CHAPTER XXX
10:30
From the Boat to Rikers Island was a short trip, made overlong by bureaucratic inefficiency in the form of lazy guards who milked the system like the uniformed wastrels they were. The trip itself, while on the road, was supposed to take approximately twenty-five minutes - it instead took forty minutes. Driving at the pace of a tortoise was the favored speed NYC DOC officers maintained when transporting detainees from facility to facility. When going to court, however, the top of a detainee's head once hit the ceiling of the transport bus after the sadistic driver seemingly deliberately sped up into a pothole and directly after that onto a road bump. Going to court could kill you if you weren't alert while in the bus. Corrections officers were notorious for taking tremendous amounts of time to complete the most menial tasks. Such as taking five hours to move some prisoners from one detention center to another.
Bolo and Nut were escorted to Intake, the Receiving Room of the five story vessel. They, and others, were put in a large "bullpen," a temporary holding cell for detainees on the move within or without the facility. All jails, prisons, detention centers and court buildings had to have a plethora of bullpens in order to cope with the numbers of detainees. There were about eight hundred and seventy detainees on the Boat - it was a large detention center, but by far not the largest under the purview of the Department of Corrections.
The individuals in their group, roughly twenty, were properly and individually identified and left in the bullpen for an hour. The older Dominican officer who Nut had been talking to from time to time came to chat with him before he was transferred. In due time, guards from different buildings on Rikers Island, each of which was a detention center in and of itself, began entering the Boat.
They couldn't waste too much more time so only about fifteen more minutes were spent kicking the willy bobo, talking about whose baby mama had sucked which famous, or not so famous, nigga's dick, or which c.o. had knocked out which other c.o. - these corrections officers were straight out of your local neighborhood: gritty, grimy and grungy but with a 401k plan and slightly higher than average preparatory cunning.
In civil service one could work for up to a certain amount of time as, for example, a police officer, and then switch over to be a corrections officer, and then switch to be an FBI agent - your time as a civil servant counted; it was accumulative and allowed you to transfer benefits, (City, State or Federal) so that the new work area could easier meet your benefits requests and requirements.
The transfer guards had come with their handcuffs and shackles. One by one, each of the detainees were individually handcuffed but each pair of shackles was used for two detainees, a shackle per ankle. Bolo would not be shackled with Nut, causing the guards to be in a type of subconsciously ready, though lazy, alert. Their eyes were now on Bolo; he was, after all, also of a size with some of the bigger guards, who looked like failed linebackers and failed sumo wrestlers or aspiring bodybuilders. Bolo was just more muscularly dense. One could just look at him and tell that those muscles were not for show. At first Bolo thought they would be sent to either the Eric M. Taylor Center (EMTC, popularly known as "C-73") or the George Motchan Detention Center (GMDC, better known as "C-74, adolescents at war"). But in the back of his mind, Bolo knew he and Nut would most likely be sent to the most violent building on the Island, known as the "Beacon." Bolo and Nut had passed through the doors of Rikers Island previously, but that was when they were adolescents and the records of their youthful misdemeanors had long since been expunged with the help of some contacts. Rikers Island buses were notoriously uncomfortable and it was as if the drivers actively searched for every pothole, bump and divot on the roads. The driver himself had a nice, comfortably padded chair, the escorts had to stand in the front or in the back of the bus.
In the tinted, Greyhound-like buses of the New York State Department of Correctional Services (NYS DOCS), the seats were slight more padded and the roads in far better condition than those of the City, which was a damn shame to one of the richest cities in the world. Being that Upstate New York prison to prison transfers could be quite lengthy, there was a toilet I'm the back of each bus and a space across from or behind and across from the toilet where two guards could comfortably sit throughout the trip.
Back on the NYC DOC sardine school bus, there were four individual cages, two on each side of a short aisle, with grilled mesh and a steel door separating that front section from most of the detainees in the larger seating section behind. This larger seating area behind had approximately eight to ten rows of two man thinly padded benches to either side of and separated by a small aisle. There were about sixteen dorms on the Boat for mid to high classification detainees, but there were also 100 cells, for truly dangerous or truly stupid niggas. The individual cages at the front of the Rikers transport bus were reserved for very dangerous and only high classification detainees, some of whom were placed in Protective Custody against their will - that was called "Involuntary Protective Custody." Or snitches who had "signed in," voluntarily, to Protective Custody (PC). The guards had put Bolo in a cage by himself, as well as Nut, just in case, across from him in another cage.
The drive was longer than usual and the last part, going over the Rikers Island bridge, seemed interminable. The Rikers Island bridge, its proper designation being the Fancis R. Buono Memorial Bridge was opened on November 22, 1966. Its length was 1,280 meters but seemed far longer with the retarded driving of the NYC DOC.
This was a girder bridge with no walkway, accessible only by personal car or transport bus of visitors or employees, which bus deposited them in front of the headquarters of the Department of Corrections. When the transport bus went in a certain direction, Bolo knew what time it was. The first stop was at the George R. Vierno Center (GRVC, infamously known as the "Beacon").
"Caleb Johnson, Dennis Garcia..." Bolo didn't care about any other names - his, and Nut's, had been called. Two of the c.o.'s exited along with six detainees. They were then placed in a bullpen to the right of the entry, before which their handcuffs and shackles were removed. They had all come with their property, each of whose was in large white bag, like burlap sacks, to accommodate much or, in Bolo's and Nut's case, not so much, yet. A c.o. came to the front of the bullpen and read out the names of the newly arrived detainees. Each was verified as being present and accounted for. They had come just at the end of the Count which was fortunate because having to wait in the obnoxious heat of a Rikers Island bus or van while the Count was in progress was torturous.
During the day, three Counts were taken. The first was between 10:30 and 11:45; the second was between 15:30 and 16:15 and the third and final Count was at 21:45. Every detention center on Rikers Island initiated the Count (of detainees) at the same time. Rikers Island Central Command (RICC) contacted all the detention centers via walkie talkie in anticipation of the Count, which was the single most important thing about any detention center. Every weekday, barring holidays, detainees were bussed to Court all around the City by a certain time. Rikers Island Central Command knew how many prisoners were or were no longer on their Count at almost any given moment. If a detainee was released when he went to Court, his release papers were immediately complied a d RICC would be alerted of his release.
The detainee would still have to be brought back to Rikers, whereupon he would be closely escorted to his housing unit and given the chance to pack up his belongings before being escorted back to the Intake. Detainees being released were placed in bullpens apart from those still being detained, for obvious security reasons. It was again there, while waiting, that the Court's information (its disposition of the case concerning the detainee was triple checked and sent back to RICC. A bus doing its rounds throughout the Island, picking up detainees being released from other detention centers on the Island was always _en route_ and would shortly arrive to transport the detainee(s) across the girder bridge and into Queens proper, where said detainee(s) could then take off. The process was lengthy, but niggas dealt with it because niggas were in their way home, at that point.
Bolo, Nut and the other detainees were left in the first bullpen for about a half an hour, after which they were told to go to w second, adjacent bullpen, which had a metal detector they each had to walk through, and an x-ray machine. Each detainee was called in separately and had to both open their property bag and place it on the conveyor belt of the x-ray machine where it was rolled inside and surveyed on a nearby screen by the guard manning the machine, and open the bag when it came out the other end of the x-ray in front of another guard, in case something had escaped the view of the officer manning the device.
The detainees were also called in singly for the purposes of strip searching in at least semi-dignity.
It was a shithole!
Right in front of these first two bullpens was the OIC of the Intake. It was a station open on one side, the side the first two bullpens were facing, raised two stairs aboveground in the shape of a rectangle with two chairs inside the bo, and a shelf-like apparatus inside the one and a half meter tall structure. There were two laptops and a host of file folders on the shelf-table thingy.
Their escorts were still around, speaking to other c.o.'s in and around the OIC. The escorts would be picked up in shirt enough order by the same bus on its return journey to whatever their destination was, for this day.
Corrections officer were required to work in different areas on Rikers Island, at least for the first year of employment or so.
New officers would show up at the Command Post of RICC for their scheduled months' instructions as to which building, housing unit or area they would be required to work in. The guards could request to be OIC, or the permanent "A" officer of a work area they might be interested in after rotating throughout the Island for a year or more. They could choose to permanently be escort officers, simply moving and escorting prisoners to and fro in the facility or from building to building transfers.
In front of and directly around the OIC at Intake was floor space, some small space again back from which were other strategically placed and accordingly sized bullpens. For example, there were bullpens for one or two or three people, and bullpens for a small crowd and bullpens for a large crowd. Normally, the fights that happened in the Beacon were small in scale, unless they happened in the clinic between rival gang members of different housing units or fights on the visit, which didn't occur too often but when they did, were brutal and usually bloody.
When the in-house Emergency Response Team, also called the "ninja turtles" for the turtle-like gear they wore, came rushing to a fight with many detainees, they were quick to try and push detainees off others, slightly beating others and tackling yet others. When the out-house ERT came into a facility on an emergency response, they were fucking everything up, including the OIC of the house, the lockers of officers - and they were officers too! But these were the teams of intervention linebackers.
There was a particularly large bullpen a bit up and to the left of the Intake OIC. It was connected to and part of the Clinic, whose entrance was in another area. It was visible and so were some of the detainees therein, mean mugging the newcomers, already trying to intimidate people they had no inkling of what they were capable of. Bolo and the other detainees were place in a midsize bullpen in the back of the Intake area as some guards dragged a bloodied and we beaten detainee into one of the tiniest cells and left him on the floor bleeding, while they casually secured the bullpen with the half unconscious detainee and went about their business as if it were routine. They then went to give a short verbal report to the OIC, complaining about the blood they got on their knuckles and shoes. Everyone heard them but what could anybody do? This was exactly the same behavior pervasive throughout Rikers Island in a Department of Justice report published in 2014 in which the management of the Island was exposed as a cesspool of corruption with a deep-rooted "culture of violence." The mismanagement of funds by Rikers Island oversight staff was exposed and aired out to dry in public view.
Many people already knew Rikers was a piece of shit where anyone could be corrupted, on up to the Commissioner because their family members had passed through those infernal doors, or rather, over that decrepit bridge, but again, what could anyone do?
What could they do when four prisoners hanged themselves within a year (although one of those suicides were being sharply investigated)? What could they do when about one third of the Rikers Island corrections staff were out on Sick Leave?
Well, and that was why Rikers Island was scheduled to close by 2026, to be replaced by four detention centers inside the landmass of each of the boroughs, except Staten Island. One needed a ferry to get to Staten island, and the time it would take and the money spent going back and forth however many times would be maniacally cost-prohibitive. So anyone from Staten Island arrested for a crime would be sent to either "Brooklyn House" or "Queens House," or maybe they would give the individual a choice of which detention center in which he wanted to be held.
It seemed as if building four more prisons in four of the boroughs was ludicrous but the cries to "SHUT DOWN RIKERS ISLAND" had grown loud enough to reach and penetrate into the right skulls, for Rikers was finally going to be closed... Yet, even if the four detention centers in each borough did not attain the combined capacity of detainees now housed at Rikers. Somehow, though, people were secretly skeptical about closing Rikers down. They argued that, no matter where you put violent people together, violence would abound. They had a point but the liberal snowflakes mysteriously coddling these violent criminals would have to see and learn for themselves the reality of terrible or, rather, too liberal choices.
And the Beacon was certainly a paradigm of failed Department of Corrections policy in curbing the violence of those in detention, particularly youths. The least that could be said for the Beacon was that, much of the time, considerations were given to detainees who were of certain gang affiliations. If you were known to be a Blood gang member, you would almost automatically go to a housing unit that was made up of predominantly Bloods gang members. If you were Spanish, the guards had to find out if you were Latin King, in which case it was possible that you could go to a Blood house because after the United Blood Nation (UBN) started really fucking up the oppressive Spanish Latin King niggas who had been oppressing Black prisoners for years before then, the Latin Kings called for a truce and an alliance, where all gangs with the five point star as part of their emblem or repertoire of emblems, became allies (eg. the UBN, Vice Lords [VL], the Almighty Latin King and Queen Nation [ALKQN], etc.).
Spanish niggas could also be Ñetas, a mostly defunct Spanish gang that allied with Crips, Gangster Disciples (GD), sometimes Dominican Power (DP) and MS-13, although they also warred with their allies at any given moment. Anyone could be Muslim or Christian, even gang members (who were predominantly Christian or Catholic) - the Muslims accepted anybody and were one of the largest "gangs," or rather, had one of the largest followings in prison; they were also known to work with the prison administration as informants. Spanish niggas had some bizarre privilege to be Blood, Crip, Dominican Power, Ñetas, MS-13 or whatever, but rare was the Spanish nigga who would be "Godbody," also known as a "Five Percenter," a member of the Nation of Gods and Earths (NOGE), formerly known as the Five Percent Nation. In the late eighties and nineties, the Five Percenters were considered terrorists, until they proved their ideology was mostly theological in concept. They had evolved from, expounded on, their "The White man is the devil and Yakub came to civilize the savages" anthem. They were a Black American revisionist movement created in 1964 by Clarence X, a disillusioned member of Temple Number Seven, where Malcolm X used to preach. The Nation of Islam (NOI), spearheaded by Minister Farrakhan, is a branch off from mainstream Islam. The NOGE is a branch off from the NOI. They believe that ten percent of the world are keeping eighty-five percent in the blind, while the remaining five percent have not been blinded and seek to educate the masses on their blindness. The NOGE also believe that the Black man and the Black woman are gods and goddesses. Specifically, that the Black man is God. Spanish niggas could try to be NOI or NOGE, but the environment would never be conducive to them for promotions; out of concerns of infiltration in the ranks by non-Blacks with perhaps hidden non-Black ideologies, Spanish niggas would never rise in the ranks.
Blacks could be Blood, Crip, VL, GD, NOI, even ALKQN (if you were from the Caribbean). Religion had little to do with gang affiliation really. In the pen, when Protestant and Catholic Church services were called, it wasn't odd to see rival gangs crammed into that place of worship, even in the mosque. However, more so in church did it become violent. Church folk are fiery people, with heart, and God loves a nigga with heart.
Many fights used to occur during church services but, out of respect for the civilian pastors, the gang members or generally niggas who had beef would wait until service was over and step out into the hallway to wait and see whether it would be a rumble or not. White niggas were fucked up, for the most part, but the young, urbanised, White dudes could be Blood or Crip, or just turn Muslim (and once you turned Muslim, you were protected by the largest crew in prison; you were safe, but the other head Muslims watched you to make sure you weren't frontin' or trying to jeopardize the other Muslim). Usually, when White dudes got to prison in Upstate, they would go full on with being Muslim or they linked up with their White Power/White Pride racist family. On the east coast, White people were vastly outnumbered in the prison population; on the west coast, they were still outnumbered but far stronger.
When Bloods sent to a new detention center were sent to a housing unit, they went and didn't refuse. If they had to put in work to get out of the said housing unit, then that was what it was, but they didn't refuse! Bolo was still of this mindframe and, as soon as he had seen the "George R Vierno Center" sign, his mind had shifted into "go" mode, meaning he was ready to go from housing unit beating niggas asses if that's what it took to be comfortable. When their escort officer told Bolo and Nut that they were going to Dorm 13, the former only stayed quiet. Dorms 13, 15, 17 and 19 were filled with six point star riders: mainly Crips and Gangster Disciples, and their allied. Bolo was thinking about the roots of the five point and six point star beef. History, theology and numerology stated that the six point star was the Star of Remphan, a pagan god-figure in the Bible at Acts 7:43.
the seventeenth century until the present day, the six-pointed hexagram has been dully used as the official seal of many so-called Jewish communities. It was the (fake) Jews of Prague who were the first to use the seal as their official symbol. The misled Zionist movement erroneously called this star the Star of David, foolishly adopting it as its symbol in 1897. Why would Zionists adopt a pagan symbol as their seal? It puzzled Bolo to no end as the officers began putting filling out his information on a red card that would travel with him, via the guards, throughout his stay on Rikers Island, or until it was worn out from too much handling. (Red was the highest classification, for the most dangerous detainees.) And why would Zionists go further in their sacrilege by calling it the Star of David when it had no bibilical or Talmudic authority? Some Zionists say the hexagram represents the six days of Creation and the six attributes of God: power, wisdom, majesty, love, mercy and justice. But nowhere in Scripture is there qualitative equation between the Star of Remphan and the Divine; rather, God is emphatically against that particular star, but man, in his pridefulness, boasts more knowledge than the Ultimate Being that created him because It is a good and kind and loving God, and It's mercy endures forever. Man forgets God to be jealous and disciplined in addition to being just!
Bolo continued to reflect as two officers escorted him and Nut to Dorm 13. The hallways were clear except for Messhall workers edging out of housing units to pull in the tall, wheeled food carriers, or food serving carts, in which were trays to serve detainees food, the food ready made and having been already placed in trays in the Messhall; the trays just had to be kept warm in the small food heating/preparation area each housing unit shared with its neighbor.
were no traditional dorms in the Beacon as on the Boat - these dorms (housing units) were only individual cells, whereas the dorms on the Boat and certain dorms in other detention centers had rows of beds placed pretty close to one another and there was no privacy. Bolo preferred cells because at least you had a space that you could consider yours and, when you were sick, at least the sickness could be confined to the space of your cell when you went to lay down. In the open dorms, however, when one person fell sick, damn near everyone got sick. Couldn't the people who built those open dorms see how fast and deadly a contagion could hit in spaces that small?
Or, perhaps, that was the whole point. If contagion broke out, all the detainees would be infected in short order. The thing about this was that even the officers would be affected. Everyone working in those areas would likely be infected before they knew it, take the contagion out with them and affect the whole world - it was an entirely foreseeable, possible and plausible scenario.
Detainees were all about Dorm 13 and Bolo could already see the hunger in some of their eyes. He let his small property bag drop by the gate and approached the biggest nigga in the dorm's large and open recreation area, which they also called a "day room," synonymous to the "rec room" on the Boat. The big nigga was more muscular than Bolo; he had on ear pods and was working out, doing some pushups. Surely he was Crip - he gave off the vibe. When he stood back up from his set of pushups, Bolo pretended like he was going to give him dap, one muscle head to another. The nigga was confused and reached out his hand to receive what he thought was a dap. The Dorm 13 A officer and the escort officer immediately pushed their personal body alarms.
Each officer was given a small location device with a depressive button on it. Most of the devices were connected to a general computer server in each individual detention center, usually at the Intake OIC. These devices had i.d. numbers and, with the depression of the button on the device, the i.d. number, along with the housing unit of the officer carrying the device, popped up on the screen of the computer. Flashing red lights at different junctures in the facility, accompanied by an annoying blare, would be activated. Areas all over the facility, or in that _section_ of the detention center, were secured as certain other, predesignated, officers rushed to get their riot gear from the Intake or other nearby placed internal armory (in the case of the Beacon, near the Intake OIC) and rushed to Dorm 13.
But Dorm 13 was far, and a lot could happen in the minutes it took to suit up and get there.
The first responders of the Emergency Response Team. (ERT) that got to Dorm 13 watched as Bolo weaved the wild swings of his fourth and fifth assailants. One of the attackers tried to slash him on the arm but Bolo caught his wrist and disarmed him in one smooth and violent motion. Keeping his former attacker and now victim between him and the other attacker, Bolo followed up the movement by sweeping the nigga off his feet and pushing his head down slightly so that when he hit the tiles, it was with just enough force to knock him out. The other attacker swung on Bolo, but he blocked it with a forearm and responded with a sharp jab to the solar plexus that instantly bent over his would be aggressor. Bolo stood up and timed a roundhouse to the cheek of the detainee gasping for air. No other detainees came forward to test him so Bolo calmly walked to the front of the housing unit, picked up his property bag and calmly walked past the first and subsequent ERT officers not understanding what the fuck was going on as they rushed into Dorm 13 and found the head Crip nigga, the big Loc Cooter, knocked out and even snoring, along with four other Locs. Bloods were called "Blood" or "fool"; Crips were known as "Loc" - all called each other, within their families and sets, "homies."
