Badlands, SD – Cruising along the meandering scenic bypass through Badlands National Park in southwestern South Dakota it’s difficult to ignore the supernatural inklings they evoke. Teddy Roosevelt, awed by the dark beauty of this region, aptly described the Badlands as “hell without the fire.”

Indeed, this vast, jagged landscape is composed of eroded buttes and spires spread across nearly 244,000 acres that formed as a giant sea receded some 69 million years ago. Prehistoric animals likes mammoths, rhinos and saber-toothed cats once flourished here, making it one of the most fossil-rich areas in the nation, with some fossils dating back 33 million years. The erosion that formed the Badlands we see today began approximately 500,000 years ago. It’s expected to take just as many years before it’s completely eroded away.

Paleo-Indian tribes lived here prior to the arrival of the Lakota. In 1890, Chief Big Foot passed through here in the run-up to the Massacre at Wounded Knee, in which 300 Sioux Indians were felled by U.S. Army guns, Big Foot among them. During World War II, the military used a southern portion of the badlands as a practice aerial bombing range.

There are many hiking trails graded to varying degrees of difficulty, but don’t get to close to the edges. Even after millions of years the land is soft and crumbly. And beware of rattlesnakes, which tend to hide in crevices and near rocks. Because of the park’s size, help isn’t immediately available. Camping in designated areas is also permitted.

Lost Springs, WY – If you’re looking for a drive to get away from it all, I-25 north from Denver to US-HWY 20 east in Wyoming is about as remote as it gets. Two-hundred-and-fifty miles of beautiful nothing. You won’t see utility lines strung along as there are no towns along the way. It’s beautiful country, with large, rocky hills covered with prairie short grass. Wyoming is the nation’s least populous state and Lost Springs is its least populous town.

Lost Springs sits on US-HWY 20 east. It’s a town that never really was. It’s population peaked during the mining boom of the 1920s, but has been in decline since. The town has one mayor and a councilman. In 2000, census workers wrongly calculated the population at 1, to the chagrin of the other 3. Lost Springs may have only four residents, but there’s room for at least one more, as five mobile homes sit within its .1 miles. That’s right, .1 miles.

After fighting my eyes over dozens of miles en route to Denver I pulled off in Gothenburg, Nebraska, home of college football hall of famer Jay Novacek and, according to Golf Week Magazine, America’s best golf course under $50. But there’s another little gem. Tucked behind the Shell gas station just off the exit was a big red barn with a windmill and a cloth-covered pioneer wagon. It’s an ode to Nebraska’s way of life after the Indians had been driven out and the government began doling out free plots of land. Inside sat a diminutive elderly woman who, judging from how her face lit up upon seeing me, didn’t get many visitors.

“Well hello there,” she said, setting down her crochet hooks. “Welcome to the Sod House Museum. Where are you from?”

“Pennsylvania,” I lied, only because people often seem very confused when I tell them Wisconsin then later they notice my PA plates. I like to avoid explaining things over and over, which is why I could never be a tour guide.

After explaining the nuts-and-bolts of the operation, the woman made me an offer. “How about I give you a guided tour? It’s free and if at any time you get bored you can tell me to shut up. How does that sound?” she asked with a big megawatt smile.

“Sounds great,” I replied, hoping I wouldn’t have to ask her to shut up. It was a hopeless thing to hope, I feared, considering she was going to be talking about Nebraska, a place you couldn’t pay me to live. But even unappealing things sometimes have interesting back stories so I let the woman run with it.

She didn’t disappoint.

In old pictures, bird cages hang just outside the front door of many sod houses. The birds provided women with companionship while the men hunted.

The museum consists mostly of reprinted photographs taken by a man named Solomon Butcher, who produced roughly 3,000 glass-plate negatives of settlement life beginning in 1886. This came more than 25 years after President Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, which drew thousands of European immigrants to the plains with promises of free land.

“They came with big ideas,” the woman said.

Problem was, the woman explained, the soil was pretty crappy. Even worse, there were so few trees and stones on the plains that houses had to be made of sod, like those built by the natives who occupied those lands previously had built. Those who could afford it purchased enough lumber, delivered via railroad, to accommodate door and window frames.

Life was hard for these homesteaders who, under the law, had five years to improve the land and file for a deed of title. Problems with the soil were compounded by a lack of water. Few were willing to undertake the dangerous work of digging wells. Even if they were, many didn’t have the money to build the windmill needed to bring the water up in buckets. Their sod homes, built inexpensively, were prone to insect infestations and needed constant maintenance due to rain.

The woman pointed to the sod house behind the museum. “There’s a lot of damage to it from the all the rain we’ve gotten,” she said.

I looked out and could see the exterior sagging. The museum’s owner, who was on vacation, was going to be displeased with the damage, according to the woman. She says he’ll make the repairs himself. It must’ve been a constant struggle for settlers to protect their homes from the elements. A single thunderstorm could turn a sod house into a mud hut.

The woman finished her tour, leaving me to check out the damaged sod house on my own. It is a lot like you’d expect: grassy, damp and dusty. The air inside was very cool, and each step kicked up a plume of dust from the dirt floor. I couldn’t imagine a full family residing inside, enduring the brutal winters together, hemmed in by the elements with nowhere to escape. The disappointment must’ve hit hard these homesteaders, whose dreams had led them to a barren, virtually useless wilderness. More than 60 percent of the of 1.6 million who made land claims failed to meet the five-year requirements and lost the land they’d sacrificed so much for.

From what I gathered Nebraska hasn’t much improved since 1862. The Indians are still gone, as are the buffalo. So are most of the sod houses. More than 90 percent of the state’s surface area is tied to agriculture and 89 percent of its towns have fewer than 1,000 residents.

While its corporatized farms produce tons of corn, soybeans and beef we also have Nebraska to thank for Kool-Aid, CliffNotes and the second-richest guy in the world, Warren Buffett, a.k.a. The Oracle of Omaha.

Nebraska is also where the west begins. You can feel – about halfway across – the air shed its humidity to become semi-arid. It’s true. Even the sun shines differently.

And let’s not forget the Sod House Museum.

After strolling the grounds a bit, taking in the life-sized barbed-wire buffalo and Indian horse rider sculptures, I returned to the gift shop. The woman, who I learned was a retired charter pilot, asked some questions about Pennsylvania. She had never been there, a realization that seemed to surprise her. “We never had flights there, I guess.”

I decided there wasn’t anything gift shop junk I wanted to buy, but felt a little bad that I didn’t have any loose cash to plug in the donation box. The woman was a great tour guide, charismatic as hell and full of interesting deets, insofar as Nebraskan deets are interesting. I apologized for having nothing to give. She assured me it was okay and I believed her. I thought I’d stop by on my way home from Denver, as a way of demonstrating the fundamental goodness of humankind, but that didn’t happen either.

I detoured around Nebraska instead.

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.”

The cooling towers at Three Mile Island nuclear plant loom over Middletown, PA.

The city of Okuma Japan has been evacuated indefinitely pending the outcome of the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, where the cooling system for at least two of three failing reactors have yet to be powered up more than a week after the area was rattled by a 9.0 earthquake then ravaged by a 33-foot tsunami. So far, nuclear meltdown has spared Japan, but the situation remains serious. As of tonight, engineers are considering whether they’ll have to entomb the plant’s No. 3 reactor in concrete, the ‘Chernobyl Option.’

Predictably, the crisis has raised questions about the safety and risks of nuclear power, which, as an industry, has made major inroads in recent years. Currently, America is home to 104 nuclear power plants. About twelve more plants were being considered when the tsunami struck Japan. Some pundits claim now that the industry, at least in America, is dead. China, meanwhile, intends on proceeding full-boar with its twenty-five planned nuclear plants over the coming years.

This past weekend I visited two of Pennsylvania’s nuclear communities, one being Frick’s Lock, the other Middletown, home to the infamous Three Mile Island nuclear plant. Coming into both places, you can see from miles out the plumes of water vapor rising from the cooling towers, which themselves rise above the tree line, offering an ominous visual cue that says, ‘You’re in the hot zone.”

Despite the partial meltdown in 1979, one of the reactors remains operational.

Around 4 a.m. on March 28, 1979, nuclear coolant began escaping from a reactor at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station when a valve refused to close. A series of subsequent malfunctions occurred over the next two hours, allowing the release of some 32,000 gallons of radioactive coolant. At 7 a.m., three hours after the initial incident, an emergency was declared and within days, some 140,000 people had evacuated the area.

The reactor was eventually brought under control, suffering only a partial meltdown of its No. 2 reactor core. The No. 2 reactor has since been dismantled, with its No. 1 reactor still in operation following years of disservice. Officially, the radiation released posed no health risks, although nuclear energy opponents have argued otherwise. Some scientists claim that communities downwind from the site saw spikes in infant mortality rates and lowered reproductive rates among livestock. During the 1980s and 90s, more than $82 million in compensation was paid out to those in the affected area, including $15 million to parents of children with birth defects.

In the 1960s, PECO (Philadelphia Electric Company), began making plans to build a nuclear power plant along the Schuykill Canal, on the other side of which was a small village called Frick’s Lock, which is now pointlessly listed on the National Register of Historic Places, since to see the buildings you have to first break the law.

The village is more than 250 years old, meaning some of its buildings pre-date America’s revolution. Its oldest was built in 1754. But by 1986, when the power plant went online, PECO evicted the remaining residents of Frick’s Lock, giving some of them just forty-eight hours’ notice. This action effectively turned Frick’s Lock into a ghost town of ten rotting buildings connected by overgrown sidewalks and unpaved road.

]]> http://www.theferalscribe.com/featured/nuclear-neighbors.html/feed 0 http://www.theferalscribe.com/featured/federal-inmates-aint-all-that.html http://www.theferalscribe.com/featured/federal-inmates-aint-all-that.html#comments Sat, 26 Feb 2011 23:37:39 +0000 nathan http://www.theferalscribe.com/?p=3291 Brent Delzer, 36, is currently serving a three-year federal prison sentence after pleading guilty in August to one count of… Continue Reading]]> Brent Delzer, 36, is currently serving a three-year federal prison sentence after pleading guilty in August to one count of conspiracy to traffic marijuana. “The Worst Summer Camp Ever” is a series of Delzer’s dispatches from the Federal Prison Camp in Duluth, Minnesota. The Feral Scribe interviewed Delzer on the eve of his surrender to federal marshals in September. That interview, which provides more details about the case, can be found here.

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

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.

You’re sitting on the shoulder of a highway, on your backpack, at the edge of some town. Maybe you’ve been there several hours, thumbing each passing vehicle. You know someone will stop eventually. When they do, a rush surges through you as the brake lights flash and you hear tires hit the gravel. You run up to the car. The driver asks where you’re headed and informs how far they can take you. You scope them out. If all seems cool, you hop in and hope for the best.

You’ll repeat this process as many times as it takes to arrive at your destination.

Hitchhiking remains popular throughout the world, with countries like the Netherlands posting signs indicating good spots to catch a lift. But American motorists are weary of the practice. Picking up hitchhikers, the wisdom goes, is risking your life. It’s surprising that despite these dire warnings enough motorists still offer enough rides to keep hitchhiking as a viable means of travel in America.

Growing up, I was warned about the dangers of picking up hitchhikers. They could be carrying drugs, could be a prison escapee or worse, they could murder. In Riders on the Storm, Jim Morrison sang about a serial killing hitchhiker. In the 1986 film The Hitcher, a man picks up a homicidal hitchhiker whom he is eventually forced to kill. In the 1974 slasher flick The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a group of traveling friends pick up a sadistic hitchhiker, which leads to all but one of their deaths.

These menacing portrayals of hitchhikers have undoubtedly influenced me. Though I’ve hitchhiked numerous times, I’m leery of hitchhikers, even though every one I’ve ever given a ride to has been nothing short of pleasant.

Most people will never have that experience, on either side of the center console, let alone both.

A user of an online forum on a legal website recently posed the question: Should I pick up hitchhikers?

The answer from the hive was a resounding no.

“In this day and age it’s not a good idea to to pick up anyone that you don’t know,” answered one. “Unless you have a death wish or something!”

The irony of this public fear is that hitchhikers more-often-than-not are victims rather than the aggressors. Successful criminal acts rely in large part on anonymity. Highway hitchhikers are very visible to passing motorists and become immediate suspects of any shenanigans. It’s unlikely fugitives highway hitchhike much, given the likelihood of being questioned by local law enforcement. The likelihood of police encounters also discourages hitchhikers from carrying weapons or drugs.

Motorists, on the other hand, are better positioned to exploit their passenger’s vulnerabilities. The motorist knows the area, can conceal weapons and his intentions easier, can easily lure the hitchhiker with promises of room and board, and can count on no one knowing the traveler’s exact whereabouts. In this regard, hitchhiking represents greater risk for the traveler than the hitchhiker is to the motorist.

The issue of hitchhiking and crime has never been studied so claims such as these are based on my own experiences, observations and discussions with others.

Since perceived connections between hitchhiking and crime have never been studied makes all the more interesting an article published today in the conservative American Thinker, which urges lawmakers to re-frame arguments against immigration issues in a context of hitchhiking.

Hitchhikers need transportation, sometimes desperately. However, the needs of the motorists to be safe in their property and their persons, overrides the hitchhikers economic need for a free ride. Similarly, most illegal immigrants need economic opportunity, sometimes desperately. However, the needs of the nation and the individual states to be safe from the economic burdens and social problems brought about by massive uncontrolled immigration override the illegal immigrants’ need for a “free ride.”

Hitchhikers make the news more often than you’d expect. It’s often grim, yet doesn’t make much of a splash.

Last month Tennessee authorities identified the remains of 32-year-old Andrew Joseph Bluitt, a hitchhiker picked up and murdered in 1997. Bluitt had been killed by two men, one of whom had successfully used the body in staging his own death. The plot unraveled in 2000 and both men were convicted of murder. Last month, Bluitt’s sister recognized a police sketch posted on a website.

Prosecutors in Sweetwater County, Wyoming, dropped charges against two men accused of murdering a Colorado hitchhiker who’d come to Wyoming to snowboard, when doubt was cast on the truthfulness of their incriminating statements.

Last month a woman shared with CNN her close call with Washington’s Green River Killer while hitchhiking in November 1982.

Baptist minister James McCollough, who has spent 32 years hitchhiking for Jesus, received his first ticket for soliciting a motor vehicle, but insists that his thumb wasn’t raised when the officer found him sitting at an on-ramp.

Some times hitchhikers are celebrated in the news or their communities.

In early October, the National Library of Wales made a plea for information about what became of an area hitchhiker who left home in 1958. The museum was soon inundated with information about Islwyn Roberts, an eccentric man who spent his later years recounting his adventures for children. His travels took him to Egypt, Algiers, South America, Patagonia, South Africa and Canada. Roberts eventually returned home and died in 1993.

Roberts, like most hitchhikers, was probably spilling with tales of human kindness and generosity of a kind only hitchhikers know.

Media loves a good hitchhiker tale, but it seems academia is averse to studying this dynamic subject. Who hitchhikes and why do they do it? Who picks them up? What percentage of hitchhiking events end in violence or other crimes? How often do people open there homes to these strangers? What does polling reveal about peoples’ attitudes toward hitchhikers? How does this vary around the country? What is its history?

In his Informal History of Hitchhiking, published in 1958, the late-John T. Schlebecker observed, “Begging rides from passing motorists, or hitchhiking, is an American contribution to world civilization which has been largely unexamined by historians. And this is strange because hitchhikers first became familiar figures on the American scene in the middle 1920s, and have been more or less ubiquitous ever since.”

Almost every study since has cited the lack of previous studies.

In 1975, a legislative committee in Connecticut commissioned to study hitchhiking wrote in their findings, “If the report appears to lack detailed information it is because very little valid research regarding hitchhiking has been done.”

Little has changed since. The people over at DigiHitch.com have compiled an amusing timeline of the scant appearances hitchhiking has made in the academic record since Schlebeker published his Informal History more than 50 years ago.

Just who are these motorists that allow strangers inside their vehicles in these freaky modern times?

Well, they’re anyone.

When I hitchhiked in 2000 and 2001, I was always struck by the diversity of people who pulled over for me, men and women alike. Many confessed they always wanted to backpack around. Regrettably, I never asked anyone why they picked me up, not even the woman who asked only half-jokingly as I got in her car, “You’re not going to kill me, right?”

I assured her I wouldn’t and for the length of the ride she relayed conversations she was having with her dead friend, via her pyschic. It might have been comical had not the death been so recent and obviously traumatizing.

Some would offer money and food. One guy told me I reminded him of his son, whom he hadn’t spoken with for many years.

In Oregon, a guy picked me up outside of Medford and drove me all the way to the California border. He’d been evacuated after lightening sparked a forest fire near his home earlier that morning.

Over the course of some 60 to 70 rides, in New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Oregon and California, I never felt like my life was in danger. Other hitchhikers I’ve met never talked about running into trouble except for hassles from the cops.

Why these people chose to pick me up I can’t say. But I suspect it’s owed in part to a trust that people are fundamentally good. Will American hitchhiking ever again be as popular as it was between the 1920s and 1970s or is currently in Europe, Australia and many developing countries? Unlikely. Americans are naturally suspicious of strangers, even when they’re neighbors. And most motorists, upon spotting a hitchhiker, will be deterred from offering them a ride because of an irrational perception of danger.

A trucker on the forum I mentioned earlier put it this way, “Life is not a horror film, and a handful of murder stories that hit the news with big hype does not mean all people in a ‘certain category’ are bad. There are more mothers who kill their children every year than there are hitchhikers who kill motorists….yet we’re not warily eyeballing that soccer mom with our doors locked, are we?”

Then he adds, “Use your common sense and good judgement. I have run across a lot of harmless young people hitchhiking – squatters, runaways, modern-day hippie wannabes, who are happy to have a ride, some company and maybe a hot meal. I have also run across older people with obvious substance abuse problems and no doubt a shady past. That’s the nature of the transient human population; it embraces all kinds.”

Sounds like something that ought to be studied.

The cattle approached us curiously only to charge away upon our first step toward them. Creeks. Freshwater springs. Busted up mobile homes. Rusty farm equipment. An abandoned home that, if the rumors are believed, houses a dead body. (I didn’t want to verify this.) And yes, peacocks. My guide had quite the knack for peacock calling. While the colorful creatures answered back, they never came close enough for a picture. “Have you ever seen a peacock?” she asked.

“Only at the zoo.”

“They have peacocks in zoos?” she laughed.

“I guess they’re not that exotic, huh?”

“Not around here.”

“I tell him that’s fine, I’ll just go out and buy a paper and come back. I’ll stroll around the town and take in the sights. He says there are no sights; there is no town. But I tell him I’m a big fan of desolation; appear and disappear. The way something very prosperous and promising turns out to be disappointing and sad. The way people hang on in the middle of such obliteration and don’t think twice about it. The way people just keep living their lives because they don’t know what else to do.”

Shepard articulates pitch-perfectly one of the aspects of traveling America I love most – the desolation. Big city life is great, with its ceaseless activity, but it’s those wayward places of extreme inactivity that enchant me. This feature is a running photo album of American desolation. Check in periodically, because I’ll continue adding to it.