A Guard In Gangland
When Luis Sandoval went to work for the Texas prison system, he did the wrong favors for the wrong people. But, he insisted, that didn’t make him a murderer.
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“I’ve seen about five new boots take one step out of the control riot-gate and into the main hallway and turn around and say, ‘See you later,’ “ said Sandoval. “If you last six months in there, you’ll make it. But the first six months is hell.” Sandoval was determined to tough it out. The new boot suffered the usual abuse from veterans and inmates. But he stayed out of trouble, in large part because of two hall porters, Bubba Ray Smith and Johnny Abrams. The two inmates snitched for Sandoval and herded him away from troublemakers, admonishing him, “Boss, stay away from those guys.”
Somehow an inmate by the name of Vicente had gotten past the new boot’s boys. Perhaps it was because Vicente was so quiet and servile or perhaps he had such a talent for lingering that the porters simply paid him no mind. It seemed that everywhere Sandoval went, there was Vicente, pushing his broom across the floor, sometimes waving or offering a greeting to the new boot, but never badgering him. Eventually the guard found himself engaging in polite conversation with the inmate. Sandoval came to enjoy these moments. It was a pleasure to deal with an inmate man to man, for once. When Vicente and his friend Armando Garcia—also a pleasant, nonconfrontational fellow—began to ask Sandoval if he had a light, the guard refused at first, and finally decided, after repeated requests, what the hell. Some rules were just too silly to heed.
Eventually, however, Vicente and Garcia began to ask for more than a light. The inmates handed Sandoval a letter, wondering if the guard could mail it for them. “I don’t have any money to get any stamps,” Garcia explained.
Sandoval weighed his choices. If he refused to do the favor, they could always snitch on him for lighting an inmate’s cigarette—though Sandoval didn’t think either was that type of inmate. On the other hand, if his superiors caught him delivering inmate mail, they could fire him on the spot. But that was if they caught him. Or if they cared to enforce the rule. Neither possibility seemed likely, given what Sandoval had learned about TDCJ in his first few months on the job.
At Ellis I, Sandoval had never seen so many rules enforced so haphazardly. Homosexuality was prohibited, yet punks strutted about in their cells, wearing women’s panties and makeup. Alcohol was forbidden, yet “chock,” or homemade wine, was made in a variety of ways in cells, the crudest method being by letting food wrapped in a plastic bag fester in a toilet tank. One Ellis I officer reported that in 1986, between one hundred and two hundred gallons of chock was discovered on a weekly basis within the unit.
Compared with Luis Sandoval’s quiet life in Alice, Ellis I must have seemed like an opium den. The 1985 lockdown put a damper on the atmosphere but not on the flow of drugs. Guards could still smell burning marijuana and still see inmates giggling to themselves.
Inmates fashioned shanks out of road signs, door hinges, food trays, typewriter platen rods, and field equipment. After the big lockdown, metal detectors were installed in every prison unit to discourage the carrying of shanks. Thereafter, inmates made their blades out of hard plastic or made do with whatever crude instrument was within reach, like the cast-iron weight an inmate found in the recreation yard and used, with one vicious swing, to lop off the ear of another inmate. Other weapons were by-products of inmate ingenuity, as in the case of Cosmo, the death row inmate who fashioned a bomb out of matchstick tips and an asthma inhaler and blew a hole in his cell wall.
Though inmates weren’t allowed needles for tattooing, resident artists took to using the metal pieces of windup toys. Convicts made primitive ovens out of foil-lined cardboard boxes equipped with a light bulb, and cooked deer or rabbit killed by inmates working in the fields. Sandoval caught one inmate with a homemade oven and a laundry basket filled with about fifty prime-cut steaks.
The steaks would have come from the kitchen; the laundry basket that held them would have been wheeled past a guard. Either the guard didn’t know what was going on, or he did. Sandoval figured the odds were about even. In prison, he had come to learn, if you gave, you got. Rumor had it that inmate Jesse Turner had stood between an inmate and a prison official and had taken the blade himself. Now Turner could be seen pushing trash cans down the hall, twirling his knife in the air; nobody took his knife away. According to Sandoval, Howard Digby, a runty burglar with a pug nose and heavily tattooed arms, was known as a captain’s boy, a snitch who filled his boss’s cup with coffee and his ear with prison gossip. In return, the snitch had an oversized cell to himself, plus a hall pass that gave him the run of the unit.
Sandoval did not know any warden, ranking officer, or CO at Ellis I who did not have at least one snitch. Everyone wanted information—on the inmates, on their superiors, on their peers. Seemingly everyone in Ellis I would snitch or be snitched on. If you didn’t treat your snitch right, he would scurry off to a more grateful listener and begin his new relationship by snitching on you. It was not the most hospitable climate for trust, which was something Sandoval felt inclined to consider when Armando Garcia and Vicente held out a letter and asked Sandoval to mail it for them.
Today, Sandoval says he mailed the letter and others like it “with a kind heart but with bad judgment.” And in an institution where judgment allowed some inmates to flaunt dangerous weapons while officials looked the other way, mailing the letter seemed like a minor transgression. He did so and, he told me, was then given $50 by the inmates. Later, Vicente asked the guard if a free world individual could mail Sandoval two money orders, which Sandoval would cash and then bring the $250 to the inmates. Sandoval did as he was asked. For his trouble, the inmates offered the guard $75. Sandoval told me that he took the money, though he denied it in court. Later, when Vicente asked the guard to phone a number in Brady and ask the person who answered when Vicente’s family would make their next visit, Sandoval had no objections. On another occasion, Vicente asked Sandoval to deliver the phone message that Vicente needed money to buy arts and crafts supplies. The guard made the call, apparently unaware that such messages, and the letters, might contain coded instructions from a prison drug-runner to a high-ranking member of the Texas Syndicate.
Garcia himself was not a TS member. Murder wasn’t his thing. He was a drug dealer, with connections dating back to his days peddling heroin in El Paso. Like any good businessman, Garcia kept a close eye on the marketplace. When cocaine was cheap, he sold coke; when pure coke became scarce and heroin became abundant, Garcia seized the opportunity. “I just want to take care of my business,” he would tell gang members who tried to recruit him. A deal was struck between the gang and Garcia: Garcia would acquire the drugs, give half to the Texas Syndicate, and sell the other half himself. All Garcia and his friend Vicente lacked was a reliable “drug mule” who could be counted on to transport drugs into the prison.
Eventually, Sandoval agreed to bring drugs into Ellis I. The drug trade was lucrative, and Sandoval always seemed to be hurting for money. But other factors have caused guards to agree to be drug mules. One of them is fear. The moment Garcia asked Sandoval to bring marijuana into TDCJ, it did not take superhuman deductive powers for the guard to figure out the Hispanic inmate’s clientele. Recalling the letter deliveries and phone messages, Sandoval might have wondered just what he had gotten himself into and how deeply. Garcia, of course, could snitch to the Ellis I authorities. But now that seemed the least of Luis Sandoval’s worries.
The other factor that has led guards to traffic in drugs is the peculiar morality of Ellis I, where rules are never universally applied and the use of drugs is so widespread that officials have to know—and accept—that prison guards are involved in the supply chain. On Sandoval’s shift alone, at least four or five guards had been busted for bringing drugs into prison, but there were others who hadn’t been busted and probably never would be. One was an officer who muled marijuana and cocaine for a black inmate known as Apple Jack, whose activities were no secret at the unit. “He would stand at the searcher’s desk like he was running the building,” Sandoval said. “Everybody knew about this scum.” Yet Apple Jack went unpunished: He tithed a share of his profits to the Texas Syndicate and gave the supervisors something to crow about by setting up a guard now and then. Apple Jack protected his mule, however, and though many knew of the officer’s extracurriculars, the hammer never fell on him.
One day Garcia told Sandoval to expect a call at home that evening. The caller, known as El Carpintero, was a convicted child molester from El Paso who nonetheless had managed to obtain a job, under an assumed name, as an x-ray technician at Ellis I. El Carpintero instructed Sandoval to drive to a location in Huntsville where a sack containing marijuana awaited. Sandoval picked up the marijuana and smuggled it into Ellis I—frightened every step of the way, he told me, that someone might notice the smell of marijuana and search him. But no one suspected a thing.
After that first transaction, Sandoval went back for more—a total of “three, four, or five times,” he told me, though he vividly described six transactions to an investigator hired by his family. (For that matter, Garcia testified during the trial, outside the presence of the jury, that Sandoval muled drugs “countless times.”) Sandoval was never searched, he told me, and came to learn that “the only way they bust you is if they’re told by a snitch, ‘This guy’s coming in today.’”
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