Born to Lose by James G. Hollock Page A

huge cell blocks, administration buildings, and on-site homes, together with seven hundred acres of workable farmland, the place consumed all the western outskirts of little Hoboken, the early name for the present-day borough of Blawnox. Every few decades, the workhouse was expanded. By the 1930s, it could hold fifteen hundred prisoners, with sentences ranging from thirty days to thirty years, accepting convicts from Pennsylvania’s western thirty-two counties.
    For a century, prisoners had been brought to the county workhouse by the noon train from Pittsburgh. The men were handcuffed and always sat in the front seats of the “Smoker,” the first car of the train. Some inmates regarded doing time at the workhouse as easy, even healthful, since it obliged many to become sober for the first time in months. Inmates whose offenses were nonviolent were judged to be suitable for farm work—cultivating the fields, gardens, and orchards or tending the pigs, hogs, horses, or the milking herd. There was even a creamery, where butter was made twice a week.
    The inmates always included a good number of ordinary drunks, who’d “drink everything, even bay rum”; these “bay rummers” (in the prison lingo) were regarded as a group distinct from men imprisoned for serious crimes like assault and worse, who were known as the “convicts.” It was the sobered, nonviolent bay rummers who were allowed to work in the fields or the barns, outside the great walls. The convicts were kept inside, making shoes, barrels, brooms, or rugs.
    To the relief of Warden Robinson, about three hundred inmates were transferred from the county jail to the county workhouse on July 29, 1969. Along with the rest of the new receptions at the workhouse, Hoss was fingerprinted, photographed, issued prison blues—an uncomfortable, thick, part-wool shirt, and pants with only a single pocket in front—and assigned a cell on the fourth- or top-tier O and P ranges of the West Block. This block, the longest in the United States with sixty-two cells straight, could alone house five hundred men, although many of the cells were empty in these summer months.
    After only two days of settling in, Hoss, clearly no bay rummer, was assigned work in the textile shop. The shop’s supervisor, fifty-one-year-old Frank Petika, frowned when he saw Hoss come into his shop. He knew Hoss from a previous lockup and, frankly, didn’t care for him.
    â€œMr.Petika, I see you still got your cushy job makin’ us cons sweat blood,” was Hoss’s unsmiling greeting. Petika didn’t know if Hoss was joking or not, but the jibe displayed the typical proclivity among criminals to assume that everyone else has it better than they do.
    Frank Petika himself had grown up the hard way. After eighth grade, at age fifteen, his father had said it was time for young Frank to go to work. The coal mines were really the only thing open to boys in his poor circumstances, but it was 1933 and any employment was a godsend. Only after twenty-five years “in the ground” did Petika make it out of the mines to begin a second career at the workhouse.
    Knowing it was wasted breath enlightening criminals, Petika replied, “Yep, Hoss, love my job, and I get to rub elbows with the likes of you.” Petika assigned Hoss to the same rug-making loom he’d been on before.
    Later on, Petika told his good friend George Suchevich, a guard who often patrolled the textile shop, that Hoss was back. Suchevich shook his head. He felt the same as Petika: Hoss was a man you’d better watch.
    Trouble came sooner than expected. “I had Hoss transferred out of my textile shop after just two weeks,” Petika remembered.
    He didn’t do any one single thing to cause this, you know, a fight or having a weapon, but he’d play havoc with the other inmates. The workhouse was around three to one colored to white, and that was about the makeup