MANSFIELD: The Circle Is Now Closed… Or Is It?

By Mansfield Frazier

As I exited the elevator on the third floor of the InterContinental Hotel on my way to the conference being held on the alarming number of heroin deaths statewide, someone poked me in the back. I turned, and there was this white dude with a wickedly sly grin on his face.

“Should I know you?” I asked.

“Yeah, you should, I was the Secret Service agent that sent your ass to prison for the last time.”

“Jim!” I almost shouted, as we bear-hugged each other. “Jim Scullin, man, it’s been what, over 20 years?” Back in the day we were as close to being “friends” as our vastly different professions and lifestyles would allow … seeing that we were on the opposite sides of the law — which actually is a very thin two-sided coin indeed.

“Yeah, it’s been about that long,” he responded.

We kicked it for a few minutes (he was headed to the same conference), recalling old times when we played cops and robbers in real life. The thing was, we had maximum respect for each other and we played the game with a degree of honor and dignity lacking in the current criminal Zeitgeist.

For him to do his job effectively, and for me to end up with the shortest sentence possible, we had to develop a degree of trust between us — something we managed to accomplish. In the hardball game we played there was always an opportunity for either of us to cross the other, but we never did.

“Shoot you through the grease” was the term for the double-cross back in the day, but we both were men of our word … and I’ve always respected Jim Scullin for how he treated me. Yes, he took my freedom — which was his job — but he never tried to take my dignity. Word.

He told me that he’d been reading about what I’m doing in my community with Château Hough, and that he sometimes uses my story when talking to troubled youth out in Westlake, where he’s now a senior member of the Police Department. In parting, I offered to come out and help him deliver his message in any way he deemed appropriate.

So the circle is now complete. I’m cool with both the cop that arrested me for the first time back in 1969 (Bob Reid, the former county sheriff, who was a Bedford police officer at the time), and Jim Scullin, who did me a favor by busting me for the last time in 1992.

But, alas, not all members of law enforcement believe in redemption, that people can —and do — turn their lives around. Indeed, some cops would love nothing better than to see previously incarcerated folks like me slip on a banana peel and once again wind up behind bars. A few will even go so far as to attempt to place the banana peel under your foot, so they can get their sick jollies off as you land flat on your back.

By way of example: One of the volunteers from the halfway house that worked with us when we were building the vineyard a few summers ago was a big, strong white guy named Billy who hailed from West Virginia. I didn’t know if he knew that I knew that one of the numerous tattoos circling his neck was a gang symbol that represented membership in the Aryan Brotherhood, the violently racist white prison gang with chapters across the country.

Nonetheless, he was respectful and worked exceptionally hard. He was good with his hands, was willing to learn, and had a great, self-deprecating sense of humor. To Billy, silver duck tape was known as “Kentucky chrome” and he once joked, “Hell, all us hillbillies come out of the womb knowing how to weld and rebuild car engines.”

He was such a willing worker that I hired him after he exited the halfway house. When a friend, who just happened to be black, asked why I was hiring a white guy when so many blacks are coming home, I patiently explained to him that what our non-profit does is not about race; it’s about helping folks returning from incarceration, no matter their race. Period.

After a few weeks on the job Billy finally came up to me and asked if I knew what the tattoo represented. When I acknowledged that I did, he asked, “And you hired me anyway?”

“Yeah, Billy, because I know that people change.”

He then went on to attempt to explain to me how and why he joined the Brotherhood in prison when he was 19-years-old, but I stopped him halfway though, since I already knew that in the joint he had little choice. Prison culture is simple: “Either you’re with us, or against us” so he had to join up. He said that he was banking his money so that he could get the tattoo — that he was now ashamed of — removed.

But life sometimes throws curveballs. His girlfriend, whom I had met one day when I dropped him off at home on W. 98th and Lorain Ave., called me and asked a favor: Financial help for Billy.

He was in police custody for breaking and entering (the crime he had been busted and sent to prison for three or four times, both in Ohio and West Virginia) and his bond was $5,000; so she needed 10 percent to bail him out, but she was a hundred dollars short. I stopped what I was doing and took her the money, thinking that Billy could work off the debt.

When Billy got out of jail he assured me that he was innocent of the charge of breaking into a nearby pawn shop … that the police, knowing his prior record and the fact he’d recently returned to the neighborhood, were simply picking on him as a likely suspect.

When you work with recently released individuals as I do, giving them the benefit of the doubt until all of the evidence is in is part of the trust compact that needs to be forged. So, against my better judgment, I consciously suspended judgment … since, what he was saying could very well be true.

He then said that he was in the process of hiring a lawyer, but needed money to do so, and that his brother-in-law was willing to help raise the money by selling off some of his construction tools.

“He’s got some really clean tools, Mr. Frazier, a rotary hammer, a concrete saw, stuff like that,” Billy said, knowing this was the kind of equipment I’d eventually need when we began construction on the BioCellar.

“Billy,” I said, in a loud, clear voice, “not to accuse your brother-in-law of anything, but those tools could be stolen, and if I bought them, that would be a receiving stolen property beef, and I ain’t down with that.”

I made damn sure I said it loud enough so the cop (who was, in all probability, listening in via three-way) could hear me unmistakably well. If I had bought the tools the cops would have been at my door, search warrant in hand, in a New York minute. And they wouldn’t listen to anything I had to say.

What I’d quickly surmised due to my many years in the street (which was later confirmed) was this: The police had a dead-bang case on Billy, and when he attempted to squirm out of it by saying that he was working for me, they offered him a chance to “help himself” and receive a lighter sentence. All he had to do was to help them set me up.

I guess they thought I had shit for brains. But as the old C & W song goes, “I was born in the dark, but it wasn’t last night.” ‘Ya know, sometimes it’s not just paranoia; they really are out to get you.

I later found out that Billy had been caught red-handed on camera in the shop (he’d tried to conceal his identity under a cap and hooded sweatshirt), but still had glass from the broken front window of the pawnshop in the cuffs of his pants when he was arrested. No one ever said he was the brightest criminal in the world.

Should I have been outraged at the clumsy attempt by the police to set me up? No, and here’s why: It doesn’t matter to some cops that I’ve been out of prison now for close to 20 years, and have attempted to lead an exemplary life … they are of the mindset that “leopards don’t change their spots” and they’d love nothing better than to validate their preconceived notions by catching me with my pants down. And you know what happens when you’re caught by the police with your pants down, don’t you? You get fucked … but they see that as their job, and, maybe it is. It’s just that suborning, enticing someone to commit a crime — entrapment — still has this funky-assed smell about it.

Of course this wasn’t the first time law enforcement has attempted to test my honesty since I’ve been home by setting a trap for me (they’ve made other, albeit more sophisticated, efforts a few times over the years), and I fully expect them to try some other kind of bullshit again to play me out of pocket. But it just ain’t gonna happen.

Hey, when crime is down, for some of them it sure beats the hell out of going out in the streets and doing real police work. But the only way they’ll succeed with me is by planting something, and then making up a goddamn lie … something a few cops — thankfully, a very few — are not above attempting to do. It’s a bitch out here sometimes.

As for Billy, he broke camp; he jumped bail and headed back down to West Virginia … running as fast as he could, like a turkey through the corn. He called me about a month later and apologized for trying to set me up for the knock-off.

“That ain’t me, Mr. Frazier,” Billy said, with all of the sincerity he could muster, “I just didn’t want to go right back to prison, but I was starting to feel like shit about what they was trying to get me to do. I ain’t gonna be no dancin’ bear for them, helping them to fuck people over, that’s why I took off.”

“Yeah, Billy,” I said, “but you know you can’t keep running all your life, looking over your shoulder all the goddamn time, trust me, that shit will put a crook in your neck.” We both laughed, and then I made him an offer: How about I send you bus fare to come back to Cleveland and turn yourself in? I’ll still have a job waiting for you when you get out.”

He thought about it for a long minute and then said, “Well, that’s something I’ve never had before, a job waiting for me when I get out.”

Billy caught the next thing smokin’ out of Beckley, West Virginia and is now stepping off a buffalo (for the uninitiated, that’s a nickel, uh, five years) in Marion Correctional Institution; he’ll be home sometime in early 2016, and — God willing, and the creek don’t rise — I’ll have that job for him … it’ll be pruning season in the vineyard.

 

From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.

 

 

 

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