Crash Course: A Reporter's Journey into Prison

Table of Contents

Title

Copyright

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Closure

About the Author

Crash Course

A Reporter's Journey into Prison

Pippin Ross

Copyright © 2023 Pippin Ross

All rights reserved

First Edition

Fulton Books

Meadville, PA

Published by Fulton Books 2023

ISBN 979-8-88982-270-7 (paperback)

ISBN 979-8-88982-271-4 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Chapter 1

When you're playing as well as I was at the time, you think you can play with anything. That isn't true, of course, but I didn't know it then.

—Golfer Payne Stewart

Ross! Get over here! Standing halfway across the room was a nice-looking guy dressed in civilian casuals, smiling broadly. C'mon—he gestures—we're going to get real on some of your shit.

In prison, people like Counselor Jeff held celebrity status. We all jumped to our feet and maneuvered for access whenever the thirty-something blue-eyed cherub showed up. The fact that he'd done time on the inside and remained sober on the outside fueled his unbearable cuteness among us who didn't know if we could pull off being back out.

Your secrets are safe. He grinned conspiratorially. He knew what only an ex-con did. I was entrenched in a battle of who could out-bullshit whom, a lesson that cops and lawyers and judges taught us.

He then paused theatrically. Thing is, they're not safe with you.

We sat together in a miniscule glass room to ensure everyone could watch me…cry? Throw myself onto the ground? Bang my head against the cement wall? All three seemed like a good idea.

I was playing Scrabble analyzing the amazing career I just demolished.

Berkshire County

Jeff was the counselor required at the Berkshire County House of Correction, a term established in the 1950s to upgrade the words jail, slammer, pen, clink, brig, the terms society used to define the place where bad guys were put to make streets safer. Correction implied rehabilitation like being sent to your room as a kid or put in detention at school. Here it was women sent by court who had nonviolently broken laws like petty theft, child neglect, drug possession, or sale of an ounce of pot or a few grams of coke to an undercover cop putting on the act of a nice, safe and sound, reliable client to provide some rent and food money for her two kids. It was a place where no one guilty of white-collar fraud embezzlement existed because a high-price lawyer was connected enough to cut a deal in a judge's chamber, a common strategy to ensure the judge won't see the head-shaking, tear-spilling people in the courtroom who had been ripped off and lied to. I was there being held as to whether a third drunk-driving arrest and driving on a suspended license were valid enough for punishment.

Ross! Skip the hoo-ha. You know what you remind me of?

What? I asked in the tired, sad tone humiliated people like me use out of total humiliation. It's a close word to humble, but I was not there yet.

"I know you're old enough to recall a Three Stooges episode in which Moe and Larry are crashing a party with ‘Press' stickers on their lapels. Curly blows it. On his lapel is the sticker he pulled off the public toilet flush chain. It says ‘Pull.' Don't Curly me. You didn't get here because of your great and intriguing life—you got here because you fucked up big-time!"

I'd been dodging this one for months: offering up the details on how, when, and perhaps why I completely fell apart and became a fall-down, piss-my-pants, pain-in-the-ass, public-safety-threatening, world-class drunk. I didn't want to go there. It was like self-induced water torture from the weight of all its humiliating baggage. Sometimes I imagined myself as an alcoholic version of Dumbo's mother, sad and shackled, dreaming my son can fly away from all the mess and hurt I created.

Jeff did what any good therapist knew how to do: He invented a way for me to dig up my dirt long-distance.

All right, tell me the story like a reporter would—all facts, no lies.

I stared across the table at this man whose sole job was to listen and offer a judgment-free response.

It wouldn't be pretty, but I began.

*****

Shortly after takeoff, a chartered Learjet-carrying golf superstar Payne Stewart, three of his pals, and two pilots lost oxygen and flew on autopilot for a few pointless hours with six corpses aboard until it finally ran out of fuel and corkscrewed into a North Dakota cornfield. It was page 3 news, but ten years later, the memory remained imprinted in my heart in graphic, 3D sensory detail.

I know it's not happy golf talk, I asked Harry Hurt III, my editor at Travel and Leisure Golf, but are you guys covering this?

Why would we do a story about that? he asked, editor double-speak for Tell me what's sexy enough about the idea so the sales staff can use it as a pitch to convince advertisers they definitely want to advertise in this hot, juicy issue.

Because a lot of people in your readership are rich enough to have private planes and jets. They'll want to know if they ought to worry about crashing like Payne and his buddies did.

It was a ballsy topic for a golfing magazine, but as I pointed out, of 2,049 airplane crashes the year before Payne's flight to heaven, only fifty-two of those crashes involved commercial airplanes. Amateur golfers were one of the non-commercial airline's most lucrative markets. Seeing as no one blamed the aircraft for John F. Kennedy Jr.'s crash, I thought the time had come for people to stop ignoring the reasonable and rational fear that there might be something wrong with airplanes. Unlike a car, there aren't a lot of diverse outcomes to a plane crash. You go down, end of story.

So off I went on a wing and a laughable per diem, imagining my plane cobbled together with disintegrating parts to sunny, Disney-whacked Orlando. My mission was to figure out what made Payne Stewart fall like some oxygen-starved Icarus. I was suddenly very jazzed. This was real journalism again, not some fluff piece about captains of industry hitting a silly orb at some distant tin cup. I was on the trail of the dirt like some hard-boiled cop in a Robert Parker novel.

I spent a day hanging out at SunJet Aviation, the company from which Stewart had rented his fatally flawed Lear Jet. The company was owned by a father-and-son team who'd parlayed their house of investments by exploiting two of life's necessities: charter airplanes and women taking off their clothes in public. I encountered a very media-savvy PR team wise enough to take me for a ride in a Lear 35, the very same make and model that snuffed Stewart and his golf advisers. They wanted to show me they operated only plush eight-seat jets that could safely circumnavigate the globe as long as the fuel and Moet Chardon held out.

It didn't take much digging to unearth the slime. Unscrupulous operators, who profited by flying planes way past their shelf life by skipping routine but very expensive maintenance, were routinely fudging the paperwork that the FAA was too busy or bored to notice. Case in point? Airplanes usually have oxygen masks drop from the overhead when there's a problem. On Payne's fatal Learjet, so pulverized that the only signs of Stewart were his wedding band and his demolished golf bag, the oxygen masks were still stowed neatly in a back of airplane cubby. They kept dropping down inexplicably on other flights so the drop-down feature had been disabled, the final fix delayed until…eternity.

Then I found the real smoking gun or at least the lingering smoke. It was hard evidence of a lucrative black market in bogus airplane parts.

I met Harry Schaffer, the one and only guy working at the FAA whose job was to sniff out the airplane part counterfeiters. Think of it like taking cartel-level drug dealing into the aeronautical industry, he explained, shaking his head in frustration. It's the equivalent of figuring out a way to sell cocaine to Merck—legally. Guys are collecting junked parts out of old airplanes, jazzing them up enough to make them work again and look new, faking the FAA documents they need to have, and selling them. That's big criminal money-making that's almost impossible to stop.

I played dumb, which wasn't hard when the talk turned techno. Say, I hypothesized to Schaeffer, I go to the airplane junkyard—I abscond with a steering system. I polish it up because I happen to work in maintenance at Delta, or I have a buddy I've cut in on the lowdown who does. I scan and finagle the paperwork and sell it for three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Feasible?

Schaeffer nodded with a No shit, Sherlock expression. All I could think of was the guy who built a fake septic system for the first house my ex-husband and I ever bought. When we figured out he'd scammed the building inspector paperwork to get away with it, the seven-year statute on legal retaliation had passed. A seeping septic system was far from a potential paid-for-hire mass murderer fudging airplane parts, but it was the same official paper chase.

Schaeffer was incredulous. I can't believe no one is doing anything about this. I can't believe I'm supposed to sit in Washington, DC, and figure out how to stop it from happening all by myself!

In ways that we reporters often hide with fake neutrality, I wanted to help—bad. I turned in a piece that opened in the father-son strip club then segued to the bogus airplane parts. My golfing editors were leery. Too inflammatory. A potential lawsuit. Horribly written. Golf magazines don't go into the high grass to chase a story. Another writer was summoned to create a factually nonlibelous piece based on the statistics I'd collected. It ran with my byline and the flat title Are Jet Charters Safe?

My ego deflated, I took the story to whom I qualified as real newspeople, not a bunch of elitist club swingers. NPR was interested, so it was off to Miami, the place where the state's attorney general, Mark Thomas, explained, Every crime is invented, acted upon, and rarely caught in the act. I found Luis Verigara, the detective of my dreams, an amiable subject who loved to talk.

C'mon, Ross, I'm going to show you how pathetically easy this is… In separate cars, Luis and I drove to the Opa Locka Airport's dump yard. You could cut the humidity and the sight of dozens of all kinds of dead planes with a knife.

This is where the clunkers get dumped. He pointed across a heat-shimmering tarmac parking lot the size of a football field surrounded by a rusted chain-link fence. I gawked at the desolate magnificence like a gigantic yard sale of modern flight. There were a couple of enormous DC10s, their wings severed like wounded birds, several rumpled designer jets, and a lot of small prop-driven commuter planes. On each airframe, judging by the dark maws where turbines and engines once noisily shrieked, critical components for flight were obviously missing; the body snatchers had been very busy.

This is where the aero-pigs exhume and ravage their booty, I observed, so why don't you do a lookout and bust them?

He shrugged. Thing is, he said with obvious frustration, because most of them are sanctioned to come in here with some kind of industry-related paperwork.

We walked across the asphalt yard, and Luis demoed how easy it was for us to board one of the planes.

These guys dress as though they work as airline mechanics or insurance adjusters and climb aboard to steal like nobody's home.

I glanced around. But it looks as though nobody is home…

He smiled. That would be part of the problem.

After an hour of capturing the full audio of Luis's description of how it all went down, we walked back to our cars. He seemed genuinely agitated.

You're leaving now, right? he asked protectively. When I didn't reply, he said, Let me try this another way. Let me spell it out for you, Ross: You are leaving—now! This is not the place for a woman to be hanging around—alone. That's why you're leaving now, right?

This is how it happened.

Since I was born with a damaged fight-or-flight instinct, I completely ignored his advice, lied, and told him I was leaving, even went through the motions of unlocking my rental car door and keying the ignition. We said goodbye. He left. I would give anything to replay that moment with a new script that had the part where I laughed and said, Of course. Lead the way. Show me how to get back to the highway.

With his unmarked cruiser out of my rearview, I emerged from my rental car and headed back into the aero junkyard. There was something out there, something more this risk-disordered reporter needed to know. In about two minutes, I heard the most dangerous sound a woman could hear in a place she's been warned not to go: Hey, you looking for something?

The voice sounded sonorous, suave, and—what my jammed personal safety radar didn't ever catch—terrifying…but intriguing. I turned. Two men were dressed in the open-collar, short-sleeved, hip-length, smooth polyesters so popular in Miami and alien to my New England dress code. Of course, edge walker that I am, they looked perfectly safe.

Hi. I'm Pippin Ross. I reached out my hand. We shook. They introduced themselves, but their names, unlike the events that followed, has been deleted from my PTSD's selective hard drive. I remembered exactly what they look like in the event I was ever pulled in for the lineup.

Is there anything interesting here? I asked, trying to sound hopeful and nonthreatening. I've never before been to an airplane junkyard. I was hoping to appeal to their chauvinistic instincts, the old damsel in distress routine. It opened a lot of doors for a lady reporter. One of them could be Detective Luis's kid brother, a twenty-first-century Mayan warrior with high cheekbones, cocoa butter skin, and broad shoulders.

We understand from our friends in the detective unit that you're a reporter onto a very, very interesting story, he purred, raising his eyebrows.

I raised mine back as if it was the password to a top-secret club. Why couldn't I hear the klaxon bleat of the danger siren whooping, smell the smoke of a three-alarm fire just erupting in my brain?

Do you know about it? I asked.

Plane parts? Sure. He grinned, exposing rows of perfect molars that glowed like neon behind his mocha cheeks. C'mon, I'll show you.

The Mayan chief grinned and marched away with an air of excitement that titillated me.

This is good. I'm on to something. I'm glad I stayed. Luis! What a worrywart. I loped behind them into a beat metal garage. Inside were two more men and a bunch of airplane parts lying about. I scanned the room for story details: a maroon sedan, a couple of scarred tables and benches, a few trash barrels. I scanned for voiceover details. I looked to the roof to listen for ambience, the aural atmospherics of the scene the BBC taught us public radio people to plug into every radio story to take our listeners beyond the script. It took me years to remember to record the sound of the room, the street, the river, the crowd, the restaurant, the airplane junkyard until one of my many great bosses said, Turn on your recorder, and go smoke a cigarette.

Pippin Ross, the reporter, announced the Detective Luis lookalike. I cheerfully shook the other men's hands and quickly noted their cold stares. They eyed me suspiciously, but I figured…I figured…what? They must get this a lot. They too want justice brought to this terrible crime, I rationalized. But they're just nervous around reporters. Right?

Whoop, whoop, whoop…

I began my banter, gauging their receptivity. Something was…off.

Suddenly, the faux Luis interrupted, Put your things down and come here. Any reporter knows something's up when you're asked to put your things down. Our things were our notes, tape recorders, cameras, the tool bag for scribbles and sound bites. In an asinine gesture of good faith, I put my tape recorder, mike, and notepad down and strolled over to where he was standing beside the car. Suddenly, out of nowhere, with the force of a linebacker, one of the men slammed me from behind with full body force onto the hood of the car.

Here's what we've got for you, Ross. He knocked the wind out of me, so all I could do was gurgle senselessly as he continued, We're going to tell you everything you need to know. We're going to drive the point home in a way that will make it so you never forget to stay far, far away from this story. Hmm…nice ass…

Invisible hands gripped each ankle, each wrist. Another hand pressed down on my back—hard. I was wrenched open, splay-legged as a roped calf. With a practiced quickness that amazed me even in the sudden wind of shock, I felt knots around my wrists and ankles etch into my skin. I was going to die, I knew that, but the preservation instinct was always the last to go.

What are you guys doing? You don't have to do this. I don't have to do this story. Please don't do this to me. I entered my place of fear—no panic, no screaming, no struggle, simply swept along by a tsunami of irreconcilable sadness. It was as though I was at my son's funeral. I was still alive but ready for death. My body imitated rigor mortis. My skirt got shoved up, my underwear ripped down. I was about to be raped by four violently maniacal and clearly pissed-off gangsters.

I felt a hot breath on my neck smelling vaguely of aftershave, sweat, and garlic. Like this, Ross? Is this what you're really looking for? Like this? Huh…huh? Someone pressed a gun against the side of my head—right side, left side, I can't recall. I felt as though I was undergoing rectal surgery without anesthesia, a slicing burn of something being shoved hard up inside me then yanked back out with a serrated edge then shoved back in farther and deeper.

You better like this, Ross! the faux Detective Luis yelled. Because it's only going to get worse. You do this story on our business with our names in it and we will have to kill someone. Umph! He made another thrust and called out, Anyone else want a shot at this nice ass? I could feel his weapon withdrawing.

Oh yeah, another man said greedily, and then he began.

Oh God, please stop! I cried out.

"You love your son, don't you?"

My tears slowed, replaced by white rage. I began to twist and writhe. Incredibly, a defiant scream echoed off the walls of that cavernous hell. Leave my son out of this! I'll fucking kill you! I'll destroy everything you've got! I was now screaming so loud it almost made them pause.

Almost.

You…umph…got…umph…it…umph…backwards…umph…Ross! We'll destroy your Nick. Nice boy who lives in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. You'll lose him if you mention anything about what it is you think you're on to. Got…umph…that? Thrust. Huh? Thrust. Huh?

Et cetera, et cetera.

I died. I died the way I imagine death truly comes: complete surrender, quietly accepting that all of what I knew, loved, and enjoyed was gone. I was floating above all this carnage done to this crazy, impetuous woman that used to be me.

Hours, it seems, passed. In an act of pure survival, I hid in my emotional closet away from those monsters free as a weather balloon. In my numbing shock, I passively watched from a safe altitude how they performed and laughed over their hideous, deplorable violence. As the injured, I watched in silent devastation as they high-fived their sordid victory, strutting out of the deserted airplane hangar. The goodbye I heard was Fuck you, ya sleazy cunt! Do your story? Then for sure, you die!

I crashed from the distance, unconsciousness provided with Fuck you, bitch! in my ears.

To fuck reality was what I wanted. To kill myself would only fuel their maggot-crawling morals. I was determined to navigate myself to function for revenge, tied, splayed with a warm ooze trickle from my genitals, a substance I couldn't bear to investigate. Torn and bleeding, my insides hurting were darkly indelible pain that emotionally remained.

With ferocity, I wriggled again and again until one ankle came untied—finally a hand then another. I rolled over and sat up, a badly beaten survivor with no future.

I got up. My gear was strewn like the children of hell had staged a manic playtime then moved on. My tape recorder was crushed. The recording discs were snapped and bent. I bent to retrieve a note on which someone had scrawled, Nick Williamson. Chandler Ave. Longmeadow, Mass., my son's name and address.

How do they know this? Why don't they just kill me? A deeper reporter/cop/lawyer question appears because we think in relentless, trashy styles. Won't they get in trouble for this? What are they saying and telling? Are they that stupid and miserable to leave me here with the chance of survival? My son is twelve years old. He's not at all an idiot. If I tell, he'll be there. How do they know I've no self-defense like cops, lawyers, gangs who will kill for money? How do they know I can't and won't expose their racket and protect whoever will be next? They were very bad men compelled to hurt the woman, who was, in any way, shape, or form, their mom. Good men like Nick loved us no matter what because they learned while life has rough and tough events, it's also a fun, interesting adventure.

Another woman would have run for help. Another woman would have called the police or her husband or even flagged down a stranger. I still can't believe or recall why I didn't. But like the first time I