The Life and Times of the Stopwatch Gang (Kindle Single) by Josh Dean

Author:Josh Dean [Dean, Josh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Atavist
Published: 2015-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

Ten

Not surprisingly, Reid and Wright were kept apart. Wright was sent to Leavenworth, a maximum-security prison in Kansas, while Reid, considered to be an extreme escape risk, got some unusual treatment. Shortly after his sentence, he was put on what he calls a “ghost chain.” For 11 months, Reid was bused around the country, from jail to jail, often every few days, with no notice of where he was going or how long his stay would be. One night he’d sleep in a county lockup in McAlester, Oklahoma; the next he’d be off to Lacuna, Texas.

The point was to make him disappear, to make his whereabouts impossible to track. After nearly a year, he landed at the federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, the highest-security facility in the system. Marion was built to house the 500 most dangerous criminals in the prison system, and the initial population was made up mostly of transfers from Alcatraz. It is not a place for reform. Prisoners there aren’t allowed to work and spend much of their time in solitary confinement.

Reid knew there was no chance of escape from Marion, so he worked diligently on earning a transfer back to Canada. He wrote letters and lobbied the consulate, calling in every possible favor from his old connections in Ottawa. Finally, on May 6, 1983, after two years at Marion, Reid was sent back home, to Millhaven, where he joined Wright, who had also been granted a transfer.

Back at Millhaven, Reid once again developed a reputation as both an inmate and an administration favorite. He ran the sports commission, which organized the prison hockey and baseball teams, as well as the illegal sports-gambling ring. He was a major player in the smuggling and distribution of hash, and he mediated disputes between guards and prisoners. “I was kinda known as the mayor of Millhaven,” he said.

In 1984, Millhaven was an even more violent place than it had been in 1977, when the grim conditions caused Reid and Mitchell to begin plotting their escapes. One winter, after a rash of stabbings, including the murder of the goalie of his prison hockey team, Reid’s spirit broke. He became angry and depressed. He quit all his prison jobs and scams and began to write, tearing through pages of a yellow legal pad in longhand. “At first it was just words on paper, then disjointed sentences, expressions of anger, bitterness, loss of hope, page after page, the pencil pushing right through the paper with the force of those words coming out of me,” Reid later wrote. “Then a story began to emerge.”

In a few months, he finished a draft of a novel about a gang of bank robbers led by Bobby, a character very much like Stephen Reid, and his sidekick Denny, a thinly veiled version of Lionel Wright. In an adjacent cell, Wright typed the pages as Reid wrote them, never commenting on the story itself. Toward the end of the book, Bobby kills Denny. After he handed the pages to Wright, Reid said, he sat and listened as the tapping of the keys slowed and then stopped.

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