Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars (17 page)

I was too furious to respond. I laughed about it later, but at the time, it was a critical breach of policy. With Pin covered, I made another pass by Manson’s cell, making doubly sure he wasn’t up to something.

“You again?” he snarled. “What the fuck’s going on?”

“Never mind. I’m sure you’ll hear about it later.”

Without saying another word, Manson went to the back of his cell, picked up a metal mop holder, and handed it to me through the bars.

“This could be dangerous,” he said.

I was stunned. A mop holder could easily be altered into one of the most feared weapons found in a prison. The size and amount of metal made it something to kill for—and with. It had fallen into Charlie’s lap when an officer foolishly left it on the tier after an inmate mopped the floors. Since Manson never did anything out of benevolence, I viewed it as an act of self-preservation. Without ratting, he was signaling to me that security was sloppy on the block and needed to be cleaned up. Manson had reason to be concerned. If the mop handle had fallen into another inmate’s hands, it might have been used to kill or maim him. There was always the fear that somebody wanted to gain a reputation by taking out Charles Manson, and such slipups would give some young sociopath the perfect opportunity. Although Manson was loath to admit it, and often railed against it, he was a strong proponent of tight security.

A few days later, I was bent over my desk concentrating on some procedures for the new AC manual when a shadow crossed my path, giving me a start. I glanced and saw Pin’s imposing frame blocking the doorway. He had a strange, wanton look on his face.

“You sure have a nice ass, boss,” he cooed. “I’d sure like to bust your brownie.”

“What?” I demanded, angered by the lewd remark.

“I mean, I’d like to butt-fuck you,” he clarified, jerking his hips forward to emphasize the point. Oh shit, I thought, feeling a trace of fear. What were these two scheming now? Had Manson ordered Pin to force me into a compromising position so they could gain blackmail power? Was Pin, possibly with the help of others behind the door, going to try and rape me in the hope that I would be too ashamed to file charges and would thus be under their control? Pin knew that if something like that happened, many of my fellow officers would think that I’d willingly participated. A number of officers at San Quentin had destroyed their careers by having relations with inmates, so it was possible that I could end up being thrown into the Dumpster with them. This was a serious situation. I dropped my pen and glared at the burly Irishman.

“Over my dead body!”

My response broke the tension. A smile cut across both of our faces, then laughter, side-splitting laughter. Neither of us could stop for nearly five minutes. We couldn’t talk. Tears filled our eyes as we howled. Each time we tried to regain control, we’d look at each other and burst out laughing. When we were finally spent, we confirmed what had been so funny. Pin was imprisoned because of sexual crimes. He’d killed for sex. Even in prison, sex was his main motivation. He came to me once with a plan to randomly murder someone so he could be sent to death row and reunite with a lover. He was dead serious about it, dropping the idea only after I explained that his lover would be long gone before Pin made it through the system.

My ad-libbed “Over my dead body” remark was the wrong threat to make with this character. Pin was laughing for the same reason. “The moment you said that, I thought, ‘I’ve killed guys for a lot less.’ And I knew you knew it,” he said. What started out as a scary moment ended with us bonding emotionally in a way two men rarely experience. Yet after it was over, driving home that evening, I couldn’t help feeling uneasy about what might have prompted it. Would Pin have tried to rape me? I didn’t think so. We’d gone through a lot together and I trusted the guy. He wouldn’t have forced the issue—unless he was under the influence of somebody else. Would Pin have go through with it had I consented? Absolutely. Pin’s motto was, “Nothing ventured, nothing gained.” As long as it was Pin just being Pin, everything was cool. But if Charlie had something to do with it, then everything was decidedly uncool. As I pulled into my driveway, I realized that I’d probably never know the truth.

Later that spring, something happened that put my problems with Manson and Pin Cushion in glaring perspective. The brutally murdered body of a thirty-eight-year-old officer was found sprawled on the floor of the laundry warehouse in the lower yard. His head was crushed and brain tissue was oozing from his fractured skull. It took a blow of tremendous force to do that kind of damage. A bloody gunnysack containing a heavy weight was found near the corpse. There were no signs of struggle, indicating that the officer had been jumped. A general recall was immediately sounded, summoning the inmates to return to their cells. The guards examined everyone as they filtered back. The prison was locked down, and the gooner squad sealed off the crime scene, searching for clues. The assignment officer gave the gooners a list of the inmates who worked in the laundry. They were located and grilled in their cells. One, a man named Rios, had blood on his clothing. He was panting, perspiring, and extremely jittery, looking from one face to another expecting something to happen. His answers were nervous and evasive. It was pretty obvious that he was the one.

Rios was jerked around, pushed, and yanked from his cell. The gooners dragged him across the yard and brought him to the AC. Inside, they blew past the door officer and bypassed the holding cage, where the suspect should have been deposited. Instead, they pushed him into the sergeant’s office, cornered him, and began to beat him mercilessly. The whole gooner crew took part, each venting his fury on the con’s body. They were so frenzied that they battered him against the wire-fused windows, cracking two and completely caving in a third. When Rios fell to the floor, they proceeded to kick him around like an old soccer ball. After Rios confessed, he was dragged limp into the holding cage.

The Marin County DA went ballistic over the prison-style justice. He jumped on the warden, demanding to know who had inflicted the beating and why. He warned that the whole case against Rios had been jeopardized because the confession was obviously coerced. Warden Rees angrily sought answers. None were forthcoming. The code of silence among the officers was an impenetrable stone wall. The gooners didn’t care about the law, or even losing the confession. Rios was in long-term anyway, so another mark on his record was meaningless. They’d meted our their own instant sentence as a message to him, and to everyone else.

Justified as this might sound in an eye-for-an-eye environment, the problem was, it wouldn’t end there. As I’ve explained before, all this does is start an endless cycle of murder and mayhem. The officer had been killed because a prisoner somewhere had been roughed up. The gooners in turn had battered the culprit. Now Rios’s brothers had a new score to settle, so another officer would go down. Around and around it went. To break the cycle, I received permission to crack down hard on the men. I hammered the door officer—one of my crew—until he broke down and fingered the specific gooners. That only made things worse. The gooners found out and threatened the door officer for snitching. That enraged me. I called in the bully who delivered the threat and jumped on his ass. Didn’t matter. Despite my efforts, nothing changed. All I’d done was place one of my men in jeopardy with his fellow officers. No matter how hard you try, sometimes things can’t be changed.

The government put on a good show for the slain guard’s funeral. The church, St. Dominic’s in San Francisco, was packed with law-enforcement officers from every city and county in the Bay Area. The eulogy seemed to fit not only the victim, but what I had tried to accomplish in the aftermath. “Christlike he died.… Like Christ, he would have said, ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.…’ He was a loving father, humble, peaceful, caring. So, his life with God begins for him, as his life ends with us here.”

The military-style ceremony at the cemetery had all the bells and whistles, including a twenty-one-gun salute, taps, and the presentation of the folded coffin flag to his devastated widow as her four stunned children clung to her side.

Sometime later, I was chatting with Manson and Pin Cushion and mentioned offhand how impossible it was to stop the constant waves of violence at San Quentin. To my surprise, both cons supported the guards.

“If an inmate jumps an officer, he should get the shit beat out of him,” Pin said. “They did it to me, and I finally learned.”

Manson’s opinion was even stronger. “Put me in charge of this prison for one day, and I’ll stop all the killing. Give me just one hour, and I’ll end the violence. Show them no mercy, and they’ll obey. Give them a dose of fear, a taste of the wolf’s fangs, a sting of the scorpion’s tail, and all your problems will be over.”

“I can’t do that,” I explained. “Legally, or morally.”

“You have the power to do anything you want,” Manson snapped. “You just need the balls to do it.”

I walked away, marveling at how Manson’s sentiments echoed those expressed by the hard-line guards. Someone had told me once that there was “a thin line between cops and robbers.” That statement never rang truer than at that moment. Charles Manson was a gooner.

8.

I
WAS CASUALLY
chatting with Charlie one afternoon when he started going on about how horrible it was that “the system” had caged him. “You have no idea what it’s like. You’re close, but you’re still on the right side of the bars, so you don’t know.”

Actually, I did—to an extent. I wanted to explain, but I always had to be careful what I said because Charlie fed on human weakness and would use it against me later. This day, however, I decided to open up a crack. “When I was at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Mountain View [California], there were a lot of similarities. I was there nearly six years, a solid sentence.”

“Like armed robbery.”

“Yeah, something like that. It was pretty torturous, full of loneliness and despair. Seminarians are well protected from the world. No girls. No newspapers. No radios or television. Tons of silence. In some ways, it’s worst than here. The study load was rigorous, the discipline strict, stricter than here because you guys can run your mouths. We couldn’t. We had small private rooms with a closet, a bed, a bureau, a desk, a chair, and a sink with a mirror. It was similar to a prison cell. There were community showers and toilets. We didn’t even have the privacy and convenience that you guys have. Silence was imposed in the living areas, so even with other people around, I couldn’t talk. The spiritual exercise and prayer was heavy. Like here, we formed societies and had secret gatherings to survive mentally. Only we took a bigger risk. If we were caught, we’d be sent home in shame, a vocation lost. Of my class, twenty-five made it through, fifteen didn’t. The ones who left did so mainly because of the celibacy thing.”

“Went for the pussy, eh? No surprise there. But you guys had a choice. You could have left anytime,” Manson gruffed, unimpressed. “That’s a big difference.”

“It’s no different with you. You had a choice. You could have chosen not to end up here in the first place. Then, after your first few falls, you could have done your time and made sure you never came back. How many times have you been paroled?”

“It’s still not the same,” he parried, ignoring my logic. “You don’t know how I grew up, man. Even in prison, I was at the bottom. Because of my high security and history of escapes, I wasn’t allowed to participate in the trade programs. While other guys were learning how to be auto mechanics, welders, plumbers, electricians, printers, and things like that, I was locked in a cell and kept out of the classes. So what good did that do me? What did they prepare me for when I was released? Nothing! See, you haven’t walked in my shoes.”

No, thankfully, I hadn’t.

Fortunately, Manson interrupted me before I slipped and went further. Near the end of my “sentence” I began suffering headaches and dizzy spells. They increased in pain and frequency until I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. A Methodist psychologist told me I was trying to be something I wasn’t “cut out to be.” He suggested that I reconsider my career path. Because he was Methodist, I cast it off as heathen heresy. I’d persevere, I insisted, through prayer and faith. I prayed and had faith, but the headaches wouldn’t ease. Finally, a Catholic psychologist advised me to leave the seminary immediately before I had a complete mental breakdown. Back home in San Francisco, the pain and dizziness vanished. I walked the beach for a month, breathing in the air and slowly rejoining the world, secure in my decision to escape my “prison.” Strange how things turn out. After an up-and-down stint in the military as a pilot candidate (probably overcompensating for my desire to be free), I settled into a career as a correctional administrator. I could take what I’d learned about being “caged,” and try to ease the burden of men who had no other choice. Even men like Charles Manson.

I doubted whether my personal bio helped Manson, especially since I’d ended it with a scolding. He was probably beyond help anyway. But that wasn’t going to stop me from trying.

A lot of decent people were trying at San Quentin in the middle 1970s. There were numerous renovation projects under way, some of which I personally handled. I supervised the design and building of a new exercise yard for the lockup units. Basketball and handball courts were spread across a smooth asphalt surface, complete with freshly painted white lines. At the completion of a series of similar projects, we held a big dog and pony show for area politicians, central office staffers, and other big shots. Associate Warden Rinker was set to give them the grand tour and was on pins and needles about it. We all knew how many things can go wrong inside a prison.

“It’ll be a disaster,” Manson warned in a nonthreatening manner. “You watch. You give these guys an audience, and they’ll take it every time. You march a bunch of lambs in front of a den of lions, and what do you think will happen? It’s the natural order.” Recalling how the death row gang had played to the media, I couldn’t help agreeing with him.