The Life Crimes and Hard Times of Ricky Atkinson, Leader of the Dirty Tricks Gang by Richard Atkinson & Fiorito Atkinson

Author:Richard Atkinson & Fiorito Atkinson [Atkinson, Richard & Fiorito, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Exile Editions
Published: 2017-07-14T05:00:00+00:00

RATS AND COWS

A month or so later, still riding high on our success, I came back to my cell and saw a newspaper on my bed. On the front page was a picture of Warren Hart with a story about the Toronto Black Panther cell.

According to the paper, Hart had been a government informant. There were details about the guns we’d given him from the army surplus store break-in, and how those guns had been used in western Canada to set up and imprison some of the revolutionary natives there.

My stomach churned. I remembered what Bert Novis had said to me in the cop car, after my arrest, about how surprised I’d be if I knew who ratted me out.

I had a very short list of those who I thought could have dropped a dime on. It was clear now. Hart was the rat.

The reason he’d given up his undercover status and gone public? Warren Allmand, the Attorney General, had stiffed him out of a $60,000 payment for having set people up. People like me.

Nobody seemed to care that a group of teenaged kids were made dupes of the government, or that I’d been given a loaded gun by an undercover rat and then persuaded to commit a robbery. Not that I’d needed a lot of persuasion.

I kept my hatred of Hart and the government to myself. I was smart to do so – within six months I was transferred to the Frontenac farm camp.

My mind was still reeling. It reels to this day. If I am a criminal I was created, in large part, by that double-crossing rat Warren Hart. By extension, I was criminalized by the government of Canada that was so eager to have Hart’s secret reports.

When I finally graduated to farm camp, I was put in a car with my belongings and driven, unshackled, 200 yards outside the prison walls. We pulled up to a long, two-storey brick building with no bars on the windows. The bottom floor was the visiting area, with an administration office, a kitchen and admission and discharge areas, where I took my box of personal belongings. After the usual admittance processing, I ran upstairs. There were two huge dormitory-style rooms with sixty beds lined up in rows, punctuated by four banks of chest-high, metal military lockers. Showers and a washroom were at the end of each dorm. I asked where Owen slept.

I found his neatly made bed and an expensive-looking bathrobe hanging from a metal closet door. At the foot of the bed was a television. No prisoner, in any of the prisons I’d been in, had their own TV.

On the bed was a book of blues sheet music.

I smiled at the set-up; Owen the Crook always went first-class. I turned the TV on. I hadn’t seen a colour television since my arrest. I kicked off my shoes and put my head on the pillows. Next to me was a dirty bed with a pair of old work boots on the floor.

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