Free Born to Lose by James G. Hollock Page B

background, but Stanley Hoss could boast no such credentials. Still, he swore to himself, no matter what, no matter how, he damn well was not going to rot away in some lousy prison.

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    â€œI knew Hoss very well,” Warden William Robinson reflected.
    I spent some thirty years in the prison system, so you get to know these guys. Some I got when they were eighteen and, with them in and out and back, still had them when I retired … Life on the installment plan. I first met Hoss at the county workhouse where he was doing a short stint. Hoss was a strong person, exceptionally strong, and a fairly good-looking man.
    In that strange way sometimes found between enemies, Hoss appreciated me and I understood him. Odd, but in all my dealings with Hoss, I found him to be normal, even affable, but that’s when he chose to be. Yet in the summer of ’69, future tidings unknown, Hoss was just one more prisoner in my jail, which was already filled to the brim.
    Robinson did indeed have a lot on his plate in 1969. Over the preceding couple of years there’d been much turmoil at the jail. The well-publicized beating of inmate “Georgia” Buoy was a public relations nightmare. After speaking only with inmates, handsome, fair-haired DA Robert Duggan “confirmed” that beatings had been administered for some time, particularly at night. His premature statement pitted his office against the jail’s administration and officer corps. A headline shouted, “Jail Terrorism Probe Entered by State Bureau.” Not long after that, Grant Price—who’d become warden in the days of Bonnie and Clyde, Machine Gun Kelley, and Dillinger—abruptly quit. In a bittersweet parting, Price said, “The duties are becoming greater, more complex … perhaps a younger man can cope better.” Suffering regular salvos from the media, it got worse for the jail when twenty-seven-year-old Richard Mayberry and three sidekicks, armed with zip guns, forced an officer to unlock a door to the outside. For this fiasco, more media potshots were fired at the Ross Street lockup, now dubbed “the schlockup.” After several investigations, the jail’s staff was cleared of wrongdoing in the “Georgia” Buoy incident. Although some critics screamed “Whitewash,” most people accepted the conclusions of theinvestigating committee, for, as one man in the street concluded in an interview, “You can’t have those convicts spittin’ in your eye, can you?”
    Over the fourteen months following Warden Price’s departure, a couple interim wardens ran the place until a permanent replacement—energetic, thirty-seven-year-old William Robinson—came on board. Called Robby by most everyone, Robinson didn’t fit ordinary perceptions of a warden. The powers that be brought him to the county jail from the Allegheny County Workhouse, where he’d come up through the ranks to eventually become deputy warden. The county jail, with all its problems, needed a strong, experienced hand, and this, in Robby, is what it got. Young by traditional standards to assume command of such a ticklish post, Robinson was savvy, politically astute, and, most importantly, knew a con when he saw one, literally and figuratively.
    However, by the time Robinson officially took up residence (for in those days the warden and his family lived in quarters on the second floor), the jail presented even more problems than usual. While day-to-day grousing by inmates—and often staff—was standard, it still had to be addressed if valid. The jail itself, though beautiful on the outside, often proved to be a maintenance nightmare for those within. This was partly because of its age—it was built in 1886—but its physical deterioration had been aggravated by an explosion in its population over the preceding couple of years to a total of several hundred over capacity. Crowding and insufficient