The Brethren

"Twenty-three."

The letter writing was momentarily forgotten. They looked at his sad young face and tried to picture it fifty years later. Released at the age of seventy-one; it was impossible to imagine. Each of the Brethren would leave Trumble a younger man than this kid.

"Pull up a chair," Yarber said, and the kid grabbed the nearest one and placed it in front of their table. Even Spicer felt a little sympathy for him.

"What's your name?" Yarber asked.

"I go by Buster."

"Okay, Buster, what'd you do to get yourself fortyeight years?"

The story came in torrents. Balancing his box on his knees, and staring at the floor, he began by saying he'd never been in trouble with the law, nor had his father. They owned a small boat dock together in Pensacola. They fished and sailed and loved the sea, and ru

The U.S. Attorney offered them a deal-two years each in return for guilty pleas and cooperation against the other codefendants. Pleading guilty to what? They'd done nothing wrong. They knew exactly one of their twenty-six coconspirators. They'd never seen cocaine.

Buster's father remortgaged their home to raise $20,000 for a lawyer, and they made a bad selection. At trial, they were alarmed to find themselves sitting at the same table with the Colombians and the real drug traffickers. They were on one side of the courtroom, all the coconspirators, sitting together as if they'd once been a well-oiled drug machine. On the other side, near the jury, were the government lawyers, groups of pompous little bastards in dark suits, taking notes, glaring at them as if they were child molesters. The jury glared at them too.

During seven weeks of trial, Buster and his father were practically ignored. Three times their names werementioned. The government's principal charge against them was that they had conspired to procure and rebuild fishing boats with souped-up engines to transport drugs from Mexico to various drop-offs along the Florida panhandle. Their lawyer, who complained that he wasn't getting paid enough to handle a sevenweek trial, proved inefective at rebutting these loose charges. Still, the government lawyers did little damage and were much more concerned with nailing the Colombians.

But they didn't have to prove much.They had done a superior job of picking the jury. After eight days of deliberation, the jurors, obviously tired and frustrated, found every conspirator guilty of all charges. A month after they were sentenced, Buster's father killed himself.

As the narrative wound down, the kid looked as if he might cry. But he stuck out his jaw, gritted his teeth, and said, "I did nothing wrong."

He certainly wasn't the first inmate at Trumble to declare his i

A liberal is a conservative who's been arrested. After three years on the inside of a prison Hadee Beech agonized over many of the people he'd thrown the book at. People far guiltier than Buster here. Kids who just needed a break.

Fi

Joe Roy Spicer listened to Buster's compelling story, and he sized the boy up for future use. There were two possibilities. First, in Spicer's opinion, the telephones were not being properly utilized in the Angola scam. The Brethren were old men writing letters as if they were young. It would be too risky to call Quince Garbe in Iowa, for example, and pretend to be Ricky, a robust twenty-eight-year-old. But with a kid like Buster working for them, they could convince any potential victim. There were plenty of young guys at Trumble, and Spicer had considered several of them. But they were criminals, and he didn't trust them. Buster was fresh off the streets, seemingly i

The second possibility was an offshoot of the first. If Buster joined their conspiracy, he would be in place when Joe Roy was released. The scam was proving too profitable to simply walk away from. Beech andYarber were splendid at writing the letters, but they had no business sense. Perhaps Spicer could train young Buster here to fill his shoes, and to divert his share to the outside.

Just a thought.

"Do you have any money?" Spicer asked.

"No sir. We lost everything."

"No family, no uncles, aunts, cousins, friends who could help you with your legal fees?"

"No sir. What kinds legal fees?"

"We usually charge for reviewing cases and helping with the appeals."

"I'm dead broke, sir."

"I think we can help," Beech said. Spicer didn't work on the appeals anyway. The man never finished high school.

"Sort of a pro bono case, wouldn't you say?" Yarber said to Beech.

"A pro what?" Spicer asked.

"Pro bono,"

"What's that?"

"Free legal work," Beech said.

"Free legal work. Done by whom?"

"By lawyers," Yarber explained. "Every lawyer is expected to donate a few hours of his time to help people who can't afford to hire him."

"It's part of the Old English common law," Beech added, further clouding the issue.

"It never caught on over here, did it?" Spicer said.

"We'll review your case," Yarber said to Buster. "But please do not be optimistic."

"Thank you."

They left the cafeteria in a group, three ex judges in green choir robes followed by a scared young inmate.

Frightened, but also quite curious.