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Puerto Ricans to every white person. As I looked around at my cell mates, I figured that I had to be some kind of fool to end up in this jail. Most of the other detainees were from some ethnic minority or other. There were very few other white boys in our holding cells besides Bishop and me.
    Vinny, the jailhouse star, was one of them. Vinny, was a consigiliere of a New York Mafia crime family. He was facing twenty years in the slammer for the famous French Connection heroin importing scheme and he took it like he was waiting for a bus. You had to wonder why Vinny was in there because he looked so out of place. He was tall, athletic, handsome and intelligent. He would exercise in a black belt routine every day before leaving his cell, and when he could find a challenger, he played chess like a master. I gave him a bit of a run at chess and he seemed to enjoy the competition before finishing me off in a few well-chosen moves. Besides Vinny, there were three other Caucasian inmates. One was Robert Lieberman. Lieberman was a white-collar millionaire who was awaiting sentencing and incarceration for breaking antitrust rules and for tax evasion. Lieberman had the dubious honour of a front page photo spread in Time magazine to his credit, which made him a different kind of jailhouse star from Vinny. Lieberman had been smuggling new cars down to South America and bypassing customs on both ends. He used to smuggle them in shrimp boats, he told us. He took the decks off the shrimp boats in the U.S. and dropped two cars per vessel inside. In South America he would remove the decks again to recover the automobiles and sell them for several times their value. He bragged to us that he was moving more cars than the largest General Motors dealer in the U.S. and he heaped scorn upon our drug business.
    “Believe me, you can make way more money my way than you can with drugs,” he said, offering to take us under his wing. He even offered us the use of his luxury apartment in Manhattan, which was a necessary requirement for our bail application. “Stay here in the U.S. and do your time,” he said. “If you stay, I will help you get transferred to Danamora Prison which is where I’m going. It’s the country club of federal jails. It even has its own golf course. When you finish your time, I’ll show you how to make real money.”
    It was a generous offer, but not one Bishop and I were interested in under the circumstances. The remainder of the people we met in the federal detention cells were all morons or worse,except for Hans, a Dutch pilot who enthralled us with his tales of flying weed into the States from Jamaica. Besides Hans, the one other white guy in our eight-man cellblock was a twenty-five-year-old smack dealer and user from New York City. He was in for five years for trafficking and couldn’t wait to get back out on the street for another run at the smack. He told us that his heroin supplier had given him a Cadillac to work with, but that the New York cops busted him, took the car and stole his money before letting him go without arrest. His heroin supplier gave him another Caddy following the shake-down but after a time on the street, the same thing happened. His heroin supplier bailed him out again and this time he gave the street pusher a Chevy 396 with a four speed and told him, “Next time, outrun the motherfuckers!”
    “I couldn’t buy the cops off the last time,” the smack pusher told us. “They told me I had to go in.” His attitude was so accepting and so matter-of-fact that I was somewhat taken aback. His stoic acceptance of his fate was something I had not seen before. It was an attitude that I could never imagine myself adopting.
    Other than Vinny and Lieberman, most of the other detainees were black and Puerto Rican, several of whom were in for immigration violations. Like the commercial pilot from Panama who was in his third year of detention and walked around the cellblock as though the rest of us were