My wife had been wanting to head to California even before we were married. My promise to take her there might have been the only reason she married me. No, that isn’t true, but now that someone was out there waiting to even things up with me, we both wanted to leave town. I stole a ’51 Mercury and we loaded in all our worldly possessions, but we still had plenty of room in the car when we headed for the land of opportunity. The trip west was a leisurely one. We’d stop in some town or city that interested us and I’d hustle for anything I could, or case a place to burglarize. If I got money, great. If not, we’d load whatever I had taken into the Mercury and sell the goods along the way.
By the time we got to Los Angeles we had a few dollars and a few items to set up housekeeping. We rented an inexpensive place to live. My wife was in the early months of pregnancy, so I went looking for honest employment and the next few weeks saw me with a variety of jobs. With the jobs, and some thievery, we weren’t enjoying great luxury but things weren’t too bad for us. I had gotten used to the Mercury and felt like I was the legal owner. So much so that when they arrested me in it for car theft, I gave the arresting officer a lot of shit. Because the car had been stolen in another state, the FBI took over the case. They gave me that old song and dance about coming clean on everything to clear up the books and said they would show leniency. I’m no longer sure if I voluntarily told them about the car in Florida or if they tricked me into telling them. Anyway, I did get a hell of a break when I went to court for the stolen Mercury. Mostly because of my wife’s pregnancy, the judge put me on the streets with five years’ probation. I still had the other charge in Florida to face. If I’d had the guts to show up in court on that charge I might have gotten another break, but I was afraid to be too trusting of the courts. Instead I hit the road as a fugitive.
I put my wife through a lot of shit for the next four months. Why she stuck with me, I don’t know. We traveled a lot of miles, and we stole a lot of things to keep from being hungry or for travel money. She was getting close to having the baby and I didn’t know how that could be handled on the run, so I shipped her back to Los Angeles where my mom was now living and could look after her.
Not long after sending my wife to Los Angeles I was arrested in Indianapolis. You would think I’d had enough of that city, but there I was again in the same county jail where I had started. It was easier and less expensive for the court to revoke the five years’ probation than to prosecute me on the other theft, so I was returned to California and sentenced to the Federal Penitentiary at Terminal Island, San Pedro. I was twenty-one years old—no longer a juvenile delinquent. But looking back, I was never a juvenile anything, only an inmate in some reformatory. Now that I was twenty-one, it seemed only appropriate that I start my adult life in a prison with the big guys.
Terminal Island was a paradise compared to the institutions I had been in as a youth offender. The guards were there strictly for security and weren’t continually hassling the convicts. And the cons themselves did their own time, without trying to run anybody else’s life. It was a whole lot easier doing time with men instead of a bunch of kids who were always trying to play macho. It was so good, I didn’t create any problems. Escape wasn’t even on my mind. It was my intention to do my time like a saint and earn an early release. I sincerely thought that when I got on the streets again I would never do anything to put myself back in jail. I thought of those months with my wife, the thrills and warmth her body had given me, the new baby and all the pleasures the free world afforded me, and I realized what a goddamn fool I was for wasting my life being locked up.
Those first few months I went about doing my time with a positive attitude toward becoming a straight person. My wife wrote to me almost daily and came to visit as often as she could. I marveled at our new son during our visits and knew that I would break my ass to give him a better childhood than I had gone through.
But!—and it seems like in my life there has always been a “but”—before the baby was a year old, she stopped visiting. Her letters ceased without even a “Dear John.” My mother brought the news. “Your wife has moved out of the house and is living with some truck driver.” I flipped! The whole fucking world caved in on me. I wrote to her pleading for her to reconsider, begging her to come and see me. I needed her, loved her, and wanted to see little Charlie. Though the letters were never answered, for a few weeks I held on to the hope that her affair with the truck driver was just temporary and that she would eventually come back to me. All hope ended when Mom reported, “Your wife, your son, and her truck driver friend have moved out of the state.” To this day I have never seen or heard from her or the son that came from our marriage. When I gave up on her, my attitude of wanting to be Mr. Straight left me.
My work assignment was outside the prison walls, and I decided if my wife wasn’t going to come and see me any more, I was going to try and locate her. I attempted an escape. However, like so many of my escape attempts while in reform school, I was caught before I was out of sight of the prison, in the prison parking lot trying to hot wire a car.
For my attempt, I was taken off the minimum custody work assignment, which meant I was no longer allowed outside the prison walls, and given an additional five-year probation period to begin after I completed my existing sentence. It was a break from the court, but I wasn’t in an appreciative mood. My marriage, the new baby and a good clean work record inside the prison had been my ace in the hole toward an early parole date. And now that was gone.
I went back to being bitter and hating everyone. I had been bitter when my mom turned me over to the court when I was twelve years old. I hated her when she refused to let me stay with her after my first escape from Gibault. The bitterness I had learned at Plainfield never left me. And though I don’t blame her or feel bitter toward her now, my wife had the full brunt of my hate then.
Even if she had stuck by me and had been waiting when I got out of Terminal Island, I don’t know what the results would have been, because it’s obvious there is something lacking in my make up. It could have started with being a bastard son and my life with and without my mother. Maybe it was the years at Plainfield, or maybe the insanity of my uncle Jess and grandfather. I do know that until my wife left me I was filled with honest thoughts for our future together. I also know that the letdown I experienced when I realized I had lost her was a turning point in my life. I figured, screw all that honest-john bullshit, I’m a thief, I don’t know anything else. I made up my mind to perfect myself in the life I had been leaning toward since I stole all those toys and burned them when I was seven years old. And what better place to begin the perfection of an outlaw than in a penitentiary, a place that was loaded with every anti-establishment offender imaginable?
I was into learning ways to beat the law besides robbing or stealing. I was already pretty adept in those areas even though I had never made any big scores and I never doubted my ability to pull off a job if I needed to go that route. What interested me now was status. Among criminals in the joint, a thief or a gunman is kind of like a blue-collar worker, whereas a pimp or a top-grade con man is comparable to a bank president on the outside, kind of a high-roller, envied by other convicts. Pretty girls and sex provide the most interesting conversation for a guy doing time, and girls and their bodies are also big business in the free world. As long as I had decided to continue a life of crime, why not pursue what appealed to me most? What could be better than having all the girls you want and letting them supply the money and lifestyle an ex-convict dreams of on the outside?
To simplify my quest to become a pimp, right there in Terminal Island was one of the nation’s best known procurers—I’ll call him Vic. At one time Vic had his fingers in every whorehouse in Nevada and controlled call girls in numerous other states. He was a regular godfather of prostitution. The Feds hadn’t been able to bust him on any illegal activities other than income-tax evasion so I figured he really knew the score. Another thing that drew me to him was the fact that he wasn’t a big guy. Though I was never consciously insecure about being small, at times I did give up on pursuing roles in life I might have