The Second Life of Nick Mason

7

Darius Cole was born on the streets of Englewood. In the suburbs, you inherit wealth. In Englewood, depending on which block you live on, and which side of the street, you inherit a gang’s colors. By the time he was thirteen, he was on a corner. This was back in the 1970s, when the city saw a thousand homicides every year.

Young Darius was given a bag of money one day. Take this to the laundry, he was told. If there’s one dollar missing, we’ll find out in two minutes. You’ll be dead in three.

He took the money to the laundry-actually, it was a laundromat-and that’s where he met the man who kept a little office in the back of the place. It was one of several cash-based businesses the man owned all over the city. Laundromats, car washes, restaurants. Anyplace that handled a lot of bills, and even loose change. The man would take money from guys like Darius Cole and he’d mix it up with the cash from the businesses and like some kind of magic trick he’d somehow make it all come out clean.

The man at the laundromat told Darius Cole that this was a trick invented in Chicago, by Al Capone, back in the Prohibition days. Later, Cole learned about Meyer Lansky, the criminal mastermind and financial genius who was a hell of a lot smarter than Capone. Lansky financed the National Crime Syndicate, held points in every casino from Vegas to London, and transferred every dollar he made to his own personal bank in Switzerland. He never spent one day in prison.

Cole didn’t want to be just another kid working a corner. He wanted to be the black Meyer Lansky. No more drug addicts. No more gunfights on the streets. If you clean the money, you get clean yourself. You wear a suit like a legitimate businessman. Fuck that, you are a legitimate businessman.

By the time he was twenty, Cole had a minority share in a dozen restaurants. In barbershops. In car washes. Even a few laundromats. Any business that handled cash, with minimal recordkeeping, Cole wanted a piece of it. He’d mix in drug money with the cash proceeds and deposit it all as legitimate income.

The entire time, he kept a low profile. No flash. He paid federal agents to keep him out of the files. FBI, DEA, ATF, IRS, even Interpol. Cole stayed invisible.

He bought more businesses all over the country. Better restaurants, nightclubs. If the bartender would take a hundred-dollar bill from you without blinking, Cole wanted to meet the owner.

He got so good at it, he started handling other people’s money. Not from rival gangs, of course. Some lines don’t get crossed. But there were plenty of other criminal enterprises with money that needed cleaning. He didn’t get nervous about taking that money from white men in suits and giving most of it back to them. In fact, he would use the opportunity to learn everything he could about their operations, every last detail, until he could take over from the inside, like a Greek soldier from a Trojan horse, eliminating anyone who dared stand in his way.

By the time he was thirty, Cole had grown smarter and even more powerful. He expanded overseas, first in the Cayman Islands, then in Mexico, Brazil, Russia, Poland, Belarus-any country with soft banking laws. He always kept the money moving, more and more of it, faster and faster, in amounts small enough to avoid suspicion, but times a hundred, then a thousand, using accounts in other people’s names. People he could trust. People who knew the penalty for betraying him. The money would be round-tripped from one “smurf” account to another, Kraków to Rio to Jakarta, before coming back to Chicago.

When the time was right, he moved back into the drug business, but he did it the smart way, on the wholesale end. There was already a direct pipeline from the Mexican cartels to Chicago-Cole took this over and made life easier for the Mexicans by giving them one single contact to work with. Then he supplied the product to high-level dealers who would move it throughout the entire Midwest. So instead of having a thousand customers, he had twenty or thirty, all men he could trust. This was how he managed the risk and maximized the revenue. Then he channeled that money into more and more legitimate businesses.

He hired the best accountants. He hired the best attorneys. And he paid off the dirtiest cops. He grew his business into an empire.

Most cops know how to follow criminals. Only a select few of them are good at following money. Cole stayed ahead of them for years until they finally brought him down on a federal RICO case. He’d been here in Terre Haute ever since.

It was a story Mason never thought he’d hear. Not from Darius Cole himself. He never thought he’d make a second trip to the Secure Housing Unit. Or that the third trip would be permanent.

The same two men came to get him that day. Mason ignored the stares and followed them out of the cellblock. As he walked between them, he had time to think it over. It must have been a hell of a first conversation or there wouldn’t be a second. But what did Cole really want from him? If he wanted Mason’s ticket punched, that would have happened already. Out in the yard or in the cafeteria. You wouldn’t walk the man right to your cell.

When he got there, Cole was sitting at his desk with his back to him. He turned and gave Mason a quick nod. He was wearing the same rimless reading glasses that made him look like a prison librarian.

“Why am I back here?” Mason said.

Cole turned in his chair and took off the glasses. He didn’t look like a librarian anymore. “You’re back here,” he said, “because you got something I wanna know more about.”

“Look, Mr. Cole…”

“Read up on you,” Cole said. “Got some questions.”

Cole reached behind him and grabbed a folder from the desk. As he opened it, Mason saw his own mug shot from four years ago on the top page. This was his criminal file.

“You’re dialed in,” Mason said. “You’ve got this whole place wired. Is there anything the guards won’t bring you?”

“You’re a Canaryville boy,” Cole said, putting his reading glasses back on and starting to flip through the pages. “‘Father unknown.’”

Mason didn’t respond to that. He didn’t like seeing this man reading through his file, but once again figured it was probably a great time to keep his mouth shut.

“Tough way to start your life,” Cole said. “Don’t learn how to be a man, sometimes, until it’s too late. You put work in on the streets for over fifteen years, never spent more than one night locked up.”

Mason watched Cole flip back to the first page.

“‘Possession of a stolen vehicle,’” he said, reading from the page. “Got a few of them here. You work for one shop? Freelance? How’d that work?”

“Whoever paid. I moved around.”

“‘Possession of burglary tools’? Man’s branching out. But that one got dropped, too. Nothing ever sticks to you.”

Cole kept reading the file.

“You work alone sometimes,” Cole said, flipping to the next page. “Sometimes with a crew. All over the city. Sometimes you go in hard. Sometimes on the sly.”

He flipped back to the first page.

“Thirty years without going down. But then they get you and you don’t just go down, you go down hard. Some men wouldn’t handle that so well.”

“This is starting to sound like a job interview,” Mason said.

“That’s exactly what this is.”

The two men looked each other in the eye. Cole waited for Mason to say something.

“I handled it,” Mason said. “What choice did I have?”

“You always got a choice, Nick. Even here, you always got a choice. Like when I wanted to meet you.”

“Look, if we’re gonna do this again…”

“How come you didn’t give them up?” Cole said. “Twenty-five-to-life, you’re looking at. Hard federal time, Nick. But you keep your mouth shut.”

There was a long silence, finally broken when two inmates walked by in the hallway outside Cole’s cell. Their conversation ended as soon as they saw the look on the bodyguards’ faces, and the two men moved quickly away.

“One of your men got killed that night,” Cole said, looking back down at the papers. “Finn O’Malley. He a friend of yours?”

“Yes.”

“Two other men got away. Were they friends, too?”

“One was a friend. The other was a piece of shit.”

“But you didn’t turn on either of them.”

“I turn on the piece of shit, he turns on my friend. I’m still heading down here, either way. No matter what I did.”

“You had a wife,” Cole said, looking at the sheet again. “And a daughter.”

“I’m outta here,” Mason said.

“You don’t talk about them. They don’t belong in this place, right?” Cole leaned forward and studied Mason carefully for a long time. “What happens when they come to visit you?”

Mason looked away without answering. Cole shuffled through the papers again and found something interesting on one of the last pages.

“They don’t,” Cole said. “Ever. So you don’t talk about them. It’s, like, a rule you made up. To keep your mind right.”

Mason stared at Cole. He’d never mentioned his rules to anyone in here. It was an essential part of him that nobody else had ever seen.

“That’s right, Nick. You know what I’m talking about. You wanna hear one of my rules?”

Mason didn’t respond.

“I’m here for two lifetimes, Nick. But just because I eat here and I sleep here, does that mean I live here? Fuck that. I’m still back in Chicago, where I belong. Most guys hear that, they think I’m crazy. But maybe you understand what I’m saying.”

Mason looked at one bodyguard, then the other, wondering if they had to hear this bullshit every day.

“It’s a state of mind,” Cole said, tapping his temple with one index finger. “You look at it right, it’s just a problem of geography.”

A problem of geography, Nick thought. The man actually just said that.

“That’s just one of my rules,” Cole said. He picked up the file and opened it again. “I already know a couple of yours. Don’t sell out your friends. Keep everything separate. Keep your family inside you. I’m seeing a picture here.”

“You hear my name,” Mason said. “Now you read a file. And you think you know me?”

“I want to know what’s not in the file.”

“I do my time,” Mason said. “I mind my own business. I don’t fuck with people and people don’t fuck with me. I don’t need to make friends here. When you make a friend, that man’s enemies become your enemies. I don’t need that.”

Cole listened to him carefully, slowly nodding his head.

“That doesn’t mean I don’t look out for people,” Mason went on. “I look out for them, they look out for me. That’s how you survive. But I don’t owe them anything else. I don’t belong to anybody in this prison, Mr. Cole. And even though I can see you’ve got lots of power here and you can drag me down here anytime you want, I’m not going to belong to you, either. Nobody owns me.”

Cole kept looking at him, still nodding his head.

“You don’t always have to be that way,” he finally said. “People in my neighborhood, they have a problem, they don’t call nine-one-one. They call me. I’m the police, the fireman, and the judge.”

“Yeah, that’s your neighborhood. It’s not mine.”

Cole smiled at that. “How long you been here, Nick?”

“You saw the file. Four years.”

“Four years down, twenty-one to go if you’re lucky. So we got time to get to know each other. My boys will help you pack your stuff.”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re coming to SHU, Nick. Better food, better equipment… You’ll like it here.”

“What if I say no?”

“It’s already done,” Cole said.