hadn't been in any kind of fist fight since a couple times at age eighteen in the enlisted men's club up in Iceland where all four military forces shared the same club. Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines were in too close proximity for heavy drinking together of the twenty-cent per bottle Heinekens Beer. Of course there were scraps, all forgotten about the next day except for a lump or two, maybe a black eye or a cut cheek bone.

Ron had adapted to hard core prison life. He had toughened himself up, doing pushups in his cell until his arms were swollen with muscles, trotting around the exercise track on weekends. He had carried himself erect as a man and no one had challenged him, that is not until a case of mistaken identity occurred.

Ron felt himself being watched. He had been working in the carpenter's shop at Lompoc for nearly a year. The two men eyeing him from maybe thirty yards away were Mexican inmates. "Probably Mexican Mafia," Ron breathed to himself. "I wonder what's the deal?"

The two ambled closer. Ron seized a short length of two-by-four board, holding a claw hammer in his other hand as if he were about to do some kind of carpenter work. The two men stopped where they were, turned around, then wandered off to another part of the prison work area.

Later, Ron learned he had been targeted because he resembled a white inmate who had punched out one of their Mexican Mafia buddies working in the kitchen at two a.m. one recent morning.

"All of us Gringos look alike," he had reminded himself.

But here at Maxwell, Ron had no qualms about who was standing behind him in the chow line. These men were never going to make any kind of trouble. Suddenly, he began to enjoy toying with them. One evening entering the t.v. room he had walked to the front and simply switched channels, turning to the several inmates seated watching the show and telling them: 'I don't feel like watching this."

He had waited for a response, but none was forthcoming. "Ah, what the hell..." he had told them, switching back to the original program. "Go ahead and have at it."

The following day Ron saw the snake. Some of the inmates fished with poles and cord along the river bank behind the furnace room, a small brick building holding the boiler for steam heat. The fish were cooked over the furnace and supplemented the prison diet admirably.

The early Summer evening was cool beside the river. The loudspeaker had blared: "COUNT !"

All men immediately hastened to their bunks to be in place before the counting hack passed by with his clipboard. Fish caught earlier had been strung on a line tied to a tree on the river bank. After the 'count' had been completed, Ron wandered over behind the furnace room and down to the river's edge where an inmate was retrieving the line holding caught fish.

"Good Gawd A'mighty!" the man had exclaimed. "Look at that."

Ron moved closer. He believed he was looking at the largest water moccasin ever to exist. He saw that the snake had grabbed the last fish, inched it into his mouth, kept on moving up the line to get the next fish and had become trapped. A snake's meal is a one-way trip. There is no way for the snake to become disentangled from the fish and the line. The snake was dead, drowned right where it had become trapped under water.

"How long do you think that snake is?" Ron asked, still gaping at the fat dark brown moccasin.

"He's some over seven feet, I would say," came the answer. "I've seen some up here that were bigger, though."


THE END

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