Operation Family Secrets by Frank Calabrese Jr

Author:Frank Calabrese, Jr. [Calabrese, Frank, Jr.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-71774-0
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-08T05:00:00+00:00

I was in prison.

The trip from the MCC in downtown Chicago to FCI Milan had one stopover. I arrived by bus at USP (United States Penitentiary) Terre Haute, Indiana, and then flew on “Con Air” into Michigan. It was November 1997 and transportation was shut down for the Thanksgiving holiday. Because the Terre Haute facility was under lockdown, I spent my entire stay in the SHU, the Secure Housing Unit. This was my first stay in the hole.

For sixteen days before I boarded the plane for Milan, I stayed locked down in one of USP Terre Haute’s older wings. It was filled with Cubans from Fidel Castro’s Cuban Crime Wave purge of the late seventies and early eighties. These were criminals who had been dumped onto American shores like Al Pacino’s Tony Montana character in Scarface. Lockdown was twenty-three hours a day with one hour of “rec” outside in the frigid cold. Consistent with the high security, rec was spent in an outdoor cage. It took only one session for me to beg the guards to let me back in with the Cubans and the cockroaches. Meals were slid through a slot three times a day. Inmates were issued one set of clothes that could be swapped out every couple of days. Showers were offered every three days. I scored a couple of dog-eared paperback books off a cart that squeaked by my cell. I spent time doing push-ups on the bed to avoid crushing roaches on the floor.

Terre Haute was the appropriate stop for me to consider my dilemma. Was my father going to change or, more important, was he going to step up? Would he step up and stand behind his sons, by paying my fine and looking after Kurt, who had opted to sacrifice his freedom for his dad. It was also time for me to step up and become proactive, if not for myself, then for my family. Federal prison would be the great equalizer. The prison yard would be the place where I would judge my father not by his promises, but by his actions.

When I walked into FCI Milan, I noticed that a large part of the prison was old. There was an outdoor yard with a new gymnasium and three large housing units. There were cells and tiers but no bars. Milan’s cells had electronic doors. Going through intake, I was fortunate to get an outside cell unit rather than one facing inside that was part of a noisy dormitory. In a matter of days, I had gone from sitting in the cold darkness of a two-man cell in the hole in Terre Haute to moving into a modest two-man room that looked more like a college dorm than a prison cell—and with no cockroaches.

I had met a guy at the MCC who advised me, “When you get to Milan, make sure you get a job quick!” Once I made it through Milan reception, the guard in my unit tested a bunch of fresh “fish” inmates on their first days.

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