Free Slob by Rex Miller Page B

the rule. A rogue elephant. A once-in-a-lifetime deviation that was bungled or exposed and never tried again. The fact you have learned of his existence proves how inept we are at such things. No. Outside of show business and literary invention or perhaps some ancient leftover of whatever the goombahs are calling Cosa Nostra these days, he is an invention. A fictional device. And that is the official line. What else.
    The real killers are seldom portrayed in popular fiction. They are seldom pretty enough for consumption. The word assassin, literally, means one who does murder under the influence of hashish, and today it evokes the pop-culture portrait of a black-suited ninja dropping down out of the trees to kick the bad guys into little pieces. Real killing is seldom so neat as one sees it on the screen. There is lots of blood and gore and horror. And "wet work," the profession of slaughtering, takes its toll on the killer as well as the victim.
    The real irony is that our spymasters and those who control our intelligence monolith wish that they had a vast agency of highly efficient superkillers to draw from. How operationally marvelous it would be for all of them if they could only reach out and draw upon the wealth of diversity, the richness that our pop fiction would have you believe exists. We do have killers, of course, and have had for a long time. But their track record is far from great.
    Unlike KGB or the Israelis we have not maintained a special section of security personnel whose sole function is to kill. We have had to build a small pool of talent outside the security umbrella, in the elite branches of the military, in certain areas of law enforcement, and even marginally in the private sector for "termination with extreme prejudice."
    In 1960, with sensitivities raw, the national security heads decided to create a small and highly clandestine unit that could be used for assassinations. At the time our intelligence services taught the deadly arts but only as an adjunct to tradecraft. We had no counterpart to SMERSH's Active Measures Department that operated covertly as a unit trained to do sanctioned murder by governmental decree.
    It proved as difficult for our controllers to find contact killers as it had for outraged wives wanting someone to cowboy their cheating spouses. So our security people turned to what is laughingly called organized crime, on one hand, and the military on the other. One of those military experiments was MACVSAUCOG, a hot mouthful of alphabet soup cooked up by an action arm of the National Security Council. Mack-Vee-Saw-Cog, as it was pronounced, was the first of the so-called secret sanction groups, and because of its special status of a "paramilitary" unit the most clandestine.
    MACVSAUCOG was classified out there in the vortical swirl of smoke beyond the ULTRA TOP SECRET YOUR EYES ONLY classification. The main course was counterinsurgency warfare. The first thing it served up to its proud masters was a nasty little piece of business called the spike team. The spike team was designed for one purpose. To assassinate covertly. And it was built around one man, a four-hundred-plus pounder who was then waiting to hear on an appeal, doing Death Row time in a federal prison in Illinois. He was a "discovery" of unusual proportions in every sense.
    Marion Federal Penitentiary has a number of nicknames, one of the more accurate being The House of Pain. It is the only correctional institution in the Federal lash-up with a level-six rating. A con inside Marion is serving an average sentence of forty-and-a-quarter years. Slammed down tight under a twenty-two-and-a-half-hour-a-day lockdown, behind a fortress of eight guard towers and chainlink and sharp razor wire, are some of the toughest, most feared, wild-eyed killer cons in the federal system. In 1961, over there with the 340-some animals in Max, was a creature named Daniel Bunkowski.
    At the time of his incarceration Daniel Edward Flowers