Monday, December 18, 2023

My Criminal Memoir, Part Twenty-Four. Jail, and Killers. Louis Shalako.

The three killers, ladies and gentlemen...







Louis Shalako



Jail, and killers. It was in 2003 when I found myself in jail, for the first and only time in my life.

As one might imagine, the experience was extremely educational.

A bit of background. I had bought my Great Aunt’s house in the south end. She was in an old age home, and my Aunt Sharon suggested I put in an offer. My mother encouraged me as well.

The house wasn’t even on the market, but she’d been in the old age home for over a year, and it was clear she wasn’t getting out—she wasn’t coming home, ever again. I hadn’t been there three weeks when I knew there was a problem. The neighbour was already showing his true colours. The one guy on my right side was the instigator, and the guy who lived to my left was his work buddy, in fact an employee. I was on disability. Unfortunately for me, I could still walk, I could still talk. Quite frankly, it was too bad I didn’t die, it would have made things a lot easier for everybody else.

The problem was pain, ladies and gentlemen. I’d fallen through a scaffolding, May 4, 1989, working on a building in Hamilton, Ontario. Some guys had been asked to clear a bunch of stuff off the roof. Like the dangerous fools that they were, they yelled to look out down below, and proceeded to throw all these scaffolding frames and cedar planks off of the top of a six-story building. As one might imagine, they were fired on the same afternoon. The construction company, what with being a bunch of cheap pricks and all, kept the planks, and one of them split as I was walking across it. This is where I failed to fall to my death, ladies and gentlemen.

There were a few brothers. The one guy who did not get fired was Mike, who was not there that day. Mike was in court that day. Mike was out on bail, on a homicide beef, this guy had a wife and a kid living downtown. I heard later he was convicted, after all these years, he is probably out by now…

There I was, living on a $930.00 per month Ontario Disability Support Program pension, and I’ve just bought a house, and the fucking neighbour didn’t like it—

That is all I can figure there, it makes as much sense as any other explanation.

I lasted four years, with intermittent but persistent harassment from more than one neighbour. When I moved in, I weighed two hundred and ten, two hundred and fifteen pounds. When I moved out, I weighed one hundred seventy-eight pounds…I was riding my bike back and forth to the food bank, I was visiting my old man, now retired, mostly for the purpose of watching his TV, drinking his tea and coffee, and yes, bumming his smokes.

When I went home, he’d let me take a few slices of bread, all buttered up with margarine and a tin of soup or something, a handful of tea bags…a half a dozen cigarettes.

Over the course of those four years, people would bang their fists on the side of my house when coming and going. People followed me around, more than once. On one occasion, driving my dad home from a place uptown, after he’d had one too many drinks, a familiar vehicle came up behind. Recognizing me somehow in the darkness, they proceeded to make mock ramming attacks at the back end, and when a Sarnia cop accidentally observed this behaviour, she pulled me over—not them.

“And what did you do to provoke them, Mister Shalako.” What a stinking whore, ladies and gentlemen.

I’m convinced, only the presence of my old man asleep on the passenger seat saved me from a quick and dirty little roadside execution, and yes, that sounds an awful lot like paranoia.

Some little prick put toast in my mailbox. They put toast in the front and back screen doors, they put toast on every window ledge. What message were you trying to send?

I’m toast? You’re going to burn my house down while I’m sleeping some night?

But that’s what I was up against.

"Who made this diagnosis...???"

When I complained to the police about the neighbour’s harassment, they took me to the loonie bin for three days of observation.

When I wrote letters to the editor complaining about criminal harassment, they were never published, and in the end, the cops came around and took me to the loonie bin again…admittedly I was terribly depressed by this time, but even so.

And when my goofy little neighbour accused me of criminal harassment, the cops promptly arrested me and tossed me in the bucket. I was accused of taking his photograph while him and the other neighbour were illegally dumping behind a local department store, where I had pulled in to answer a call—from my mother, who had given me a cheap flip-type cell-phone, in the rather forlorn hopes that I wouldn’t feel so isolated, so vulnerable to these creeps. Who was I going to call?

Certainly not the Sarnia police, that is for sure, ladies and gentlemen.

That was a quick road to hell, in my experience.

Just for the record. Yes, Willy and Squiggly, and Buddy Two-Shoes and Zoomer were in and out of my house. McNuggets offered to set up a grow-op, and was seriously disappointed when I said no. I said no, ladies and gentlemen. I wasn’t willing to risk my fucking house and my fucking pension over it—and social services fraud is a serious offence. That was my thinking, of course guys like that didn’t understand it. They’re guys with nothing to lose.

I still thought I did have something to lose.

I guess maybe I still had a lot to lose.

I had gotten so hungry, so desperate, that I started working for my brother, two hours here, four hours there…I had some hopes that this would get the creepy neighbours off my back, naturally they just assumed it was all more criminal stuff, or something. Like when I scraped up every nickel and every dime, after six or eight months of ten bucks an hour, and bought myself a little General Motors S-15, a club-cab, V-6 little pickup truck.

When I asked the ODSP for the proper forms to report income as a business, they started in and I endured two and a half years of bureaucratic harassment from them…

It just went on, and on, and on. They didn’t want to give me the proper forms, they wanted me to use the little thingy that comes in the mail, where there is no provision to claim allowable deductions for things like mileage, tools, work clothes. In my mind, all of this shit was somehow related, but of course there was no way in hell to prove it, and no one else was ever going to investigate it.

Letters to the editor ain't going to help you. Left, the county bucket, right, the courthouse.

You can write letters to the editor all day long, no one cares.

So. In documents submitted to the court by Sarnia Police, it was stated that I was ‘paranoid and delusional, dangerous and out of control, and an unexploded bomb waiting for a chance to happen’. In other words, just plain bullshit, and yet it does have a way of taking away all credibility, any realistic hope for defense against a charge that was already pretty bogus to begin with.

The judge asked who had made this diagnosis.

I yelled, “My fucking neighbour, that’s who—”

And they all laughed, and the court moved on…

It cost me a couple of grand in legal fees. I sold my house and moved back in with my old man. During the nine months I was out on bail, I suffered anxiety attacks, real bad ones, which I had never suffered before, and I have never suffered since. I was afraid to go anywhere alone, for fear of running into Mr. K, my name for this fucking goof, and having him make a hurried phone call to the Sarnia cops and I just felt so defenseless.

Truth is, he didn’t even have to see me around—but luckily, he didn’t have the nerve just to make something up, which would have worked well enough at this point. His worry there would be that I might be sitting around a dinner table, with a bunch of people the cops couldn’t marginalize, and then his own bullshit story would have begun to unravel.

Hell, even the cops aren’t that stupid. Seriously, they might have caught on. In about a million years.

Otherwise, I would have been back behind bars in a heartbeat. I have no illusions about this piece of human filth having any kind of a conscience. I know better than that, and that goes for the cops, the courts and the social workers as well. Even my so-called psychiatrists weren’t even half the man I was, and quite frankly, there was no hope they would ever become so. If that sounds like sour grapes, well. Why not? What else did you expect?

You still expect me to like you, after all of this bullshit. It’s just like that scene in Catch-22…yeah, you’re just trying, ever so hard, to help me.

Just a crummy little truck. It was all held against me, of course.

I had no rights at all, and that is especially true once the cops have transported you to the loonie bin once or twice. Talk about insidious. Trust me, those guys really know what they’re doing when they set out to destroy, absolutely destroy someone…

So, the police take you out of their holding cell, and take you to the county bucket. You are processed, where I was inspired enough to mention the word ‘suicide’, and why not?

I was pretty depressed by this point, and they stuck me in the hospital wing of four cells.

It was later that evening when they brought in Nick. Nick and two of his brothers had beaten a man to death in the south end of this city over some kind of a drug debt.

He was in the cell to my right…he was tall, well-built, long dark hair, and a warrior in some sense. These guys have never recognized the Crown. Can’t say as I blame them, on some level…

Three days later, it’s time for a bail hearing. They take you through a tunnel over to the court house, and into a holding cell with six or seven males in there…there’s a red-haired, blue-eyed guy, not all that unusual for a native guy, and this is another one of the brothers—he’s eyeballing me, sitting there on a bench, and he’s walking up and down the cell. Not a happy man, right. I had run into another guy that I actually knew, and we just kept talking to each other.

We’re trying to ignore this creep, who has some kind of burr under his saddle, and this is when the guards bring in the third brother. This guy is clearly native, Ojibwe, and he’s huge. Maybe not as tall as me, but holy, fuck, he’s three feet wide across the shoulders, he’s got legs like tree trunks, his chest gives the impression of being a foot and a half deep, front to back—you do not want to tangle with that guy. This is the third brother, all of them held in custody at various institutions, depending on where and when they were picked up. Let’s say one brother goes to trial first. Realizing he’s sunk, he cops a plea to a lesser charge, and off he goes to jail. The second brother comes to trial, and realizing he’s sunk, he also pleads to a lesser charge. This may sound pretty hard on the third brother, as they were all involved…and yet, they are also the only ones who know what really happened out there that night. Their lawyers may have talked back and forth, and while they were brothers, self-interest will also play a role. It always does—

So now, you’re in a holding cell with three killers.

Hiyee. Welcome to my court, where all are equal under the law.

With a good lawyer, I made bail. So did Gibby, my new buddy, and holy fuck, the next nine months were pretty bad. I sold my house, paid off my aunt, and ended up with $27,000.00 in my pocket, which wasn’t much consolation. All that really did was to drive the ignorant bitches downtown at the ODSP into a real frenzy of applied cruelty and quite frankly, these days I don’t talk to the fucking social workers any more than I have to.

I don’t have any good reason to talk to the cops. Maybe if I saw a house on fire, or a terrible accident, but it would have to be a good reason.

The last time I called the cops, I got nothing but shit out of it—we had a problem child in the building, a guy who pounded on things endlessly, and yet they never seemed to do much about it. Even the landlord didn’t do much about it. Fuck, I saw a vacant unit in the building and moved out from under the guy, and that is just the facts.

I did call the cops once, more recently—I would have preferred not to give my name, but with the modern cell-phone, you don’t have much choice if you do decide to call. Some guy, all addled up on strong dope and probably not taking his anti-psychotic meds was having some kind of an episode and I sort of felt I had no choice. I called it in, and pulled out of my parking spot, and got the hell out of there—if the cops are going to shoot some fucker in a bank lobby, at least it isn’t going to be me, ladies and gentlemen.

Owning a home was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for me, and I will never get a chance to own a home again. Basically, this individual and I entered into a ‘bond at common law’, a so-called peace bond. The charge was withdrawn, and that was it, everyone was happy but me.

Like I said—it was all very educational.

As for having a little money, all you can do is ‘spend it down’ as best you can, all the while remembering that the ODSP can hit you with an ‘overpayment’, in which case, now you owe them a substantial sum of money, and in the end, you realize that the whole system is stacked against you.

After all of this, I went into the worst depression of my life. It went on for about a year and a half…the first thought I had upon waking up was I have to kill myself. The last thought that went through my head when I went to bed at night was I have to kill myself.

That is one hell of a way to live, ladies and gentlemen. If suicide, or attempted suicide, or threats of suicide are redirected aggression, and it probably is—yes, ladies and gentlemen, I really wanted to kill that little piece of shit, and one or two Sarnia cops as well. I had fantasies of driving my vehicle up the steps and into the front lobby of Sarnia Police Services, and make them kill me—suicide by cop, as it is called.

I have no idea, some years later, of how I managed to get real again. At some point it was over, and I could live again. I could breathe again…

Want to know something funny? I have no criminal record. For one thing, I wasn’t going to knuckle under to the likes of them, and secondly, my good name means a lot to me.

Take it or leave it.

It is what it is.

Going back to the quote at the end of the previous chapter, whether that’s accurate or not, I really can’t say. However, I have, absolutely for sure, rubbed shoulders with four genuine killers in my lifetime. That’s more than enough for me, thank you very much.

I guess I've rubbed shoulders with a few malignant little assholes as well.

 

END

 

Louis has books and stories available from Amazon.

See his art on Fine Art America.

Check out One Million Words of Crap, an audio essay on independent, digital publishing, in celebration of fourteen years here at Long Cool One Books.

 

My Criminal Memoir. (Part One).

My Criminal Memoir, Part Two.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Three.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Four.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Five.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Six.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Seven.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Eight.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Nine.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Ten.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Eleven.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Twelve. (Access restricted due to content. 18+)

My Criminal Memoir, Part Thirteen.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Fourteen.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Fifteen.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Sixteen.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Seventeen.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Eighteen.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Nineteen. 

My Criminal Memoir, Part Twenty.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Twenty-One

My Criminal Memoir, Part Twenty-Two.

My Criminal Memoir, Part Twenty-Three. 


Thank you for reading, and listening.


 


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