Chapter 2
Bellevue was a horrendous experience, especially the first week. Maher found himself in a cramped prison ward that was a honeycomb of small steel cells. Adding to the ambience was the fact that the entire ward smelled of urine. The stench was almost unbearable, and Maher spent much of the first hours retching. His wardmates included an assortment of mentally disturbed patients. Muttering paranoids. Dead-eyed catatonics. Even a few homicidal manic types who ranted and raved as if they were possessed by demons. And then there was Johnson.
Johnson, it seemed, refused to sleep on his bed – a steel frame with a thin mattress- preferring to curl up on the floor underneath. When the nurse would make her late-night rounds with medication, she would stop at Maher’s cell first. After she handed Maher his pills, she would walk to the front of Johnson’s cell.
“Johnson!” she would scream as loud as she could. “Medication!”
Johnson would wake with a start and raise up, cracking his head on the bottom of the bed frame. As Johnson crawled across the cell in obvious pain, the nurse would say, “Mr. Johnson, don’t you think it would be better if you slept on top of your bed?”
A week after Maher arrived he was moved to the sixth floor, a setting more like a dormitory. For the next three weeks he underwent all manner of tests and attended group therapy sessions. Finally it was determined that Maher was not insane, and he was returned to Rikers Island. This time Maher wasn’t placed in the Adolescent Remand Shelter; he was tossed into Cell Block 2 amid the “general population.”
Meanwhile, Morihan tried to console Maher’s parents. Yet when Agnes asked how her teenage son could receive treatment usually reserved for monsters who had butchered their families or sociopathic career criminals, Morihan had no plausible explanation.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Morihan admitted. “It’s just a stolen car. And he’s a minor, for God’s sake!”
Maher’s father was beside himself. He had heard about what happens in prison, the beatings, the rapes. And now his son was on Rikers Island. It was the worst nightmare a father could endure.
But Edward Maher need not have worried about his son. A couple of days after arriving at Rikers, Maher was approached by an inmate who was in for armed robbery.
“I want you to be my sweet boy,” the man said. “I’ll buy you things from the commissary and look out for you.”
When Maher tried to ignore him, his prospective suitor became enraged. “Hey, you don’t give it to me, I’ll beat your fuckin’ brains in and take that pussy!”
Maher walked over to the man and smiled. The man smiled back. Then Maher leaned in slightly, crouched a little, and bawled up his fist.
“Oh, yeah?” Maher said.
“Yeah,” the man responded with a snarl.
Maher brought his fist up with all the force he could muster, landing a solid punch under the man’s chin. The man staggered back and Maher set upon him like a wild animal, biting him on the face. It took four guards to peel Maher off. When it was over, the man was a bloody mess, and Maher – due to the bites he had so savagely inflicted – had acquired a prison nickname: “Dirty Red.” From then on, nobody messed with “crazy white boy.”
Two mysteries were answered early in March as Maher settled in to prison life at Rikers: (1) how Maher came to be implicated in the bank robberies and (2) why Burton Roberts prosecuted Maher so zealously.
At first Maher had thought the Braccini brothers had given him up. But then a detective from Burton Roberts’ office stopped by Rikers to see Maher.
“Who was with you on the Cross Bay bank jobs?” the detective asked.
Obviously the cops had not identified the Barccini brothers. And Maher refused to name them.
Day after day detectives would come to Rikers and badger Maher for hours. When the badgering didn’t work, they would resort to offering a deal.
“Give us the Cross Bay bank robbers,” they would say, “and we’ll get you out of here.”
It became increasingly clear that Bronx DA Burton Roberts had little interest in locking up a car thief; rather, he had been after the Cross Bay robbers all along.
As the interrogations continued, Maher was told he had been identified by a bank employee. It made sense. After all, Maher hung around Cross Bay Boulevard all the time, and everybody knew that baby face of his. Yet, when Maher asked when and where he was identified, the interrogators were vague. It occurred to Maher that he had not been positively identified by the employee. Otherwise the DA would have charged him with armed robbery.
More damning than the uncertain testimony of a bank employee was Maher’s own propensity to boast about his exploits.
“Sources tell us you were bragging about the jobs,” a detective told Maher one day.
Maher grimaced. He had told people about his daring getaways. If the cops know I did the bank jobs,it’s my own fucking fault.
Various detectives filed in and out of Rikers to see Maher, each new face expressed optimism that he would be the one to get Maher to break down and name the Cross Bay bank. But Maher became inured to the drama after a few days. The characters were always the same: the “bad cop,” the “good cop,” and the prisoner. Maher had come to know the script so well that he sometimes played along as if he were an actor in an old prison movie.
Bad Cop
Look, you little rat bastard, you give me the fucking Cross Bay gang or I’ll make sure you never get the fuck out of here.
Good Cop
(stepping in front of the bad cop)
Hold on. Hold on. He’s just a kid. Why don’t you let me talk to him.
(turning to Maher; in a soothing voice)
You don’t belong in here, Kevin. You belong at home with your parents.
Maher
I would like to be home.
Good Cop
Then let me help you.
(off Maher’s hopeful expression)
All you have to do is give me the names of your accomplices and we can work a deal.
After a long beat.
Maher
Fuck you! I don’t know nothin’ about no Cross Bay bank robberies.
No matter how hard you detectives pressed him or how much his parents begged him or how dire Morihan painted the consequences, Maher refused to snitch on the Braccinis. No way I’m giving up Joey Braccini. Joey is a friend of mine.
As the daily interrogations continued, Maher was struck with the thought that cops were often reduced to being little more than information brokers, bartering small crimes for big crimes, constantly negotiating deals. And district attorneys would do almost anything to get an edge in the negotiation, even if it meant sentencing a minor to four years in prison for a car theft. Maher wasn’t sure what he would do with that little pearl of wisdom, but it stuck in his mind like a grain of sand in an oyster.
During Maher’s first month at Rikers – a huge institution with eight thousand inmates – Maher’s mother visited him. She had to go through several checkpoints, got frisked more than once, waited three hours, and finally got a thirty-minute visit in a small booth with thick glass separating her and her son.
“Ma,” Maher said toward the of the half hour, “I don’t want you to come here anymore.”
Agnes was insistent. “I miss you, Kevin, I worry about you.”
But Maher didn’t want his mother being hand-searched by male correction officers.
“I meant it,” Maher asserted. “I won’t see you if you come here again.”
Agnes did come again and, as he had warned her, he refused to receive her.
Maher afforded the same treatment to his father and his sister, Susan. Edward Maher came once and from then on his son would not receive him. Nor would he allow Susan to enter the gates of Rikers. Maher just didn’t want his family to go through the agony of the visit.
After the horror of seeing their son at Rikers, both Agnes and Edward pushed Morihan for some kind of resolution.
“Why doesn’t my son have bail?” Edward Maher wailed. “Every day, I see murderers getting out.”
“It’s because he’s still under an MO order,” Morihan explained. “But I’ll see what I can do. I’ll try.”
Morihan frequently contacted Burton Roberts’ office and was always rebuffed. It soon became obvious that the Bronx DA’s office had a plan: Keep Maher locked up until he gave up the Cross Bay bank gang. March turned into April, and April turned to May. June. July. August. September. Maher remained entrenched., and the DA’s office continued to file motions and postponements. In fact, Morihan cracked before Maher. He was arrested for selling forged green cards to illegal aliens. Consequently, another lawyer was hired by Maher’s father: Nathan Gottosman. Gottosman made a determination: “The only way out of this is to plead it down.”
The deal was simple: In place of the myriad of charges against him, Maher would plead guilty to a single count of reckless endangerment in the first degree, which was a “D” felony carrying a maximum sentence of seven years.
Maher balked. “Seven years?”
Gottosman soothed him. “Don’t worry. I can tell you right now, if anybody deserves probation, it’s you. No record. Youthful offender. And you already served fourteen months. You should get time served or probation.”
Judge George Stark had a reputation for being tough, and stories about him abounded. The tales may have been apocryphal, but they frightened criminals nonetheless. One anecdote went like this: Judge Stark peered at a defendant and asked him how many buttons he had. When the defendant looked down at his shirt and answered “six,” Judge Stark pronounced sentence: “Six years!” Another story had Judge Stark pointing out a window and asking a defendant what he thought of the tree. When the defendant told the judge that there was no tree outside the window, the judge responded by saying, “That’s right. There is no tree. But by the time you get out of jail, there will be.”
While Gottosman was not pleased with the fact that Judge Stark would be passing sentence, he had a more personal reason to be unhappy. The protracted maneuvers by the Bronx DA’s office had caused Gottosman to spend a great deal of bill-able time on the case, resulting in a fee that outstripped Edward Maher’s ability to pay. Gottosman had not received a check in sometime.
“I want to withdraw,” Gottosman told Judge Stark, “because I haven’t gotten paid.”
“You are the attorney of record,” Judge Stark declared, “ and you may not withdraw. If you have a problem you can take it up in civil court at a later time.” Judge Stark stared at Gottosman. “So, counselor, do you have anything to say before I pass sentence?”
Gottosman stood and collected his thoughts. Finally, he drew in his breath and spoke. “He’s a good kid, Your Honor, he served in the Marine Corps. He’s good with his hands. He knows how to work on cars.”
Maher almost fell off the court bench. Knows how to work with cars? Is this fuckin’ idiot crazy?
Judge Stark wasted no time in reading the sentence: “Kevin Maher, you are to sere an indeterminate sentence of not less than one day nor more than four years.” He banged his gavel, and the bailiff started to lead Maher away.
“Four years?” Maher gasped. “I can’t do four years.”
Judge Stark waved at the bailiff to stop. He looked at Maher. “You can’t? Okay. Do what you can. And then all the rest.” Judge Stark waved his hand again, this time in a dismissive manner, and Maher was led out of the courtroom amid the hysterical cries of his mother.
A short time after sentencing, Maher was picked up at Rikers Island by three corrections officers who would transfer him to Elmira Prison in upstate New York. They loaded Maher into the third seat of a 1968 Plymouth station wagon, then headed to the Bronx House of Detention to sign out two additional prisoners scheduled for transfer.
On the way to the Bronx, Maher chattered and joked with the officers. Among other things, he told them he had a cousin named Eddie Lacey, who was a corrections officer.
“Yeah,” one of the officers reacted in recognition. “I know Eddie.”
Maher told them about his car chase and subsequent four-year sentence. The officers were sympathetic.
“You don’t belong in prison,” one of them said.
“you steal three cars and get four years?” another chimed in, shaking his head in disbelief. “Kid, you’ll be out in six months.”
The Bronx prisoners, who were black, appeared to have nasty dispositions, so one of the officers pulled Maher from the back of the station wagon.
“Come on up with me, kid,” the officer said. “You’ll be more comfortable.”
About an hour and a half into the trip, the station wagon started to shimmy, and the driver pulled to the side of the road.
One of the officers nodded toward Maher. “This kid knows about cars. Let him fix it.”
Maher stepped outside and started to crawl under the car.
“Hold it,” an officer shouted.
Maher turned around. The officer had a handcuff key. “Let me take those cuffs off.”
By then everyone- the three officers and the two other prisoners – had gotten out of the station wagon. Maher glanced at the ignition and saw that the keys had been removed. If that key was in there, Maher thought. But it wasn’t, so Maher knelt down and stuck his head under the car.
“Here’s your problem. You’ve got a bubble in the left rear tire. It’s got to be changed.”
An officer knelt down and to take a look, his gun suddenly positioned right in Maher’s face. I could take the gun, Maher thought. But he didn’t.
Maher changed the tire, and in a few minutes the station wagon was back on the road.
IN Ithaca, which was thirty miles from Elmira, they stopped for gas.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Maher said.
“I do, too,” one of the officers said.
Maher started to get out of the car.
The officer stopped him. “Sit back down.” He unlocked Maher’s cuffs.
Maher and the officer walked toward the bathroom. Once inside the officer went to the urinal and Maher went in the stall. The had an open window.
Maher sat on the toilet and waited until he heard the flush of the urinal.
“Okay,” the officer yelled, “I’ll wait for you outside in the car.”
The moment Maher heard the bathroom door shut, he dove out the window and landed in a thicket of rose bushes. Bloody, but free, Maher sprinted away.
The officers became concerned when Maher hadn’t emerged after five full minutes, so they ran to check the bathroom. Maher was gone.
Cruising the area in the station wagon, the officers spotted Maher running down a side street. One of the officers jumped from the station wagon and fired three shots. The first splatted into the brick wall. The second whizzed by Maher’s head, sucking the air away from his ear. The third also missed, but Maher pretended to be hit. As Maher knew it would, it caused the officer to stop firing and put his gun away. Maher took off again, disappearing around a building. As he ran, he lost a shoe. A car, Maher thought, I need a car. Maher scanned the ground for a piece of metal, anything he might use to pop an ignition. But Ithaca wasn’t like the Bronx. The streets were spotless.
Within minutes, a cacophony of sirens shattered the quiet night, and helicopters filled the sky. Even the media were alerted. Suddenly the town of Ithaca was buzzing. Cops. Fire trucks. Reporters. All hunting for a redheaded teenager.
Maher’s escape attempt finally ended in a concrete stairwell of a record store. When the officers found him huddled against a locked steel door at the bottom of the steps, they began beating him unmercifully.
“I talked to you like a brother,” one of them said as he kicked Maher in the face.
“You fucking scumbag,” another said as he slammed his fist into Maher’s stomach.
“You little bastard,” the third officer screamed as he punched Maher in the face. “we’ve got seventy-six years of service among the three of us.”
As the officers were pounding Maher, an Ithaca cop arrived and pulled them off.
“I don’t know how you guys do it in New York City,” the cop said, “but this is Ithaca.”
When the television cameras arrived, the bloodied and bruised Maher grabbed the Ithaca cop.
“Please take me with you! They’re going to kill me!”
The Ithaca cop explained that he couldn’t do anything. “You’re property of the state,” he said.
The correction officers handcuffed and shackled Maher, then threw him face down in the back of the station wagon.
“We’ve got thirty miles to go,” an officer said. “You try anything else and I’ll blow your brains out.”
A few miles outside of Ithaca, Maher looked out the back window and saw an Ithaca cop car following at a discrete distance. It made Maher feel better. At least he would make it to prison alive.
Elmira State Prison was not always a final destination. Two cellblocks were designated as Elmira Reception Center, a place where prisoners were evaluated to determine which type of institution would best serve them. In July 1973 it was resolved that Maher should serve his sentence at Coxsackie Correctional Facility, a medium-security institution near Albany.
At this point, Maher had served a month at the Rikers Island Adolescent Remand Center, a month in Bellevue, fourteen months in the Rikers main prison, and two moths at Elmira, a total of eighteen months.
Since New York State only required prisoners to serve eight moths out of each year – four moths off for “good time” – Maher’s four-year sentence translated to thirty-two months. He was more than halfway home when he arrived at Coxsackie.
The conditions at Coxsackie made serving time there relatively easy. It was clean. There was a television room, a gym, and good food. A month after arriving there, Maher was chosen for a program called DVR – Division of Vocational Rehabilitation – and was given a job as a clerk at the prison hospital. The job was a hard one to get, although there were only two requirements: (1) that an inmate have no prior record of drug abuse, and (2) that the inmate be white, because the nurses were white and they were afraid of black prisoners. The color specification was not official.
When he wasn’t working in the hospital, Maher exercised in the gym and played cards with other inmates. Except for the bars and barbed wire, it was almost normal life. In fact, the most difficult aspects of his incarceration was his internal rage about being given such a harsh sentence and his constant worry about how his father was taking the fact that his son was locked up. Maher realized he had let his father down. And it gnawed at him. It was understandable then, that in May of 1974, Maher fell apart when he called his father and his father said:
“I’m going in the hospital, Kevin. I need to have a heart operation.”
Edward Maher explained that he had a faulty heart valve and doctors were going to remedy the situation by implanting a recently developed mechanical micro valve.
Maher hung up and ran to see Father DIrken, the prison chaplain.
“I killed him,” Maher said, sobbing.
“I broke my father’s heart.”
Maher immediately applied for a furlough to be with his father, but he was told he was ineligible because of his escape attempt. Upon hearing that, Maher grew despondent, even suicidal. So Father Dirken interceded and approached Coxsackie’s warden, Harry Fritz.
“Harry,” Father Dirken said, “I think we have to find a way that this boy can see his father before the operation.” Dirken had called Lenox Hill Hospital in New York and verified the serious nature of Edward Maher’s condition.
“Bring him into my office,” Fritz responded.
Maher met with Dirken and Fritz.
“I can’t grant you a furlough,” Fritz said. “But I’ll tell you what I can do. I can take you off the count.”
Taking a prison off the count was a dangerous thing for a warden. Essentially, it meant looking the other way while a prisoner took an unauthorized leave.
Fritz pointed at the name on his door. “Kevin if you don’t come back, that name won’t be on the door anymore. My career will be over.”
Maher broke down and cried like a baby. “I’ll come back, Mr. Fritz. I swear I’ll come back.”
Maher was shocked by his father’s appearance. The strong, vital man he had left behind was now weak, almost fragile. In fact, the operation had been postponed because Edward Maher’s blood count was too low.
“I love you, Kevin,” Edward Maher told his son. “No matter what you did, you’re still my boy.”
After three days, during which they were closer than they had ever been, Edward Maher drove Kevin to the bus station.
“Please,” Edward said as he hugged Kevin tightly. “Please go back.”
And he did. Maher returned to Coxsackie to finish the last three months of his sentence, there months that were far more difficult for Maher to serve than all the previous time he had spent behind bars. Besides dealing with his father’s illness, Maher’s mother – the woman who had left his father for a drunken bum – married for the third time.
Every day Maher called to see if the operation had been rescheduled. Finally Maher was informed that the procedure would take place on August 9, 1974, which also happened to be the same day Maher was to be released from Coxsackie.
On the morning of August 9, Maher walked out of Coxsackie and boarded a Greyhound bus for New York. The entire trip, he rocked back and forth, holding his stomach.
At 3:00 PM, Maher ran into Lenox Hill Hospital and jogged to the cardiac ward.
“I want to check” – Maher was out of breath – “on the condition of Edward Maher.”
The nurse looked at Maher and then quickly looked away. Edward Maher was dead.
Maher moved into his father’s apartment at 1609 Aqueduct Avenue. The grief was overwhelming, the guilt suffocating. Maher had planned to make it all up to his father, spend more time with him, look after him. He was going to be a good son for a change. Stay out of trouble. Maher wanted desperately to make his father proud.
But now it was too late.
After nearly three years behind bars, Maher realized that the adjustment to life on the outside would be difficult, but he hadn’t expected that even the most ordinary things would seem strange. The front door of his apartment closing with a thud instead of clank. Eating whenever he was hungry. And children. The first time he say a group of children, they appeared to be surreal little beings. Munchkins from The Wizard of Oz.
A week after he was released, Maher began working as a bartender at a Blarney Stone in Manhattan, located on 59th Street between Second and Third Avenues. It was a job his father had arranged nearly a year ago.
“I want you to have a place to work when you get out,” Edward Maher had told his son during one of their weekly phone calls.
After three days on the job, Maher had his first meeting with his parole officer, Jerry Israel, and dutifully reported that he was employed. Israel was upset.
“You can’t work in an establishment that serves alcohol,” Israel almost shouted. “Didn’t you know that?”
“I could report you for a parole violation!” Israel grumbled.
Maher quit his job at e Blarney Stone and tried to find other employment. Of course, nobody would hire an ex-con. This left Maher with no money and no legitimate way to make money. The “system” had done it again. So when one of Maher’s friends, a man named Brian O’Neal, suggested a way to make a quick buck, Maher went along with the plan.
“It’s easy,” O’Neal said. “You go over to one of these places where they have opera and shit like that. And you go up to one of these old ladies wearing a mink and rip the fuckin’ thing right off her back.”
O’Neal added that he had a fence who bought the coats.
Maher and O’Neal decided upon Lincoln Center. Naturally, Maher was the “wheel man.”
A few minutes after they parked in the Lincoln Center service road, O’Neal spotted a mark. He jumped from the car, ran to an old woman, and hit her so hard she actually lifted of the sidewalk. He then bent over her crumpled body and tore off her mink.
“Why the fuck did you hit her for?” Maher screamed as O’Neal climbed into the car.
“She was a Jew,” O’Neal sneered.
Maher punched O’Neal in the face. “You motherfucker!”
What the hell am I doing? Maher wondered. Mugging old ladies? Maher was disgusted with himself. And then, as he jammed his foot on the accelerator and sent the car speeding up Broadway, it occurred to him that there was one thing he was very good at: stealing cars.
After stealing and selling several cars, Maher was pulled over for speeding in a stolen 1974 Plymouth. The familiar scenario plated out” Whitestone Impound Lot. A search for a true VIN. And charged with grand theft auto. Maher had accumulated quite a stash and bailed himself out.
Jerry Israel, his parole officer, was not pleased. But Israel could do nothing because of a New York State law that did not allow him to file a parole violation upon an arrest, only after conviction.
Maher was caught a second time. And a third. Still there was nothing the parole board could do. But then Maher helped a few friends break into a speed shop and was charged with burglary, a much more serious crime. This time he couldn’t make bail- which was set at three thousand, fine hundred cash- and he was incarcerated at the Bronx House of Detention. Within three months of his release from Coxsackie, Maher was back behind bars.
After spending Christmas at the Bronx House of Detention, Maher was warehoused for a while at Sing Sing, then was shuttled to the Queens House of Detention to await a parole hearing, which was scheduled at Green Haven State Prison. The vicious circle had begun one winter night on the Bronx River Parkway was now complete. Kevin Maher had become a repeat offender, an incorrigible felon. Except for a month or two here and there, he would probably spend the rest of his life languishing away in one penal institution or another.
