Word: wardens
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WHEN JOHN WHITLEY WANDERS INTO the courtyard of Camp H, he is not just any visitor. He is the warden. The Man. Yet his presence stirs hardly a ripple. He inspects a flower bed, points to some asbestos dangling from a pipe. Mostly he just loiters, signaling that he is open for business. Slowly, as if they have all the time in the world (which, of course, many of them do), half a dozen inmates drift his way. One complains about missing laundry; another asks that recreational time be extended. All are polite, but none display the eagerness of someone...
...impartial, considerate. In a closed society where everyone constantly scrutinizes everyone else, he merits the highest compliment: he is straight up. "With Whitley, what you see is what you get," says veteran inmate Wilbert Rideau, who edits the prison's hard- hitting magazine, the Angolite. "He's the best warden we've ever had." Whitley earns praise even from those who know he may preside over their execution. "The warden's pretty cool people," says Curtis Kyles, one of 35 inmates on death row. "He sees people as individuals, not throwaways...
...that date, Whitley presided over Louisiana's final execution by electric chair. Later the same day, orders reached the prison metal shop to construct the gurney that would henceforth be used for lethal injections. Two inmate welders balked; then 375 convicts joined their "work buck." Confronted by every warden's worst nightmare -- a prisoner rebellion -- Whitley did the unthinkable: he backed down. He publicly called the idea a bad one and said a private contractor would build the table instead. "He admitted he was wrong," says lifer Patrick DeVille. "Wardens just don't do that...
DeNiro plays Harry Fabian, an ambulance chaser (a.k.a. personal injury lawyer) who wants to be somebody. He decides to bring back the good old days of boxing with the help of Al Grossman (Jack Warden), a retired prizefighter prone to coronary failure...
...into New York's moribund boxing game looks like a step up to him. His half-baked idea is to revive club fighting, which once kept half a dozen small arenas in the city busy. To help promote the plan he recruits a retired boxer named Al Grossman (Jack Warden, in a canny, counterpunching performance). This brings him into conflict with Al's brother Boom Boom (Alan King), a man of deadly self-importance, who also happens to be kingpin of what's left of the fight racket...