Blood in the Water Read online

  Then, in 2011, I had another incredibly lucky break. I had just published an op-ed in The New York Times on the occasion of Attica’s fortieth anniversary when I received an email from Craig Williams, an archivist at the New York State Museum who wanted help making sense of a new trove of materials he had received from the New York State Police.3 Troopers had just turned over an entire Quonset hut full of items they had gathered from the prison yards of Attica immediately after the four-day standoff there in 1971—items that the state considered evidence in the cases that it might make against prisoners or troopers. I was thrilled to hear this, and soon headed to Albany.

  When I got to the museum’s cavernous warehouse, I was glad to be joined by Christine Christopher, a filmmaker making a documentary on Attica with whom I had been working closely. Together we just stood for a while, staring at rows and rows of cartons, boxes, bags, and crates of materials that had been removed from the prison forty years before. And what had been gathered and hidden away for those many decades turned out to be grim indeed. In one particularly mangled container lay a heap of clothing—the dirty, rumpled pants and shirt of a slain correction officer, Carl Valone. His clothing wasn’t soiled merely with decades-old mud from Attica’s D Yard. It was stiff and stained with blood. I had met two of Carl Valone’s kids who were still desperate for answers regarding what, exactly, had happened to their father on September 13, 1971.

  And this was just one box. Next to it sat another in which I found the now rigid, blood-soaked clothing of Attica prisoner Elliot “L. D.” Barkley. Like Carl Valone, L. D. Barkley had been gunned down during Attica’s retaking. I had met one of his family members too—L.D.’s younger sister, Traycee. She, like every one of the Valone kids, was also still haunted by Attica.

  Although the detritus of Attica that the NYSP had saved in these many boxes revealed little new about why this event played out as it did, it was a harrowing reminder of its human toll. There was a dog-eared red spiral notebook filled with messages written by the prisoners who had survived the retaking, men who had hoped these pages could somehow be smuggled out so that their families and friends might know that they were still alive. There were also cartons of torn and faded photographs of prisoners’ loved ones, countless legal proceedings that the prisoners had painstakingly copied, and even their Bibles and Qurans—all of which had been ripped out of cells in the aftermath of the rebellion.

  Carl Valone’s clothing (undated, from the Elizabeth Fink Papers)

  All of the Attica files that I saw in that dark room of the Erie County courthouse have now vanished, and all of the Attica artifacts that the New York State Museum had been willing to share have also been removed from anyone’s view.4 But all that I learned from those documents back in 2006 can’t be unlearned, and all of the boxes of bloody Attica clothes and heartbreaking letters written by Attica’s prisoners that I saw back in 2011 can’t be unseen.

  And I have decided to include all that I have learned and seen in this book.

  That said, this decision was agonizing. Although my job as a historian is to write the past as it was, not as I wished it had been, I have no desire to cause anyone pain in the present. I am well aware, and it haunts me, that my decision to name individuals who have spent the last forty-five years trying to remain unnamed will reopen many old wounds and cause much new suffering. That old wounds were never allowed to heal, and that new suffering is now a certainty, however, is, I believe, the responsibility of officials in the state of New York. It is these officials who have chosen repeatedly, since 1971, to protect the politicians and members of law enforcement who caused so much trauma. It is these officials who could have, and should have, told the whole truth about Attica long ago so that the healing could have begun and Attica’s history would have been just that: history, not present-day politics and pain.

  Of course, even this book can’t promise Attica’s survivors the full story. The state of New York still sits on many secrets. This book does vow, however, to recount all that I was able to uncover, and by doing that, at least, perhaps a bit more justice will be done.

  PART I

  The Tinderbox

  FRANK “BIG BLACK” SMITH

  Frank “Big Black” Smith wondered if he would ever get used to being locked up. His cell felt like a casket with the lid left off just far enough for noise, bugs, and weather to get in, and conditions outside of that cage were also grim. Green Haven Correctional Facility was no place for human beings to live.

  Frank Smith had been born in Bennettsville, South Carolina, on September 11, 1933, to Henry Parker and Millie Smith. Millie spent long days laboring in the same fields that her family members had been forced to work under slavery. As her son grew older, however, Millie became determined to leave the South to forge a better life. When Frank was five years old she and Henry finally found the courage to move to Brooklyn. However, jobs were hard to find and poorly paid in this vast Northern city, and the family struggled there as well. Frank’s father eventually turned to gambling and other street hustles to make ends meet, and by the time Frank was a teenager, he like his father had mastered the art of running numbers on the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant. In 1969, and not for the first time, his luck ran out. That was the year he discovered that the problem with running games was that eventually someone owes money that they can’t, or won’t, pay. When Frank burst into a dice game with a loaded gun and took money that he felt he was owed, the next thing he knew he was bunking behind cement walls in one of the most rural parts of New York State.

  The other prisoners at Green Haven tended to leave Frank Smith alone. Smith was a huge, thick-necked man with closely cropped hair and a deep booming voice. He was not political, so the Black Panthers, the various Muslim organizations, the antiwar rebels, and the Maoists in the prison had little use for him. Big Black, as he was known by all there, wasn’t particularly religious, either, so the various Christian cliques also kept their distance. Big Black was just a man doing his time. His goals were simple: keep a low profile, tick off the days, and get back to Brooklyn.

  In 1970 Big Black found himself transferred to Attica Correctional Facility, where he spent his days pulling smelly, soiled garments out of the massive rolling carts that crowded its steamy laundry room. All around him that summer and into the fall, Attica’s prisoners were buzzing with the news that there had been a series of dramatic rebellions in New York City’s jails. From the notorious facility known as the Tombs to the Queens House of Detention, thousands of prisoners had been taking over their facilities and demanding major reforms. Teams of sympathetic observers were sent to negotiate with them, which included two U.S. representatives from New York, Shirley Chisholm and Herman Badillo, and the mayor of New York City himself, John Lindsay. Some of these rebellions ended quietly after intensive discussions. Others ended when guards retook the prison with their nightsticks. There were no fatalities. Afterward, city officials decided that the quickest way to deal with one of the most obvious prisoner complaints—severe overcrowding—was to send as many men as possible to upstate facilities. In other words, to push the problem up the line rather than solve it. Rumor had it that many of these men were being sent to Attica. As Big Black sorted through the piles of dirty shirts and sheets before him—sent over from Superintendent Vincent Mancusi’s mansion—he wondered wearily just how much more crowded Attica could get before it too would blow.

  1

  Not So Greener Pastures

  If a man had lived his whole life in Brooklyn or the Bronx, the journey to Attica was profoundly disorienting. Within an hour of boarding one of the Department of Correctional Services’ many vans ferrying newly sentenced prisoners upstate, all he could see out of the scratched-up bulletproof window was miles and miles of cows, barns, and land.

  After getting off the highway in Batavia, the vans headed down the two-lane road connecting this small town to the even smaller village of Attica. Here the faces were all white. Here the men drove pickup trucks rather than pushed
their way through subway turnstiles. Here the landscape consisted of rolling hills, not bodegas and burned-out buildings. The sign welcoming visitors to Attica, New York, boasted a population of less than three thousand—fewer people than lived in many of the urban neighborhoods that Attica’s prisoners called home.

  Attica, New York, was a part of America that for most of these prisoners existed only on TV. The town’s tiny storefronts were quaint. It had a pretty park, complete with a gaily adorned bandstand, a Little League pitcher’s mound, and a sparkling public pool, all straight out of a Norman Rockwell painting. Yet just beyond this slice of Americana loomed a massive and most forbidding fortress, one of New York’s most notorious maximum security prisons.

  Less than a mile from the village was the Attica Correctional Facility, enclosed by massive gray walls. Each thirty-foot slab was cemented twelve feet deep into the ground and on each corner perched a gun tower from which guards could scan the fifty-five-acre penal complex for any trouble. From the parking lot, newly arriving prisoners could make out the shapes of the men who paced within those red-tiled towers, ready to fire either into or outside the prison in the blink of an eye.

  Approaching the Attica prison (Courtesy of the Democrat and Chronicle)

  The contrast between this colossal and intimidating facility and its bucolic environs was something to behold. As men were delivered to Attica’s front entrance, and just before they were ushered through its massive doors, most could not help but steal one final glance back across the road. Even as guards yelled at them to get inside, it was hard not to be lulled by the rhythmic hum of a million crickets echoing from the tall grasses of the neighboring wildflower-sprinkled pasture.

  Entering this high security prison was another jolt. The building was archaic, hardly modernized since it first opened during the Great Depression. And it was crowded with bodies—jam-packed with anxious and angry men, young and old, from cities and small towns all across the state of New York. Attica’s 2,243 prisoners were overwhelmingly young, urban, under-educated, and African American or Puerto Rican.1 More than two thirds of the men at Attica had been incarcerated at least once before arriving there.

  That is not to say, though, that Attica’s men were all hardened criminals. Many had been sent to Attica simply because they had violated parole, including some who were much too young to navigate life in a maximum security prison. James and John Schleich were nineteen-year-old twins who had landed in Attica for parole violations. John’s original conviction had been for the “unauthorized use of a motor vehicle” and his brother James had come before the court for “cutting a hole in a lady’s convertible top.” Even though he had “bought the lady a new top,” he still got time.2 Another young Attica prisoner, twenty-one-year-old Elliot “L. D.” Barkley, had been sent to Attica for violating his parole by driving without a license.

  Increasingly younger men also had been landing in Attica because of their drug addiction. One seventeen-year-old Puerto Rican kid, Angel Martinez, had become an addict after shooting heroin to try to alleviate the pain of polio. When he then committed a crime to feed his habit, the judge sent him to Attica.3 Ending up in this particular New York state prison was especially rough on prisoners like Martinez since they could neither speak nor understand English. There was one Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican correction officer on staff, but his fellow officers insisted that he only use English with the men in his charge.4

  Whatever brought someone to Attica, once there his routine varied little. After passing through the entrance in the massive concrete facade, officers would assign each prisoner to a housing block. Attica had five main housing blocks: A, B, C, D, and E. There was also Housing Block Z, an area of the prison known as HBZ, or “the Box,” where officers placed men for disciplinary reasons. Each of the five main housing blocks held five hundred prisoners. Each block had its own exercise yard, and each was divided into twelve different groups of forty to forty-five men known as “companies.” All of the cell blocks save E were three stories high and divided into two wings. The cells in these wings looked in 1970 just as they had when the prison was built in the 1930s, except that by 1970 the bars had become thick with rust and layers of peeling paint.

  Even though Attica’s cell blocks were equally uninviting, which one was assigned to could make a big difference. For one thing, the cells in some blocks had bars, while others were enclosed by steel doors with small viewing slots. The former offered little privacy but the latter were claustrophobic. While some of Attica’s cell blocks had little to no heat and the wind howled through the cement walls, others were so hot one could barely breathe. Where one bunked also determined where one worked.

  Attica’s most menial and hardest jobs, such as shoveling the endless piles of snow in the harsh winter months, were done by the so-called grading companies. The best jobs were those in the commissary, the laundry, and the hospital. Being a clerk or a messenger in the administration building was also considered a step up. No matter what the job, few of Attica’s prisoners earned more than 6 cents a day in 1970. The lucky ones were paid $2.90 for a full day’s work, which was still much less than a man needed to survive at this facility.

  Cells at Attica (Courtesy of the Democrat and Chronicle)

  The men needed money at Attica because the state offered them only a few items gratis. These included a thin gray coat, two gray work shirts, three pairs of gray pants, one pair of shoes, three pairs of underwear, six pairs of socks, and one comb. Then, every month, prisoners would receive one bar of soap and one roll of toilet paper, which meant that men were forced to limit themselves “to one sheet per day.”5 The state’s food budget allotment was also meager. At a mere 63 cents per prisoner per day, it was insufficient to meet the minimum dietary standards as determined by federal guidelines.6 The reality was that many men at Attica went to bed hungry.7 For this reason jobs in the kitchen or the mess hall, while more arduous than others given their seven-day-a-week schedule, were some of the most coveted. At least on those jobs a man could eat leftovers.

  To get anything beyond the supplies given them—warmer clothes, more food, toiletries like toothbrushes, toothpaste, deodorant, shampoo, razors, and extra toilet paper—prisoners needed money.8 Being able to buy deodorant was no luxury since these men were allowed only one shower a week and were given only two quarts of water a day. With this water prisoners were expected to wash their socks and underwear, shave, brush their teeth, and clean the cell to a correction officer’s exacting standards.9

  Attica’s men could rarely rely on their families to send funds to meet their basic needs because they too were usually impoverished. Nearly half of Attica’s prisoners came from the New York City area. To visit them, it would cost family members $33.55 for a bus ticket to Batavia, the city nearest to Attica with a depot. Since there was no public transportation to and from that bus depot, they would also need cab fare. For loved ones who did manage to come up with the more than $100 of travel expenses and twenty hours of time away from a job required to visit the prison, there was rarely money left over to buy food for themselves, let alone assist the relative they had come to see.10

  The constant hustling for adequate supplies took its toll on prisoners’ morale and went a long way toward escalating tensions at the facility. Attica’s men spent fifteen to twenty-four hours of every day in their cells. They were bored, frustrated, and on edge. Crammed into each tiny cell was a bed, a toilet, and a basin, which left barely enough room for a man to move around. Most of the men were allowed thirty-one to one hundred minutes a day in one of the prison’s four exercise yards to run or stretch their muscles. Unfortunately, many months of the year, the temperature was well below freezing, so even a break from one’s cell could be most uncomfortable.11

  One benefit of being inside the cell, even if oppressive, might have been the opportunity to read or listen to the radio. And, yet, Attica had no newspapers, very few books to share, and nothing at all to read in Spanish. Attica did subscribe to a few
magazines, including such unlikely selections as Outdoor Life, Field and Stream, American Home, and House Beautiful.12 If a prisoner wanted anything else to read, he had to have it sent to him from the outside. And even then he might not actually receive the publication since administrators confiscated a great many books and newspapers they considered inappropriate. As for listening to the radio, the prison piped in only three static-ridden stations, which all stopped broadcasting at 11:00 p.m. Since the men were forbidden from talking in their cells after 8:00 p.m., evenings passed very slowly.13

  There were scores of rules governing the daily behavior of Attica’s prisoners that were, on the whole, petty and thus netted men frequent punishment. Breaking rules usually resulted in a man facing “keeplock”—a slang term for being confined to his cell, twenty-four hours a day, for an indefinite number of days. Often this sanction was imposed for trivial violations, such as talking on the way to the mess hall. Yet the “no talking” rule that was supposed to be in effect when a company walked from one part of the prison to another was enforced by some guards and ignored by others.

  Many of Attica’s prisoners coped with their living conditions creatively. In order to heat water to make hot drinks and thus ward off the chill, for example, they devised their own electrical units called “droppers.” They would take two razor blades, put matchsticks between them, and wrap them in thread or string. By using paper clips to hook a piece of lamp cord to this contraption, and then placing the entire mechanism into water, they could generate heat via electrolysis. Even though the prison administration had deemed these heaters contraband, and being caught with one could land a man in serious trouble, nearly every cell had one, and for the most part they were tolerated. The bottom line, according to one outsider who later interviewed over 1,600 of Attica’s prisoners, was that almost all of the men at Attica, “including the acclimated ones,” were deeply “frustrated by the inconsistencies.”14 The fact that keeplock was used to force their labor also generated anger. When teenager Angel Martinez begged off work for two days because he was in intense pain from his polio, guards confined him to his cramped cell for a full month.15