But Noll spent little time thinking about the Malcos. He was convinced they would never find him, and even if they did he would be ready. His alias, one chosen by the prison officials, was Lou Palmer, and if anyone succeeded in finding his bogus file they would learn that he was serving a twenty-year sentence for selling drugs around Jackson.
In his five years at Parchman, Noll had solidified his membership in an Aryan gang and was a rising lieutenant. It took only two fistfights to catch the attention of the gang leaders, and he survived the initiation with little effort. Not surprisingly, organized crime suited him well; he’d never really known anything else. The gangs were divided by color—blacks, browns, and whites—and survival often depended on who was watching your back. Violence simmered just under the surface, but outright warfare was frowned upon. If the guards were forced to pull out their shotguns, the punishments were severe.
So Nevin Noll washed dishes for five dollars a day, and when the cooks weren’t watching he stole potatoes and flour which he funneled to a distillery run by his gang. The home-brewed vodka was quite popular around the camp and provided income and protection for the gang. Noll figured out a way to traffic the stuff to other camps by bribing the trustees and guards who drove the vans and trucks. He also set up a pot-smuggling route by using contacts on the Coast who mailed the drugs in packages to a post office in Clarksdale, an hour away. A guard retrieved them and sneaked them into Unit 18.
Noll at first had no interest in the sex trade and was startled at how vibrant it was. Since the age of twenty, he’d had unlimited access to loose women and had never been exposed to sex among men. Always enterprising, though, he saw opportunity and established a brothel in a restroom of an old gymnasium that was now used as a print shop. He controlled it with strict rules and kept the guards away with bribes of hard cash and fruit-flavored vodka.
Bingo was popular, and before long Noll had restructured the game and offered small jackpots of pot and junk food stolen from a central warehouse.
In short, after a couple years at Parchman he was doing the same things he’d always done in Biloxi. After five years, though, he was ready for a change of scenery.
His goal had never been to take over a gang. Nor was it to make profits. From the day he arrived at Parchman he had been planning his escape. He had no intention of serving thirty years. Long before he could ever think about parole, he planned to be hiding in South America and living the good life.
He watched everything: every vehicle that entered and left the camp; every changing shift of the guards; every visitor who came and went; every inmate that was assigned to the camp and everyone who left. After a few months in prison, the men slowly became institutionalized. They fell into line without complaint because complaining only made their lives worse. They followed the rules and the schedules made by the officials. They ate the food, did their menial jobs, took their breaks, cleaned their cells, and tried to survive each day because tomorrow was another step closer to parole. Almost all of them stopped waiting, noticing, counting, plotting, wondering, and scheming.
Not Nevin Noll. After three years of careful scrutiny, he made the important decision of selecting Sammy Shaw as his running mate. Shaw was a black guy from a tough Memphis neighborhood who’d been caught smuggling drugs and pled guilty to forty years. He, too, had no plans to hang around that long. He was savvy, tough, observant, and his street smarts were second to none.
Noll and Shaw shook hands and began making plans. A prison that sprawled over 18,000 acres was impossible to guard. Its borders were porous. The traffic in and out was barely noticed.
Parchman had a long and colorful history of escapes. Nevin Noll was biding his time. Watching, always watching.
Chapter 55
On January 5, 1984, Keith Rudy was sworn in as Mississippi’s thirty-seventh attorney general. It was a quiet ceremony in the supreme court chambers with the chief justice doing the honors. Ainsley and their two daughters, Colette and Eliza, stood proudly beside Keith. Agnes, Laura, Beverly, Tim, and other relatives watched from the front row. The Pettigrew brothers, Egan Clement, Rex Dubisson, and a dozen close friends from law school clapped politely after he took the oath, then waited for their chance to be photographed with the new AG.