Dateline: May 31, 2009
WRITING WHILE TIPTOEING THROUGH A MINEFIELD
Don’t think that because I haven’t made any recent posts I haven’t been busy. Conditions in prison continue to deteriorate, making life very difficult for everyone. Despite the stress-filled, tense days, I try to spend three mornings a week in the prison law library, finishing work on a petition for a new parole hearing. Since the Governor and Cabinet are running for new offices in 2010, I am fairly well forced to prepare an application for executive clemency, seeking a September, 2010, hearing before Charlie Crist, Alex Sink, Charles Bronson, and Bill McCollum leave. We were “this close” to Gov. Lawton Chiles signing my clemency in December, 1998, before Jeb Bush took office, but Chiles’ sudden death nixed that. Good thing I’m not a conspiracy theorists.
I’ve also been busy writing short stories, memoirs, poems and essays these past months, for various submissions. Bell Chevigny in NYC, who edited Doing Time, the 1998 anthology of the best prison writing of the past twenty-five years (which included my essay, “Pearl Got Stabbed”), recently notified me that “Fighting The Ninja,” my memoir about AIDS in prison, will be included in a new publication, The Journal of Prisoners on Prisons.
I’m not sure if the harsh conditions fuel or hinder literary creativity. There is a school of thought that adversity provides a fertile ground for expression. Either way, I am compelled to write, so I do. I just wish I could test the hypothesis in freedom and see how the creativity flows then.
Charlie
Sunday, May 31, 2009
Saturday, May 9, 2009
WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE? (AND THE TREES?)
Dateline: May 5, 2009
WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE? (AND THE TREES?)
A year ago I had twenty-six flower gardens, ranging in size from small three foot by twelve plots to thirty foot diameter circles, and numerous other beds from one hundred to nine hundred square feet, all blooming inside the fences here at Tomoka C.I. in Daytona Beach. Thousands of flowers, from pansies and petunias and snapdragons, to calendulas, marigolds, zinnias, and sunflowers, and many more, bloomed everywhere. More than forty prisoners helped tend them.
Today there are virtually none. The only ones left are some surviving gaillardias that refuse to die, that keep poking their heads up and blooming in the now grassy beds until the lawnmower crews run over them and chop them down with their “Flintstones,” what they call the push mowers they’re allowed to use. One brick planter has eight gloriosa daisies plants still struggling to survive in the dry sand, and another planter has a lone Echinacea—coneflower—barely holding on. A few French marigolds have somehow sef-seeded and bloomed, but all these plants are endangered.
In the fenced-in area by the “psychology” trailer, an eccentric psychologist who was permitted to plant several rosebushes by previous administrations over the years jealously guards his babies, and some remnants of my plants still hold on in that restricted area, but even that situation is subject to change at any time.
How did this happen? How did such an abundance of natural beauty lovingly tended by a large platoon of dedicated prisoners selflessly working in the hot Florida sun all day suddenly disappear from view, leaving behind dry, dusty deserts of hot sand interspersed with weeds, looking like a vacant lot? It’s a sad tale.
When I came here on the bus seven years ago, I was pleased to see dozens of tall shade trees everywhere—sycamores, oaks, pines, red maples, sweet gums, and others, along with numerous specimen plants like junipers, cedars, and yews. Neatly trimmed hedges, many at least twenty years old, lined the streets and sidewalks. Virtually all of them are gone now, too. Only two severely hacked and pruned oaks in the cut-down “visiting park” and a lone pine in another fenced in area survive. Last of the Mohicans.
As a card-carrying member of the National Arbor Day Foundation, Audubon, and other environmental and nature-advocacy groups, it hurts me to see the trees and other plants go. The destruction came in stages, started by Mother Nature. We got hit by three hurricanes that intersected this area in 2004, which blew down and bent a number of trees, many that were over twenty years old. The people in charge decided to do a surgical strike and cut down otherwise healthy trees as a preventive measure, which eliminated much of the previously shady areas on the compound, raising the heat index precipitously, but the prison still had a modest population of tall greenery.
The day I arrived here, then-Colonel Ronnie Edwards approached me, smiling, and asked, “Charlie, are you going to do the same thing here that you did for me at Polk?”
“If I get the cooperation I got there, I will,” I told him.
“You will,” he said.
Between 1988 and 1992 at Polk C.I., I started off with three small plants in a tiny rose garden and ended up with a greenhouse, shade house, and large gardens of flowers and vegetables, with every seed and all the supplies donated by outside people, at no cost to the state.
In 1990 to 1992, I was actually assigned as a chapel clerk, printing memos, rosters, and Bible studies on a computer for the various programs, along with my artwork and writing, but I still maintained my horticulture project and beautified the chapel grounds with flowers raised from seeds in the greenhouse. One day the warden came over to me and said he was just amazed at how our area looked; he was so proud of it that he brought outside visitors in to look at it when we were locked inside for count.
One day then-Inside Grounds Sergeant Ronnie Edwards came up to me while I was watering, and told me he wanted to make lieutenant, and I could help him. How? Look at what you’ve done here, with one helper. It looks like Cypress Gardens. The rest of the compound is dead. You help me make my areas like yours, I’ll make lieutenant, he explained.
“Inside Grounds” isn’t a punishment job, per se, but it is something like “make work,” to keep the idle prisoners who otherwise had nothing to do, busy doing menial tasks such as picking up cigarette butts and trash, cutting grass, or raking. At Polk, they had numerous dry, empty flower beds that were ceaselessly raked over and over by squads of prisoners, with nothing growing. I agreed to help beautify the rest of the compound if he gave me free rein to instruct some of his interested workers in how to tend the flowers. It didn’t make sense to plant hundreds of flowers if no one tended or watered them. I already worked seven days a week and couldn’t possibly do it all. Okay.
Six months later, the sidewalks leading into the prison from the front gate were lined with beautiful colors: reds, yellows, oranges, white, pinks, purples and blues. The visitors admired overflowing flower beds in the visiting park. The flag pole in front of the colonel’s office was ringed in flowers. It looked like a botanical garden, someone said.
One of my friends who worked with processing “new arrivals” each week came to me one day and said some old guy who’d just gotten off the bus was talking about me up front. Talking about someone can be a serious infraction in prison, and one must be on guard against any threats. I asked my friend what he’d said.
He walked in, looked around, and said, “Charlie Norman is at this camp.” My friend told him he was right, but how did he know?
“The flowers,” he said. “As soon as I saw all these flowers, I knew Charlie Norman was here. He’s the only one who’d do this. He did it at Raiford years ago.” He was right.
When I saw the old man later and greeted him, he embraced me and said he knew he’d come to the right place when he saw the flowers.
The sergeant made lieutenant, went on his way, and I went on mine, a ten-year tour of five other prisons, ending up here in 2002. The lieutenant was now a colonel, and it didn’t take long before I was back on operation, expanding flower beds every year, training more workers, beautifying the grounds. Then came the hurricanes, the trees began coming down, new, harsher, flower-hating people came in and took charge, which ended in the widespread destruction of most every living, rooted thing. The loss of the trees hit hardest.
Do you know how easy it is to grow oak trees from acorns? I had a mini-nursery of oak trees I grew in recycled one gallon plastic peanut butter pots, along with rows of pines, sycamores and red maples. The last red maple had been cut down two years before, but not before its winged seeds had found their way into a number of potting soil filled trays in my little greenhouse operation. I even had a few apple trees growing from seeds from apples handed out in the chow hall.
I’d been steadily planting and re-planting little trees until a particularly hateful and onerous guard was put in charge and given the duty to destroy every tree and flower I had. He took his job seriously. You’d have thought locusts had come through.
Over the past year many prisoners have bemoaned the barrenness of the grounds, remembering how it had looked not so long ago. Numerous guards and other staff have whispered their sadness at how bad it looks, what a waste. I agreed with all of them, but what was I to do? No one listens to me. Someone thinks the place should look “more like a prison,” but what does a prison look like?
Across the U.S., people who regularly visit prisons rave about those facilities where the grounds are well-tended and beautified, where smiling prisoners ceaselessly weed and trim neat flower beds, learn skills useful “outside,” and rehabilitate themselves with productive work. There are lessons to be learned there, as there are lessons to be learned here. As they said in the song, asking where have all the flowers gone, when will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?
Charlie
WHERE HAVE ALL THE FLOWERS GONE? (AND THE TREES?)
A year ago I had twenty-six flower gardens, ranging in size from small three foot by twelve plots to thirty foot diameter circles, and numerous other beds from one hundred to nine hundred square feet, all blooming inside the fences here at Tomoka C.I. in Daytona Beach. Thousands of flowers, from pansies and petunias and snapdragons, to calendulas, marigolds, zinnias, and sunflowers, and many more, bloomed everywhere. More than forty prisoners helped tend them.
Today there are virtually none. The only ones left are some surviving gaillardias that refuse to die, that keep poking their heads up and blooming in the now grassy beds until the lawnmower crews run over them and chop them down with their “Flintstones,” what they call the push mowers they’re allowed to use. One brick planter has eight gloriosa daisies plants still struggling to survive in the dry sand, and another planter has a lone Echinacea—coneflower—barely holding on. A few French marigolds have somehow sef-seeded and bloomed, but all these plants are endangered.
In the fenced-in area by the “psychology” trailer, an eccentric psychologist who was permitted to plant several rosebushes by previous administrations over the years jealously guards his babies, and some remnants of my plants still hold on in that restricted area, but even that situation is subject to change at any time.
How did this happen? How did such an abundance of natural beauty lovingly tended by a large platoon of dedicated prisoners selflessly working in the hot Florida sun all day suddenly disappear from view, leaving behind dry, dusty deserts of hot sand interspersed with weeds, looking like a vacant lot? It’s a sad tale.
When I came here on the bus seven years ago, I was pleased to see dozens of tall shade trees everywhere—sycamores, oaks, pines, red maples, sweet gums, and others, along with numerous specimen plants like junipers, cedars, and yews. Neatly trimmed hedges, many at least twenty years old, lined the streets and sidewalks. Virtually all of them are gone now, too. Only two severely hacked and pruned oaks in the cut-down “visiting park” and a lone pine in another fenced in area survive. Last of the Mohicans.
As a card-carrying member of the National Arbor Day Foundation, Audubon, and other environmental and nature-advocacy groups, it hurts me to see the trees and other plants go. The destruction came in stages, started by Mother Nature. We got hit by three hurricanes that intersected this area in 2004, which blew down and bent a number of trees, many that were over twenty years old. The people in charge decided to do a surgical strike and cut down otherwise healthy trees as a preventive measure, which eliminated much of the previously shady areas on the compound, raising the heat index precipitously, but the prison still had a modest population of tall greenery.
The day I arrived here, then-Colonel Ronnie Edwards approached me, smiling, and asked, “Charlie, are you going to do the same thing here that you did for me at Polk?”
“If I get the cooperation I got there, I will,” I told him.
“You will,” he said.
Between 1988 and 1992 at Polk C.I., I started off with three small plants in a tiny rose garden and ended up with a greenhouse, shade house, and large gardens of flowers and vegetables, with every seed and all the supplies donated by outside people, at no cost to the state.
In 1990 to 1992, I was actually assigned as a chapel clerk, printing memos, rosters, and Bible studies on a computer for the various programs, along with my artwork and writing, but I still maintained my horticulture project and beautified the chapel grounds with flowers raised from seeds in the greenhouse. One day the warden came over to me and said he was just amazed at how our area looked; he was so proud of it that he brought outside visitors in to look at it when we were locked inside for count.
One day then-Inside Grounds Sergeant Ronnie Edwards came up to me while I was watering, and told me he wanted to make lieutenant, and I could help him. How? Look at what you’ve done here, with one helper. It looks like Cypress Gardens. The rest of the compound is dead. You help me make my areas like yours, I’ll make lieutenant, he explained.
“Inside Grounds” isn’t a punishment job, per se, but it is something like “make work,” to keep the idle prisoners who otherwise had nothing to do, busy doing menial tasks such as picking up cigarette butts and trash, cutting grass, or raking. At Polk, they had numerous dry, empty flower beds that were ceaselessly raked over and over by squads of prisoners, with nothing growing. I agreed to help beautify the rest of the compound if he gave me free rein to instruct some of his interested workers in how to tend the flowers. It didn’t make sense to plant hundreds of flowers if no one tended or watered them. I already worked seven days a week and couldn’t possibly do it all. Okay.
Six months later, the sidewalks leading into the prison from the front gate were lined with beautiful colors: reds, yellows, oranges, white, pinks, purples and blues. The visitors admired overflowing flower beds in the visiting park. The flag pole in front of the colonel’s office was ringed in flowers. It looked like a botanical garden, someone said.
One of my friends who worked with processing “new arrivals” each week came to me one day and said some old guy who’d just gotten off the bus was talking about me up front. Talking about someone can be a serious infraction in prison, and one must be on guard against any threats. I asked my friend what he’d said.
He walked in, looked around, and said, “Charlie Norman is at this camp.” My friend told him he was right, but how did he know?
“The flowers,” he said. “As soon as I saw all these flowers, I knew Charlie Norman was here. He’s the only one who’d do this. He did it at Raiford years ago.” He was right.
When I saw the old man later and greeted him, he embraced me and said he knew he’d come to the right place when he saw the flowers.
The sergeant made lieutenant, went on his way, and I went on mine, a ten-year tour of five other prisons, ending up here in 2002. The lieutenant was now a colonel, and it didn’t take long before I was back on operation, expanding flower beds every year, training more workers, beautifying the grounds. Then came the hurricanes, the trees began coming down, new, harsher, flower-hating people came in and took charge, which ended in the widespread destruction of most every living, rooted thing. The loss of the trees hit hardest.
Do you know how easy it is to grow oak trees from acorns? I had a mini-nursery of oak trees I grew in recycled one gallon plastic peanut butter pots, along with rows of pines, sycamores and red maples. The last red maple had been cut down two years before, but not before its winged seeds had found their way into a number of potting soil filled trays in my little greenhouse operation. I even had a few apple trees growing from seeds from apples handed out in the chow hall.
I’d been steadily planting and re-planting little trees until a particularly hateful and onerous guard was put in charge and given the duty to destroy every tree and flower I had. He took his job seriously. You’d have thought locusts had come through.
Over the past year many prisoners have bemoaned the barrenness of the grounds, remembering how it had looked not so long ago. Numerous guards and other staff have whispered their sadness at how bad it looks, what a waste. I agreed with all of them, but what was I to do? No one listens to me. Someone thinks the place should look “more like a prison,” but what does a prison look like?
Across the U.S., people who regularly visit prisons rave about those facilities where the grounds are well-tended and beautified, where smiling prisoners ceaselessly weed and trim neat flower beds, learn skills useful “outside,” and rehabilitate themselves with productive work. There are lessons to be learned there, as there are lessons to be learned here. As they said in the song, asking where have all the flowers gone, when will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?
Charlie
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
A LESSON IN MEDIA MANIPULATION AND OFFICIAL LIES
Dateline: Friday, April 24, 2009
A LESSON IN MEDIA MANIPULATION AND OFFICIAL LIES
I want to tell you about an egregious abuse of authority, how a public official manipulated both the media and a state agency to keep his lies alive and to keep me in prison. I have some letters and documents to include, to better illustrate how Mark Ober intimidated the Florida Parole Commission and made inadvertent liars out of Fox 13 WTVT news anchors and reporter, Warren Elly.
I wrote Warren Elly a letter laying out how he was used, with the supporting documents, but he never responded.
This is what happened: on Wednesday, December 13, 2006, Hillsborough State Attorney Mark Ober and his faithful sidekick, Pam Bondi, accompanied by a Fox News camera crew, appeared at my Florida Parole Commission hearing in Tallahassee. The news camera was set up only a few feet away from Commissioners Fred Dunphy, Monica David, and Tena Pate, and focused directly at them. The 800 pound gorilla.
The message was clear: “I am the state attorney. I command the news media. They are here at my bidding. We are recording your actions in the Charles Norman case. If you oppose me and parole this guy, I am going to publicly denounce you on television. If you do what I want, I will praise you. The risk/reward ratio is high. If you want me to be your enemy, I will come after you, criticize you, call for your removal. I am raising the stakes. Be my co-conspirators in keeping Norman locked away, and your job is safe for now. Don’t sacrifice your politically-appointed position for that guy. It’s not worth it.”
And what is the message to Fox 13 News and reporter, Warren Elly? “I am the state attorney. I need a favor. This is important to me. I want to put pressure on the parole commissioners to keep Charles Norman in prison. I want you to help me intimidate them and to broadcast a short clip of defamatory statements on the 10 P.M. news, but I don’t want you to look too closely at this stuff, just take my word for it. In exchange, I will give you first access to any stories coming out of our office, you’ll get the scoops, we’ll work together, and all it will cost you is your journalistic integrity. I assure you that is no big deal. I lost my integrity years ago, and look where I am now! I could be the attorney general one day!”
Warren Elly, Channel 13, and the parole commissioners aren’t the only ones deceived by Mark Ober. He has deceived many well-meaning, wealthy and influential citizens, also, who have steadily contributed thousands of dollars to his campaign. I have been examining Ober’s campaign contributions for the 2008 state attorney’s election, in which he ran unopposed, and have discovered numerous discrepancies and questions. That is fodder for a future blog, but in the meantime, I will offer you three letters I wrote to Pam Bondi, George Steinbrenner, III, and Roche Security and Casualty, none of whom has responded. When I get more postage stamps I will send out more letters to some of the 492 contributors, including thirty-five assistant prosecutors who listed only their home addresses for contributions to their boss, withholding their business address and affiliation with Mark. Naughty, naughty.
When you have a behemoth like Ober playing Goliath against a paralyzed, shrunken, chained David, such as myself, dodging giant boulders of lies continually tossed by Mark and his minions, it makes for a very one-sided, unfair battle. If you want to know more, or offer help, I would be pleased to tell you more.
Read the following letters and DVD transcript of the Fox News broadcast item and ask yourself if something is rotten in Denmark. The ethics complaint, which goes into much more analysis and detail, is long, so if you want to read it, let me know, and I’ll forward it, rather than clogging the blog worse than it is.
Thanks. Charlie
1. Warren Elly
c/o WTVT – Fox 13
3213 West Kennedy Boulevard
Tampa, FL 33609
Dear Mr. Elly:
How do you feel when you discover that someone has lied to you, not about some minor thing, but something serious and important? Has that ever happened to you?
As a result of someone lying to you, have you ever found yourself to have been manipulated and duped, and (possibly) unknowingly made out to be a liar yourself? On TV?
Mr. Elly, if your answer is “no,” I have some bad news for you. Mark Ober lied, manipulated, and duped you, on December 13, 2006, when he made false statements about me, and you repeated them on the ten o’clock news broadcast without verifying their veracity.
I am preparing complaints to the Florida Commission on Ethics and the Florida Bar against Mark Ober for abusing his authority to pursue a personal vendetta and secure political enhancement for himself. A complaint to the Florida Election Commission for campaign finance violations is also being prepared.
I am surprised that you took Ober at his word and didn’t even attempt to contact my lawyers or me for the opposing view. The slightest verification would have put the lie to one of the most damning falsehoods in your story, the tale that when Steve Bluffstone was ten years old, Charles Norman was a cop and used to come by the Bluffstones’ gas station in his police car to “rest and cool off,” befriended the sick child recuperating from cancer, who wanted to be a cop, like his “mentor.”
Of course, you neglected to mention that at the time, 1965, Charles Norman was a 15 year old junior high school student.
If the same person who befriended Steve in 1965 killed him ten years later, as Ober and others have stated, obviously it wasn’t Charles Norman.
There is much, much more. Perhaps you should call in Doug Smith and his investigative team to find the truth. Perhaps you’ll talk to Mark Ober’s state witness who recanted and stated it was all a fabrication, or Ober’s other witness, who now says she knows Charles Norman was twenty miles away when the crime occurred, could not have been in two places at once, that Ober knew it, and withheld that information.
Or perhaps you can talk to the only true eyewitness, Albert McKinley, who said it was not Charles Norman who was in the Pantry Pride store on the night of the crime.
Try it again, Warren. Get it right this time. Tell the world Mark Ober is a liar and a cheat, like Mike Nifong, and has kept an innocent man in prison for over 30 years. Let’s see some journalistic integrity at work. If you want more, you can e-mail me through my friend at freecharlie2001@yahoo.com.
Make a difference. Don’t be Ober’s dupe.
Sincerely,
Charles Norman
2. Warren Elly
c/o WTVT – Fox 13
3213 West Kennedy Boulevard
Tampa, FL 33609
Dear Mr. Elly:
This is a follow-up to the letter dated February 4, 2009, that I sent to you last week. I have enclosed for your use, a transcript of the broadcast piece you had on TV on December 13, 2006, on the 10:00 News in Tampa and a copy of the complaint I have filed with the Florida State Commission On Ethics.
These two documents will serve to further delineate the lies, distortions, and complete disregard for facts that are being continually represented as truth by those who ignore the real story, refuse to check the facts, and deliberately strive to portray me in the worst possible light through slander and libel.
Sincerely,
Charles Norman
3. TRANSCRIPT FROM DVD RECORDING
OF CHANNEL 13 NEWS STORY RE: CHARLES NORMAN
BROADCAST ON DECEMBER 13, 2006 AT 10:00 PM IN TAMPA
From the Fox Channel 13 10:00 [PM] News
Female news anchor: Thirty years ago, a Tampa cop was fired after the suspicious death of his girlfriend.
Male news anchor: And shortly after that, the man murdered a security guard in a supermarket robbery in South Tampa. But as Fox 13's Warren Elly reports, he’s trying to get out of jail, & the victim’s family is furious.
Elly: At ten years old, Steven Bluffstone wanted to be a police officer. He got the idea hanging out at his dad’s Tampa gas station, hanging out with a Tampa police officer, named Charlie Norman. Steven’s mother remembers the police officer the little boy idolized.
Phillis Bluffstone: He used to come in & cool off, rest. How could he do this? To someone he knows? How could he do it?
Elly: What Charles Norman did ten years later was to murder Steven Bluffstone. It happened at a supermarket that used to be here on Gandy Boulevard. Norman, a fired TPD cop, was inside after closing, hiding, wanted to rob the supermarket. What he didn’t know was Steven, now 20 years old, was working as an armed security guard nearby.
Ober: After being confronted by young Mr. Bluffstone, Mr. Norman shot him in the head & stomach & killed him.
Elly: It was the state attorney’s first murder case as a young prosecutor. Norman was convicted, but the jury spared him the death penalty. He’s served 29 years of a life sentence, & he’s now fighting for parole with some unlikely supporters.
John Grant: I’m a tough law & order person. I also believe in redemption & rehabilitation & compassion.
Elly: Former state senator John Grant led the charge for tougher prison sentences. As a prosecutor, he put people on death row. But now...
John Grant: I have no hesitation about driving to the prison & picking up Charlie & taking him into my home.
Elly: Also backing Norman’s release, high-profile jewel thief turned prison minister, Jack ‘Murf the Surf’ Murphy.
Phillis Bluffstone: And I’m just thinking this time he’s going to get out. I really did.
Elly: But celebrities & ex-state senators couldn’t stop Mark Ober.
Ober: It’s interesting to me how Norman can be rehabilitated from a crime he proclaims he never committed.
Elly: After that, the Parole Commission voted to keep Norman behind bars , at least until 2014. But there’s more to this story of Steven Bluffstone. He had bone cancer as a young child, suffered through eleven operations, ended up in a body cast. He was newly-married, & had survived nearly 5 years without the cancer coming back, when Norman killed him.
Phillis Bluffstone: Every day I light candles for my son. Every day. To know what the child went through, & to end up like this. Not right.
Elly: At least, she says, her son’s killer will stay where he is, for now. Warren Elly, Fox 13 News.
Male news anchor: Among the issues that could interfere with Norman’s bid for early release, he’s had disciplinary problems in prison, & back when he was arrested, he was still wearing a bullet-proof vest & carrying a Tampa police radio.
End.
4. Roche Surety and Casualty Company, Inc.
1910 Orient Road
Tampa, FL 33619
RE: Mark Ober Campaign Contributions
Dear Sir:
Since the Florida state elections of the year 2000, I have been studying the campaign contributions of State Attorney Mark Alan Ober, Hillsborough County. Most recently, I have been examining documents from the Division of Elections, Florida Department of State, of 492 contributors of $138,517.80 to the 2008 General Election campaign of Mr. Ober, and I continue to discover anomalies that raise questions.
These public records from the Campaign Finance Data Base reveal that on December 17, 2007, eight checks were written from your address of 1910 Orient Road, for a total of #2350.00. Please tell me whether the following information is correct:
1) Roche Surety & Casualty Co., Inc. $ 500.00
2) Roche Suriety & Casualty Co., Inc. $ 100.00
3) Roche Surety, Inc. $ 500.00
4) RS & CCO As Trustee For T. Anthony Sands $ 500.00
5) RS & CCO As Trustee For Al Arenal Bail Bon $ 500.00
6) Danielle Miller $ 50.00
7) Tim Myers $ 100.00
8) Zavolas, Mike $ 100.00
$ 2350.00
December 17, 2007, was a very profitable campaign finance day for Mr. Ober, according to the records. He also collected $500.00 from Aaron’s Bail Bonds down the street from your business, and a total of $10,200 from 24 other contributors, plus your 8.
I request that you please advise me of the name(s) of the actual person or persons who signed/authorized the five company/business/corporation campaign contributions to Mark Ober from your 1910 Orient Road address listed above. If you would also advise me of the relationships of the three individuals listed above to the businesses listed, I would greatly appreciate it.
Perhaps you are wondering why I am asking these questions. In February, 1980, Mark Ober was the young assistant state attorney who prosecuted me for a 1975 murder I did not commit. There was absolutely no physical or forensic evidence that connected me to the crime, and an eyewitness stated in court that I was not the person who committed the crime. The actual killer was given immunity from prosecution for first degree murder to falsely testify that I told him I’d shot someone. Other convicted felons were coerced by Ober to commit perjury, resulting in my being convicted and sentenced to life in prison for a crime Mark Ober knew I did not commit, for his political ambitions.
In 2002 and 2006 Mark Ober went to my parole hearings, made false, misleading, and malicious statements opposing my parole, among other unethical acts, resulting in my continued imprisonment, a travesty of justice.
If a man can continue such wrongful prosecution for thirty years, I believe such lack of integrity could very well spill over into campaign finance irregularities. If you have any questions or comments about this man you have so strongly supported, I would be happy to answer them.
Sincerely,
Charles Norman
5. Pamela J. Bondi
Hillsborough State Attorney’s Office
800 East Kennedy Boulevard, 5th Floor
Tampa, FL 33602-4147
RE: Campaign Contributions: 2008 General Election—Mark Ober
Dear Ms. Bondi:
I see from the public records of the Division of Elections, Florida Department of State, that on November 9, 2007, you contributed $ 500.00 to Mark Ober’s campaign for Hillsborough State Attorney.
Cross-indexing 492 contributions of $ 138,517.80 to Mark’s campaign with the 2008 Florida Bar Journal, I discovered that thirty-five lawyers who listed their employment as the SAO—13th Circuit made contributions of $ 11,250.00 to their boss. I’m sure that is perfectly legal.
What attracted my attention was the fact that not a single contributor from the Hillsborough SAO, including yourself, listed an address of 800 E. Kennedy Boulevard, instead, listing home addresses only.
I have been reading the campaign finance laws in an attempt to understand the intricacies. My question to you is: is it mere coincidence that all thirty-five SAO contributors/lawyers listed only their home addresses, or was there instruction/order/memorandum that directed them not to use their business address?
While perhaps not a campaign finance law violation on its face, it seems that such concerted actions give the appearance of deception, to mislead the public as to the true source of Mark’s campaign financing.
If you have any comments, I’d like to hear them.
Sincerely,
Charles Norman
6. George M. Steinbrenner, III
1 Steinbrenner Drive
Tampa, FL 33614-7064
Dear Mr. Steinbrenner:
A study of public records obtained from the Florida Department of State, Division of Elections, the Campaign Finance Data Base, for Mark Ober’s 2008 General Election campaign for Hillsborough State Attorney has revealed some interesting information. Although Mark was unopposed, he still collected 492 contributions for $138,517.80. That’s not bad for someone whose net worth was $1,686,019.25 as of April, 2008.
From these public records I discovered that you contributed $1400.00 personally and through two Kinsman Properties accounts to Mark on 11/21/2007.
I’m sure that the reason you were so generous to Mark was because you believe in our system of justice and good government; however, I’ve seen a side of Mark Ober that I hope you never see. I’d like to tell you about his dark side.
In February, 1980, as a young assistant state attorney and protégé of E.J. Salcines and Norman Cannella, his mentor, Mark Ober wrongfully prosecuted and convicted me of first degree murder, a crime I did not commit. He gave the actual killer and other convicted felons “immunity from prosecution” (two for murder) to falsely testify that I told them I shot someone. As you may know, only the guilty are given immunity—the innocent don’t need it. An eyewitness said I was not the shooter.
This crime occurred February 17, 1975. I was cleared of the crime by the original homicide detective nine months later. Three years later, crooked cops arrested me for the crime. After I repeatedly refused Mark’s offers of plea bargains and reduced charges, Mark coerced witnesses to commit perjury, knowingly used false testimony, and withheld evidence that would have cleared me. He did his best to strap me into the electric chair. His budding political ambitions and personal vendetta against me blinded him to the point where he sold his soul. I hope he got a good price.
When Mark decided to go for the big bucks in private practice, his favorite, most infamous client, whose case gave him front page headlines, was Oscar Ray Bolin, the most notoriously brutal rapist and serial killer in Hillsborough County history. Mark did his very best to free Oscar Ray Bolin, fought hard for him, and got him off Death Row multiple times, but, alas, that’s where he resides today.
Despite his wrongful prosecution of me, I have survived over thirty-one years of imprisonment, to Mark’s eternal chagrin. That wasn’t enough for him, though. Since my conviction, Mark Ober has appeared at my two parole hearings, repeatedly making false, misleading, and malicious statements against my release. He staked his political career on lies, and perhaps feels he must continue to ride that horse to the end. I continue to fight for justice and my release, against all odds, which are great.
If you’d like to know more about this, let me know, and I’ll be happy to provide you the information.
I pray that the next time Mark Ober asks you for money you think long and hard about supporting the blind ambitions of such a man.
Sincerely,
Charles P. Norman
A LESSON IN MEDIA MANIPULATION AND OFFICIAL LIES
I want to tell you about an egregious abuse of authority, how a public official manipulated both the media and a state agency to keep his lies alive and to keep me in prison. I have some letters and documents to include, to better illustrate how Mark Ober intimidated the Florida Parole Commission and made inadvertent liars out of Fox 13 WTVT news anchors and reporter, Warren Elly.
I wrote Warren Elly a letter laying out how he was used, with the supporting documents, but he never responded.
This is what happened: on Wednesday, December 13, 2006, Hillsborough State Attorney Mark Ober and his faithful sidekick, Pam Bondi, accompanied by a Fox News camera crew, appeared at my Florida Parole Commission hearing in Tallahassee. The news camera was set up only a few feet away from Commissioners Fred Dunphy, Monica David, and Tena Pate, and focused directly at them. The 800 pound gorilla.
The message was clear: “I am the state attorney. I command the news media. They are here at my bidding. We are recording your actions in the Charles Norman case. If you oppose me and parole this guy, I am going to publicly denounce you on television. If you do what I want, I will praise you. The risk/reward ratio is high. If you want me to be your enemy, I will come after you, criticize you, call for your removal. I am raising the stakes. Be my co-conspirators in keeping Norman locked away, and your job is safe for now. Don’t sacrifice your politically-appointed position for that guy. It’s not worth it.”
And what is the message to Fox 13 News and reporter, Warren Elly? “I am the state attorney. I need a favor. This is important to me. I want to put pressure on the parole commissioners to keep Charles Norman in prison. I want you to help me intimidate them and to broadcast a short clip of defamatory statements on the 10 P.M. news, but I don’t want you to look too closely at this stuff, just take my word for it. In exchange, I will give you first access to any stories coming out of our office, you’ll get the scoops, we’ll work together, and all it will cost you is your journalistic integrity. I assure you that is no big deal. I lost my integrity years ago, and look where I am now! I could be the attorney general one day!”
Warren Elly, Channel 13, and the parole commissioners aren’t the only ones deceived by Mark Ober. He has deceived many well-meaning, wealthy and influential citizens, also, who have steadily contributed thousands of dollars to his campaign. I have been examining Ober’s campaign contributions for the 2008 state attorney’s election, in which he ran unopposed, and have discovered numerous discrepancies and questions. That is fodder for a future blog, but in the meantime, I will offer you three letters I wrote to Pam Bondi, George Steinbrenner, III, and Roche Security and Casualty, none of whom has responded. When I get more postage stamps I will send out more letters to some of the 492 contributors, including thirty-five assistant prosecutors who listed only their home addresses for contributions to their boss, withholding their business address and affiliation with Mark. Naughty, naughty.
When you have a behemoth like Ober playing Goliath against a paralyzed, shrunken, chained David, such as myself, dodging giant boulders of lies continually tossed by Mark and his minions, it makes for a very one-sided, unfair battle. If you want to know more, or offer help, I would be pleased to tell you more.
Read the following letters and DVD transcript of the Fox News broadcast item and ask yourself if something is rotten in Denmark. The ethics complaint, which goes into much more analysis and detail, is long, so if you want to read it, let me know, and I’ll forward it, rather than clogging the blog worse than it is.
Thanks. Charlie
1. Warren Elly
c/o WTVT – Fox 13
3213 West Kennedy Boulevard
Tampa, FL 33609
Dear Mr. Elly:
How do you feel when you discover that someone has lied to you, not about some minor thing, but something serious and important? Has that ever happened to you?
As a result of someone lying to you, have you ever found yourself to have been manipulated and duped, and (possibly) unknowingly made out to be a liar yourself? On TV?
Mr. Elly, if your answer is “no,” I have some bad news for you. Mark Ober lied, manipulated, and duped you, on December 13, 2006, when he made false statements about me, and you repeated them on the ten o’clock news broadcast without verifying their veracity.
I am preparing complaints to the Florida Commission on Ethics and the Florida Bar against Mark Ober for abusing his authority to pursue a personal vendetta and secure political enhancement for himself. A complaint to the Florida Election Commission for campaign finance violations is also being prepared.
I am surprised that you took Ober at his word and didn’t even attempt to contact my lawyers or me for the opposing view. The slightest verification would have put the lie to one of the most damning falsehoods in your story, the tale that when Steve Bluffstone was ten years old, Charles Norman was a cop and used to come by the Bluffstones’ gas station in his police car to “rest and cool off,” befriended the sick child recuperating from cancer, who wanted to be a cop, like his “mentor.”
Of course, you neglected to mention that at the time, 1965, Charles Norman was a 15 year old junior high school student.
If the same person who befriended Steve in 1965 killed him ten years later, as Ober and others have stated, obviously it wasn’t Charles Norman.
There is much, much more. Perhaps you should call in Doug Smith and his investigative team to find the truth. Perhaps you’ll talk to Mark Ober’s state witness who recanted and stated it was all a fabrication, or Ober’s other witness, who now says she knows Charles Norman was twenty miles away when the crime occurred, could not have been in two places at once, that Ober knew it, and withheld that information.
Or perhaps you can talk to the only true eyewitness, Albert McKinley, who said it was not Charles Norman who was in the Pantry Pride store on the night of the crime.
Try it again, Warren. Get it right this time. Tell the world Mark Ober is a liar and a cheat, like Mike Nifong, and has kept an innocent man in prison for over 30 years. Let’s see some journalistic integrity at work. If you want more, you can e-mail me through my friend at freecharlie2001@yahoo.com.
Make a difference. Don’t be Ober’s dupe.
Sincerely,
Charles Norman
2. Warren Elly
c/o WTVT – Fox 13
3213 West Kennedy Boulevard
Tampa, FL 33609
Dear Mr. Elly:
This is a follow-up to the letter dated February 4, 2009, that I sent to you last week. I have enclosed for your use, a transcript of the broadcast piece you had on TV on December 13, 2006, on the 10:00 News in Tampa and a copy of the complaint I have filed with the Florida State Commission On Ethics.
These two documents will serve to further delineate the lies, distortions, and complete disregard for facts that are being continually represented as truth by those who ignore the real story, refuse to check the facts, and deliberately strive to portray me in the worst possible light through slander and libel.
Sincerely,
Charles Norman
3. TRANSCRIPT FROM DVD RECORDING
OF CHANNEL 13 NEWS STORY RE: CHARLES NORMAN
BROADCAST ON DECEMBER 13, 2006 AT 10:00 PM IN TAMPA
From the Fox Channel 13 10:00 [PM] News
Female news anchor: Thirty years ago, a Tampa cop was fired after the suspicious death of his girlfriend.
Male news anchor: And shortly after that, the man murdered a security guard in a supermarket robbery in South Tampa. But as Fox 13's Warren Elly reports, he’s trying to get out of jail, & the victim’s family is furious.
Elly: At ten years old, Steven Bluffstone wanted to be a police officer. He got the idea hanging out at his dad’s Tampa gas station, hanging out with a Tampa police officer, named Charlie Norman. Steven’s mother remembers the police officer the little boy idolized.
Phillis Bluffstone: He used to come in & cool off, rest. How could he do this? To someone he knows? How could he do it?
Elly: What Charles Norman did ten years later was to murder Steven Bluffstone. It happened at a supermarket that used to be here on Gandy Boulevard. Norman, a fired TPD cop, was inside after closing, hiding, wanted to rob the supermarket. What he didn’t know was Steven, now 20 years old, was working as an armed security guard nearby.
Ober: After being confronted by young Mr. Bluffstone, Mr. Norman shot him in the head & stomach & killed him.
Elly: It was the state attorney’s first murder case as a young prosecutor. Norman was convicted, but the jury spared him the death penalty. He’s served 29 years of a life sentence, & he’s now fighting for parole with some unlikely supporters.
John Grant: I’m a tough law & order person. I also believe in redemption & rehabilitation & compassion.
Elly: Former state senator John Grant led the charge for tougher prison sentences. As a prosecutor, he put people on death row. But now...
John Grant: I have no hesitation about driving to the prison & picking up Charlie & taking him into my home.
Elly: Also backing Norman’s release, high-profile jewel thief turned prison minister, Jack ‘Murf the Surf’ Murphy.
Phillis Bluffstone: And I’m just thinking this time he’s going to get out. I really did.
Elly: But celebrities & ex-state senators couldn’t stop Mark Ober.
Ober: It’s interesting to me how Norman can be rehabilitated from a crime he proclaims he never committed.
Elly: After that, the Parole Commission voted to keep Norman behind bars , at least until 2014. But there’s more to this story of Steven Bluffstone. He had bone cancer as a young child, suffered through eleven operations, ended up in a body cast. He was newly-married, & had survived nearly 5 years without the cancer coming back, when Norman killed him.
Phillis Bluffstone: Every day I light candles for my son. Every day. To know what the child went through, & to end up like this. Not right.
Elly: At least, she says, her son’s killer will stay where he is, for now. Warren Elly, Fox 13 News.
Male news anchor: Among the issues that could interfere with Norman’s bid for early release, he’s had disciplinary problems in prison, & back when he was arrested, he was still wearing a bullet-proof vest & carrying a Tampa police radio.
End.
4. Roche Surety and Casualty Company, Inc.
1910 Orient Road
Tampa, FL 33619
RE: Mark Ober Campaign Contributions
Dear Sir:
Since the Florida state elections of the year 2000, I have been studying the campaign contributions of State Attorney Mark Alan Ober, Hillsborough County. Most recently, I have been examining documents from the Division of Elections, Florida Department of State, of 492 contributors of $138,517.80 to the 2008 General Election campaign of Mr. Ober, and I continue to discover anomalies that raise questions.
These public records from the Campaign Finance Data Base reveal that on December 17, 2007, eight checks were written from your address of 1910 Orient Road, for a total of #2350.00. Please tell me whether the following information is correct:
1) Roche Surety & Casualty Co., Inc. $ 500.00
2) Roche Suriety & Casualty Co., Inc. $ 100.00
3) Roche Surety, Inc. $ 500.00
4) RS & CCO As Trustee For T. Anthony Sands $ 500.00
5) RS & CCO As Trustee For Al Arenal Bail Bon $ 500.00
6) Danielle Miller $ 50.00
7) Tim Myers $ 100.00
8) Zavolas, Mike $ 100.00
$ 2350.00
December 17, 2007, was a very profitable campaign finance day for Mr. Ober, according to the records. He also collected $500.00 from Aaron’s Bail Bonds down the street from your business, and a total of $10,200 from 24 other contributors, plus your 8.
I request that you please advise me of the name(s) of the actual person or persons who signed/authorized the five company/business/corporation campaign contributions to Mark Ober from your 1910 Orient Road address listed above. If you would also advise me of the relationships of the three individuals listed above to the businesses listed, I would greatly appreciate it.
Perhaps you are wondering why I am asking these questions. In February, 1980, Mark Ober was the young assistant state attorney who prosecuted me for a 1975 murder I did not commit. There was absolutely no physical or forensic evidence that connected me to the crime, and an eyewitness stated in court that I was not the person who committed the crime. The actual killer was given immunity from prosecution for first degree murder to falsely testify that I told him I’d shot someone. Other convicted felons were coerced by Ober to commit perjury, resulting in my being convicted and sentenced to life in prison for a crime Mark Ober knew I did not commit, for his political ambitions.
In 2002 and 2006 Mark Ober went to my parole hearings, made false, misleading, and malicious statements opposing my parole, among other unethical acts, resulting in my continued imprisonment, a travesty of justice.
If a man can continue such wrongful prosecution for thirty years, I believe such lack of integrity could very well spill over into campaign finance irregularities. If you have any questions or comments about this man you have so strongly supported, I would be happy to answer them.
Sincerely,
Charles Norman
5. Pamela J. Bondi
Hillsborough State Attorney’s Office
800 East Kennedy Boulevard, 5th Floor
Tampa, FL 33602-4147
RE: Campaign Contributions: 2008 General Election—Mark Ober
Dear Ms. Bondi:
I see from the public records of the Division of Elections, Florida Department of State, that on November 9, 2007, you contributed $ 500.00 to Mark Ober’s campaign for Hillsborough State Attorney.
Cross-indexing 492 contributions of $ 138,517.80 to Mark’s campaign with the 2008 Florida Bar Journal, I discovered that thirty-five lawyers who listed their employment as the SAO—13th Circuit made contributions of $ 11,250.00 to their boss. I’m sure that is perfectly legal.
What attracted my attention was the fact that not a single contributor from the Hillsborough SAO, including yourself, listed an address of 800 E. Kennedy Boulevard, instead, listing home addresses only.
I have been reading the campaign finance laws in an attempt to understand the intricacies. My question to you is: is it mere coincidence that all thirty-five SAO contributors/lawyers listed only their home addresses, or was there instruction/order/memorandum that directed them not to use their business address?
While perhaps not a campaign finance law violation on its face, it seems that such concerted actions give the appearance of deception, to mislead the public as to the true source of Mark’s campaign financing.
If you have any comments, I’d like to hear them.
Sincerely,
Charles Norman
6. George M. Steinbrenner, III
1 Steinbrenner Drive
Tampa, FL 33614-7064
Dear Mr. Steinbrenner:
A study of public records obtained from the Florida Department of State, Division of Elections, the Campaign Finance Data Base, for Mark Ober’s 2008 General Election campaign for Hillsborough State Attorney has revealed some interesting information. Although Mark was unopposed, he still collected 492 contributions for $138,517.80. That’s not bad for someone whose net worth was $1,686,019.25 as of April, 2008.
From these public records I discovered that you contributed $1400.00 personally and through two Kinsman Properties accounts to Mark on 11/21/2007.
I’m sure that the reason you were so generous to Mark was because you believe in our system of justice and good government; however, I’ve seen a side of Mark Ober that I hope you never see. I’d like to tell you about his dark side.
In February, 1980, as a young assistant state attorney and protégé of E.J. Salcines and Norman Cannella, his mentor, Mark Ober wrongfully prosecuted and convicted me of first degree murder, a crime I did not commit. He gave the actual killer and other convicted felons “immunity from prosecution” (two for murder) to falsely testify that I told them I shot someone. As you may know, only the guilty are given immunity—the innocent don’t need it. An eyewitness said I was not the shooter.
This crime occurred February 17, 1975. I was cleared of the crime by the original homicide detective nine months later. Three years later, crooked cops arrested me for the crime. After I repeatedly refused Mark’s offers of plea bargains and reduced charges, Mark coerced witnesses to commit perjury, knowingly used false testimony, and withheld evidence that would have cleared me. He did his best to strap me into the electric chair. His budding political ambitions and personal vendetta against me blinded him to the point where he sold his soul. I hope he got a good price.
When Mark decided to go for the big bucks in private practice, his favorite, most infamous client, whose case gave him front page headlines, was Oscar Ray Bolin, the most notoriously brutal rapist and serial killer in Hillsborough County history. Mark did his very best to free Oscar Ray Bolin, fought hard for him, and got him off Death Row multiple times, but, alas, that’s where he resides today.
Despite his wrongful prosecution of me, I have survived over thirty-one years of imprisonment, to Mark’s eternal chagrin. That wasn’t enough for him, though. Since my conviction, Mark Ober has appeared at my two parole hearings, repeatedly making false, misleading, and malicious statements against my release. He staked his political career on lies, and perhaps feels he must continue to ride that horse to the end. I continue to fight for justice and my release, against all odds, which are great.
If you’d like to know more about this, let me know, and I’ll be happy to provide you the information.
I pray that the next time Mark Ober asks you for money you think long and hard about supporting the blind ambitions of such a man.
Sincerely,
Charles P. Norman
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
DEATH COMES EASY IN PRISON
Dateline: April 17, 2009
DEATH COMES EASY IN PRISON
Murder at Noon. If Garrison Keillor was writing this, he’d probably say, it’s been a rough week in Lake Wobegon, but he’s not, I am. Yesterday, Thursday, they had a particularly unappetizing lunch in the chow hall, so I stayed in my dorm. Next thing I know, there’s a commotion at the housing area to the west, A—Dorm, and “open dorm,” which is a warehouse-type space filled with about seventy-two prisoners and bunks on two separate sides. Close quarters.
I saw something I’ve never seen before—guards— “white shirts,” higher-ranking lieutenants, a captain, the colonel, it looked like, and several prisoners were all trying to carry a wounded prisoner to medical. They left the nurse with the wheelchair behind. It had to be bad for such exalted ranks to get bloody and jump in to help the guy.
It didn’t matter. Ten minutes later, Dexter Bridges was dead, seventeen stab wounds, one through his heart. The killer, Tim Howard, sat on a locker with the long, sharp piece of steel in his hand and waited. When the first guard approached him, he handed over the “shank,” and put his hands behind his back for the handcuffs. Last I saw of him was his back, shuffling slowly up the road to confinement. We won’t see him again.
The week started out badly on Saturday. When they opened the yard Saturday morning, two Latino gang members, one residing down the hall from my cell, hurried to the other end of the compound, entered “J” Dorm, another “open” dorm filled mostly with prisoners with bad medical problems, proceeded to a far corner, threw a blanket over a man, and beat the hell out of him before hurrying out. They were locked up shortly thereafter.
Sunday morning, I was very glad that my friend, Libby, got here early for visit. Only the first sixteen were admitted before they closed the yard, locked down the entire prison. No one came in or out for at least a couple of hours. The warden walked through the visiting area with a foot-long piece of sharpened steel sticking out his back pocket a little later.
When I finally left visiting around 2:30 PM and returned to “B” Dorm, everyone was locked in their cells. The halls were littered with trash. Uh oh. I knew what they meant—the guards had come through en masse and ransacked the cells. I hated to look when they unlocked my door to let me in. It was bad, locker dumped out, property scattered, legal papers tossed, clothes and canteen items jumbled. Very little missing, though. They were looking for knives and other weapons. Neither my cellmate nor I have any contraband. That doesn’t keep them from regularly ransacking everything I own.
Then they came in with industrial steel saws that looked like electric carving knives on steroids. They cut the heavy steel handles off the sides of the stand-up storage lockers. Ah ha! That’s where the foot-long shank came from—he broke off a locker handle and sharpened one end to a point somehow. We knew it wasn’t over.
Monday morning early they cut off the water. No toilets or drinking water. That’s a dead giveaway. They’re coming. So they did.
Cell-by-cell, step out, strip search, carry your clothes thataway, get examined for gang-related tattoos. Sorry, I don’t have any. I prefer to put my art on canvas. Some prisoners looked dipped in ink. The guards were busy writing.
Meanwhile, other guards ransacked the cells again, dumping out lockers, trashing legal papers and other property, a different crew from Sunday, shipped in from another prison, their riot squad. It was a mess.
Life in prison. The week before, they raised the canteen prices, doubled in many cases, including tobacco, which caused great problems in an already tense and poverty-filled society. Prisoners whose families sacrificed to send them money to buy sweets, drinks, food items, and toiletries were getting assaulted, and their canteen bags taken from them. The strong ones armed themselves. It got so bad, immediately, that a large cadre of prisoners who have nothing, no resources whatsoever, and no hustles, no ability to earn money, who survive by panhandling cigarettes, cups of coffee, and the occasional Ramen soup, found themselves cut off from even those meager means of sustenance. The ones who previously provided for them found themselves too strapped to share.
Tuesday, prison life seemed to return to normal. They picked up and shipped out a van load of Latino gang members, which was a drop in the bucket. Then Thursday came, and the slaughter took place.
When I came here to Tomoka, almost seven years ago, I met Dexter Bridges in A-Dorm. He was a small man with a shaved head, very polite, interested in only one thing, young, white homosexuals. Any time you saw him, you saw a white boy with him. I say, “boy,” but that’s relatively speaking in prison. “Boy” relates more to their status as passive homosexuals on the receiving end, rather than their ages. There are thirty, thirty-five, forty-year old “white boys” in prison, most aged beyond their years.
A prisoner in a neighboring cell said that Tim Howard, chain-gang nickname, “China Doll,” a very rough-looking man, had “rented out” his white boy to Bridges for fifteen dollars, but Bridges hadn’t paid him. He told them before lunch that he was going over to A-Dorm to get his money, and if he didn’t get paid, he was going to kill Dexter. He was a man of his word.
Being locked down since it happened, we haven’t heard the whole story yet, but it will all come out if they don’t lock up and ship out the dozens of witnesses in A-Dorm. Initial reports are that Dexter tried to run, got stabbed four times in the back, in the side, both shoulders, then several times in the front, including the coup de grace heart shot that killed him.
The incident caught them off guard here. After the local riot squad had to come in Sunday and Monday, a disturbance at the prison in Brevard, the next county south, required the locals from here to go down there yesterday to ransack and search, supposedly to restore order with a show of force. We had a skeleton crew on duty. Today they had to bring in additional troops to do the mopping up exercises, guards from other prisons, some a long distance away, leaving them shorthanded.
On the news, they say they need to build nineteen more prisons in the next five years to accommodate the burgeoning prison population. Who are they going to hire to staff them? They can barely staff the prisons that exist now, and then only through double shifts and overtime. It doesn’t make sense to me.
The high-ranking officials came into B-Dorm this morning to reassure the men that things would be back to normal soon. I talked to the colonel, and he authorized turning on the telephones, so we could call our families, and let them know we were safe. The TV news shows just said that a prisoner had been stabbed to death, prompting much worry among family members with loved ones in prison.
And things will probably be back to normal tomorrow, since this was a “BOB” crime, a “black-on-black” murder, no gang related activity that might lead to reprisals or racial incident, which undoubtedly provided relief for the worried guards. Had it not been a “BOB” crime, we could be locked down for days. As it is, it was a typical, run-of-the-mill homosexual stabbing, like so many others, that concern only those involved.
I remember Dexter coming out to the visiting park some weeks back, a stooped old woman hugging him. He nodded his head to me when he walked by, smiling, and I nodded back. It may not mean much to those in charge, but today, one poor mother’s heart is broken, and I feel sad.
Charlie
DEATH COMES EASY IN PRISON
Murder at Noon. If Garrison Keillor was writing this, he’d probably say, it’s been a rough week in Lake Wobegon, but he’s not, I am. Yesterday, Thursday, they had a particularly unappetizing lunch in the chow hall, so I stayed in my dorm. Next thing I know, there’s a commotion at the housing area to the west, A—Dorm, and “open dorm,” which is a warehouse-type space filled with about seventy-two prisoners and bunks on two separate sides. Close quarters.
I saw something I’ve never seen before—guards— “white shirts,” higher-ranking lieutenants, a captain, the colonel, it looked like, and several prisoners were all trying to carry a wounded prisoner to medical. They left the nurse with the wheelchair behind. It had to be bad for such exalted ranks to get bloody and jump in to help the guy.
It didn’t matter. Ten minutes later, Dexter Bridges was dead, seventeen stab wounds, one through his heart. The killer, Tim Howard, sat on a locker with the long, sharp piece of steel in his hand and waited. When the first guard approached him, he handed over the “shank,” and put his hands behind his back for the handcuffs. Last I saw of him was his back, shuffling slowly up the road to confinement. We won’t see him again.
The week started out badly on Saturday. When they opened the yard Saturday morning, two Latino gang members, one residing down the hall from my cell, hurried to the other end of the compound, entered “J” Dorm, another “open” dorm filled mostly with prisoners with bad medical problems, proceeded to a far corner, threw a blanket over a man, and beat the hell out of him before hurrying out. They were locked up shortly thereafter.
Sunday morning, I was very glad that my friend, Libby, got here early for visit. Only the first sixteen were admitted before they closed the yard, locked down the entire prison. No one came in or out for at least a couple of hours. The warden walked through the visiting area with a foot-long piece of sharpened steel sticking out his back pocket a little later.
When I finally left visiting around 2:30 PM and returned to “B” Dorm, everyone was locked in their cells. The halls were littered with trash. Uh oh. I knew what they meant—the guards had come through en masse and ransacked the cells. I hated to look when they unlocked my door to let me in. It was bad, locker dumped out, property scattered, legal papers tossed, clothes and canteen items jumbled. Very little missing, though. They were looking for knives and other weapons. Neither my cellmate nor I have any contraband. That doesn’t keep them from regularly ransacking everything I own.
Then they came in with industrial steel saws that looked like electric carving knives on steroids. They cut the heavy steel handles off the sides of the stand-up storage lockers. Ah ha! That’s where the foot-long shank came from—he broke off a locker handle and sharpened one end to a point somehow. We knew it wasn’t over.
Monday morning early they cut off the water. No toilets or drinking water. That’s a dead giveaway. They’re coming. So they did.
Cell-by-cell, step out, strip search, carry your clothes thataway, get examined for gang-related tattoos. Sorry, I don’t have any. I prefer to put my art on canvas. Some prisoners looked dipped in ink. The guards were busy writing.
Meanwhile, other guards ransacked the cells again, dumping out lockers, trashing legal papers and other property, a different crew from Sunday, shipped in from another prison, their riot squad. It was a mess.
Life in prison. The week before, they raised the canteen prices, doubled in many cases, including tobacco, which caused great problems in an already tense and poverty-filled society. Prisoners whose families sacrificed to send them money to buy sweets, drinks, food items, and toiletries were getting assaulted, and their canteen bags taken from them. The strong ones armed themselves. It got so bad, immediately, that a large cadre of prisoners who have nothing, no resources whatsoever, and no hustles, no ability to earn money, who survive by panhandling cigarettes, cups of coffee, and the occasional Ramen soup, found themselves cut off from even those meager means of sustenance. The ones who previously provided for them found themselves too strapped to share.
Tuesday, prison life seemed to return to normal. They picked up and shipped out a van load of Latino gang members, which was a drop in the bucket. Then Thursday came, and the slaughter took place.
When I came here to Tomoka, almost seven years ago, I met Dexter Bridges in A-Dorm. He was a small man with a shaved head, very polite, interested in only one thing, young, white homosexuals. Any time you saw him, you saw a white boy with him. I say, “boy,” but that’s relatively speaking in prison. “Boy” relates more to their status as passive homosexuals on the receiving end, rather than their ages. There are thirty, thirty-five, forty-year old “white boys” in prison, most aged beyond their years.
A prisoner in a neighboring cell said that Tim Howard, chain-gang nickname, “China Doll,” a very rough-looking man, had “rented out” his white boy to Bridges for fifteen dollars, but Bridges hadn’t paid him. He told them before lunch that he was going over to A-Dorm to get his money, and if he didn’t get paid, he was going to kill Dexter. He was a man of his word.
Being locked down since it happened, we haven’t heard the whole story yet, but it will all come out if they don’t lock up and ship out the dozens of witnesses in A-Dorm. Initial reports are that Dexter tried to run, got stabbed four times in the back, in the side, both shoulders, then several times in the front, including the coup de grace heart shot that killed him.
The incident caught them off guard here. After the local riot squad had to come in Sunday and Monday, a disturbance at the prison in Brevard, the next county south, required the locals from here to go down there yesterday to ransack and search, supposedly to restore order with a show of force. We had a skeleton crew on duty. Today they had to bring in additional troops to do the mopping up exercises, guards from other prisons, some a long distance away, leaving them shorthanded.
On the news, they say they need to build nineteen more prisons in the next five years to accommodate the burgeoning prison population. Who are they going to hire to staff them? They can barely staff the prisons that exist now, and then only through double shifts and overtime. It doesn’t make sense to me.
The high-ranking officials came into B-Dorm this morning to reassure the men that things would be back to normal soon. I talked to the colonel, and he authorized turning on the telephones, so we could call our families, and let them know we were safe. The TV news shows just said that a prisoner had been stabbed to death, prompting much worry among family members with loved ones in prison.
And things will probably be back to normal tomorrow, since this was a “BOB” crime, a “black-on-black” murder, no gang related activity that might lead to reprisals or racial incident, which undoubtedly provided relief for the worried guards. Had it not been a “BOB” crime, we could be locked down for days. As it is, it was a typical, run-of-the-mill homosexual stabbing, like so many others, that concern only those involved.
I remember Dexter coming out to the visiting park some weeks back, a stooped old woman hugging him. He nodded his head to me when he walked by, smiling, and I nodded back. It may not mean much to those in charge, but today, one poor mother’s heart is broken, and I feel sad.
Charlie
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
STATE ATTORNEY MARK OBER SUFFERING FROM DISEASE
Dateline: March 27, 2009
STATE ATTORNEY MARK OBER SUFFERING FROM DISEASE
(EXPOSURE TO SERIAL KILLER OSCAR RAY BOLIN TRIGGERS ILLNESS)
After spending months researching legal cases, I’m beginning to understand Hillsborough State Attorney Mark Ober better. He’s not such a bad fellow after all.
The Florida Supreme Court automatically reviews death penalty cases, and after reading so many of them, discovering all the horrors that the victims suffered, realizing the depths of evil some of these people have reached, I have suffered, too, and feel great compassion and empathy for the victims and their families. I’d heard about the “Jimmy Rice Act,” and why it came about, but I had no concept of what “heinous, atrocious, and cruel,” actually meant until I read the account of what the evil Chavez did to that little boy. It haunted me.
After researching serial killer, Oscar Ray Bolin’s, horrific crimes against Stephanie Collins, Teri Lynn Matthews, and Natalie Blanche Holley, and imagining what their families must have endured in trial after re-trial after appeal, over and over again, the facts of their cases made me physically ill. It just doesn’t seem possible that one human could commit such crimes against others, but, sadly, it happens all the time. Perhaps the answer is that Bolin is not human.
It now seems clear to me why Mark Ober is the way he is. I have gained insight into why he wrongfully prosecuted me for a murder I did not commit, let the actual killer go free with “immunity from prosecution for first degree murder,” why he coerced convicted felon state witnesses to perjure themselves, why he withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense, and why he has continued to make false, misleading, and malicious statements against me before the Florida Parole Commission and on Fox News.
Mark Ober has paid a high price for exposing himself to all the crimes in his career as an assistant state attorney, private defense attorney representing Bolin, the most notorious serial killer in Hillsborough County history, and now as the elected state attorney sending people to Florida’s Death Row.
Immersing himself in all that evil has infected Mark Ober with a serious disease, a mental illness, similar to“Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),” commonly associated with soldiers affected by the horrors of war, but also applicable to civilians, victims of crimes, police, fire, and rescue workers, and now, perhaps even prosecutors.
Mark Ober is sick, and he deserves our sympathy. The moral conflicts he must have suffered when he was torn by the decision to further his political career by trying so hard to free the monster, Oscar Ray Bolin, in exchange for months of free publicity and name recognition attendant with his efforts to save Bolin from the electric chair must have torn him up inside and warped his conscience.
Once you go so far across the no-man’s-land of moral turpitude, it’s virtually impossible to turn around and make your way back through the minefield of lost souls, even with your eyes wide open. It’s like becoming a cannibal—once you’ve fed on human flesh, any other acts you commit seem inconsequential and pale by comparison.
So, Mark Ober suffers from PTSD, and unless he gets some intensive psychiatric treatment and therapy for it, it will only get worse. I’ve seen many such cases in over thirty-one years of false imprisonment. Often they are prescribed so many psychotropic drugs that they become zombies.
Mark is trying to do it on his own, like going fishing in Tampa Bay for snook and redfish every chance he gets, going to Bucs football games and Yankees baseball games, but that isn’t enough. You know, he owns a Ruger .44 magnum pistol, and there is a history of suicide in the state attorney’s office. Mark’s predecessor, Hanging Harry Lee Coe, supposedly blew his brains out beneath the Crosstown Expressway during the 2000 election campaign (which Mark won by default). Lots of pressure, it seems he took the easy way out.
Don’t do it, Mark! Hang in there and get the help you need. In the meantime, you could come clean, confess your sins, and admit you’re sorry for the prosecutorial misconduct you committed against me. Show some remorse! It will make you feel a lot better.
Charlie
STATE ATTORNEY MARK OBER SUFFERING FROM DISEASE
(EXPOSURE TO SERIAL KILLER OSCAR RAY BOLIN TRIGGERS ILLNESS)
After spending months researching legal cases, I’m beginning to understand Hillsborough State Attorney Mark Ober better. He’s not such a bad fellow after all.
The Florida Supreme Court automatically reviews death penalty cases, and after reading so many of them, discovering all the horrors that the victims suffered, realizing the depths of evil some of these people have reached, I have suffered, too, and feel great compassion and empathy for the victims and their families. I’d heard about the “Jimmy Rice Act,” and why it came about, but I had no concept of what “heinous, atrocious, and cruel,” actually meant until I read the account of what the evil Chavez did to that little boy. It haunted me.
After researching serial killer, Oscar Ray Bolin’s, horrific crimes against Stephanie Collins, Teri Lynn Matthews, and Natalie Blanche Holley, and imagining what their families must have endured in trial after re-trial after appeal, over and over again, the facts of their cases made me physically ill. It just doesn’t seem possible that one human could commit such crimes against others, but, sadly, it happens all the time. Perhaps the answer is that Bolin is not human.
It now seems clear to me why Mark Ober is the way he is. I have gained insight into why he wrongfully prosecuted me for a murder I did not commit, let the actual killer go free with “immunity from prosecution for first degree murder,” why he coerced convicted felon state witnesses to perjure themselves, why he withheld exculpatory evidence from the defense, and why he has continued to make false, misleading, and malicious statements against me before the Florida Parole Commission and on Fox News.
Mark Ober has paid a high price for exposing himself to all the crimes in his career as an assistant state attorney, private defense attorney representing Bolin, the most notorious serial killer in Hillsborough County history, and now as the elected state attorney sending people to Florida’s Death Row.
Immersing himself in all that evil has infected Mark Ober with a serious disease, a mental illness, similar to“Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD),” commonly associated with soldiers affected by the horrors of war, but also applicable to civilians, victims of crimes, police, fire, and rescue workers, and now, perhaps even prosecutors.
Mark Ober is sick, and he deserves our sympathy. The moral conflicts he must have suffered when he was torn by the decision to further his political career by trying so hard to free the monster, Oscar Ray Bolin, in exchange for months of free publicity and name recognition attendant with his efforts to save Bolin from the electric chair must have torn him up inside and warped his conscience.
Once you go so far across the no-man’s-land of moral turpitude, it’s virtually impossible to turn around and make your way back through the minefield of lost souls, even with your eyes wide open. It’s like becoming a cannibal—once you’ve fed on human flesh, any other acts you commit seem inconsequential and pale by comparison.
So, Mark Ober suffers from PTSD, and unless he gets some intensive psychiatric treatment and therapy for it, it will only get worse. I’ve seen many such cases in over thirty-one years of false imprisonment. Often they are prescribed so many psychotropic drugs that they become zombies.
Mark is trying to do it on his own, like going fishing in Tampa Bay for snook and redfish every chance he gets, going to Bucs football games and Yankees baseball games, but that isn’t enough. You know, he owns a Ruger .44 magnum pistol, and there is a history of suicide in the state attorney’s office. Mark’s predecessor, Hanging Harry Lee Coe, supposedly blew his brains out beneath the Crosstown Expressway during the 2000 election campaign (which Mark won by default). Lots of pressure, it seems he took the easy way out.
Don’t do it, Mark! Hang in there and get the help you need. In the meantime, you could come clean, confess your sins, and admit you’re sorry for the prosecutorial misconduct you committed against me. Show some remorse! It will make you feel a lot better.
Charlie
Saturday, March 28, 2009
PLANTING SEEDS FROM PRISON TO THE WHITE HOUSE
Dateline: March 21, 2009
PLANTING SEEDS FROM PRISON TO THE WHITE HOUSE
By Charlie Norman
Last week I listened to a National Public Radio interview with Alice Waters (a person after my own heart) talking about her restaurant, Chez Panisse, organic gardening, healthy food, and her desire to see a vegetable garden at the White House. Now, today, March 21st, the national TV news shows are filled with the story of Michelle Obama (another person after my own heart) and a group of D.C. fifth graders starting a garden at the White House!
This is not a new invention. ABC News was kind enough to show newsreel clips of Eleanor Roosevelt inspiring millions of American families to plant Victory Gardens almost seventy years ago. What many people don’t know is that Mary Todd Lincoln used to walk out back and pick fresh vegetables every day when the South lawn was the White House vegetable garden during the Civil War.
As for myself, I’ve been planting gardens in prisons across Florida for over twenty-eight years, flowers, herbs, and vegetables, and teaching hundreds of prisoners how to beautify their environment and feed their families, too. I hope Michelle plants plenty of flowers alongside the fifty-five different vegetables they plan to grow, lessons I learned holding on to my grandmother’s skirt as a child in rural East Texas, toddling along beside her as she tended her backyard garden.
My grandfather, Bebaw, I called him, plowed and grew a potato field that provided us with a staple crop through the winter, but Memaw’s garden produced fresh vegetables every day for months, followed by canning Mason jars of the excess, which filled a pantry of plenty.
Memaw loved flowers and always had colorful blooms. Little did I know, until I was grown and read all the horticulture books, how important “companion planting” is to garden health, repelling harmful insects, and feeding one’s soul as well as one’s body.
I smile at the “new” emphasis on organic, pesticide-free gardening. My ancestors did it for centuries. It would never have occurred to Bebaw to spray poison on his plants. He’d take my Aunt Cherry (fourteen months younger) and me as small children to the potato patch, give us Mason jars, show us what potato bugs looked like, and set us to filling the jars with the bad bugs. We delighted in smacking each one between two rocks, the ultimate “pesticide-free” insect control.
My first garden I planted in a fallow field behind an old chicken coop. Little did I know that my small plot had been a former “chicken run,” highly-fertile from years of “deposits” of organic chicken manure. I was five years old, and even at that age, I liked to do things myself. I shadowed every move Memaw made in “her” garden, but I wanted “my garden.”
We fed Memaw’s flock of chickens (free range, organic eggs, the works) “chicken feed,” which was mostly cracked corn. I picked out a number of uncracked kernels for my garden. I loved corn. I knew nothing of vegetable varieties. Corn was corn. Of course, the “feed corn” raised for animals was much different from the sweet corn Memaw grew, but I’d learn that lesson later.
Memaw had a sack of dried pinto beans in a kitchen cabinet. I scooped a cupful to plant in my garden with the corn.
Weeks went by. The beans and corn grew and grew. No one ever went back behind that old chicken house but me. The corn grew tall, grew tassels on top, and green ears formed on the stalks. Neither did I know at the time that Native Americans had been growing corn and beans together for centuries. I did it by accident.
I didn’t plan on keeping my garden a secret, but every day I’d go back there alone, pull weeds, check for bugs, and admire the plants.
One day at lunch, Bebaw came in and asked my grandmother why she’d planted those rows of corn and beans behind the old chicken house. She didn’t know what he was talking about. Well, I didn’t plant it, he said. Who did? That’s the tallest corn I’ve ever seen. I grinned with pride at the praise.
I thought I might be in trouble when they both looked at me. I did it, I admitted. You did? Memaw and Bebaw were surprised. Where did you get the seeds? I told them. Bebaw smiled. He was pleased. The farming instinct carried over strongly to the next generation.
That was the first of many small gardens I grew growing up. We moved to Florida, and behind the utility shed, I planted a patch of turnips that my mother eyed suspiciously while she hung up wet laundry on the clothes line. When the young plants grew crowded, she told me that if we thinned them, pulled out some, the others would grow bigger, and we’d have enough for a pot of fresh greens.
I planted them so we could eat them. I didn’t really know how to thin them properly, so she did it. Memaw and Bebaw taught all their children how to tend their gardens. Where’s these turnip greens come from, my father asked that night at supper, as he took a second helping. He was a farm boy, too. Charlie grew them out back. Huh!
Burpee Seeds’ business is booming. In this economy it makes sense to spend $70 on seeds and harvest $600 in vegetables. You can do a lot better than that if you know how, take care germinating all the seeds, and saving fresh seeds from year-to-year. I learned that in prison.
I also learned and practiced “edible landscaping” and “camouflage gardening” techniques that work in prison as well as in “free society.”
It took me awhile at Raiford to get permission to have seeds sent in, but when I did, I ordered flowers and vegetables. I intermingled hot pepper plants among the marigolds and zinnias, and most people didn’t even know what they were. When the colorful peppers matured, most people couldn’t believe their eyes. There was enough for anyone to pick a few for themselves, and it certainly made a difference in the bland prison food, to chop up a jalapeno in the noodles and gravy.
I planted vegetables “out back,” and taught other prisoners the nutritional value of fresh radishes, squash, greens, carrots, onions, peppers, and tomatoes. We harvested many a fresh salad.
In some prisons I’ve been in over the past thirty-one years, my efforts were praised, and I was able to plant large, decorative flower beds and also vegetable plots, where I taught interested volunteer prisoners about composting, organic pest control, and other skills needed to plant their own gardens when they went home. Other times, when the people in charge were more negative, I practiced edible landscaping and camouflage gardening.
You’d be surprised at how decorative certain edible plants can be. Chives make a very attractive border. I once grew some beautiful collard plants in between a row of hibiscus shrubs. Chinese vegetables make beautiful, exotic specimens that most people don’t recognize as vegetables. Mizuna greens and komatsuna are very decorative, tasty, and vitamin-enriched.
In camouflage gardening, similar to “square-foot planting,” the vegetables are intermingled with flowers and herbs and often go unnoticed by those who bear any prison food crop ill will.
It never made any sense to me to have such huge expanses of lawns inside the fences that grounds crews spent days mowing each week when we could convert those wasted spaces into productive vegetable gardens that would not only save the taxpayers a lot of money and put the idle prisoners to work, but would provide a continual source of fresh vegetables to feed the prisoners.
I found from my own experiences and those of hundreds of other prisoners I’ve taught gardening to over all these years that growing flowers and vegetables changes people for the better. A psychologist at Raiford years ago studied prisoners who worked in horticulture and found their recidivism rate, how many returned to prison after release, was 11%, as opposed to over 60% of non-horticulture workers. There are multiple reasons I’m sure the experts can explain.
So why doesn’t the prison system catch on and jump on the bandwagon? Good question. It has to come from the top. If D.O.C. Secretary Walt McNeil had an Obama epiphany and decreed it to be, it would be. It makes dollars and sense in more ways than one.
In that same vein, along with Michelle Obama, if gardening works so well as an anti-crime tool for adults, certainly it should be a positive influence on children.
Last year, I put together a community garden proposal for at-risk children and their families in Jacksonville, converting unused city property, lots, or empty spaces as community gardens, mentored by private citizens, funded by donations and grants. It could change lives. “Project Green Grow,’ as I call it, would give underprivileged, at-risk children an opportunity to participate in a positive group activity that would not only improve their diets, but also provide an intervention that very well could keep many children from becoming drug addicts, criminals, and prisoners.
Perhaps Alice Waters and Michelle Obama can inspire millions by their examples. I’d settle for a few hundred to be saved from a life of crime and imprisonment by mine.
Charlie
PLANTING SEEDS FROM PRISON TO THE WHITE HOUSE
By Charlie Norman
Last week I listened to a National Public Radio interview with Alice Waters (a person after my own heart) talking about her restaurant, Chez Panisse, organic gardening, healthy food, and her desire to see a vegetable garden at the White House. Now, today, March 21st, the national TV news shows are filled with the story of Michelle Obama (another person after my own heart) and a group of D.C. fifth graders starting a garden at the White House!
This is not a new invention. ABC News was kind enough to show newsreel clips of Eleanor Roosevelt inspiring millions of American families to plant Victory Gardens almost seventy years ago. What many people don’t know is that Mary Todd Lincoln used to walk out back and pick fresh vegetables every day when the South lawn was the White House vegetable garden during the Civil War.
As for myself, I’ve been planting gardens in prisons across Florida for over twenty-eight years, flowers, herbs, and vegetables, and teaching hundreds of prisoners how to beautify their environment and feed their families, too. I hope Michelle plants plenty of flowers alongside the fifty-five different vegetables they plan to grow, lessons I learned holding on to my grandmother’s skirt as a child in rural East Texas, toddling along beside her as she tended her backyard garden.
My grandfather, Bebaw, I called him, plowed and grew a potato field that provided us with a staple crop through the winter, but Memaw’s garden produced fresh vegetables every day for months, followed by canning Mason jars of the excess, which filled a pantry of plenty.
Memaw loved flowers and always had colorful blooms. Little did I know, until I was grown and read all the horticulture books, how important “companion planting” is to garden health, repelling harmful insects, and feeding one’s soul as well as one’s body.
I smile at the “new” emphasis on organic, pesticide-free gardening. My ancestors did it for centuries. It would never have occurred to Bebaw to spray poison on his plants. He’d take my Aunt Cherry (fourteen months younger) and me as small children to the potato patch, give us Mason jars, show us what potato bugs looked like, and set us to filling the jars with the bad bugs. We delighted in smacking each one between two rocks, the ultimate “pesticide-free” insect control.
My first garden I planted in a fallow field behind an old chicken coop. Little did I know that my small plot had been a former “chicken run,” highly-fertile from years of “deposits” of organic chicken manure. I was five years old, and even at that age, I liked to do things myself. I shadowed every move Memaw made in “her” garden, but I wanted “my garden.”
We fed Memaw’s flock of chickens (free range, organic eggs, the works) “chicken feed,” which was mostly cracked corn. I picked out a number of uncracked kernels for my garden. I loved corn. I knew nothing of vegetable varieties. Corn was corn. Of course, the “feed corn” raised for animals was much different from the sweet corn Memaw grew, but I’d learn that lesson later.
Memaw had a sack of dried pinto beans in a kitchen cabinet. I scooped a cupful to plant in my garden with the corn.
Weeks went by. The beans and corn grew and grew. No one ever went back behind that old chicken house but me. The corn grew tall, grew tassels on top, and green ears formed on the stalks. Neither did I know at the time that Native Americans had been growing corn and beans together for centuries. I did it by accident.
I didn’t plan on keeping my garden a secret, but every day I’d go back there alone, pull weeds, check for bugs, and admire the plants.
One day at lunch, Bebaw came in and asked my grandmother why she’d planted those rows of corn and beans behind the old chicken house. She didn’t know what he was talking about. Well, I didn’t plant it, he said. Who did? That’s the tallest corn I’ve ever seen. I grinned with pride at the praise.
I thought I might be in trouble when they both looked at me. I did it, I admitted. You did? Memaw and Bebaw were surprised. Where did you get the seeds? I told them. Bebaw smiled. He was pleased. The farming instinct carried over strongly to the next generation.
That was the first of many small gardens I grew growing up. We moved to Florida, and behind the utility shed, I planted a patch of turnips that my mother eyed suspiciously while she hung up wet laundry on the clothes line. When the young plants grew crowded, she told me that if we thinned them, pulled out some, the others would grow bigger, and we’d have enough for a pot of fresh greens.
I planted them so we could eat them. I didn’t really know how to thin them properly, so she did it. Memaw and Bebaw taught all their children how to tend their gardens. Where’s these turnip greens come from, my father asked that night at supper, as he took a second helping. He was a farm boy, too. Charlie grew them out back. Huh!
Burpee Seeds’ business is booming. In this economy it makes sense to spend $70 on seeds and harvest $600 in vegetables. You can do a lot better than that if you know how, take care germinating all the seeds, and saving fresh seeds from year-to-year. I learned that in prison.
I also learned and practiced “edible landscaping” and “camouflage gardening” techniques that work in prison as well as in “free society.”
It took me awhile at Raiford to get permission to have seeds sent in, but when I did, I ordered flowers and vegetables. I intermingled hot pepper plants among the marigolds and zinnias, and most people didn’t even know what they were. When the colorful peppers matured, most people couldn’t believe their eyes. There was enough for anyone to pick a few for themselves, and it certainly made a difference in the bland prison food, to chop up a jalapeno in the noodles and gravy.
I planted vegetables “out back,” and taught other prisoners the nutritional value of fresh radishes, squash, greens, carrots, onions, peppers, and tomatoes. We harvested many a fresh salad.
In some prisons I’ve been in over the past thirty-one years, my efforts were praised, and I was able to plant large, decorative flower beds and also vegetable plots, where I taught interested volunteer prisoners about composting, organic pest control, and other skills needed to plant their own gardens when they went home. Other times, when the people in charge were more negative, I practiced edible landscaping and camouflage gardening.
You’d be surprised at how decorative certain edible plants can be. Chives make a very attractive border. I once grew some beautiful collard plants in between a row of hibiscus shrubs. Chinese vegetables make beautiful, exotic specimens that most people don’t recognize as vegetables. Mizuna greens and komatsuna are very decorative, tasty, and vitamin-enriched.
In camouflage gardening, similar to “square-foot planting,” the vegetables are intermingled with flowers and herbs and often go unnoticed by those who bear any prison food crop ill will.
It never made any sense to me to have such huge expanses of lawns inside the fences that grounds crews spent days mowing each week when we could convert those wasted spaces into productive vegetable gardens that would not only save the taxpayers a lot of money and put the idle prisoners to work, but would provide a continual source of fresh vegetables to feed the prisoners.
I found from my own experiences and those of hundreds of other prisoners I’ve taught gardening to over all these years that growing flowers and vegetables changes people for the better. A psychologist at Raiford years ago studied prisoners who worked in horticulture and found their recidivism rate, how many returned to prison after release, was 11%, as opposed to over 60% of non-horticulture workers. There are multiple reasons I’m sure the experts can explain.
So why doesn’t the prison system catch on and jump on the bandwagon? Good question. It has to come from the top. If D.O.C. Secretary Walt McNeil had an Obama epiphany and decreed it to be, it would be. It makes dollars and sense in more ways than one.
In that same vein, along with Michelle Obama, if gardening works so well as an anti-crime tool for adults, certainly it should be a positive influence on children.
Last year, I put together a community garden proposal for at-risk children and their families in Jacksonville, converting unused city property, lots, or empty spaces as community gardens, mentored by private citizens, funded by donations and grants. It could change lives. “Project Green Grow,’ as I call it, would give underprivileged, at-risk children an opportunity to participate in a positive group activity that would not only improve their diets, but also provide an intervention that very well could keep many children from becoming drug addicts, criminals, and prisoners.
Perhaps Alice Waters and Michelle Obama can inspire millions by their examples. I’d settle for a few hundred to be saved from a life of crime and imprisonment by mine.
Charlie
Saturday, March 14, 2009
WALKING ON THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA
Dateline 03/11/09
WALKING ON THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA
I wanted to take a break from the doom and gloom of corrupt prosecutors, serial killers, and wrongful imprisonment, to share another interest with you, poetry. In the darkness of my cell many thought of the past and future percolate into my consciousness. Some of the thoughts and feelings are best expressed as poems, and here’s one I’d like to get your opinion of:
WALKING ON THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA
A Poem by Charles Patrick Norman
Barefoot, I trudged along a dirt road,
Sun-warmed sand squinches ‘tween my toes,
Not dirt, so much as white beach sand
Unkempt grass and weeds separate the ruts
Worn down by pick up trucks and old cars
Carrying refuse and junk to the dump at the end.
Squiggles cross the road, S-curves of snake,
Perhaps a rattler, more likely a grass snake or coachwhip
Coming out of the brush on one side and into the other.
Bird tracks blur in the breeze, their paths betray
Their wanderings, seeking seeds, or an unwary grasshopper.
Smears of sand—something dragged from right to left,
Stopped, started, tracks on either side, a turtle,
It’s gone, but still I see it, eyes peering, sighing slowly
Everything is going somewhere but me and the dead tree.
Someone said this part of Florida was once covered
By the sea, no gulf, no Atlantic, just one big sea,
Thus the beach sand ‘tween my toes, I wonder how deep I am.
One other I’ll share, one I wrote the other night, of an image I’ve never been able to get out of my head:
AS THE CROW FLIES, FLIES
A Poem by Charles Patrick Norman
Cries from above, above, the cries draw my eyes to the sky, high
As the crow flies, flies, gray baby mockingbird cries, cries,
One half-feathered wing clamped determinedly in the crow’s beak,
One wing struggles to fly back to the nest, too weak to flee, futilely.
Mother bird flies, flies, dives, strokes the relentless crow again, again
Flapping, flapping, pushing air, the crow flies, black feather falls
Not enough, never enough, one small gray mother bird strikes another
Again, again, she tries, swoops, loops, dives, can’t leave her child
To be devoured, torn piece by piece, alive, beseeching, seeking
In a distant crows nest, mother bird feeding her babies, hers, hers.
Across the sky they fly, fly, the cries grow weaker, weaker,
Feathers flutter slowly, loop by loop, to the silent earth below
Where I stand mourning, weeping, gray sky empty, world sleeping
Living, dying, crying, flying, crows feed their children,
Remorseless.
Charlie
WALKING ON THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA
I wanted to take a break from the doom and gloom of corrupt prosecutors, serial killers, and wrongful imprisonment, to share another interest with you, poetry. In the darkness of my cell many thought of the past and future percolate into my consciousness. Some of the thoughts and feelings are best expressed as poems, and here’s one I’d like to get your opinion of:
WALKING ON THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA
A Poem by Charles Patrick Norman
Barefoot, I trudged along a dirt road,
Sun-warmed sand squinches ‘tween my toes,
Not dirt, so much as white beach sand
Unkempt grass and weeds separate the ruts
Worn down by pick up trucks and old cars
Carrying refuse and junk to the dump at the end.
Squiggles cross the road, S-curves of snake,
Perhaps a rattler, more likely a grass snake or coachwhip
Coming out of the brush on one side and into the other.
Bird tracks blur in the breeze, their paths betray
Their wanderings, seeking seeds, or an unwary grasshopper.
Smears of sand—something dragged from right to left,
Stopped, started, tracks on either side, a turtle,
It’s gone, but still I see it, eyes peering, sighing slowly
Everything is going somewhere but me and the dead tree.
Someone said this part of Florida was once covered
By the sea, no gulf, no Atlantic, just one big sea,
Thus the beach sand ‘tween my toes, I wonder how deep I am.
One other I’ll share, one I wrote the other night, of an image I’ve never been able to get out of my head:
AS THE CROW FLIES, FLIES
A Poem by Charles Patrick Norman
Cries from above, above, the cries draw my eyes to the sky, high
As the crow flies, flies, gray baby mockingbird cries, cries,
One half-feathered wing clamped determinedly in the crow’s beak,
One wing struggles to fly back to the nest, too weak to flee, futilely.
Mother bird flies, flies, dives, strokes the relentless crow again, again
Flapping, flapping, pushing air, the crow flies, black feather falls
Not enough, never enough, one small gray mother bird strikes another
Again, again, she tries, swoops, loops, dives, can’t leave her child
To be devoured, torn piece by piece, alive, beseeching, seeking
In a distant crows nest, mother bird feeding her babies, hers, hers.
Across the sky they fly, fly, the cries grow weaker, weaker,
Feathers flutter slowly, loop by loop, to the silent earth below
Where I stand mourning, weeping, gray sky empty, world sleeping
Living, dying, crying, flying, crows feed their children,
Remorseless.
Charlie
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