Chapter 7
Prisons as Purgatory
LIKE TO KNOW HOW to commit a murder? This is how:
You are both alone in his cell. You've slipped out a knife (eighteen-inch blade, double edged). You're holding it beside your leg so he can't see it. The enemy is smiling and chattering away about something. He thinks you're his fool he trusts you. You see the spot. It's a target between the third button in his shirt. As you calmly talk and smile, you move your left foot to the side to step across his right-side body length. A light pivot toward him with your right shoulder and the world turns upside down you have sunk the knife to its hilt into the middle of his chest.
With this now celebrated passage from his book In the Belly of the Beast, convict John Henry Abbott became a literary sensation. He was interviewed on Good Morning America, and was proclaimed by a New York Times reviewer as "awesome, brilliant..." Norman Mailer wrote a long and laudatory article for the New York Review of Books and campaigned to have Abbott's early release.
Abbott was released in June, 1981.
In July, 1981 he allegedly murdered 22 year old Richard Adan because Adan, a bartender, would not let him use the staff restroom of the Bini-Bon restaurant. Mailer, his agent Scott Meredith, and various New York editors were quoted in Time Magazine assaying, "How tragic."
"We pretended he had always been a writer," famed author Jerzy Kosinski said. In other words, Abbott had always been a criminal.
The morality scam pulled off by Abbott is common in prison literature. In fact it is almost a literary genre, having taken in people of quite different persuasions. In the 1960's, for example, William F. Buckley helped set free Edgar Smith who attempted murder once released.
The perverted logic of the morality scam goes something like this...
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