Prolog, Author's Bio. and Chapter One

This Book Contains Graphic and Explicit Language, and is Not Recommended for Children Under the Age of Eighteen.

This book is dedicated to my wife, Trudy and my three sons and their families. They had to go without a husband and a father for the many years that I was assigned to undercover narcotics. Without their support I could not have tolerated the stress and loneliness that goes with the job of an Undercover Officer.

PS: Thanks to all the police officers who have lived in the trenches of life to make our society safer.

“THIS JAIL IS BLACK”

A fictional tale of two young black drug dealers growing up in the murder capital of the United States, Gary Indiana.

Author’s Bio:

Jim Wallace grew up in Northwest Indiana. After service in the U.S Marines Corps he returned to join the Indiana State Police. For eight years he worked as an undercover narcotics officer, three of those years he coordinated and supervised the Lake County Drug Task Force composed of seventeen different police agencies, one of which was Gary.
He then was assigned to work in Chicago and Northwest Indiana as a member of one of President Reagan’s regional joint drug task forces. These task forces were made up of local and state law enforcement officers and agents from the Federal Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and U.S. Customs. The author was assigned to investigate drug related homicides that had occurred throughout the Midwest. His twenty-eight year state police career culminated with him serving eleven years as the Chief of Detectives overseeing all the Indiana State Police criminal investigations in Northwestern Indiana.
After his state police service he ran for and was elected Sheriff of Jasper County Indiana and served in that capacity for eight years. Jasper County is a rural county that borders Lake County, of which Gary, Indiana is it’s the largest city. The author learned quickly that Gary’s problems many times became Jasper County’s problems.


Prologue

The wind was blowing down Broadway off of Lake Michigan like a fan inside a refrigerator, strong, silent, and freezing cold. Gary Indiana’s steel mills had been a warming source for these strong, sometimes gale force winds, for several decades. Many of the mill’s open-hearth furnaces have since been silenced and their fires extinguished. Many businesses that had located on Gary’s main street, Broadway, are now closed. Broadway is now a funnel emptying its cold windy contents onto anyone who is brave enough or so determined that they would challenge its power.
The early settlers of Gary did a good job of laying out Gary’s downtown streets. The streets just seemed to splay out of the steel mills like fingers from a palm. The main thoroughfares were named and built like most cities, in a grid pattern, with Broadway as its epicenter. The streets to the west were named after U.S. presidents, in the order they had served, starting with Washington.
To the east of Broadway they were named after individual states, and streets running horizontal to Lake Michigan were avenues in numerical order starting with First Avenue.
Gary, once a prosperous city, has begun to fall on hard times.
Several steel mills had once sat on the southern shore of Lake Michigan and for years they had employed several thousand workers.
A workforce made up by many nationalities and races that had moved to Northwest Indiana with hopes of finding work in one of these mills. For several decades there was plenty of work for everyone and the pay and the life it supported was a good one. This held true until the dreaded sixties arrived.
That was the decade that started Gary’s downturn. The employment situation deteriorated quickly as the steel mills began to have massive layoffs. The reduction of the workforce continued until most of the mills were operating with only a minimum staff. Lacks of orders caused by a staggering economy were responsible for many of the smaller mills closing. To find other work many the white families started moving out of Gary. Leaving the downtown or what was then known as the “District”, mostly populated by black and Hispanic families, and fewer white families who could not afford to move or just would not leave the home they had occupied for years.
Street gangs, composed of young adult blacks and teenagers who either had lost their jobs or just couldn’t find one, slowly began to rule the streets of Gary’s downtown. Stores, which use to be thriving businesses, closed leaving Broadway and its adjacent streets in ruins.
Driving down Broadway after dark was as if you had crossed into another dimension. On many nights not a soul could be seen walking in the downtown area.

If driving through, a white person knew better then to stray too far off of Broadway. Numerous stores either had their windows boarded up or gated with steel bars. Street lighting was now minimal at most. Several of the light poles were now nothing more then big grey steel sticks bearing the remnants of tattered signs of some long ago would be politician. Their bulbs had burned out several years ago and had not been replaced. If they were fixed they would only be broken out again within days.
Gary, as had been reported in the Federal Bureau of Investigations
Uniform Crime Report, was the murder capital of the United States. More people were murdered in Gary, percentage wise, then in any other city in the United States. If these statistics, along with the reported drug stats, were accurately gathered, Gary also was one of the largest drug distribution centers in the Midwest.
In the midst of all this children were being born and raised by many parents who had no opportunity to find much needed work to support their families. Many children and young adults were left to wander the streets and exist as best they could.
Their homes became the street corners and for many their vocation became drug dealing and prostitution.

Eventually the money being earned just to exist became money to be used for the nicer things in life, such as fancy cars and big flash rolls.
The Family Street Gang composed of black drug dealers, thieves, and killers, with its ruthlessness, got its foot in the door and took control of Gary and its streets.

This story is about two black kids raised in Gary during this period of time. It is about their lives and their downward spiral into drug dealing, murder, and prison.

Chapter One: Business is Good

Twenty-five blocks south of the lake, on Broadway, was the center of most of the drug activity in Gary and Lake County. It was said that more drugs and narcotics were peddled on this one corner in one hour, than anywhere else in the Midwest. The drug-dealing operational center was a phone booth at the corner of Twenty-fifth and Broadway.
It was a winter night and the wind was howling its way through Gary’s deserted streets as if it was looking for the warmth of another steel mill furnace.
Two lone figures hunkered down next to the only telephone booth that still worked on Gary‘s south side. The telephone company had decided long ago that it was useless to try to repair any telephone booth that was not inside a building or protected by the lights of a nearby business. In Gary drugs were now considered a major industry and where else could you score a few dollars to buy your drugs so easily than a phone both. A nail puller or even a claw hammer could do the job, a quick pry down and out, and the coins would just tumble out onto the filthy alcohol and urine stained floor.
The two black men were doing everything they could to stay out of the freezing wind, but their efforts to use the phone booth, as a windbreak wasn’t working very well.

Most of the phone booth’s windows were broken out, but it still served its purpose, it was Jimmy and Jerld’s office. As long as the phone worked they would be there. Not only were they using the phone booth as a windbreak, they also were making sure that no one damaged “their” phone.
Regardless of the wind, snow, freezing rain or the heat of the summer, their business depended on them being there to answer the phone when it rang. Their job depended on a working phone; each ring was to them like a cash register bell, bringing in more money. They understood very well that to exist on the streets of Gary, money and bullets were the only conversation everyone understood. The night’s business had been unusually slow but it was soon going to pick up.
This corner was like a lot of the neighborhood corners in Gary. Everywhere you looked regardless of direction, you could see boarded up buildings. Except for an aging mission for derelicts and the homeless, located across the street, there were no other buildings lighted for several blocks.
This now rundown area had been a vital and busy section of Gary only a few years ago, with numerous mom and pop storefront businesses.
Now the buildings looked as if terrorist had set off a bomb knocking out every pane of glass within eyesight.


Vacant buildings, like old soldiers, stood watch over the streets with their drapes, like shoulder epaulets, flapping out the second story windows.
Their deteriorating and dilapidated condition and the vacant lots scattered with beer bottles, cans and used condoms had turned this once thriving business corner into a no man’s land.
It was a December night and Northwest Indiana was its usual sub-zero dumping ground for winter’s angry ice and snow. The rap, rap, rap sound of car tires was all that could be heard as they slipped and slid down the ice covered streets.
Suddenly the two lonely figures stood erect as a car slowed and Jimmy whispered “Business.”
Jerld and Jimmy had been standing on their corner for about fifteen or twenty minutes when they saw a carload of honky kids drive slowly by. The driver made the usual pass trying to get up his courage and also to trying to decide if the two black men standing on the corner looked like they were dope dealers.
Jerld didn’t mind this ritual car dance that all the younger kids did.
He knew if he looked as if he expected them to stop and then gave them the flash, a hand in and out of his front pocket quickly, that they would summon up enough nerve to stop.

Jimmy hated these drive-bys for two reasons. One, he always suspected it might be a rival dealer out to put his competition out of business with a shotgun barrel out the window and a couple of shots and no more J & J.
Reason number two was he hated whites and whites were the ones who always had to do the drive-bys first before they stopped.
He would always say to Jerld, “I ain’t no fucking animal in the zoo to be stared at.”
Jerld would just smile and say, “You can leave and I’ll take their white-assed money. It all spends the same.”
Jimmy would growl, and then as he was paid to do, he would look up and down the street making sure there were no cops or anyone else nearby to interfere with their business.
This carload of white kids was not familiar to Jerld or Jimmy. They had a lot of whiteys that were regular customers. They would come to Gary from the surrounding counties, and Jerld and Jimmy had got to know some of them as good customers. They also could recognize some of their cars, which was very important in their line of work.
This was an older faded Pontiac and it had Kentucky license plates.
Jerld wondered what these Cracker Kids were doing on the south side of Gary.

Whites only came here to collect the Black Wheel Lottery payoffs or to buy dope.
Jerld thought to himself, “If them kids get on the wrong street tonight they will be a nice target with their white skin and what looked like two young blond ladies in the back seat.”
He felt sorry for some of his customers. They would drive up in their fancy cars and would want to buy some “Coke” or “Smack.” They acted and thought they were cool the way they would dicker for the price.
“Hell this is the seventies now, not the sixties, the Smack, (heroin) he sold was what was called salt and pepper. It was cut and diluted so bad that you had to do several “Dimes” or a couple of “Quarters” to even get a runny nose, but the kids didn’t know that. They just wanted to get high.
So they just kept coming back time and time again.
It was good for business, but Jerld still had a goal, he wanted to be known as the dealer with the best and the most. If and when that ever happened he would then be able to deal quantities, and would be living on easy street for the rest of his life, with a lot of nice “Bitches” and nice “Rides.
The white kids in the Pontiac returned and started to pull up to the curb. Jerld motioned to them to drive around the corner and park on 25th.


They did, and a young male in the passenger seat rolled down the window as Jerld walked over and leaned in. The driver was holding a sawed off shotgun, and it was pointed right at Jerld’s nose.
The passenger said, “Don’t move your black ass one inch or your dead.” Jimmy had moved away from the car and had returned to the corner to watch Jerld’s back. Jerld just stared into the both barrels of the shotgun, which looked like two small cannons pointed directly at his face.
The driver said, “Give me all of your dope or I will give you a new face.”
Jerld could see out the corner of his eyes that there were two very young teenage girls in the back seat and they were giggling and slapping each other as if they were laughing at a funny joke they had just heard.
Jerld thought, “Man this ain’t funny.” They had parked right in front of a boarded-up building and the plywood had several knot holes that had been punched out, fallen out, or had rotted out from age. This was J & J’s corner they knew every inch of it and could see it with their eyes closed.
The passenger said, “Didn’t you hear the man? We want your dope or your shoulder pimple is going to be splattered all over that plywood.” As he motioned with his head toward the boarded up building.


Jerld’s legs were trembling, and it wasn’t from the cold that had bothered him so much a few minutes ago. He felt like someone had just kicked him in the groin and his balls had come up into his throat and were trying to climb over his tongue to get out. Jerld looked for Jimmy and could only see the tip one of his shoes without turning his head. It looked like they were miles away, not just the fifteen or twenty feet that it actually was. Jerld had been sizing up his would-be killers, as he stood transfixed. He stood very still not moving or doing anything that would make this white kid a hero in his friend’s eyes, by having killed a nigger.
Jerld had heard that there were families down in Kentucky that go nigger hunting just for fun on Saturday nights. He didn’t want to make these two punk-ass kids heroes in their “Cunts’ eyes. And sure as hell he wasn’t going to give up his dope to them or anyone else.
The driver looked to be anywhere from fifteen to eighteen years old. The passenger was probably a little older. Neither one of the little “Back Seat Bitches” could be much over fourteen years old.
It was very cold out, and the tank tops that these little “Prick Teasers” wore were white, and almost see-through, their tiny nipples showed their excitement.


The two in the front seat were typical “Crackers” they each had on a cowboy shirt and wore boots and Levis.
Both had what looked to be belts with buckles as big as the pancakes Jerld’s momma made.
The only difference between them was one had a double barrel cannon in his hand and that hand was starting to shake.
Jerld thought to himself “Think of something quick or your going to be a sidewalk lollypop for some stray dog.”
“You Crackers had better think twice before you come up into this nigger’s face with a gun in my town” Jerld said in the coldest and calmest voice he could summon up.
There was a quick look of fright on the driver’s face.
Jerld continued. “Do you see that plywood over there?” He said, gesturing with a sideward nod of his head toward the boarded-up building.
“You punk-ass kids want to shoot me, do you?”
“Each hole that you see in that wood over there has a loaded scatter gun behind it, pointing right at all your white asses and this ratty old piece of shit you’re driving.”
“If you want to check it out pull that fucking trigger, you dumb ass hillbillies, why do you think I had you pull around the corner and park here.”
Jerld could see the questioning fear in their eyes. The little “Tits” in the back had quit slapping each other and were sitting with their hands in their laps, just as if their mothers had often told them to do, “Sit up straight and be good”.
There was no doubt that the “Big Heroes” in the front seat were now frightened shitless. Jerld leaned further into the car and grabbed the barrel of the shotgun and wrenched it out of the driver’s hand. As he was pulling it out, he took the butt and hit the passenger right in the middle of his forehead. Blood flew; it splattered all over the front of the driver’s shirt and made it look like it was made with red and white poke-a-dotted material.
The two petrified bitches in the back seat let out a sound that could only be described as a whimpering, silent scream. Blood decorated their hair, face, arms and legs. Their white t-tops were covered with splatters of every shape.
The passenger groaned and rolled down onto the floor and gagging and gurgling sounds spewed out with the blood as it dripped on the floor.
In the same motion he turned the gun around and pointed at the driver and said, “Get out your money and I want it all. If I find out you are holding out on me I will blow your asses back to Kentucky.”
All four of the would-be dope robbers grabbed for their pockets.

They started handing their bills and change to Jerld just like a cashier at a drive through window. It kept coming from one hand or another. The driver grabbed the passenger’s; who was stilled curled up in a bloody pile on the floorboard, wallet out of his back pocket and handed it to Jerld. Jerld was surprised without counting it; it looked like they had given him several hundred dollars.
Jerld stuck the gun in the driver’s neck and said, “You should have been out of my town yesterday, get your asses back to Kentucky before you find out what us northern niggers do to hillbillies on Saturday night.”
Tires shrilled like a referee’s whistle as the driver slammed his foot down on the accelerator. As the car pulled away, from the back seat came a cry of shear terror. It faded away like the siren of a passing fire truck.
Jimmy quickly turned around and saw Jerld standing there with a shotgun in one hand and a hand full of money in the other.
Jimmy came running over with a quizzical look on his face and said: “What happened? I can’t leave you alone for a minute.”
Jerld just looked at the hand full of money and said, “Business is good Jimmy, Business is good”

Chapter two will be posted Aug. 26, After 6PM