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TALES OF THE CITY

The slow death of Tony Natale
By John Bloom |

THEY PUT MY friend Tony in prison last month. His wife drove him to the gates on the appointed day, then tried to comfort him when he saw the wicked concertina wire and went dead inside. He called home two days later, scared, talking about his new “counselor.”

“We don’t care about rehabilitation here,” he told Tony. “You guys are being warehoused.”

Tony Natale. one of the gentlest men I’ve ever known, is innocent. I have no proof, no new evidence. I simply know it in the same way you know some people are liars even before you know exactly what they’re lying about. My certainty is of no help to Tony. Even before he went to prison I told him there was nothing I could do. He wasn’t the first person to approach me with a tale of injustice, believing that journalists can work miracles. You’ve probably never heard of his case: Tony’s crime is unexciting (“credit extortion”), his sentence very light (six months imprisonment, followed by four and a half years probation).

The circumstances of the case are extraordinarily confusing. Tony was a middleman in a deal to rebuild expensive foreign cars that had been wrecked. When the rebuilder took the money but failed to deliver the cars, Tony tried to get the money back for his client. His attempt was interpreted as a threat and resulted in an arrest by the FBI under a rarely used law that defines “extortion” broadly enough to include money that is actually owed. He was convicted on the basis of a government informant’s testimony; the informant had a $20,000 debt erased as a result. Tony’s case, in short, has no sex appeal. To the world and to most people who know him, Tony is just a businessman caught crossing over one of the gray areas between business cunning and outright illegality.



AT SEAGOVILLE. where he lives now in a cell with an illegal-alien smuggler, no one has much sympathy for Tony’s complaints of ill treatment. He’s lumped in with the cadre of airline pilots serving time there, the guys who once worked for Pan American, TWA, Continental and Braniff but who now share a table in the prison mess hall, where they occasionally reminisce about the drug runs that landed them there. Or the former sheriff of Johnson County, who seems trim and fit, never converses with the other prisoners and seems to have totally adapted to prison life, Or the former mayor of Atlantic City, a likeable guy everyone regards with both respect and curiosity. All of them are “special” prisoners at Seagoville, like Tony. Because of his age (at 61, he’s the fourth oldest prisoner) and his obvious intelligence (he was immediately put to work as a teacher in the prison high school), Tony is known to the other inmates as “The Professor.”

There’s only one difference in Tony’s case: Prison is killing him. I can see it around his eyes and in the lines on his face. When he greeted me in the prison visiting room-on Sunday afternoon it’s as crowded as a Greyhound bus station-he tried to play his accustomed role as a hearty, good-natured fat man, everybody’s favorite uncle.

“Welcome to the Psycho Ward,” he said, but there was no smile.

Ten minutes later he told me exactly how he had tried to kill himself.

The news didn’t shock me or seem out of place as we sat at a circular picnic table, staring at the smooching couples across the way. Most of them were “old ladies” visiting members of the Bandidos motorcycle gang. Tony already knew some of them by name.

“I don’t know if it was the right thing or not,” said Tony. He was talking about the suicide attempt. “They took away my belt for a while. I guess I’m the only prisoner with a 54-inch belt.”

This will be the first year in a long time that Tony won’t play Santa Claus at Brook-hollow Country Club.

“It could happen to anybody, John. Anybody walking down the street. They could be here and I could be there.”

What happened to Tony, I imagine, is that a chain of circumstantial evidence finally caught up to him:

Tony’s younger brother, a lawyer, lives in Philadelphia and has done legal work for the Mafia there. When Tony first found out about it, about 10 years ago, a huge family argument ensued, and the two men haven’t spoken since.

Tony is the world’s greatest conversa tionalist, gregarious, the consummate Italian go-between, and so for the past 15 years he has been a “consultant.” arranging business deals for clients as diverse as Middle Eastern potentates, West Texas oilmen, the Army Corps of Engineers and-the one that got him into trouble-the owner of Colortyme TV Rental in Houston. Though Dallas is full of consultants, Tony’s profession is sc nebulous, involving frequent travel around the world and constant contact with businessmen who are less than straight, that he is suspicious by association,

3. There’s a mob hit man in New Jersey named Ralph Natale. At one point during his prosecution. Tony was asked to sign a statement affirming that he worked directly for “Big Ralph.” Tony had never worked for Ralph Natale, no relation, and thought this was funny at the time. Now he wishes he’d taken it more seriously, especially after he learned that the federal “credit extortion” law is also called the “guinea law.” because almost all of its victims have been Italian-Americans suspected of belonging to the mob.

“The first day I got to prison,” Tony said, “these wops started coming around me. They even talk like they’re in The Godfather. ’Hey, we heard you were comin’.’ I tell ’em to get away from me, but they think I’m one of them. Marcello’s son. the guy from New Orleans, he’s in here. I can’t believe this.”



TONY PULLED HIS frayed jacket tighter across his shoulders. His mind drifted to other things. I told him he should be happy he has the chance to help some of the other prisoners. He started laughing, for the first time, and told me how he got the teaching job. It pays 13 cents an hour. “So the mentality of this place is, everybody wants the high-paying jobs. They want the hard-labor construction jobs because they pay 30 cents an hour. Can you believe that?”

I told him the inside sounds a lot like the outside. I told him there was no way to prove he was innocent. There were other people in the same position, other people who had a lot more than six months facing them.

“I know,” he said. “I’m resigned to being here for six months. But there’s a part of me that wants to change this. That’s how ridiculous I am. There’s a part of me that wants to write a letter to the president.”

I remembered the time when Tony was one of the most trusted friends of the Arab Bank of Paris, a position he used to help Catholic Archbishop Hilarion Capoucci, a prisoner of conscience, in his efforts to return to the Middle East and continue his work there. Surely. I suggested, Tony had found friends in prison. Tony’s great talent is being able to talk to anyone and strike up an instant rapport.

“I don’t do that so much anymore,” he said. “I don’t trust anybody. I did meet this doctor. He was in here for starting a mailorder university that gave out 37,000 medical degrees. He was a great guy. Very affable. But I don’t trust anybody now.”

The cold wind ruffled Tony’s curly white hair. He fidgeted nervously as a guard walked in our direction. He didn’t relax again until the guard had passed us and was well out of sight.

“This is something I can never change.”

I remembered the time Tony did environmental consulting work for the state of Kentucky. Governor Louis Nunn remembered it. too. When Tony appeared for sentencing last year. Governor Nunn was the only illustrious ex-associate to come forward as a character witness. All the others, including several corporation presidents in Dallas, had said it was too risky. He was, after all, a convicted felon.

I asked him about the food.

“Not as bad as I thought.” He told a hilarious story about the prisoners” successful petition for doughnuts.

I remembered the epic battles Tony and his friends had with Ned Fritz, the environmentalist. Tony was one of the biggest supporters of the Trinity River channelization project, because he thought it would be great for Dallas. It had been so many years since Tony had come to Dallas. He always said he came here to “escape crime and crooks.”

“I was always a good citizen, a good American. I hate bad guys as much as the government does.”

I had heard this speech before, so I changed the subject.

“I know I have to quit dwelling on the past.”

I warned him about bitterness.

“I’m not bitter.”

The afternoon was growing colder, and the sunlight was dim and musty, full of dust particles, funereal. Tony asked me if 1 was uncomfortable.

“We could move over by the wall to get out of the wind.” he said, “but I think it’s some kind of government regulation that we can’t go on the grass. We’ve got a Captain Queeg mentality here. Most days we have guys out here waxing the bricks. The toilets are dirty, but we’ve got waxed bricks.”

I suggested he do some writing while he’s in prison.

“It’s not allowed,” he said. “Writing paper is contraband.”

Tony told another funny story, about how his roommate desperately fears that the parole board will let him go and he’ll be forced to return to Guadalajara. He loves the cement floor, the flush toilet and the three meals a day, all benefits he lacks in his hometown.

“They say I don’t belong here,” said Tony.

Who does? I could see the regret and the bitterness rising again.

“The psychiatrists, the counselors. They say I belong in a halfway house or something.”

I told him he belongs wherever they put him. It’s their choice once he’s convicted.

“It could happen to anybody, John. It could happen to anybody.”



VISITING HOURS were over. The guard started checking the prisoners back into the quadrangle, strip-searching them as they passed through the doorway. “The Professor” waited patiently, wondering whether they would check his shoe for radio transmitters as they had the other times.

“What do you think this is, ’Get Smart’?” Tony would say to them. He enjoyed that line.

When you go to a prison, you remember to talk about everything except the things that matter. For two hours I’d told him everything it was impossible to do for him and everything it was impossible for him to do for himself. I promised to send him a book called Gideon’s Trumpet, about a prisoner whose case was even more hopeless than Tony’s but who appealed to the Supreme Court from his jail cell-and suddenly I regretted suggesting it, seeing the sudden hope on Tony’s face and fearing that perhaps it was just setting him up for one more disappointment.

Now, as Tony disappeared into the gray distance, it was already too late to tell him how much I loved him. It would have embar rassed us both. It would have been too real. It would have been too solemn and personal a thing at a prison on a Sunday afternoon when we both know that nobody cares except us.

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