![]() Although many of the prisoners I knew over the years still write to me, none of them are the Russians I met. ![]() ![]() I did my minimum and was released earlier this year. I had committed five robberies, gotten away with them, and then got caught on a fluke a few months later. In less than two years, heroin addiction had taken me from my desk at a literary agency in New York to a shop at closing time with a pocketknife in my hand. I was serving a sentence for robbery, of which I was indeed very guilty. And so began my uncanny journey into the underworld of Russian zeks (a Soviet abbreviation for prisoner) in New York prisons. The porter simply chuckled and said not to worry about it: The Russians in the facility had found out that a "brother" had arrived. Fearing the worst and remembering the awful things I had heard about the consequences of accepting gifts in prison, I wouldn't touch any of it until he told me where this bounty came from. He gave me an envelope of coffee, a handful of tea bags, a newspaper, a few candy bars and shower slippers. On my first day of 10 years and three months spent in the prisons of New York state, a man came to the bare cell I was locked in.
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