Word: abbotts
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...author of those words, Jack Henry Abbott, 37, had practiced that lethal sidestep on a fellow inmate while doing time in Utah state prison. He described the art of murder in one of some 1,000 letters that he wrote to Author Norman Mailer between 1977 and 1980, providing a cool but furious description of life behind bars. It was an existence filled with violence: the violence done to Abbott in roach-infested solitary-confinement cells and the violence that Abbott, long a prison incorrigible, did to others. His was a voice so choked with rage that he admitted...
...Abbott began his correspondence with Mailer after reading that he was at work on a book about Gary Gilmore, a Utah inmate who was executed for murder in 1977. Abbott, who had spent all but 9½ months of his adult life in prison, offered to give the author a sense of "the atmospheric pressure" endured by long-term convicts like Gilmore. Mailer accepted the offer and was stunned by the hard-edged eloquence of the self-educated Abbott, who boasted: "Nine-tenths of my vocabulary I have never heard spoken." Wrote Mailer: "I felt all the awe one knows...
...Abbott arrived in New York on June 5 with something "only one in a million convicts ever get," as Ed Henson of the federal Bureau of Prisons put it. Not only was Abbott suddenly free-a condition he had once likened to "a free man's dreams of heaven"-he was also a celebrity, invited to literary parties and interviewed on Good Morning America. His work would be hailed in the New York Times Book Review as an "awesome, brilliant, perversely ingenuous . . . articulation of penal nightmare." Says Henson: "He had everything a man needs to start a life outside...
...Abbott was staying at a Salvation Army halfway house in Lower Manhattan until his parole became official on Aug. 25. He was required to check in seven times a day, but otherwise was free to enjoy the city. He was doing just that on early Saturday morning, July 18, in the company of two attractive, well-educated young women he had met at a party. At 5:30 they stopped at the Bini-Bon Restaurant near the halfway house; it is a threadbare bohemian place, open 24 hours. Behind the counter was Richard Adan, 22, an aspiring actor and playwright...
...Mailer notes, Abbott's trials are far from over. His gift for survival now faces its newest and hardest test. He has been paroled to freedom for the first time in 25 years. -By J.D. Reed