Where Brutality Rules : Suits Expose Hidden Hell Behind Bars

BELLE GLADE, Fla. —  LaMarca had been to prison before and he was nobody’s punk. Fight, he’d fight. Cut, he’d cut.

But he wasn’t three steps off the bus when his moxie bled away. Two dozen cons were leaning against the front fence, blowing kisses and grinding their hips. They were arguing who’d get to keep him.

In the dorm, an older guy told him the score: You pay or you fight or you end up on your belly. Guards, forget guards. Get yourself a blade.

LaMarca put down $5 for a welding rod from a guy in the hobby craft shop. It was fitted with a rosewood handle, curved for a good grip like a derringer.

He should have been packing it when three guys jumped him near his bunk. They worked over the ribs, then the face.

Ultimatum Delivered

Next day, a prisoner came by to talk business. He called himself Soda Water and he had monster hands. You pay $25 a week, he said. Or you pick yourself a daddy. Then he gave LaMarca a compliment:

“You’re fat back there,” he said.

Soda Water liked his shape.

For three years, Anthony LaMarca, a small-time Miami burglar, battled the predators at Glades Correctional Institution out here near the sugar cane fields in Belle Glade, not an hour west of Palm Beach.

Sometimes LaMarca ducked and dodged. Sometimes he hit back. Sometimes he talked his way into protective custody, trading his bunk in the dorm for floor space behind the solid steel doors of a tiny lockup.

And he did one more thing. He filed a lawsuit against the warden. Someone up the line had a responsibility to protect prisoners from other prisoners, he said. Hard time a criminal deserved; hell he didn’t.

This is the story of that hell, of fists and knives and rape, of guards who cared little and saw less, of desperate men whimpering in the night.

Story Often Forgotten

It is the story of LaMarca and his lawsuit, and it is the kind of prison story that is repeated year after year in prison after prison.

Most often, such stories then vanish like spit into the dark ocean, forgotten because there is too much else to worry about and prisons are too vexing and costly to redeem and nobody is sure what to do about them anyhow.

Besides, there are no heroes in these stories. Nobody goes to prison, so the saying goes, for singing too loud in the choir.

“No-good crud is all they are,” said Supt. Robert V. Turner, the warden LaMarca sued for damages.

And, truth be told, LaMarca was high when he wrote the lawsuit in the prison law library, which was cool and quiet and his favorite place to smoke a reefer.

He later was joined as a plaintiff by nine other inmates, including one known on the outside as the “baby-faced rapist” and a transvestite who went by the name Nancy Sue.

On top of it all, by the time the lawyers were ready to take depositions, LaMarca had decided the prison wasn’t so bad after all.

By then, he had the place licked. He was peddling dope and making wine. He fermented the juice in plastic bags and hooked them with fishing line to the dorm toilets. Then he flushed them into hiding.

Did you experience problems in the operation of the prison? the defendant Robert Turner, a 30-year veteran in corrections, was asked on the witness stand last December.

“Do you have the rest of the week?” he replied sarcastically.

Weapons, sure, weapons. A knife can be fashioned from most anything--a broken mirror, a spoon, a pen. The prison had to stop buying brooms from the Florida School for the Blind because of the wire around the straw, he said.

Drugs, yes. How would you ever stop them? People lob them over the fence. Visitors smuggle them in, hidden in cigarettes, tucked into clothes, keistered.

Then there is that awful-smelling wine. They make it from nothing more than water and sugar and a teaspoon of yeast. It’s flavored with oranges or tomato juice. They pick the raisins out of the raisin bran.

And that’s not the worst of it. Shaving lotion had to be banned because the prisoners drank that. Windex, same thing.

Space, Money Scarce

Enough correctional officers? How could there be? The budget is too small. Besides, out in Belle Glade nobody wants the jobs, he said. At one point, there were 35 openings out of 108 spots.

Problems, plenty of problems. Bob Turner, a flinty man with a stern face, testified: “Let me tell you about . . . poorly trained officers who were poorly paid, and who really don’t want to be in this, anyhow.

“And who, tonight, if they happened to be assigned to a dormitory, that officer, on the midnight shift, will face straight on more convicted felons than the average police officer will face his entire career, and so . . . .”

And so it peeved him no end to be hauled into court by the likes of Anthony LaMarca and some sissy claiming to have been raped who flat out admits to calling himself Nancy Sue.

Bunch of liars, Turner recalled, wanting to shout from his seat at the defendant’s table. Bunch of crud!

Crowding Growing Worse

And why in the devil, he wanted to know, was he getting sued for something that’s a mess from sea to shining sea--a prison system loaded with problems, numbers one, two and three of which are overcrowding?

When he took over the prison in 1976, it housed about 700 inmates and it was packed at that. Five years later, there were more than 900, he said.

Two-thirds of the men were classified as close-custody, just a step down from maximum security. These are convicts with the longer sentences, the ones most likely to escape.

Glades wasn’t designed for them, he said. It’s a dormitory prison, as many as 240 men crammed into a building. They had to sleep these dangerous criminals in long rows of bunk beds, pinched tighter all the time.

Hold it just a darned minute! Bob Turner wanted to shout.

By now, the appalling truths about prisons--as shabby human warehouses, as seminaries of crime, as epic subcultures of fear--seem almost inborn, chronic as poverty and rooted as sin.

But actually, most experts say prisons have generally improved in the past 10 years. Privileges such as visiting and uncensored mail have been liberalized. Medical care is better. So is the training of staff.

Much of this resulted from lawsuits. In 35 states, the entire system--or one or more of its major prisons--are under federal court orders to fix conditions called cruel and unusual punishment.

Yet whatever the reforms, many prisons are buckling beneath an onslaught of numbers. In the past decade, the inmate population nearly doubled to 503,601. State prisons are jammed to an estimated 106% to 121% of capacity, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

In the same 10 years, the rate of Americans being sent to prison also has nearly doubled--to 201 per 100,000 residents. The nation has a higher rate of incarceration than any country except South Africa and the Soviet Union.

More Violent Convicts

Keeping pace is costly. In 1984, $7 billion was spent to operate prisons and jails. Another $1.2 billion went for construction.

Overcrowding affects prisons like some sadistic psychology experiment. Brawls are fought over a few feet of floor space. Besides, officials say cynically, there is a poorer class of criminal these days.

Now more than a third of the nation’s prisoners are guilty of violent crimes. Often as not, they arrive with a taste for drugs and a contempt for authority.

Bold lifers with nothing to lose brutalize the timid. Wardens try to separate the wolves from the sheep, but they are limited by the lack of bed space.

Rapes and assaults are not uncommon, though the numbers vary widely from prison to prison and year to year, often depending as much on truces among prison gangs as on rules from the top.

Reliable statistics don’t exist. Not all prisons keep track--and only a fraction of the assaults are reported anyway. In the lip-buttoned code of prison life, a man makes his own way.

Curse of Informers

“You snitch, and you never get away from it,” Anthony LaMarca said. “It follows you everywhere.”

LaMarca didn’t snitch on Soda Water, and Soda didn’t come back at him right away. He had a bunch of others kowtowing. He sent one of them.

“Someone likes you,” the man said with a pretended smile.

Then, on his fourth day at Glades, LaMarca walked in from chow to find his bunk was tossed. His smokes were gone. So was the ice pick.

I know what time this is, he told himself, and he looked around.

A guy who could really box was on his way. He knuckle-bumped LaMarca real good, up and down.

“Cracker, your day is coming,” he threatened with a wag of his finger.

And maybe that was true.

LaMarca is the son of a nurse and a long-haul trucker. He was 25 when he arrived at Glades in 1980. He has a sturdy build and good smarts. He has a year of college. He can talk.

Luck is what he lacks. Once, he and a guy drilled the safe in a bar and snatched up the cash. Then on the way out, his partner clocked him from behind and shoved him under the pool table.

Another time, he and a pal knocked over a cabin cruiser and were speeding away up the boulevard when the cops pulled alongside. The other guy jumped out and ran, lugging off a ship-to-shore radio. When they caught him, he squealed.

Now LaMarca was stuck in some prison that used to be a black work camp back in the days of Jim Crow. The temperature always seemed to be 150 degrees. He swore he could smell the plumbing right under the building.

Noise was like a convention hall. Everyone in the dorm had a radio and no taste. Fat mosquitoes whined in the air. Roaches scooted across the floor.

Good Turn of Luck

And this guy Soda Water, always coming on with his boo game, either play or pay. That was serious. Give in to that and there was no telling where it ended.

But luck would be kinder to Anthony LaMarca for a while. He got assigned to a work detail on the prison cattle ranch. There were some tough guys there, but nobody he didn’t get along with. Truth is, he made some friends.

He was moved to a different dorm, in with his new buddies. For eight months, he never even saw Soda, except a few times at chow. They cussed back and forth, but no big deal.

On the witness stand, years later, LaMarca would complain about the terror of it all, the beatings and the shakedowns.

“Where were you supposed to get $25?” his attorney asked him.

“Good question,” he answered innocently.

But he tells a much fuller story out of court, and the more detailed version has him dealing buck--that homemade wine--and plenty of weed.

Aided by Smugglers

Visitors would smuggle in the pot. The women hid it in their bras. Barely a stem and a seed would fetch him $1. Some weeks, he made $100, $200, more.

And out on this ranch, the guards would let him go off checking the fences. He liked to buy some Chivas Regal and sit under a tree. His wife would drive up from Miami, and he’d meet her in the back pasture.

“I was loving Belle Glade after I got used to it,” LaMarca said.

But it didn’t last. Maybe things got too good. Maybe he had too much mouth. Anyway, they moved him off the ranch and out of the dorm.

He went back where he came from, and Soda Water was bug-eyed to see him.

“Pick a daddy or pay!” he warned him, swinging right off, knuckles against cheek.

This time, there didn’t seem an easy way out. Soda and his pals kept on LaMarca everyday, sassing and hassling.

Other guys picked it up. They’d tell him they’d heard he was somebody’s boy, that he was a good time.

Penalized for Fighting

LaMarca asked to be transferred but got nowhere. So he back-talked and he looked over his shoulders. Sometimes, he threw a punch.

That got him disciplinary reports--and each of those cost him gain time he could have earned off his sentence for good behavior.

A few fights even got him sent into confinement, what they call “the box.”

The cell was 7 by 9. Lights were dim. It stank.

Sometimes three prisoners were jammed in. Two slept in bunk beds, the other on a thin mattress on the floor beside the toilet. Nobody got out for exercise.

It was after a time in the box that LaMarca was assigned to a work detail for the foul-ups. They cleaned weeds out of the canals along the state roads.

One guy on the squad was named Nordheim, and he had the deep smoke of hatred in his face, scars and tattoos all over.

“Kick out $25 by tomorrow,” he warned, his fingers curled into fists.

Finally, that was enough. The next morning LaMarca split. He begged off work to use the bathroom, then stashed his prison blues.

He casually walked away in jogging shorts and a sweat shirt, stopping along U.S. 441, his thumb out.

An off-duty guard found him just that way. That guy looks familiar, the officer thought as he drove by.

LaMarca got six months for the escape--a hard slap for 45 minutes of freedom along a dusty highway. He served it in the county jail.

When it was time to go back to Glades, he swallowed eight balloons full of reefer, then a laxative. He wanted to get back in business right away.

This time, he planned to get himself some protection. A guy they called Scrap Iron was in his dorm. He was black like Soda Water and twice as tough.

At Glades, like many other prisons, a lot of combat broke along racial lines. But Scrap Iron didn’t just run with the brothers and he wanted in on LaMarca’s hustles.

“Me and Scrap, we’d sell those little matchboxes full of marijuana for $15 apiece,” LaMarca said, again volunteering details he didn’t mention in court.

They became full partners, dealing wine and marijuana and even sandwich fixings stolen from the kitchen. Scrap Iron taught LaMarca how to kick-box.

Prison may not have been pleasant, but it was profitable. Even Soda Water tried to become a customer, though LaMarca wouldn’t sell to him.

Fight Over Marijuana

Once, the two fought over some weed LaMarca was cleaning on his bunk. Both men had shanks, and they cut a little skin before it was over.

By late 1982, LaMarca should have been looking toward parole. But his escape and all his disciplinary write-ups jinxed that. It made him furious. Most of that trouble wasn’t his fault, he figured.

He was spending a lot of hours in the law library, a good, quiet place to get high. A few of the prisoners were trained as law clerks. One of them smoked pot. He and LaMarca giggled the hours away, thinking up a lawsuit.

“I wanted to stick it to Turner the way Soda Water wanted it stuck to me,” LaMarca recalled.

Each year, prisoners flood the federal courts with complaints alleging violations of their civil rights. Last year, there were 19,947 of them--about one for every 25 prisoners.

The courts provide special forms for prisoners to file. Some districts hire law clerks who do nothing but screen the lawsuits.

Many of the complaints are trivial, the work of prolific writ writers who say the showers are cold and the food is slop. But others are the stuff of nightmares--and they become the taproot of reform.

Plaintiff’s Statement

LaMarca’s suit began: “I have been countlessly approached, threatened with physical violence and assaulted by other inmates because I refuse to participate in homosexual activities or pay protection to be left alone.”

Federal Magistrate Peter Nimkoff read the complaint. Belle Glade--it rang a bell. He already had heard nasty things about the place. He decided to drive up from Miami, take a look, meet LaMarca.

“He told me horror stories,” Nimkoff recalled.

The magistrate obtained counsel for the prisoner. Soon, notice of the suit went up throughout the Florida prison system.

Nine other inmates who had served time at Glades came forward, and what they had to tell was like something from a fevered dream.

Justice does not often hurry. The lawsuit came to trial in Miami only last December, 3 1/2 years after LaMarca filed it. By then, he had served his time for burglary and gone home.

A few months after his release, he was arrested for kidnaping a woman in a shopping mall and sexually abusing her in the toilet stall of a ladies’ room. This time, he was sentenced to life plus 15.

For him, the suit against Supt. Turner was no longer something timely, just diversion and revenge. For two weeks, he sat in a soft chair on the plaintiff’s side of a wood-paneled courtroom.

His fantasy was escape. A friend in a Mercury waited outside every morning, he said. He hoped to slip his handcuffs, but he never could.

Instead he listened.

The case was well constructed. Two psychologists who had interviewed the men judged their stories too consistent to be cooked up.

“Most of these inmates did not know each other, and if they did, they had not seen each other in a significant amount of time,” psychologist Richard Swanson testified.

Prison Expert’s Testimony

A college professor and prison expert, Swanson had visited Glades. Based on what he saw and heard, he described it as a wide open place dominated by black inmates who added up to a majority.

“Sexual assaults and extortion of white inmates by black inmates was not only commonplace, but in some instances this activity was actually encouraged by some officers,” he said.

Then the prisoners took the stand.

First was Ronald Durrance, 28, a country boy who drove fast, drank vodka and robbed convenience stores. One night, he collapsed drunk in front of a 7-Eleven, the money still in his pocket.

Durrance is muscular and barrel-chested. Tattoos color his arms. One is a spider web covering the name Tammy, once his love and the mother of his son.

He said that at Glades he fancied himself something of a big brother. He warned new guys to stuff away their gear before it got ripped off. Sleep on your sneakers, he’d tell them.

None of this pleased a convict named Willie Dock. Durrance was blocking his operations, he said, and he better quit it.

The country boy didn’t flinch. He’d been there six months and nobody had messed with him yet.

Assault in Showers

But one night, Willie’s friend J. R. asked Durrance to step back by his bunk for a talk. He obliged.

The way the dorms were arranged, there were three rows of bunk beds--two by the walls, one down the middle. Towels and blankets often hung down from the top bunks. The guy in the bottom had the privacy of a tent.

A lone guard sat in the center of the room, caged in what they call the wicket. He couldn’t see past those cluttered bunks, especially back toward the toilets and showers.

When Durrance got to J. R.’s rack another guy, Bull, grabbed him around the neck from behind. Willie Dock was there with a knife. So was a guy named Bone.

“Cracker, if you holler, I’ll cut you,” Willie said.

They dragged him to the shower, eight inches of blade pressed against his throat. They threw him down on the floor.

Bean jammed his knee against Durrance’s left shoulder. He could still see a flash of knife. They cursed him. His lips touched the wet, red-brown tile.

Then they pulled at his britches. There were three penetrations, he said. It took 35, 40 minutes--who knows? Then they left him.

Gives Up on Revenge

“I felt the pain for maybe five days regular,” Durrance testified.

Revenge and shame pulled at him. He saw three choices.

He could bash their heads. A mop wringer would be a good weapon. But there are consequences. Whop a guy like that, they lock you up for good.

He could snitch, though he supposed the guards wouldn’t do much. He’d seen them selling the guys whiskey.

Or he could ask to check into the box for protective confinement. But for that he’d need a story.

“I couldn’t bring myself to go in and say I had been raped,” he said.

So he told the lieutenant that he’d got himself bad in debt, that he had to be locked away to keep from getting cut. It worked.

For four months, Durrance holed up in the box. Anger got to him so bad he thought it would blow out his forehead. Finally, he was transferred.

Even then, he didn’t get away from it. An inmate knew about the rape.

“He told me: You’re either going to pay me or I’m going to let it be known that you’re a punk,” said Ronald Durrance, the first of the prisoners to tell his horrible story.

After him, the others were like drifting voices from the same delirium.

Steve Bronson Jr., 37, burglar and thief, sat on the witness stand, his eyes pouchy and his lips molded into a frown. He asked to be called Nancy Sue.

They showed porno movies in a prison trailer, the explicit stuff, he said. That’s where he met a con called Mack, a mean pimp with a long knife.

“He told me I was going to be one of his girls,” Bronson testified.

Mack liked to keep a pair of “girls.” He dressed them in bikini panties, halter tops, tight shorts and sandals. Blusher brightened their cheeks and bandannas covered their hair.

He’d send them customers, sometimes 10 a day. Finally, Bronson had enough. No more, he told Mack, and no was a word Mack took as a dare.

One Saturday, he and some others caught Bronson in the recreation yard. They stuffed a grimy piece of towel in his mouth. They yanked his hands behind his head. They twisted a baseball bat up into him.

“It felt like I was being torn apart,” he told the court.

Second Rape Victim

Then David Aldred, 25, sweet-faced and a murderer, testified. He said he was raped in the showers on his second night at Glades. He wasn’t sure how many men did it, at least three, maybe four.

“My arms were stretched out on either side of me and held there,” he said. “Somebody grabbed me by the hair and raised my head up and stuck a knife underneath my throat.”

He tried to detach his thoughts, throw his mind clear from the pain in his body. It was little use. He cried like a child.

Afterward, he got up and rinsed off. The next day he reported the rape to a lieutenant.

“He told me there was nothing he could do . . . “ Aldred testified. “He told me something to the effect of: You got to start being a man sometime.”

Then Wayne Epprecht, 33 and a burglar, took the stand. He was robbed of 26 cents in the dorm bathroom, he said. The left side of his face was smashed in with a lead pipe.

He needed to go to the hospital, but he knew better than to snitch. He told the guards he got hurt playing football.

“I have been in and out, and I’ve come to learn the ropes,” Epprecht told the court.

Then, on and on, more stories came, like the awful break in a mirror getting larger all the time.

Nimkoff, the magistrate, sided with the plaintiffs.

First, he quoted Dostoevsky: “The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prison.”

Then he laid into Turner. The warden either knew or should have known what was going on, the magistrate said. In the language of the law, a “good faith effort” was required to protect those prisoners. Where was that effort?

He recommended damages for all 10 men, including $30,000 each to Ronald Durrance, Steve Bronson and David Aldred, and $17,000 to Wayne Epprecht.

For Anthony LaMarca, he suggested $9,000. LaMarca hadn’t been raped, but he did spend those months stuck in the box, plus the extra time for the escape.

Still, the case isn’t closed.

The way it works, the magistrate’s recommendation is sent to U.S. District Judge James C. Paine. It’s up to him to agree with it, as is most often done, modify it or order a retrial. His ruling is expected within weeks.

Exposure in Press

If the inmates do win, it will be the first time in Florida that a prison official has been found liable for attacks in which he played no direct part. Though the judgment would be against Turner, the state would pay the damages.

Whatever the final outcome, the lawsuit already has had the effect of a grisly display case. For a few weeks, prison life vaulted the wall and marched in parade through the headlines and editorials in South Florida:

“Gang Rapes, Flourishing Drug Trade, U.S. Court Told . . . Tale of Rape, Robbery Revealed . . . Inspector Says State Unable to Protect Inmates . . . Belly of the Beast . . . “

Whether any of it lingers in the public conscience is hard to say. There are so many competing outrages.

Bob Turner, for one, doesn’t expect anyone paid much attention. Over the years, he has spoken to many civic groups. They don’t know much about their prisons, just that they want criminals locked up, far away and for many years.

Anyway, the trial was a travesty, Turner said. It never could have happened when he started out back in the ‘50s. Back then, prison authorities kept a tight control and the courts kept their hands off.

Warden’s Point of View

“Try to enforce the rules now and you bump up against what the court says are prisoner rights,” Turner said, his finger bouncing on the table. “My heavens, you’re required to give due process to an inmate who has thrown feces at a guard.

“Twenty years ago, if that happened, you took immediate action, you did not wait. You did not have to file a report and allow the prisoner 24 hours to reply to the charges.”

Nowadays, the inmates have telephones and color television. Take away their TV and the next thing you know, there’s a complaint filed in the capital.

Then there are these absurd lawsuits. Hardly any of them get anywhere, but every one requires a response. Statements have to be taken. Paper work has to be filed. It takes time.

Things have gotten so bad the guards are afraid to break up a fight, he said. They might be accused of assault. They might get sued.

No wonder rapes are almost inevitable.

‘Worst That Can Happen’

“And it’s terrible,” Turner said. “Rape is the worst thing that can happen in a prison.”

Of course, he quickly added, the rapes alleged in this lawsuit are lies. Or he’d have known about them. Informants would have come forward.

LaMarca and the others made it all up, no question.

“You know, in the old days, you could spend 90% of your time with the prisoners you could help and you’d just lock away the rest,” Bob Turner said.

“Now you’re spending all your time with the no-good crud. Doing what? Defending their lawsuits, that’s what.”

The LaMarca lawsuit was a big hit at the prison, where the inmates followed it in the newspapers.

Half of them nodded in approval, bragged that they’d seen that stuff themselves. Or heard it told.

Others figured those guys put one past the court and more power to them. Maybe they ought to file a suit of their own.

If they do, they won’t have Bob Turner to go after. The veteran warden retired months before the trial, then went into the construction business.

He wanted to get out of prisons anyway, he said. And if he hadn’t, the lawsuit would have made him. The courts want to run the prisons. So let them.

The new man in charge is Chester Lambdin and under him, Glades is not so wide open. Inmates say so, and so do some of the officers.

Pornography is no longer featured on movie nights. Prisoners don’t line up at the front gate to greet the bus.

In the dorms, the double bunks down the center are now split up. Guards have a clearer view toward the showers, and there are more guards to look. The staff is at full strength.

Magistrate Quit Bench

To Peter Nimkoff, all this is good news. Glades is a terrible place and he was proud to do something about it. A positive experience, he called it.

As it turned out, this was his final case as a magistrate. Like Bob Turner, he had grown upset with the courts, though his angle was different.

Too many screwy decisions come down from conservative appellate judges, he said. He didn’t like the way they read the Constitution. So he resigned. He went back to college to study cross-cultural anthropology.

As for the 10 plaintiffs, they too have gone through changes. Prison, for all the tedious hours, is as intense as life can be.

It reshapes a man, sometimes straightening him out, more often bending him further from form.

Ronald Durrance, the stocky country boy, stayed out of trouble and was paroled in May. He had a job lined up and he swore to stay clear of that devil, the bottle.

The rape--that still troubled him. He wanted to tell his son about it. Rape is a part of prison, and the kid ought to know the stakes.

“But how do you tell that to your boy?” he wanted to know.

Steve Bronson Jr., always easy prey, was raped several more times after he left Glades, he said. For him, prison is like a slave market, and he’s always on the block.

Transvestites should be given special consideration, he said. He has asked for a transfer to a women’s institution.

“This request is not a joke and it is made in complete seriousness and sincerity,” he wrote officials.

David Aldred also remains locked up, no different from most of his life. Prison has replaced the mental institutions he lived in as a boy.

Getting raped, he insisted, has made him the wiser. The next time he got attacked, he was ready with an iron weight and ran the guy off.

“That’s called getting yourself established,” he said.

And Anthony LaMarca? He’s now at Florida State Prison at Raiford, maximum security. It’s much tougher than Glades. But that’s OK. He’s tougher, too.

Fear is the great weapon, he has learned. Place the idea of fear in somebody’s head and it strangles away everything else.

“But I ain’t afraid of nobody no more,” he boasted.

No, LaMarca has reinvented himself, readying his life for the long, pent up future. He reads the Bible now. He writes poetry.

And one more thing: He has his own punks. Not that he’d force anybody, like that scum Soda Water did. But he does indulge.

He pays for it and that’s the humane way, he said. Or he trades, taking favors from weaker men in exchange for the shelter of his protection.