I didn’t worry about the coppers framing me in. I started it. It was their business to put me away if they could, and if they hadn’t played my game I would have beaten the case on them. It has always been a question with me where this framing and jobbing started; whether the defense originally began it and forced the prosecutor and police to do it in self-defense, or whether it was the other way around. I never could find the answer; long ago I gave it up and filed it away with that other old question about the hen and the egg.
My attorney knew his business. He held me in the county jail till my last dollar was gone, and I refused to “write for more money” as he suggested. When I was leaving for Folsom he showed up at the jail and asked me for my watch, the only thing of value I had left.
“You won’t have any use for it up there,” he said. “Give it to me and I’ll get you a job in the warden’s where you’ll get something to eat.”
I told him to go plumb to hell.
I went to prison without any plans for the future. With good conduct I would have to do five years and four months and there was no use trying to look that far ahead. Two other prisoners arrived the morning I did, and the three of us were taken out to the office to have our prison biographies written—name, age, birthplace, occupation, etc. We were then photographed, measured, and weighed, and turned over to the captain to be assigned to work.
Richard Murphy (“Dirty Dick” the “cons” called him) was captain at that time. He had worked his way up from the guard line by cunning and brutality. He believed in “throwing the fear of God” into a prisoner the minute he arrived, by browbeating and bullying him, and every man went out of his office hating him. It’s more than twenty years since I left Folsom, but I can still see Dirty Dick’s short, squat figure on the flagstones in front of his filthy office. I can still see his pop-eyes and pasty face, his frog belly, his knock knees, and his flat feet.
I was the first to be questioned. “Where are you from?” he asked.
“San Francisco,” I replied.
“How long did you do in San Quentin?”
“Never was in San Quentin.”