Running Pasta for the Mob is a remembrance by Jack Rusher, published here Friday, November 08, 2002. It is part of Memories.
Smuggling food into prison.
Mine was a troubled youth. My parents were, at various times, bank robbers, counterfeiters, drug manufacturers and pornographers who had little patience for the conventional family experience.
My first memories of my father are of us sitting together in the visiting room of Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary. We, that is my mother and I, lived in the tiny city of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, which was populated by farmers, families of inmates, families of guards and a small liberal arts college called Bucknell.
We visited my father every day we could, which was usually six days a week. My mother was dedicated, working night shifts at a local restaurant to support this lifestyle. The house was a sort of hippy commune arrangement, inhabited by four women, one little boy, two dogs and a goat.
My father got a job on a prison work crew that operated in the woods outside the prison. He would get some friends to cover for him, duck out of the group and jog four miles down the freight railway to meet us for lunch every Wednesday. I’d play in the woods around the car while they smoked marijuana and performed conjugal acts in the back of the car.
The arrangement eventually turned into a smuggling operation whereby we would travel as far afield as Harrisburg to purchase fine speciality foods for the Italian mobsters at Lewisburg, all of whom were housed on J Block. He would stuff sausages and pasta under his clothes and carry them back into the prison; the illicit contraband of a decent meal.
Time went by and we grew bolder, my father coming home for hours in the afternoon. The prison officials were aware that something was amiss, but they couldn’t work out the details. A spy was introduced, he gained my father’s confidence and convinced us to carry him to his girlfriend in town. The police were waiting when we got home.
The court battle was the sort we’d grown to expect, with my father defending himself via energetic use of the prison law library. The judge finally found in our favor, saying that we had been entrapped by the spy. My father returned to the general prison population to serve out the remaining months of his sentence. The guards joked with us that there must be many innocent people in that prison if he wasn’t guilty of escape even though he was captured in our front garden.