A convicted felon and an SOB
Peter was fat. And tall. He was a white boy who had already done some time in prison. He was the convicted felon.
Selim was short and skinny, from Bangladesh. He was a professor in a small college in Kansas city.
Dr. Selim was a big SOB – OK OK, I will explain later.
Peer and Selim, this mismatched duo, visited me together for the first time about twenty years ago, in my house in Kansas, where I worked as a professor in a big college. Selim I knew already from before, he was coming regularly to my house for Indian food. I looked at Peter with some well-deserved curiosity – who the hell is this guy? A colleague ? A friend? A neighbor of Selim?
Peter solved this problem by asking me a multiple choice question:
“Look at me carefully”, he said “ Am I
- An undercover police officer?
- A retired wrestler?
- A Bodyguard to a Kansas City Mafia Boss?
- A convicted drug dealer. ?
I went for 3. which was wrong, and we all laughed and he revealed that he has been out of prison only for the last three years. Somewhat alarmed, I was worried that he would maybe do a line of coke right in my living room. Fortunately, that did not happen. He was kind of shy too, so I did not hear about his life story until later. Both Peter and Selim the SOB ate a lot of my beef curry that I made with Indian spices.
Over the next few months I will meet Peter and Selim frequently. Selim’s house was about 60 kilometers from mine, so either he would come over to mine or I would go over to his place. Peter would usually tag along. He lived in inner Kansas City with his mother, about 30 kilometers away from Selim’s house. We were all big foodies. Mostly, I will cook large amounts of beef, chicken or fish; Selim the SOB will make rice and salad; and Peter would wash the dishes.
Slowly, Peter started talking. He grew up in an old neighborhood in Kansas City. When he was born, it was a mixed neighborhood of both blacks and whites. Overtime, as the suburbs of Kansas city expanded, many white people left for the suburbs . His white parents stayed behind, so he grew up with a lot of black neighbors and friends.
He was big and lethargic. He was not very bright, either. After graduating from high school, he remained either unemployed or worked in fast food restaurants at minimum wage. This went on for a while, then the local drug dealers in his neighborhood noticed him.
First, the local supplier, a boy that he knew from his neighborhood, gave him some coke at deeply discounted prices. A few months later, when he started enjoying the subsidized dope, this boy told him that Cushenberry wanted to see him. Cushenberry was the local drug boss, no one knew his first name! With some trepidation, he went with the boy to his house. It was kind of surreal!
It was a normal looking house, but big, with about a dozen rooms. It had grills on every door and window. As you go in the main door, there was a hallway where two strawberries hung out. In case you do not know, strawberries are severely drug-addicted women whose skin and hair lose pigmentation from long periods of severe malnutrition and drugs. Their hair turns a sickly reddish color, hence the name strawberries. They hang out at the entrance and offer sexual services in exchange for drugs to all the customers who visit the house.
Inside the house, there were armed sentries at every entrance and an armed man manning a slew of surveillance cameras. There were people whose jobs were similar to accountants, sales personnel, and purchasing managers just like in a big corporation. There were several people in charge of dispensing and counting massive amounts of cash. Several of these employees lived at the premises with their wives/girlfriends. Most of the residents were black men whereas their women were very beautiful, mostly white and some underage, all addicted to drugs. There were children of these women of different ages romping around the house among stacks of cocaine, weed, crack crystals, drug paraphernalia, and many handguns and machine guns. Children played around people sprawled out on the floor, out from various drugs. It was indeed a modern Dickensian scene .
He met Cushenberry at the inner sanctum of the house, he was shirtless, and muscular, a black man in his early forties. A woman was massaging his shoulders. He basically made small talk with Peter for a few minutes and then let him go. He was just checking him out. Peter was employed for the next two years by this gang, running small errands and getting paid peanuts. Afterwards , he got a mentor who trained him to be a courier for six months, His life changed after that.
After a few training runs, his life as a courier began in earnest. His car, or rather, Cushenberry’s car, was fitted with a false top and a lot of extra side pockets hidden around the seats. When he started his sojourn from Kansas City, the car was stuffed with about a million dollars worth of cash. He went directly south from Kansas city, all the way through Kansas, Oklahoma, and many many miles through Texas. The journey from Kansas City to Brownsville, a dusty, humid town in the southern tip of Texas was about 1600 kilometers long. That’s where Peter crossed the border. Looking at him, the agents at the border could only think of a tall fat white kid who gets no chance to score any pretty women in USA – his rotund stomach, reversed baseball cap, sheepish grin , chubby cheeks and the loud, tasteless stereo music in his car all corroborated this hypothesis. It was clear to the border patrol that he was going to use the services of escorts and party wild in Mexico. They never associated drug smuggling with Peter.
Peter entered Mexico and checked into a hotel. His Mexican business associates soon met him and took his car away for about an hour, relieving him of all the cash. He spent the night, usually freaking out, no party, no hookers, taking anti-anxiety pills in his hotel room. The next day , he drove back to USA, absolutely clean, no drugs, no cash in his car and checked into a designated motel right after crossing the border. His business associates came again and delivered the merchandise, usually cocaine , that was stuffed in his car. He drove back to Kansas City, for about 18 to 20 hours without stopping or sleeping, only eating snacks while driving ; keeping himself awake with “speed” (methamphetamine). His work was done as soon as he delivered the merchandise in Kansas City to Cushenberry’s associates. He came home to his mama with 40 to 50 thousand dollars (30/40 lakhs)- not bad for about four days work, and in the early 1990’s more than many American household’s annual income. Yes, the lady escorts came to him at this time, he could get the prettiest and the most expensive ones in Kansas City!
He would make one trip a month, usually. That would make his annual income close to a staggering $500,000, a half-million dollars a year, a dream for a high school dropout in the early 90’s. ( a college professor with a Ph.D. in a renowned university will make about $45000 per year at that time)
Peter spent a lot of this money. He bought a farm with fourteen acres of land, opened up a car “body shop” where cars were painted and body damages were repaired. Of course, he renovated his ancestral house where his mother lived, and bought another nice house for himself that he decorated with outlandish sound equipment and five big screen televisions! He also bought about seven cars , by the way!
The dream life continued for a number of years. Peter observed the inner workings of a drug dealer family. He told me about their acceptable rules of conduct, and internal punishment strategies which were rather severe. As an economist, I was impressed with the decentralization of operations that provided a huge safety net for a very risky and illegal business. Plus the codes – the members always spoke in codes! Drugs and cash were never mentioned directly, not even in obliques. When Peter will arrive in Mexico, he will wait in his car for some total stranger to arrive and say the code word or words. He will then give the car keys to him so that he can unload all the cash. The same procedure when he came back to the US side – he will say the code words to total strangers to receive delivery of the drugs that he will bring back to Kansas City. He will deliver the drugs to a different location every time in Kansas City, again by matching the code words with the recipients.
The dream life fell apart one fine morning in a matter of hours. He got a call from one of the associates, who said “we received the stuff you delivered earlier”. No code there! He started bawling – he knew the game was up! The police and the DEA were at his door soon afterwards. They caught him with about two million dollars of cash – he was getting ready for his monthly trip to Texas!, But no drugs were found on his premises. The others in the gang were arrested with drugs – they were prosecuted and convicted – their release from prison is scheduled to be somewhere around 2030!
Since it is difficult to explain why two million dollars of cash were in his house, his lawyer convinced him to plead guilty to “intent to purchase and distribute illegal drugs”. He was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, and got out in about seven years around 2006. I guess he got lucky!
He told me stories about his life in prison which I will share some other time. What I found very interesting was how futile the rehabilitation process was for him.
First, the government took away all his assets, one by one. Once he was convicted and incarcerated, he will receive legal notices from IRS and DEA claiming that some of his assets was supposedly acquired with income from illegal drugs. So these assets are being confiscated, plus he was served with a past due income tax bill on these amounts. The onus of proof was on him to show that these assets were legally acquired – the government just grabbed these assets as soon as he was convicted.
One by one, his cars, his new house, his farm, and his body shop were all taken over by the government agencies. When he got out of jail, he was literally penniless. He started living with his mom in his ancestral house.
The rehabilitation process began at that time. The government will give him grants to go to college. He had already finished his high school requirements and took some college courses while he was in prison. Now he went to Bradford university in Kansas City for his Bachelor’s degree in Business. He finished that in three years and enrolled in the MBA program there as well. That’s where he met Salem the SOB, who was his teacher. They started hanging out together soon afterwards.
What about getting a job and supporting himself? Umm, that turned out to be a problem. He was now qualified to apply for a variety of jobs, but as soon as he disclosed that he was a convicted felon on his job application, the employers will reject him. And it was not possible to lie on his application, because a background check will reveal his past conviction, and he will be sent to jail again for lying which is a parole violation!!
He could work in minimum wage jobs in selected establishments that received grants from the government for employing ex-convicts, but by the time he finished his college degree, he was overqualified for those jobs!
A nice catche-22 situation – I guess he needed a cash infusion to start a business on his own, but the banks would not lend him money, he would only get loans from other crooks. It’s no wonder that a lot of felons eventually go back to prison in USA.
What about Selim? Why was he a mammoth SOB? Well, he was merely a garden variety SOB from the Indian subcontinent. I knew him for three years before I met Peter. He lied to me constantly, about his family, about his past employment , about his failed marriage with a woman from Bangladesh and the subsequent alleged divorce. Most of these lies were habitual, inconsequential and easily detectable. He just enjoyed bragging and telling tall tales.
A year before I met Peter, I was dating a nice American woman. When I told him about her, he almost started salivating. A few weeks later, he came to my house where he met my friend. We went out for a drink. While getting down from the car, he casually rubbed my friend’s buttocks with his hand – I did not see it, but she told me about it. About three months later, we all met again at an Indian get-together. Here he went one step further and pinched her butt, hard. After this I made sure that she was never in the same room as him.
The SOB drove an old jalopy even though he made good money. I had a nice car that he wanted to drive – I always said no! One time we went to a party in Kansas City in my car. While coming back , it started raining. It was dark and rainy, my eyes were hurting from the glare of the streetlights in the rain. Seeing this, he offered to drive the car, and like a fool, I agreed.
He immediately started driving the car really fast and crashed it within about ten minutes. We were not hurt but the car suffered some serious body damage. My insurance paid for part of it, but I was left holding the bill for the remainder of the repairs, towing the car for about 80 kilometers and paying for taxis to go to work for about ten days. The SOB did not give me any of this money! He flatly refused, saying all the repair places are overcharging me!! I guess me calling him an SOB is justified, the only reason he is in this narrative is because he introduced me to Peter.
A little while later, someone from Bradford University called me and said that disciplinary actions are being taken against Selim – apparently, he seriously harassed a female student in his class. Fortunately for him, before he could actually get fired, he found a job in Saudi Arabia and left United States presumably for good. I lost touch with him at that time and with Peter as well because Peter always visited me with him. I only talked with Peter on the phone a few more times after Selim left.
Peter seemed to be doing well. His mom actually was doing fine. She was always owning a brand new car that Peter got to drive, and giving Peter a nice allowance frequently. With that allowance, and the government grants to pursue his scholastic endeavors, Peter was a happy ex-con with zero income, but a lifestyle replete with scholastics, electronics, alcohol and occasional forays into the aforementioned Kansas City escorts! I wondered about his mother’s source of funds and since Peter was unwilling to divulge this information, I had to figure this one out myself. You see, Peter was not stupid at all. For about eight years when he was making a lot of money , he made frequent deposits to a super secret savings bank – no, not a Swiss bank, but a bank called Mom Savings and Loan. He was the only client in that bank, the operations of that bank were carefully hidden from bad boys like federal agents and the police. Now that he is a free man, he made regular, albeit modest withdrawals from this bank.
In retrospect, I liked Peter. He still lived with his mother in the same drug-infested neighborhood, and cavorted with the escorts who were mostly drug addicts. So in the long run, there is a big chance that he will falter and self-destruct. He may end up in prison ten years from now, or he may hook up with a nice gf and settle down. Rehabilitation, you see, has no guarantees whatsoever!