“Did you know that Skinhead’s all make the same ‘Oop!’ noise when you run steel through them?” Moe said with his deep southern drawl to the young-blood kid sitting next to him with a calm smile, loudly enough for everyone to hear, in response to a group of Aryans on the prison yard demanding the bleachers where the two of them sat.
All hail the Convict King
Once upon a time, back in the late 1970’s, Moe was a truck hijacker down south. He'd ambush big-rig drivers with a sawed-off shotgun, steal their trucks, and sell the contents of the trailers to local mob boys in 7 different states. He and his crew were so notorious back then that the truckers had a term they'd call out on their CB's. "Badger".
These truckers would try to anticipate and out-think him as they started hauling in pairs or groups when they could. Hoping that being armed themselves and utilizing the safety in numbers strategy, he wouldn't be able to get them. What madman would hit a convoy? Whenever one would spot what they thought might be his truck on the highway, they'd jump on the radio to warn the driver ahead of them, "Badger on your donkey!" Of course Moe would hear them over his own CB so it never mattered. He expected that so it changed nothing. He and his crew wanted those trailer's more than they worried for their lives.
However no man can go that loud and hard forever and the day came where the police caught up to him. The streets of downtown Atlanta turned into a scene from the movie Heat as an open shootout erupted. Firing on the run, he grabbed a man who was ducked into a doorway for cover, pulling him close and used him to get clear. "I'm not going to hurt you", Moe told his hostage,"I just don't want them to kill me".
That random hostage he took and released once he found a route to escape, was a federal judge. Moe became the subject of a Federal manhunt which eventually led to his arrest. Ironically, that judge actually testified during the trial that, though it was wrong, he understood why Moe grabbed him in those circumstances in order to save his own life.
Moe was sentenced and shipped to Terre Haute, a maximum security federal prison in Indiana. Given he had been given a 30 years to life sentence, he accepted his new circumstances and adapted quickly. Effortlessly learning the ins-and-outs of how things worked in his new home. All of the ins-and-outs. It took approximately a decade for him to get things lined up, however once he did, he became the first man to ever break out of that prison.
What follows gets graphic. Moe began drinking vinegar every day like an alcoholic. He was aiming to create the kidney stone to end all kidney stones. The Cullinan Diamond of kidney stones. Something he eventually succeeded in doing. One day he was simply completely unable to urinate. The prison had no choice but to send him to an outside hospital for surgery due to the fact that he was literally dying in front of them.
Following his surgery, they returned him to his room to recover. Handcuffing Moe to the bed with an armed guard stationed outside the room's door. Once alone, Moe dug out the home-made handcuff key he had crafted months before the trip. One he had smuggled inside his urethra to avoid discovery during strip searches and then hid in the bedding before the surgery.
Freeing himself of the handcuffs he shuffled in his hospital gown over to the room's supply cabinet, digging out the pistol and clothing one of the nurses had hidden there that morning. A nurse he'd been writing to for years beforehand and who was very much in love with him. Quietly leaning out the door, Moe put the gun to the guards head. "Please come here" he said menacingly yet politely as only a Southerner could.
Gagging and cuffing the guard, Moe relieved him of his sidearm, then made his way outside to meet that lovestruck nurse as she waited in a running car in the parking lot. I find myself imagining how her anxious face must've lit up once she spotted Moe heading towards her. Together the two of them disappeared. Both on the run now.
I don't recall how long they were on the run but I do know that he was eventually betrayed by the same mob boys he had once helped make rich. Perhaps they saw him as a liability. Perhaps they resented their debt to him. In the end it didn't matter and Moe never found out why. Agents simply stormed his Texas motel room one night and returned him to Federal custody.
For the following decade or so Moe was placed on 'bus therapy'. A nasty little practice where he never remaining anywhere for longer than a couple of weeks at most. Placing him on every single transport bus, car or plane going anywhere. If that prison or jail had a inmate transferring, Moe was going along for the ride. They weren't going to let him get settled a second time.
Eventually they dropped him in what was just another joint no different than any of the others. While there Moe got into a brawl with that prison's chapter of the Aryan brotherhood, killing several of them during the fight. The Feds were in a bind given that this all happened while Moe was in a prison where he wasn't even listed on the inmate directory. How would they explain during the investigation why this man was there in the first place. Given that his “bus therapy” was completely off the books and was simply being utilized as a vindictive, and illegal, means of punishment. Moe had become a monster liability to the Federal Department of Corrections.
The Feds, looking for an out during the subsequent cover-up, decided to turn him over to one of the states where he had charges pending. Anything to get him out of their system. Following his conviction there, he was transferred to a high security state prison to serve his time. As before, Moe quickly made a name for himself and made that joint his own.
Almost thirty years after his original conviction, Moe found himself watching a scrawny new kid being absolutely destroyed by the man he was trying to fight. Yet this kid just kept getting back up. After he had seen enough, Moe stepped in and ended the fight with his presence alone.
"Fuck off" he told the battered kid on the tile after stepping to the other man and making him back down, having only intended to end the beating and nothing more. A statement to which this bloodied kid responded by threatening to fight him too. Moe laughed at the toothless threat. Not in a vindictive or cruel way, but warmly the way a parent would.
That was the day he decided he was going to raise me up. That's the day Moe adopted me. I had many brothers through the years but only one him. The man who'd teach me everything about everything. The man who showed me how to be a man. The man who saved me from myself. The only father figure I've ever known, Moe the Convict King.
More, please sir.
That is all.
This is great.
No one makes crazy, don't-give-a-fuck outlaws like America, especially Jacksonian, southern-accented America.
Eager to hear the rest of the story.
Glad you lived to tell the tale.