Madison, WI – One recent afternoon at the Brass Ring – a billiards bar on Madison’s east side – “Buddy,” a Wisconsin-based marijuana trafficker, talked the pros and cons of his business. He suggested that a rash of heroin-related high jinks across Dane County over the last year has stifled its growth as authorities step-up their interdiction efforts.

“Anytime you get into a period like this – and I’ve noticed waves of it happening in the past – people become a little more insular about who they work with,” he said, nursing a Bloody Mary. “There’s no new faces and you don’t strike up business conversations with people.”

In a trade where people and their freedom tend to have short shelf lives, Buddy has been in business, without interruption, for a remarkable 10 years, making him something of an old-timer. And a lucky one at that. Unlike most who draw a living from black market commerce, his criminal record is squeaky clean.

But he’s had some close calls. Once, he said, he and a friend were pulled over with two-and-a-half pounds of weed and $2,500 in cash.

“We were pissing ourselves, saying ‘We’re so fucked! We’re so fucked!” he recalled.

At the station, his friend – the driver – was issued a ticket for driving without a license. Then, something unexpected happened.

“We get released,” he said, as if still in shock. “And we’re walking out wondering, ‘What the fuck is going on?’”

Their car was still parked where they left it on the side of the road, but the money and product were gone.  “There’s nothing quite like getting robbed by a police officer,” he said. Then, as if weighing the alternative, he grinned. “It’s my favorite dirty trick.”

Buddy began selling pot in college, and was soon couriering pounds of marijuana to Madison from California, where he had a hand in establishing a medicinal marijuana farm.

Over the years he’s occasionally pushed harder stuff, like cocaine and opiate painkillers – the kind local authorities blame for the recent spike in heroin use. Buddy agreed with this theory, explaining that, for dedicated pill poppers, heroin inevitably becomes a cheaper, more accessible alternative. But over time he developed serious moral qualms about enabling his customers’ journey down that road.

“[The] pharmaceutical stuff is destroying everything,” he lamented. “That stuff involves so much more crime and deviousness.”

Still, the nature of his trade brings him in regular proximity to the hard stuff. “It’s like if you go to a whorehouse looking for a blowjob, there’ll be a guy next to you getting laid,” he explained. “You’re always running into it.”

Surely there’s more money in the hard stuff, especially heroin. But he can’t reconcile making money by pushing a product that causes death. “I saw a close family member destroy his life with it. And I’ve had three or four customers kill themselves with it,” he said. “I care about quality of life.”

Buddy wouldn’t disclose his age, but said he becomes more risk averse the older he gets. Marriage hasn’t helped, either. He admitted that he and his bride “have had some conversations.”

Looking back on colleagues who’ve died or been imprisoned, Buddy reflected on his own anxieties. “It’s a constant nagging thing,” he explained, referring to the day-to-day pressures of dealing drugs. “I’m sure it’s a lot like what stuntmen feel when they go to work every day – it’s part of the job.”

Most nerve-racking, he said, are the drives from California with marijuana loads large enough that, under federal sentencing guidelines, would land him in prison for five years or more. “For three or five days all you do is hope your vehicle doesn’t break down and they bring in the dogs.”

Chasing his Bloody Mary with a beer, Buddy continued, “The sheen disappears quite quickly… When I started out in college it was breaking up an ounce; then I found myself doing the trafficking, or unpacking and guarding it somewhere here in town and dealing with many different people. It’s a helluva lot less fun as you go on.”

But in the calculus of risk-benefit analysis, Buddy, who earned $60,000 last summer, said the money is an obvious draw. He estimated his earnings over the last decade have approached $1 million, most of which he’s spent.

“You can make a lot of money just hanging out with your friends – until things go bad,” he said.

Things went bad last fall when armed gunmen raided his California farm ahead of the harvest and stole his crop, which he valued at around $170,000. “[We] didn’t realize at that point that [we] could’ve been insured,” he said, regretfully. “There are insurance companies out there that will insure your product.”

But this wasn’t the only misfortunate to visit him in 2011. The precariousness of his trade has put strain on his marriage. And apart from losing a ton of money, he also lost his business partner to a heroin overdose.

In response he’s scaled back operations, opting to work with people on the medicinal, rather than the recreational, side of the trade. “I’m no longer dealing with smokables, either,” he explained. “I’ve moved to the edibles and oils, and that makes the shipping easier.”

He sees his business as a community service, helping those afflicted or those who just need to means to unwind. He believes public opinion is shifting in favor of marijuana’s legalization, even among some within law enforcement.

“I’ve run into so many cops, especially around Madison, that understand certain things are not a problem,” he said. “We have really great cops in Madison.”

He envisions one day there being a consortium of sorts between drug dealers, addiction specialists, authorities and other stakeholders to discuss strategies on preventing death and criminality.

“I’d love to give them suggestions,” he said, finishing off his drink. “But people like me are not going to step forward and offer suggestions on how to improve this for fear of the retribution.”

The face of a maniac.

The problem with maniacs is that you can’t reason with them. They lack perspective and all sense of proportion. They dwell so hard on the small things that the bigger picture gets obscured. I know, because all summer I’ve been menaced by a lunatic who’s gone to extraordinary lengths to rain misery on everyone around him.

Meet Joe, a developmentally disabled alcoholic who’s spent much of his adult life in and out of prison for crimes ranging from multiple drunk drivings to burglary. Joe and my sister were dating and living at my father’s house when I returned from Philly in May. I planned on staying for only a week or two, but when a temporary opportunity opened up at a local paper my stay was extended. Consequently, I became Joe’s housemate.

Things were okay for a minute. Though Joe and I had attended the same high school we didn’t know each other personally. We’re close in age, but he’d been held back several years on account of his developmental problems. I felt kind of bad for the guy. I gave him rides, bought him drinks and smokes, and indulged him as he spoke of his endless marathon of problems.

But the honeymoon was short lived. Within weeks Joe was back to drinking heavily. His friends who owned painting businesses refused to let him work because he’d show up so high on Xanax that he couldn’t hold a paint brush. He and my sister began fighting incessantly. He must’ve been manic because he hardly slept. In the mornings he’d come up from the basement upon hearing me come down from my room and before I even had a chance to wipe the sleep from my eyes he was in my space, inundating me with his many troubles. My patience soon wore thin so I explained that I no longer wanted to hear about his problems, that I make a point to avoid those kinds of problems and was tired of beginning my day with negative news that didn’t pertain to me.

To my surprise, Joe got angry and argued that by virtue of living together I was obligated to indulge him, especially when it came to his concerns about my sister. The more my father and I conveyed to him we just weren’t interested in his problems, namely because they were of his own making, the more Joe burdened us with them.

One day I mentioned seeing an old friend from high school who Joe apparently didn’t like. He thought I mentioned this person to taunt him. (I still don’t know what his beef is.) Then he got it in his head that this person was coming after him. Later that day, while I was at the kitchen table working, Joe became confrontational about this and threatened to “rip out [my] fucking throat.”

His eyes were glassy and lifeless, as though anything human about him had long ago died. There we were, standing in my father’s living room about to come to blows over the mere mention of someone’s name. My sister, in her own drug-induced confusion, basically got angry with everyone for picking on poor Joe and they moved out.

Once they were gone we found more than fifty empty vodka bottles in the basement that Joe had guzzled during his brief stay.

Though we worried about her, Joe’s departure came as a major relief, like finally killing the mosquito buzzing around your ear. But our peace was her nightmare. His drinking increased exponentially as did his paranoia. He became abusive toward her, dragging her from motel to motel convinced that people were after him. He ditched her in Milwaukee late one night, an event that led to his fifth drunk driving and to her being committed to a psych hospital.

The lovebirds reunited a week later. But soon Joe was drinking again and they were kicked out of his mother’s house. After making my sister drive throughout the night so he could sleep without fear of people finding him, they ended up in St. Paul, where she eventually fled into a hospital to escape him. He was taken to detox. Upon learning that I was on my way to pick her up, he threatened to murder her family if she left with me. For the next week my father and I were inundated with calls from Joe, who warned he was going to kill us for interfering with his relationship.

To our surprise, my sister was back with Joe a short time later, popping pills, drinking and shooting heroin. After getting kicked out of a bar one night, he returned with a knife and my sister again came home. Her descriptions of these latest episodes sound like some kind of nightmarish affront to humanity. While he showered Joe made her sit where he could keep an eye on her. When she wanted to call my father he threatened to call the cops on her. And he did, claiming she was threatening to slit her own throat. She came home terrified, having realized this person she cared about was in fact the monster everyone said he was.

The next day I took her to the motel to get her things. Joe was gone, out panhandling for booze money. But within hours I received a text from an old friend saying Joe was looking for a ride to Madison so he could kill me. In Joe’s version reality, he’s protecting my sister from her family. Over the next two nights the cops arrived at our house after Joe called to say my sister was being abused. When that plan failed, he showed up in a taxi expecting us to pay for it. My dad shut the door and called the cops.

The taxi driver told police that Joe said he was coming here to kill us. It was dark and he was dressed in camouflage. Police seized from him a knife and implored us to get a restraining order. The officer said that after speaking with him for five minutes it was clear to her that Joe is deranged. He told the officers he was there to protect my sister from us. Everyone, even his closest friends, have warned her she’s in danger by running with him.

My sister, whose drug addiction has left her unable to see not only her children but any hope of leading a meaningful life, landed in another psychiatric hospital a few days later. Her doctor had rescinded her prescriptions for the pills she abused which only aggravated her opiate withdrawal. But she seemed determined to pull it together, having narrowly escaped the dreadful outcomes of running with a mad man.

To help her stave off the institutional boredom, I brought her last night a book of puzzles that she enjoys doing. The nurse buzzed me in and paged my sister. I told her the nurse had her clothes and gave her the puzzles. When we turned the corner onto her hall there he was sitting in a chair at the end of the hallway.

As he grinned and waved at me I recalled what Albert told Bruce Wayne about the Joker in The Dark Night: Some men just want to see the world burn. Some men like Joe just want to see people suffer.

My heart sank.

It’s her funeral, I thought as I walked out, astounded that someone can so completely abandon her children yet care so much for parasitic loser like Joe. Perhaps she’s a masochist and relishes the abuse. Truth is she’s a vulnerable, lonely addict who’s being manipulated by a vindictive con man and career alcoholic.

It’s only a matter of time before he again terrifies her with threats and abuse. She’ll come running home and again my father and I will become the targets of his deranged thinking. She’s said so herself, “Joe doesn’t want me to have a family.”

She’ll pretend to feel bad about everything and offer empty apologies. And, because she’s family, we’ll play along knowing full well this is how it’ll be until one of them is dead or in jail or until the next loser comes along.

For those of you wondering what I’ve been up to in Madison, here’s a sampling. It’s an article I wrote for Isthmus newspaper about a guy who, after a series of misfortunes and unfornunate decisions, decided to check out of life. Enjoy!

The first letter to Fundamental Pete’s Ass-Jammery arrived in late September, but sat in the WSUM studio’s mailbox for several weeks before the show’s host, Pete Hnilicka, got around to opening it. It was a response to a choose-your-own-adventure bit that the college radio talk show had recently aired. The adventure left off with Hnilicka and a co-host in their old dorm room with two dead hookers.

“Dear Ass-Jammers,” wrote Rajib Mitra, an inmate in Dane County jail who was allowed to have a radio because he was in a low-security area. “I was sorry to hear about your dilemma involving the dead hookers. Having been incarcerated for the last 6 1/2 years, I’ve overheard several conversations about disposing of hookers’ bodies, and this is what I learned…”

Mitra then weighed the pros and cons of the fictional adventure’s suggested plotlines, including one that involved dumping the bodies in Lake Mendota. Mitra, 32, cautions that no matter how well weighted down, the bodies would invariably float back up, arousing the ire of the Badger men’s rowing team. He suggests they dump the bodies instead in Lakes Monona or Wingra, as the rowing team “is sick and tired of having to circumnavigate floating hooker corpses.”

Mitra’s dark humor resonated with Hnilicka, 31. “We thought it was the coolest thing that there was this guy in jail listening to us,” says Hnilicka. “He was certainly our most engaged listener. He’d write letters to us and bits for the show.”

From last September until his death in April, at age 33, Mitra wrote a series of letters to Hnilicka, and to Annie Nüggett, a frequent guest on the show. The letters, copies of which were obtained by Isthmus, were written as Mitra awaited trial on eight counts of possessing child pornography and two counts of child exploitation.

The charges, filed in December 2009, came as Mitra neared the end of an eight-year federal prison sentence for hacking into Madison’s police radio system in 2003, causing periodic blackouts. Mitra maintained that the interference was unintentional.

During that investigation, encrypted files on Mitra’s computer suspected of containing child pornography were discovered, but authorities were unable to access them until 2009. Normally, the statute of limitations would have prevented Mitra from being charged. But when he moved out of Wisconsin, due to his federal imprisonment, the limitation’s clock stopped ticking.

In his letters, Mitra, facing an additional 53 years in prison, claims the charges were a big misunderstanding involving a girl he’d dated who lied about her age. “In all seriousness,” he wrote Hnilicka, “your show brings me joy at a time in my life when little else does.”

The letters mine the depth of Mitra’s despair, revealing a gifted man who felt pinned beneath the unrelenting motions of the justice system. “It’s a sad, sad story,” says Hnilicka. “It’s disturbing that I’m a part of it.”

But some who knew Mitra best have little sympathy. “Everything bad that happened was the result of bad decisions [he] made,” says his ex-girlfriend “Paula,” who asked that her real name be withheld. “Who was Rajib Mitra? … Rajib was both a funny, clever individual and [a] horrible person.”

A federal offense?
Rajib Mitra was a quiet child raised in Brookfield, an affluent Milwaukee suburb, in a home with two parents who indulged their son’s insatiable interest in computers and radios. At 18, he published a paper on security pitfalls in the widely used Unix computer system. His mother doted on him and his father paid his way through college.

“He was not a party man,” says Rajib’s father, Samir Mitra, 77. “I don’t remember him having any close friends, except for that girl.”

In 2000, Mitra graduated from the UW-Madison with honors and a degree in computer science. In 2002, he enrolled in a master’s program at the university and began dating Paula, who he met online. It seemed that if anything stood between him and professional success, it was his crippling shyness.

“When it came to computers, he was brilliant,” recalls Paula, now 24. “He was fully capable, but underdeveloped emotionally. I don’t think he knew how to connect with people. I don’t know that he knew how to be a person.”

Mitra’s bright future dimmed on Nov. 13, 2003, when police raided the 23-year-old’s North Orchard Street apartment, arresting him for interfering with police radio transmissions. On Halloween night, police, fire and paramedics were prevented from communicating with each other on three occasions due to blackouts. On Nov. 11, someone began attaching sounds of a climaxing woman to police radio dispatches. Police traced these transmissions back to Mitra.

During the raid, police seized radio equipment, manuals, proprietary Motorola software downloaded from a Russian radio hacking site and audio files from sexsounds.org.

Mitra quite likely expected a slap on the wrist. He hadn’t stolen anything or damaged critical infrastructures. And twice in the late 1990s, he had been charged with similar offenses in Milwaukee and Waukesha counties. One case was deferred; the other drew a fine.

But in post-9/11 America, the FBI treated the interference as an act of domestic terrorism. Mitra was indicted under federal computer hacking statutes, recently strengthened by 2001’s Patriot Act and 2002’s Cyber Security Enhancement Act. In February 2004, a jury rejected Mitra’s claim that the radio interference was accidental and a judge sentenced him to eight years in federal prison.

“They treated him very harshly,” says Simar Mitra. “They made a mountain of a molehill. The judge had no understanding of being human.”

And in fact, many did see Mitra’s actions as a prank gone awry, not terrorism, and questioned the government’s rationale for indicting him on such a serious offense. The government reasoned that because the radio system used by police contained a computer chip, federal law applied. Experts testified Mitra’s interference wasn’t possible without first overriding the chip. An appellate court affirmed the government’s position and Mitra’s sentence.

William Stevens, a Michigan attorney who handled Mitra’s appeal, says his client’s troubles were also compounded by rigid sentencing guidelines that don’t distinguish pranks from sabotage. “The feds had no sense of humor about it,” says Stevens. “Once you’re caught up in the system, the possibility of forgiveness isn’t good.”

‘My soul isn’t dead’
The first time Mitra tuned into Fundamental Pete’s Ass-Jammery last July, he heard Annie Nüggett read one of her dour poems. The tragicomic absurdity of Nüggett’s prose amused and captivated the inmate. In December, Mitra asked whether Nüggett was acting when she told listeners her tales of woe were true.

“If not, I don’t know if I’ll be able to laugh at the girl’s sad poetry anymore,” he wrote.

Nüggett, 26, was touched. “I try to read my words with a sense of humor, but he heard them for what they were,” she says.
“I couldn’t believe that he’s sitting in jail feeling sorry for me. We bonded over the ways we suffer.”

Aware that Mitra was listening, Nüggett did what she could to lift his spirits. She dedicated a song to him and often began her Poetry at 11 bit by telling him “hello.” She expressed fondness for his meticulous penmanship. One night, Nüggett read “This Mother Nazi,” a poem about breaking free from negative influences. At the end, she briefly paused before asking into the ether, “Mitra, if tomorrow you woke up in Hawaii, free on the beach, would you cry?”

Mitra responded with a letter that, unlike those he wrote Hnilicka, was filled with anguish.

“On each of the last 2,490 nights, I have gone to sleep wanting to wake up in Hawaii,” he wrote. “And on each of the last 2,490 mornings I’ve awakened a little more heartbroken to find myself still trapped… just hearing your question made me burst into tears. That’s a good thing, because it proved that my soul isn’t dead after all.”

Mitra wanted his story told, but discouraged his radio friends from discussing the child porn charges on-air, assuring them, “I am not sexually attracted to children… When I first met [Paula], she told me she was older than she actually was.”

He suggested he’d been threatened after they had discussed the charges. “As I learned early Monday morning, people do listen to your show… even people in my sleeping area,” he wrote. ”In the rumor mill of jail, a story that starts as “16-year-old girlfriend” can morph into “8-year-old nephew.”

Mitra instead urged Hnilicka to resume the choose-your-own adventure series that had prompted his initial letter to the show. “After all, it has been a couple of months now, and if you don’t do something about those hooker bodies soon, they’re really going to stink,” Mitra wrote. In December, Hnilicka used Mitra’s scripts, giving him a writing credit.

As his trial approached toward the end of his federal sentence, Mitra was optimistic that, come spring, he’d be vindicated and free. In a letter dated Jan. 3, Mitra thanks Hnilicka for visiting him in jail.

“With any luck, I hope to meet you again in a couple of months under more comfortable circumstances,” he wrote. “If there is any sense, any balance, any justice in this world, I am going to win this trial.”

‘In his own way he loved me’
Mitra met Paula online in January 2002. He was 23 and she was, he believed, 17. Soon he was driving eight-hour round trips to visit her in Steven’s Point. He showered her with gifts and paid for their dates. On at least two occasions, he snapped naughty pictures of her. At one point, she promised to love him forever. But while planning their Hawaiian vacation, Mitra learned Paula was actually 16.

“He nearly broke it off with her at that point,” says attorney Jon Helland, who represented Mitra during his child porn trial. “It was she who told him that age doesn’t matter. Both of their parents were aware of, and had no problems with, the relationship.”

Paula admits all this, including having lied about her age, but says there were bigger problems with the relationship. Mitra, she says, once spit on her and was often verbally abusive. “Some days he loved me more than anything, on others I was a pain the ass.”

When a friend of hers died in a July 2003 car wreck, Paula accused Mitra of being indifferent to her grief. He responded, via email, “I care but I think you would be used to your friends dropping dead by now. You need to learn to deal with recurring issues.”

Miraculously, the relationship rebounded when Mitra went to prison in May 2004. He and Paula wrote each other love letters and talked frequently by phone. In December of that year, Paula quit the relationship for good, but kept in touch until 2007, when she met her future husband.

In prison, Mitra did his best to keep tabs on her, having another girl he’d met online mail him copies of Paula’s blog posts. In 2006, he sued her over a financial matter. After she gave statements to police in 2009 that led to his child exploitation charges, Mitra demanded his mother call her and find out why she had betrayed him.

“I know in his own way he loved me,” says Paula. “I know I was on a pedestal. Despite my best effort, Jeeb never hesitated in reminding me… how I was a liar through his eyes. I had told him that I would love him forever. He hung onto that until the very end.”

In prison, Mitra also obsessed over the computer seized by police in 2003, writing several letters demanding that it be returned to his mother. Madison computer crimes detective Cynthia Murphy made a bit-by-bit copy of Mitra’s hard drive, wiped clean the original, and returned it.

Convinced that Murphy was out to get him, he sued her personally in 2006. He also wrote Police Chief Noble Wray asking if Murphy was investigating him. Wray wrote back, “Rijib [sic] Mitra is not currently under investigation by the Madison Police.”

At the time, he wasn’t.

Murphy declines comment because the investigation into Mitra’s death is ongoing. But during a hearing last December, Murphy testified, “If there hadn’t been so much constant attention, [the case] probably would have disappeared into my caseload and been forgotten.”

Guilty as charged
At his trial in January, Murphy explained how, in 2009, she learned a technique that allowed her to decrypt the files in the folder Mitra had labeled “\porn\bad.” She also accessed two sexually explicit photos of Paula, who Murphy remembered was a minor when questioned about Mitra’s radio hacking. She contacted Paula, who confirmed that Mitra had taken the photos.

“I didn’t even care about the pictures,” says Paula. “It was the other stuff they found that made me look at things in a new light.”

In addition to the photos, Murphy accessed eight files with titles like, “Preteen Girl is Raped by 16 yo brother” and “daddy rapes drunk sleeping daughter.” She recognized the “Dee & Desi” file as originating from a known child porn series.
The state offered a plea deal that included 18 years imprisonment, which Helland rejected. “He got slammed the first time,” says Helland. “To slam him again for something that happened eight years before wasn’t fair.”

His parents didn’t attend the trial. “He stopped talking to me, because he was embarrassed,” says Samir Mitra.

The state argued that Mitra knew the files were illegal because he had segregated them in a folder labeled “\porn\bad.” Helland countered that “bad” meant that the files were corrupted, that Mitra couldn’t access them, either. But computer data revealed that some of the files had been opened not long before his 2003 arrest.

On Jan. 12, Mitra was convicted on all 10 counts.

Mitra, in his next letter to Hnilicka, assailed the judicial system, accusing all involved, even his attorney, of conspiring against him. He thanked Hnilicka for reading a news article about his conviction. “Though the words ‘up to 53 years’ are weighing heavily on my mind,” he wrote.

In a letter to Nüggett, Mitra is unusually introspective. “Shyness is a horrible affliction because it robs one of the potential friendships and opportunities that make life worth living,” he wrote. “For people such as … me, who have already lost so much due to forced isolation, the isolation caused by shyness is even more pernicious.”

While being escorted into court for his sentencing on April 28, bailiffs scolded Mitra for glancing sideways at those seated behind the defense table. After an emotional plea for leniency, Mitra was sentenced by Dane County Judge Maryann Sumi to 6 1/2 years in state prison, five of which were for taking the pictures of Paula. Upon his release, he was to register as a sex offender and would be prohibited from using computers.

But Mitra had had enough and made plans to check out of the Dane County jail.

“I’ve been sentenced to 6 1/2 more years of heartbreak,” Mitra wrote Hnilicka hours after the sentencing. “If you can imagine that – 6 1/2 years of heartbreak on top of 7 years of heartbreak – you’ll never have to wonder what was going through my mind.”

‘He deserved a second chance’
After lunch on Friday, April 29, the day after his sentencing, Mitra kicked a doorstop from beneath a janitorial closet door, which closed, but didn’t latch. The closet had been opened for post-meal chores. Forty-five minutes later, Mitra slipped into the closet undetected and hung himself from an exposed pipe.

It was only the second time in the last five years that a Dane County jail inmate has successfully committed suicide, in 278 attempts.

A sheriff and medical examiner visited Mitra’s parents in Brookefield. “It did not surprise me,” says his father. “He could not live without the computer.”

Paula learned about Mitra’s death from her victim’s counselor. “I cared about his well-being,” she says. “I don’t know if he had changed, but I didn’t want him to kill himself. There’s no joy, but it’s nice to know I don’t have to be afraid when I’m out with my kids.”

That Sunday, a sheriff’s deputy phoned Hnilicka, but wouldn’t say why he wanted to take a letter Mitra had mailed Friday morning into evidence. But then Hnilicka saw an online bulletin about an inmate who had killed himself. Hnilicka broke the news to Nüggett before that night’s show.

“At his sentencing he looked so desperate and empty,” she says. “He suffered so much in his life. The way they treated him in court was sick. He deserved a second chance.”

Mitra’s four-page letter arrived Monday. “Dear Pete,” it began. “By the time you get this I’ll be beyond the WSUM listening area… There are a lot of people in this world who seem thoughtless, heartless, cruel and oblivious to anything I try to say, but you are not one of them.”

His heartbreak over what he saw as Paula’s betrayal was palpable. “[She] suggests that because I spit on her one time during sex, I must not have really cared about her,” he wrote. “It’s called lubrication, and most women would appreciate it.”

If happiness visited Mitra during the final hours of his miserable life, it came when he disobeyed the bailiffs and snuck a fleeting glimpse of a certain someone at his sentencing, a moment he describes in the postscript to his final letter.

“They wouldn’t even let me look to see who was sitting behind me,” he wrote. “I wasn’t able to find my parents or you, but a young woman with brown hair and glasses did catch my eye. I hope Annie Nüggett can find lasting happiness in her life.”

Wow, it is really hard to stay motivated in this place. You’d think that, with all the time I have that I be cranking shit out no problem. Not so much. I am trying to get better at that. I hope I’m successful.

Before I talk about anything else, I want to say a little more about the compound itself. I realized that I haven’t told you how many people are here. There are about a thousand, give or take. In terms of the actual set-up it is like an old western shanty town, except only the sheriffs have horses. But instead of horses they have hybrid SUVs.

Now, I’ll tell you about my job. I am the vegetable prep guy for the P.M. shift in food service. Quite the dream job, I know. The job is actually two parts, both of them shitty.

The first part is during the day, Monday through Friday, 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. During this time I actually prep the vegetables that are going to be in that night’s dinner and possible lunch the next day. There is a lot of rotted food to deal with as they do buy the cheapest of the cheap. If you’ve never been around rotten potatoes, let me tell you, they’re no fun. I deal with dozens of them everyday. (I prep about 350 to 600 lbs. of potatoes daily.)

The second part of my job is a little different. Two nights a week I work the dinner salad bar or, as I like to call it, the “Insult Brent Bar.” Most of you on the outside might be surprised that a prison would have a salad bar, but the guys in here. They’re constantly pissed off by what we don’t have, specifically dressing.

For example, once I was forced to put out only blue cheese (yes, that’s how it’s spelled here) and was repeatedly called things like “cocksucker” and “faggot” when my fellow inmates saw it was their only option.

It’s hard not to think about what a waste of money it is to have a lot of people locked up. I hear it’s about $52,000 annualy per inmate. I take full responsibility for my crime, I just think there are better ways to spend $156,000 than to keep me here three years. But what do I know? I’m just a criminal.

You wouldn’t believe how fast information gets around this compound. It seems like people know shit before it’s even done. We call it “inmate.com.” The problem is that usually only 10 percent of anything someone is telling you is true.

I hope I don’t offend anybody with this, but there is nothing more irritating that the guys who come to prison and find God. Don’t get me wrong, whatever gets you through the day is cool. However, the operative word is “you,” meaning you keep it to yourself. Everyday I have to hear about how I have to also find God or risk an eternity of damnation. And my question to them is, “If you’ve already found God, why do I have to as well?”

I think I mentioned a little about the showers in a previous dispatch, but I had this creepy experience that I want to share. Before going into the shower area, you loudly ask “shower clear?” This is to avoid the uncomfortable encounter with a strange naked man. So, the other day I go in to take a shower.

“Shower clear?” I asked.

The response was, “No, but you can come back if you want to.”

I left and showered later. I’m sorry, but that was weird.

My room situation has changed a little. Aragorn has been removed and replaced by Gary. Gary is kind of dull and not too bright, either. The other day he asked if I’d gone to breakfast.

“Yeah,” I said. “The oatmeal was all right.”

“That’s nice,” Gary replied. “What did you eat?”

“Um, steak.”

To wrap it up, I want to tell you about a game I have to play almost everyday. It’s called “poop roulette.” Poop roulette states when you are on the way to one of the two bathrooms and, as you approach, you hear the flush of a toilet but enter the bathroom too late to see which of the stalls was exited. Now you must make your choice. Losing is unpleasant.

Okay, that is about all for now. I really appreciate being given the opportunity to do this, as I need some kind of outlet to express myself. To anyone reading, I hope I’m not too boring. Feel free to write me. I love getting mail.

Sincerely,
Brent

Brent Delzer
06737-090
Federal Prison Camp
P.O. Box 1000
Duluth, MN 55814

Eastern State Penitentiary was the world's first modern prison. Its Gothic architecture was intended to scare prisoners and the public alike.

Fairmount, Philadelphia – Eastern State Penitentiary was conceived in 1787, in the living room of Benjamin Franklin, a leading member of the Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons. The reformist group was appalled by conditions at the recently opened Walnut Street Jail, located behind Independence Hall, where guards sold liquor to inmates and often made women available. The reformers believed that a policy of strict solitary confinement would better encourage spiritual development.

In 1790, the society convinced Pennsylvania’s legislature to pass a series of prison reforms, including the construction of Eastern State Penitentiary. The prison opened in 1826. Inmates were isolated to their cells nearly 24 hours each day, eating, working and recreating alone. Visitors weren’t allowed and the only reading material provided was a Bible. But rather than induce the spiritual awakening for which the prison was designed, Eastern State Penitentiary instead became an incubator for psychosis.

The prison was America’s first major public works project and almost instantly became an attraction for tourists, like Charles Dickens and Alexis de Tocqueville. Dickens in particular was abhorred by what he saw, writing, “I am persuaded that those who designed this system… do not know what it is they are doing… I hold the slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body.”

Guards meted out arbitrary punishments like taking naked inmates outside during winter and dousing them with cold water. Some had their tongues chained to their wrist in a way that struggling would cause the tongue to tear.

By the early 20th Century, the policy of extreme isolation fell out of disfavor and the prison for the first time allowed inmates to work, eat and recreate together.

But it was the prison’s architecture more than the philosophy behind it that led more than 300 prisons worldwide to be modeled after it. The revolutionary hub-and-spoke design originally featured seven single-story cell blocks radiating out from a center octagonal-shaped tower. The prison was the first public building in America to have central heating, flush toilets and shower baths. However, it was the only prison in America to follow this design.

By the mid-20th Century, the compound was in shambles and, in 1971, was shuttered. For nearly 20 years the prison was left to rot before a group in the late 1980s successfully petitioned a Philadelphia mayor to spare the site from redevelopment. It opened as a tourist attraction in 1994.

Hello again from the frozen north. I wanted to start this installment with just a little more on my intentions and reasoning behind this series of articles. I don’t want anyone to think that I am not taking my incarceration seriously or that this place is an easy cake walk. Neither could be further from the truth. This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Life here is no damn fun at all and everyday is a constant struggle to remain positive, which is why I’m writing. It helps being able to record the observations I make or the thoughts I have on what’s going on around me. That being said, let’s get to it.

I wanted to tell you about my roommates, as they figure quite a bit into my day-to-day life. I’ve already mentioned Fargo and Cash (my favorites), but, as I promised the last time, I’ll give a little more detail on them. Fargo is a good natured Native American who cares too much about what other people think of him. This gets him all riled up at any little thing that he feels to be an affront. This is funny shit because he sounds just like the characters in Fargo, with their nasally drawl. In this regard, he isn’t a fan of my laughter, but decent enough to let it go.

Cash is a laid back black guy. He’s funny on my mom and can’t understand why I won’t give him her e-mail address. He doesn’t like it when I tell him that I don’t believe a heroin-addict convict is a good match for my mother. She agrees.

In addition to those two, we’ve got the two new guys. Aragorn is a quiet, well-mannered guy and consequently not very interesting to write about. Then there’s Turtle. Now, he’s nice, too, but creepy. Ok, there, I said it. The motherfucker is strange. He stares at my feet. I mean, really stares. Who does that? He will start laughing for no reason at all. And he’s always lurking outside the room, like he’s waiting to be invited in. Weird man.

Have you ever met someone who thinks they’re the shit, but aren’t good at anything? Some who is jealous of anything that you’ve done or learned that they haven’t? Someone who believes they are to be worshipped when nothing could be further from the truth? The Head makes that person seem like someone you’d want for a best friend. This guy, The Head, will belittle you for knowing things. For doing things. One day, he waxed on and on about how smart he was. Later, he asked me if there’s an ‘e’ in the word ‘living.’

He’s taken to giving me shit for following an actual exercise routine. Day after day he tells me that it’s “cute” what I’m trying to do and that someday I might be up to his level. So I laughed at him. Then he decided he needed to show me how it was done. I said he was welcome to come along anytime and that it would be nice to have someone to work out with. We got there and he refused to stretch, calling it “some faggot shit.”

We did pull-ups. I did 30. He did, well, I’m still waiting for the first one. That’s the kind of guy he is. Maybe one day I’ll be at his level.

I was going to talk about my job, but I don’t feel like it anymore and will save it for another time. Instead, I’ll talk a bit more about some of the other characters in here.

There’s Sloth, who basically watches television when he’s not eating or sleeping. He values his weekends as they give him the opportunity to “finally get some fucking rest.”

Then there’s the Salad Bandit who comes to dinner everyday and loads up a food tray with, like, twelve pounds of salad, and usually eats only a fraction of what he takes. The Salad Bandit has become a good friend of mine, one of the few in here I look forward to seeing. We have to do something about his humor, though, because he takes something funny and overdoes it to death.

Po, this guy acts like a parrot. His favorite things to say are “You’re da boss of Duluth” and “Dat’s my cousin.”

And he can change on a dime.

When the guards, on inspecting day, jokingly told him that his room – the cleanliness of which he takes great pride in – was messy, Po reacted poorly.

“Don’t play wit’ me muthafucka,” Po yelled. “You know why I’m here? I’ll put a pistol to your head.”

“You know I can put you in the hole for saying that,” the guard replied.

“I don’t give a fuck,” Po cried. “Don’t. Play. Wit. Me.”

Po isn’t the guy to piss off.

The last one I’ll talk about for now has the best reason for being here of anyone I’ve met yet. I’ll call him Awesome. You see, Awesome is here for trying to destroy the career of one Mr. John Stamos. Is that not the shit? Apparently, Awesome has compromising pictures of Stamos and tried extorting money from the actor. I’m sorry, any personal nemisis of John Stamos is a friend to me.

So, a couple more random thoughts then I’ll wrap this up. All of the clothing we wear is Air Force surplus, which is kind of cool. However, our gloves are these mitten-gloves where the thumb and index finger are glove and the rest is mitten. Sometimes I look at them on my hands I find myself thinking, ‘So this is how I would be if my mom had smoked crack?’

Interestingly, they sell cologne in the commissary. Cologne! Who the fuck do you want to smell sexy for in prison? It’s creepy enough waking up in the middle of the night to hear your bunkie singing the latest Ke$ha song.

Well, that’s about it for me. It’s about 3 a.m. and I get up to work out in three hours, with The Head. I will write again soon. Until next time… thank you for reading.

Brent

Skeleton of Harry Raymond Eastlick, who suffered a progressive condition that turned tissue to bone.

A few Sundays ago, I was at Philadelphia’s Mutter Museum viewing the Hyrtl Skull Collection, an ensemble of multi-ethnic craniums collected from throughout Central and Eastern Europe by Dr. Josef Hyrtl during the early 1800s. Hyrtl, a professor of anatomy at the University of Prague, believed that racial and intellectual traits could be determined by studying the cranial bone structures of various groups. The museum acquired Hyrtl’s 139 skulls, along with thirty-six placentas and six sets of genitals, in 1875.

Beneath each skull is a brief bio of its time as a living thing, including name, country, profession and cause of death. There was a bandit who’d been shot dead by police in Calabria, Italy’s Abruzzi Mountains. Girolama Zini, a 20-year-old rope walker, died of atlanto-axial dislocation or a broken neck. Franz Baum, 13, of Austria, hanged himself after he was caught stealing. Roland Adalbert died after slitting his throat “because of extreme poverty.” Many once belonged to people executed for various crimes.

The biographical details made viewing the skulls a slightly absurd affair.

Imagine how Hungarian guerrilla, Ladislaus Pal, might have responded upon being told that Americans in the 21st Century would pay money to see his skull? Pal found his way into the collection after being captured and executed in 1842.

There was a family with three small boys standing next to me. Both the mother and father pointed out specific skulls as though they were zoo animals. “Oooooh!” the mother exulted. “That one was a robber and murderer and was hanged.”

Moments later, the father erupted with a burst of joy. “Look at that one,” said the man, who I suspect is a dentist. “He died of a gunshot wound, but what a great set of teeth!”

Conjoined twins

From the moment you step through the museum’s beaux-arts exterior, you’re transported back more than 150 years to an era of medicine where ideas concerning heredity, germ theory and cell division – cornerstones of medical biology – were still in their infancy and thus controversial. (Before scientists discovered that cells grow by dividing, it was believed new cells simply appeared spontaneously.)

The museum is housed inside the College of Physicians, an institution founded in 1787 by twenty-four doctors who gathered “to advance the science of medicine and to thereby lessen human misery,” making Philadelphia not just the birthplace of American democracy, but of American medicine, too.

In 1858, Dr. Thomas Dent Mutter, a professor of surgery at Jefferson Medical College, located here in the city, donated his collection of more than 1,300 human specimens and medical artifacts to the college.

Unlike Body Worlds, a modern exhibit of plastinated cadavers spliced and diced and fixed in iconical poses, the Mutter Museum isn’t a homage to medicine as much as it is to horrifying instances of nature gone awry. If you’re looking for artificial joints and fatty livers, the Mutter Museum will disappoint. Here you’ll bear witness to some of the miseries those 24 physicians set out to lessen. And it ain’t always pretty.

The most everyday of these miseries was child birth, which, in the early 1800s, was often a deadly enterprise. Even when the mothers survived, children often times did not. Infant mortality rates in early 19th Century America reached 300 deaths per 1,000 babies born in cities. This is three times the mortality rate of rural births, even though only fifteen percent of the population lived in cities. This disparity is attributed to poor urban sanitation and squalid living conditions.

In 1856, in Norfolk, Virginia, a prostitute named Mary Ashberry went into labor, but at 3’6″, her miniature pelvis wasn’t large enough for the child to pass through. In response, doctors collapsed the infant’s skull as the situation became dire, killing it instantly. Still, the child would not budge. An emergency cesarean was performed. Ashberry, whose skeleton is on permanent display along with her child’s broken skull, died of infection three days later.

In a pre-genetic world, birth defects were probably as shocking as they were often fatal. But some of these victims of heredity have achieved a form of immortality, albeit one inside a big glass jar. Dozens of such jars containing stillborns and infants line museum shelves. These babies, pickled in formeldahyde for upwards of 175 years, look like little grimacing gremlins still pained by their misfortune.

Some are conjoined. Others were born with their brains extruding through their skulls (exencephaly). Some were born without any brain at all (anencephaly). A boy named James Cardinall suffered from hydrocephalus, where cerebrospinal fluid causes a progressive enlargement of the head, often resulting in death. One specimen even suffered from sirenomelia, also known as Mermaid Syndrome, a congenital defect in which the legs are fused together.

After the passage of some seventeen decades, child birth is all but routine, dwarfs can deliver safely, but many of these birth defects continue to confound experts. Although, according to the Centers for Disease Control, rates of these defects have dipped upwards of 30 percent since the U.S. Public Health Service recommended in 1992 that pregnant women take folic acid, a vitamin that can repair copy errors in DNA.

The Hyrtl Skull Collection

Around the time the world’s first detectives took to London’s streets, medicine had already begun providing prosecutors with early forensic tools employed to prove guilt. Criminology, among the many emerging sciences of the day, was highly concerned with studying the criminal brain and making phrenological assessments of the skulls that protected them.

John Wilson’s brain was described by one physician as having “structures characteristic of an ape.” In 1843, Wilson dismembered his employer. When the remains were found days later in Pennsylvania’s Wissihicken Creek, authorities used them to solve a different murder. Only years later was Wilson tried and hanged after making a drunken confession in front of several witnesses.

His brain and others are on display.

Not far from these brains are six complete skeletons used to illustrate the steps forensic anthropologists take in identifying skeletal remains. In this order, they determine age, sex, race, stature and injury or disease. An audio tour guides you through the identification process for each of the skeletons.

Authorities learned early on the importance of staying abreast of  tricks used to conceal evidence. A book published in 1876 explains how to tell the difference between human and canine blood cells. Prevailing wisdom was that criminals could exploit similarities between the cells to avoid detection.

But if common crimes aren’t your thing, maybe political assassinations are. There’s an entire exhibit devoted to the Lincoln and Garfield assassinations. Here you’ll find John Wilkes Booth’s thorax and portions of Charles Guiteau’s brain. A piece of skin cut from Garfield’s back during his autopsy found its way into the collection and is displayed alongside its provenance letter.

Skeleton of Mary Ashberry, a prostitute dwarf who died of infection following a cesarean section.

As wonderful as these primary exhibits are, it’s the museum’s countless odds and ends that drive home just how gruesomely primitive 19th Century medical ideas, practices and instruments were.  See for yourself the forceps, blunt obstetrical hooks, steel speculums, amputation saws, as well as the cheek retractor used to remove the tumor from President Grover Cleveland’s jaw and not breathe a sigh of relief.

There’s the strip of human leather peeled from a man’s leg and tanned in 1863, grouped with several human leather-bound books. You’re offered a 360-degree view of a congenital megacolon that once contained 40 pounds of feces. In 1918, the gangrenous foot of a World War I soldier was amputated, thus beginning its journey to the museum.

Another interesting tidbit is that the autopsy of famous Siamese twins Cheng and Eng was performed here. Their death cast and livers can be found in the museum’s lower-level.

Opened in 1863, the museum languished for most of its history, even as its collection of medical oddities swelled to some 20,000 artifacts. It moved in 1908 to its current home, with its marble and oak halls, soft lighting and a dignity befitting its purpose. But it wasn’t until a woman named Gretchen Worden became curator in 1982 that annual visits climbed from several hundred to more than 60,000 by the time she died in 2004.

One person eulogized that Worden “turned bones into art.”

A frequent guest on the Late Show with David Letterman, Worden promoted the museum tirelessly. She had an eye for the pathological. In the forward to a book about the museum, Worden wrote, “While the bodies may be ugly, there is a terrifying beauty in the spirits of those forced to endure these afflictions.”

More information on the Mutter Museum can be found here.

Photos by James Mundie. You’ll find more of Mundie’s photos from the Mutter Museum and other curious attractions from around the world at MundieArt.com.

I was going to start this project some time ago. I had it all set in my brain on how I was going to do it and how often. You bet’cha. I had it all figured out. That was before I came here. Once I got into this situation, shit changed really quick. My motivation dropped to almost zero and, suddenly, I was struggling to acclimate to this new experience. It took awhile, but my motivation has returned.

Let me begin with the who and where of my story.

My name is Brent Delzer. Without getting into a very long story, I’ll say that I was convicted in federal court of being part in a marijuana trafficking conspiracy. I am not here to talk about that. Believe me, I am very bored of talking about that. I am here to talk about my new home.

Home is the Federal Prison Camp located in Duluth, Minnesota. Here I have a different name. Here my name is 06737-090. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how I was going to set this up, about what I was going to write about. At first, I was going to describe the how the place it works, but it came off as dry and boring, like an instruction manual for becoming an inmate. Here’s all the instruction you need: don’t fucking come here.

Now, I will tell you a little about the place. I am not in a cell, but in a six-man room. It is about 20-feet by 15-feet with three sets of bunk beds and six lockers. The lockers are standard school size. Everything I own has to fit into this space.

I am never locked in my room, although I have to be in the room during counts. From the hours of 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. I am allowed to walk the 103-acre compound. Everything – phones, library, activities, food – has its own building. I am sure it’ll be nice this summer, but Duluth gets cold. I don’t mean just, “Hey, it’s chilly.” I mean, “I’m going to lose my fucking nose cold.” And we have to walk everywhere.

I’m also one of several vegetable prep guys in the kitchen. An interesting fact is that most of the food made here is prepared here. For this, I make a staggering $19.20 a month. Oh yeah, living the dream.

The people here are, for the most part, a peaceful bunch. I’ve met the good and the bad. This being a “camp,” the threat of violence is much lower than other prisons. A big reason for this is the fact that any incidences of violence will result in an immediate transfer to a higher security facility. Only a true moron would risk this.

I’ll admit that before I came here I had an idea of what I thought this place would be like. If your idea is anything like mine, you might think that a federal prisoner would be somewhat more refined than a state prisoner. You can push that thought right out of your head. Some of these guys are dirty-ass, repugnant people. I mean gross. I can’t walk five steps without my feet sticking to drying puddles of spat up mucous. I can’t brush my teeth or shave without dealing with all manner of filth in the sinks. These and thousands of other things you have to deal with everyday.

And if you think the white-collar criminals are any better, you’d be wrong again. They are the worst. Not only are they dirty, but smug about it. They look down on those whose crimes don’t involve money. Newsflash, douchebag: you’re a thief, plain and simple. I had a conversation with one of these types right after arriving here.

“What are you in for?” he asked, then answered for me. “Let me guess: drugs?”

“Yeah, weed,” I told him.

“I figured,” he said. “Myself, I’m in for securities fraud.”

“Lucky you.”

“Nine million,” he continued. “I don’t expect that you’ve seen that kind of cash?”

That taught me not to judge people based on the crime they’ve committed.

When it comes to people I hang out with, they are few. Two,  really. My cellmates,  Fargo and Cash. They are the closest thing to real friends I have in here. I’ll get into them more in future dispatches.

With that, it’s time to say good-bye, for now. I have over two years to spend here and am planning on writing quite a bit. I will say that I love getting mail so feel free to write me. Receiving mail is like Christmas morning.

My address is:

Brent Delzer
06737-090
Federal Prison Camp
P.O. Box 1000
Duluth, MN 55814

Meth Hearse found in Cookesville, Tennessee.

For the budget road tripper, occasional stays in a fleabag motel are a given. They’re convenient, cheap and charming in their own special ways. I’ve stayed in my fair share of them. Some had mold beneath the peeling wall paper. One came with hair in the sink. In another, a used condom and wrapper laid rudely in the bathroom wastebasket. More than a few had cigarette burns in the carpet. Paying between $25 and $45 a room, it never was any surprise that these rooms didn’t sparkle or smell particularly well. The trick is to ignore what you see, sleep on top of the blankets and never walk around barefoot, because of course they’re going to be filthy! They’re low-budget motels.

I’ve never been incited enough to write reviews of these places. It seems obvious enough there’s a substantive difference between a Super 8 and a Marriott. But judging from Trip Advisor’s 2011 Dirtiest Hotels list, compiled from user-generated reviews, many are genuinely shocked at what they find inside these architectural equivalents of a skank. One visitor to the Grand Resort Hotel and Convention Center in Pigeon Fork, Tennessee, writes:

“This is a nasty place, would not let my dog sleep there. Paid for the room and went to it. I could not believe how dirty and nasty it was… Ask for my money back they would not refund the money and sent me to the Family Inn on the strip, and it was worse…”

I’ll agree that checking into these rooms are occasions to be grateful that walls can’t talk. While grime is nasty, it’s not going to kill you. Arguably, more harm can come from what you can’t see and the things you don’t know. One unsettling risk is the proliferation of meth cooks, who frequently exploit these rooms to cook up a fast ounce or two, putting other patrons in danger of chemical contamination, explosions or deadly fumes.

“If you’re cooking meth, you’re creating fumes and gases that settle onto every surface. They’re absorbed by blankets, pillow cases, the walls, the carpet,” explains Sgt. Jere Hopson, who oversees covert counter-narcotics operations for the state police in Western Kentucky. “That room is contaminated, but you’ll never know. That’s bad news for small children, because where do they spend most of their time? On the floor. And where do they put their hands? In their mouth.”

I met with Hopson last May at his office housed at a secret location in Bowling Green, KY, about 50 miles north of Nashville. His three analysts, who provide the state with its meth-related facts and figures, were preparing a report showing that meth lab busts were up 31 percent from the same time a year earlier, continuing a three-year resurgence following several years of decline. The report didn’t include April’s figure, which was up from the previous April, or stats from Louisville, which has its own special meth task force.

According to Hopson, accounting for the renewed prolifaration is easy. “Meth Check,” he says, leaning back in his chair.

Implemented in 2006, Meth Check is a statewide system that tracks who is purchasing pseudoephedrine, an over-the-counter decongestant found in some cold medicines and the essential ingredient for making meth. The only difference between pseudo and meth is a single oxygen molecule. A succession of relatively simple chemical reactions spins the molecule off the pseudo chain. The result is a jar of pure liquid meth that is then treated with hydrogen chloride gas (a Drano and salt mixture) that crystallizes the drug.

“It looks like snowflakes falling,” he says.

In Kentucky, a person can legally purchase up to 9 grams of pseudo per month, well above the recommended dosage. It is also enough to make an ounce of meth. When a person attempts to exceed the legal limit, the pharmacist, who scans IDs, is alerted, the sale is denied and no laws are broken. Before Meth Check, pharmacists kept manual paper logs that were infrequently audited, but had a major benefit when they were. “We’d find people who went above that 9 gram threshold and get a search warrant,” Hopson says. “Chances were they’d be cooking when we showed up. What Meth Check has done is take stupid out of equation. The computer doesn’t let you break the law.”

Consequently, Meth Check has created a flourishing black market for pseudo, where a standard $7 blister pack might fetch $50. Last year in Bowling Green, a bar manager was arrested after paying her college-aged employees to buy pseudo, which she then sold to cooks. This practice, known as smurfing, has made pseudo more available than ever. And because attempting to exceed the limit isn’t illegal, smurfs often go undetected. In December 2008, while the Meth Check system was down for a week, more than 100 people exceeded their monthly 9 gram limit. “That’s a lot of people who had serious colds that week,” says Hopson.

But what bothers Hopson more than meth are the labs set up to make it. The labs are so toxic that Hopson’s team wears hazmat suits when dismantling them. A small lab requires 32 hours between four officers to clean up properly, including having the chemicals secured and hauled away. State inspectors determine what renovations must be made before they’ll deem the property safe for human habitation. Often, they’ll demand property owners replace walls, flooring, carpet and ceiling.

“These labs are such a danger to public health. They’re literally hazardous waste sites,” he says. “More times than none we’ll find kids at these labs and, well, they’ll want to take a toy or blanky with them but can’t because of contamination.”

But while the state has the authority to seal off residences where meth was manufactured, there is no protocol for how to deal with motels. In fact, once authorities have cleaned up the lab, motel operators aren’t even required to clean the room. “There are lots of these motel labs,” says Hopson. “What motels do as far as clean up, I don’t know. I’m guessing not much.”

There aren’t any figures available for how frequently motel rooms are used for meth production, but Hopson says it’s far more than the number discovered. A Google News search of “meth motel” brings up numerous recent stories. In Bristol, TN, three people were arrested for running a motel lab. A suspicious vehicle at a motel in Kosciuski County, IN, led to the arrest of two Michigan men who’d set up a lab. In Kalamazoo, MI, police found a meth lab in an Econo Lodge.

But there’s more than just the risk of being exposed to dangerous chemicals.

“Say the person next door to you is cooking meth. Unless he’s opened the windows, and in some of these places you can’t, those fumes are accumulating,” he explains. “One static spark is all it takes to blow up that room. Depending on how big that lab is and the kind of solvents being used, it could very well take your room with it.”

A motel in Fort Wayne, IN, caught fire last week that investigators say started with a meth lab. Sixteen people were evacuated. A Mobile, AL, woman was recently sentenced to almost seven years for operating a lab that had exploded inside a motel room.

Even though the risk is real, the odds you’ll be killed in a motel on account of a meth lab are slim. In fact, a deeper review of user comments posted on Trip Advisor, none reported encounters with meth labs or cooks. For Hopson, exposure to chemicals that have leeched into the carpeting or bedding is the greatest concern, especially when it comes to children. “We just don’t know the long-term effects of exposure to these things,” he says. “It’s nasty to think about.”

If chemical exposure and explosions aren’t freaky enough, there’s one more potential risk that should be noted: exposure to phosphine gas, an odorless, lethal and flammable byproduct of meth production. It can kill before you realize anything is wrong.

“Let’s say some mether starts cooking up a batch and finds he’s got some time to kill,” Hopson explains. “He’s got a girl with him so they’re doing the hanky-panky, but there’s a leak in the hose and they’re breathing in this phosphine gas. We’ll find them that way, one on top of the other, naked. It’s just one of those kind of funny things you see.”

The vacant lot where the Kensington Strangler murdered his first victim on Nov. 3, 2010.

Kensington, Philadelphia – With not much on the agenda today I thought I might make cookies, but I instead put on my Sunday best and headed north to the badlands where a man dubbed the Kensington Strangler has murdered two, but maybe upwards of four woman in recent months and has choked and raped just as many.

Several people, including myself, disembarked the el at the Somerset Station. Slow walkers they all were and it seemed like an eternity passed before the line traversed the narrow berth to the stairwell leading down to the street. Through the chainlink fence, I spied block after block of vacant buildings with shattered windows, and trash-strewn streets. The Center City skyscrapers peeked above the distant horizon an entire world away.

The line fell out of formation once we reached the stairs. Awaiting us at the bottom was a group of five or six older guys who were something of a neighborhood welcoming committee, offering liquid-filled syringes to my fellow passengers, some of whom were all too eager to do business with these needle merchants. As I approached, a meaty-faced black guy with open sores around his mouth held out his hand. He did this without looking at me, but rather scanning the mad throngs that peopled Kensington Avenue, presumably watching for the law. But something about me grabbed his attention, because he did a double-take and faster than I’ve seen anyone move, he shoved the syringes back in his coat pocket and goes, “Damn, them some shiny shoes.”

Indeed they were. Nice shiny black shoes I purchased yesterday, complemented by a pair of Levi’s Silver Tab Jeans, a black peacoat, gray cashmere scarf and gold aviator sunglasses, which I sported despite the day’s grayness. (My eyes with age have become incredibly light sensitive.) Normally I look like scumbag, but I figured with the police and media attention serial rape and murder brings to a neighborhood, no one was going to fuck with a well-dressed, mean-faced white man in shiny new shoes.

Around noon, Kensington was a hive of activity. Mothers pushed their kids in strollers along the avenue, oblivious to the open drug traffic and whores standing at attention with every creeping car. The el tracks, which run parallel with the avenue, rest on arch-shaped supports straddling the street and sitting just below the rooftops, giving day the gradient of night. Stepping onto Kensington Avenue is like venturing into a modern Heart of Darkness. Large groups of teenagers loitered about, but instead of eating hippo meat they smoked blunts. Despite all the media hoopla about police crackdowns, there wasn’t a cop in sight. I was petrified, certain that at any moment I would get jumped.

One of at least a few dozen syringes scattered about the empty lot.

There is only a cunt hair’s difference between instinct and impulse, courage and crazy, daring and dumb. If my beating heart attested to anything at that moment it was that I should’ve made haste and gotten the hell out of there. But I was already there and at times I’m impulsive, crazy and dumb combined, which has always been my problem in life. And this was one of those times. So rather than flee, I opted to take a nice scenic stroll along Kensington Avenue in my Sunday best and a $600 camera and $300 in lenses and accessories draped over my shoulder.

After a couple of blocks I swung a right, and then another onto Ruth Street, where a 21-year-old nursing student was found strangled on Nov. 3. She was the first murder attributed to the Kensington Strangler, a young black or latino male who has terrorized the area for several weeks now. A third strangulation murder occured last week, but hasn’t been linked definitively to the first two. Last week, police released a video of who they believe is that man. An FBI profiler believes the killer lives in the area, perhaps with an older relative since he chooses not to bring his victims home.

Unable to find the memorial indicating where the first victim was found, I asked a woman walking with her three kids if she knew. Tiffany, 21, told me it was near the church at the end of the street. “We’re going to the church now to pray for the neighborhood,” she said. As we walked, I asked if the murders have shaken her, considering the area’s epidemic of more ordinary violence.

“Baby, you know it,” she said. “There’s a lot of dark places to hide around here, so I ain’t even trying to be out at night.”

When we reached the end of the street, Tiffany confessed she wasn’t exactly sure where the nursing student’s body was found, except that “it’s somewhere around here.”

Streets in Kensington are among the dirtiest I've seen in Philadelphia, where vacant lots become ad hoc garbage dumps.

As Tiffany marshaled her kids into church, I found myself back at the el station. I see the syringe merchant. He began walking toward me, but when I begin to ask him about the lot, he rudely blows me off. I turned around and watched him engage in some deal with another man. Moments later, as I was walking away, he hollers for me. “Yo! Jack! Can I help you wit something brother?”

I tell him I’m looking for the vacant lot where the body was found.

“Which body?” he asks. “Niggas drop like flies around here, Jack, know what I’m sayin?”

“The girl who was strangled.”

“Oh, her,” he says, his mood becoming dour. “Why, that’s down there. You’ll see a white truck. They found her right there in those weeds.”

I thank him.

He asks for a dollar, but all I had was a twenty. I brought a twenty only because people say around here that robbers are more liable to pop you if you have nothing to give them. I guess a little change assuages the pain of a wasted effort. But in that instant, I had a brilliant idea. “How about this,” I tell the man, “I’ll give you twenty dollars if you show me around the neighborhood.”

He laughed a rich melodious laugh. “What’chu wanna see, Jack? Ain’t too many tourists visit Kensington.”

“Show me the lot.”

Really, I was just scared and didn’t want to walk around alone.

Countless vacants buildings line Kensington's streets. The Strangler's second victim was found in such a building.

After consulting with others on the welcoming committee, he returns and he leads me down Ruth Street toward the lot where Elaine Goldberg was raped and strangled. His name is Simi. He doesn’t ask me mine, content with calling me Jack, which I can’t help but think is some kind of pejorative for whitey. Simi explains the body of another man was found in this same lot a week before Goldberg’s, though drugs rather than foul play were suspected in his death. Simi explained that the three-acre parcel is where the whores bring their tricks.

He warned me to avoid the car tires scattered about, explaining the homeless defecate in them.

When we arrived I realized why I hadn’t seen it on my first pass. I was looking for a memorial – teddy bears, balloons, pictures, candles – but there was nothing but yellow police tape tied to the tall grass and whipping in the wind. The landscape was a mosaic of old car tires, neck-high weeds and discarded syringes, which Simi called “helpers.”

“Don’t step on’em,” he warned. “Muhfuckas’ll bite right through dem shiny shoes.”

I pulled out my camera to take some quick pictures.

“How much that camera cost?” Simi asked, with the slightest hint of menace in his voice. Or maybe I was just a tad jumpy.

“Too much,” I replied, beginning to question his intentions. It then occurred to me how isolated we were, that that is why the Kensington Strangler chose this spot. Even the high beams of a passing squad car in the dead of night wouldn’t have seen him straddling his victim, his powerful hands squeezing the life right out of her.

The surrounding buildings were crumbling and lifeless and I spied a pack of teenagers approaching from several blocks down. By this time, about 20 minutes had passed since Simi agreed to be my tour guide. In that time he had become fidgety and restless. Dope sickness was creeping in. “Yo Jack, lemme get that Jackson.”

My thoughts turned to the slew of police that were supposedly canvassing the area. The deputy commissioner told the Inquirer there were so many patrols now assigned to the area that undercover narcotics officers were getting pulled over for suspicious behavior. How would it look should one spy me handing Simi $20 right there in the open, at a murder scene and brothel spot. But I had no other choice but to reach in my pocket. As I paid him, I asked if he was going to go get well.

Presumptuously, he informed, “You gonna need more of them Jacksons if you wanna taste.”

I laughed nervously.

“Nah, I was wondering if I could take pictures of… you know,” and pantomimed spiking a vein.

His eyes narrowed in what I thought might be offense and anger, but to my surprise – and great relief – he began laughing uproariously, sweet and melodious. “Nigga, you crazy. Hell naw,” he yelped. “We done. Last thing I need is my nana seeing my pretty face in some newspaper. Hell! Naw!”

So we walked back toward the el station without a word between us. I wanted to ask him about his hustle, how it worked and about his life, but he seemed preoccupied. At some point, Simi had a semi-change of heart regarding my request. “You gimme another Jackson you can take a picture, but not fo’ no newspaper.”

But I didn’t have another Jackson and that was that. Simi met up with the others from the welcoming committee. No good byes or thank yous, be safes or stay in touches. He walked one way with them and I went up the stairs. Then, out of nowhere, I heard him yelling. “Yo! Jack!”

I turned around.

“You gotta catch the westbound across the street,” he hollered. “Over there!”

He then disappeared into Kensington Avenue’s maelstrom.