Latte Trouble - By Cleo Coyle Page 0,55
later, a black late-model Lincoln town car with bright white Taxi and Limousine Commission plates pulled up to the sidewalk. A diminutive middle-aged man with cocoa-brown skin and a thick iron-gray moustache stepped out and opened the door for us.
“Bonjour, Mr. Raj,” said Madame sweetly.
“Bonjour, Madame,” he replied to my French-born ex-mother-in-law. Smiling behind his moustache, he wore a well-tailored suit and a deep blue turban.
The ride out of Manhattan was fairly uneventful. We headed uptown and through the Queens Midtown Tunnel, then onto the Grand Central Parkway. As we approached LaGuardia Airport, however, the driver swerved onto a rarely used ramp marked Nineteenth Avenue. The ramp led to a narrow two-lane bridge, the only route to Rikers Island without a boat.
The bridge, largely unknown to most New Yorkers, stretched more than a mile across the East River. As we drove across the fast-moving water, a deafening roar sounded around us and the silver wings and fuselage of a United Airlines plane appeared over our heads. It rapidly descended, flying so low its roaring engines rattled our car windows and I could almost make out passengers in their upright and locked positions. For a moment, my heart stopped—I was certain I was witnessing a passenger airplane crash. Then I noticed the pier on our right displaying a huge sign directing pilots to LaGuardia’s runway 13-31. Seconds later, the jet smoothly touched down.
I sighed and sat back. Outside the car’s tinted windows, the sunlight played on the rippling waters of the East River. The route over the bridge was a lonely one, patrolled by officers in cars and on foot. Along the way, posted signs warned passengers that firearms, cameras, and photographic devices, tape recorders, beepers and cell phones, and a host of other items were not permitted inside the prison and would be confiscated; that proper identification would be required; and that all visitors were subject to a physical search before entering the sprawling island compound.
During the drive from Manhattan to Queens, I read to Madame from some papers the lawyer had provided, learning the information myself as I read. Apparently the island was named after the Rikers family, who’d sold the giant piece of rock rising from the East River to New York City in the 1880s. The city initially used the land as a dump. Over the next forty-plus years, the size of the land mass quadrupled, a result of the thousands of tons of refuse deposited there. By 1935, the dump was closed and the garbage barges halted as the first jail opened. The Rikers Island Correctional Facility is now one of the largest prisons in the world, comprised of ten jails spread across an area half the size of Central Park. There are nine jails for men and one for women, and the entire place has a daytime population of close to twenty-thousand people including prisoners, employees, and visitors.
Two-thirds of the inmates were in the same boat as Tucker—detainees who were legally innocent and waiting for their cases to crawl through the criminal justice system, stuck there because they could not produce bail, or bail was denied them by a judge because of various circumstances. The other third of the inmates on Rikers had been convicted and sentenced already and were waiting for an empty bed in an upstate prison. A smattering—all with sentences under twelve months—actually served out their entire incarceration on the island.
With its own schools, clinics, chapels, grocery stores, barbershops, a bakery, a bus depot, even a ball park and running track, Rikers essentially has become a small town.
After driving through the security gates, we were stopped by a pair of armed guards who recorded our names and asked us the nature of our business. I showed them the official letter from the Deputy Commissioner of Corrections, and we were directed to the Control Building. On the way, the town car nosed its way through a quiet and seemingly deserted two-lane street that was lined by ultra-modern modular buildings erected between aging jails of brick and mortar built half a century ago. Everywhere I looked, fences loomed, twelve-foot-high steel mesh walls tipped by razor-wire.
At the Control Building we were compelled to pass through metal detectors, then I slid the official pass from the Deputy Commissioner of Corrections under a thick, bulletproof Plexiglas window to a bored-looking desk sergeant. He checked our identification—my New York State driver’s license, Madame’s United States passport—and we were handed off to two female prison guards. They took us