Thursday, July 15, 2010:
My cellie is from Pensacola, Florida. He’s in his late forties, is of diminutive stature, and wears glasses and tells me that I will be wearing them too if I continue reading in the dark. He keeps his graying hair closely cropped and stays relatively physically fit. He’s ran up to ten miles with me several times before.
He comes from a decent family; his father was a physics professor at Pensacola Junior College. But that didn’t stop him from becoming a drug addict.
A couple of years before he was arrested, he went out west and became addicted to crystal meth. He was homeless out there for a little while and once rode a bicycle from Cheyenne, Wyoming all the way to Lincoln, Nebraska. In 2001 he met a few guys who were cooking meth in Lincoln. He helped them several times by supplying (stealing) pseudoephedrine in exchange for a portion of the dope. After a couple of months, he decided to straighten up and return to Florida.
Two years later, in 2003, the guys in Nebraska were busted. Did I say two years later? In order to receive a shorter sentence, they ratted on everyone they had been dealing with, including my cellie, even though his involvement was minimal. He wasn’t caught with any drugs, he wasn’t caught with a wiretap or trying to make a sale or a buy. The only thing they had on him was the word of three meth cooks. And this earned him a ten year federal sentence.
Read about the events that lead up to my fourteen and one-half year sentence Running Away From Me.
