WHEELER DEALER: Chapter 7

Five years as a nomad in chains – that’s how his lawyers put it. Shuttled from prison to prison to keep him from staying too long in one place and stirring up trouble. But that’s over now, and by court order Steve Kessler is back at OSP.

Matter of fact, he’s out on the yard right now. Looking like a shaggy-haired movie star. Talking that revolutionary talk to small gatherings on the bleachers.

“It's not a black problem. It’s not a white problem,” he’s saying. “It’s a blue problem.” Meaning of course that since all prisoners wear blue denim they’re brothers, right? So what they need to do is start up a prisoners union, right?

Are the prison authorities nervous? You can bet your bippy they are, to use a favorite saying from that time. They’ve always been nervous about Kessler, and usually with good reason.

First day back he looks up Roger. They know each other from Amato’s although they never did any business together. Kessler is aware of Roger’s reputation as a go-to guy when it comes to wheeling and dealing. And of course Roger has been following Kessler’s flamboyant career, if only because so much of it has been in the papers.

Starting out as a teen-aged armed robber, partnered up with an older dude named Shoulder Holster Harry. After one arrest Kessler tells the judge he wants to renounce his American citizenship and go fight for East Germany. That’s not the way things work, the judge says.

Three years later he gets shot in the neck attempting to rob a black heroin dealer and ends up in the hospital under police guard. A confederate shows up with a gun, handcuffs the officer to the bed, and they escape. Captured two months later he gets thirteen years in OSP for robbery plus flight to avoid capture.

Which of course is where he is a year later when the inmates take over three-fourth of OSP in the 1968 riot. Considered by authorities to have been one of the ringleaders, Kessler is transferred to the the federal prison in Atlanta, where he acquires the nickname “Casper the Ghost.”

Three inmates stabbed to death in a drug dispute, and all anyone can remember is that the guy doing the stabbing had a pillow case over his head with cut-out eyeholes. If it was Kessler they couldn’t prove it. But they could transfer him out, and from there he’s sent to California where they keep him on the move, one prison to the next, which is where the “nomad in chains” comes from.

And of course that’s also where he picks up that revolutionary California prison union rap he’s laying down out there on the yard.

It’s a little hard to imagine now, but in the mid-70s, there was this prisoner chic, at least among political radicals. The underlying reasoning being that if the government itself had lost all legitimacy – waging as it was an unconscionable war in Southeast Asia – then the criminals of that country, whatever they may have been convicted of, were political prisoners. If it wasn’t entirely logical, at the time it was also quite real.

And of course, what starts in California sooner or later makes its way to Oregon. Even before Kessler arrived, students from the University of Oregon, most of them well-meaning but exceedingly naïve young women, could be seen protesting one injustice or another outside the penitentiary walls.

Such as the matter of Gary Gilmore’s teeth – new dentures actually – which the prison administrators had supposedly been denying him. It wasn’t exactly true, but how were they to know?

Gilmore, who even by prison standards had more than a few screws loose (and would just a few years later be executed in Utah for two utterly senseless murders), had flushed them down the toilet in order to create just such an incident.

But what made it even screwier, was the fact that at first the prison dentist agreed to make Gilmore a new set. No problem. But when Gilmore insisted that they be made a size larger because he thought that would puff out his cheeks and make him look more attractive the dentist refused. At which point Gilmore attacked the dentist with a ball peen hammer and had to be restrained.

Meanwhile, there they were outside the walls. Holding up signs and chanting. GIVE GILMORE HIS TEETH.

So as you can imagine, when Kessler arrived back at OSP he was already something of romantic hero to this coterie of well-meaning young college women – many of whom, it should be added, had developed penpal relationships with their newfound prisoner friends and even came up to see them in the visiting room sometimes.

Inside the walls Kessler quickly acquired his own loyal group of followers. Including of course Gilmore, who by now had settled for the proper size dentures. A guy named Chris Anderson who had murdered his own partner by sneaking up and shooting him through his bedroom window. And three black guys from Eugene who had shot and killed an elderly shop owner in the course of a robbery and considered themselves Black Panthers.

Plus a big dumb white guy named David Dunster, now twenty years old, who just two years earlier, in the small town of Woodburn, had tied up up a rug shop clerk with women’s stockings, raped her, and shot her twice in the head with a .32.

As Roger recalls, Dunster followed Kessler around like a puppy dog, eating up all that California union talk. Roger and Jimmy Spaise would sit at the same table with Kessler at chow hall and listen to his political rap but they had their drug business to attend to.

Then one day – Roger can’t remember exactly what brought it up – Roger tells Kessler about his and Inez Guerrero’s scheme to smuggle a gun into the visitors room, and Kessler is all ears. For all the reasons you might expect, the idea of taking over the prison’s visiting room by force greatly appeals to him, and he starts talking it up among his followers.

As it happens, Inez is no longer present to participate in the enterprise. The state supreme court has overturned the career  criminal law under which he had been sentenced to twenty years without parole, and he is now back on the streets looking for new places to rob.

And Roger, now that his sentence has been reduced to manslaughter and he’s just a few months from being released from OSP himself, wants nothing to do with whatever Kessler’s got in mind. As far as he knows, because no one ever comes to him to about smuggling the gun in from Central Freeze – which they would have to do to pull this off – that’s the end of it.

Then several months later it’s all over the news. The prison authorities have discovered what they characterize as a plot to take over the visitors room and start a riot. Kessler, Anderson and Dunster are being transferred to other prisons for the safety of all concerned.

Complicating an already a very confusing situation, several other prisoners have been placed in solitary due to letters sent and received from two female members of Charles Manson’s “Family,” Sandra Goode and Squeaky Fromm. Since they weren’t  involved in the Sharon Tate murders they’re still out on the street and living in California.

And then in the midst of the hearings over whether Kessler should be sent to an out-of-state prison, down in Sacramento Squeaky Fromm attempts to shoot President Gerald Ford. The gun doesn’t fire because Squeaky doesn’t know how to chamber a round in it. But an assassination attempt is an assassination attempt – and Hoyt Cupp, the warden at OSP who drinks too much anyway, is now convinced that they want to kill him too.

The PIO at the Oregon’s Corrections Department claims that if there ever was a transcript of the Kessler hearings it  certainly doesn’t exist any longer. So it’s necessary to rely on the newspaper coverage, which is itself quite confusing because no one at the time really understood what, if anything, was going on.

What appears to have happened, though, is that big dummy Dunster bragged to one of the U of O girls about their half-baked plans – actually little more than a fantasy at this point – to smuggle a gun into the prison and take over the visitors room.

And after the girl notified the authorities – or maybe the prison authorities just intercepted Dunster’s letter – everything hit the fan and before long Kessler was on his way out of OSP again. This time to the nation’s maximum security prison in Marion, Illinois.

As for Roger, just three months later he’s released from prison. As a reward for his exemplary behavior during his six years in OSP he’d been sent to the prison’s forest camp on he coast and so he missed most of the excitement back in Salem.

As he’s signing out, as luck would have it, he runs into Jimmy Spaise, who’s about to be discharged himself and has been spending most of his time latelyn at a halfway house in Portland – where of course he, along with his sister Sandra, the call girl from Alaska, plus her luscious friend Carmela, also from Alaska, are engaged in a start-up drug business.

Would Roger be interested in joining them? Why, yes, I think he would.