The Ballad of Salah Mohammed
he was pretty decent at soccer
Salah, you know, he was good. Framed and entrapped by the feds, untaxed cigarettes, and crack. The plug was an ATF informant who took $700,000 and told Salah he wouldn’t get it all back in cigarettes. It was supposed to be a terrorism case, but when Salah wasn’t a terrorist they, in essence, planted crack on him so they could give him a lot of time. The crack law was still in effect: 100 to one on the weight, per the cocaine guidelines, which entered into the sentence calculation. The feds gave him 20 years.
But they were too late. He was a star already. He jumped out the window when they sent the goons to arrest him, and he’d have maybe gotten away except he broke his legs on the landing. He fully recovered. He was low-key a tough guy, though diminutive in stature, and he could ball a little into the bargain. His shot wasn’t as strong as, say, that of a Bustos or a Carranza or a Godoy, but he was accurate. He could kick it strong enough to kick a corner, and he would put it on the money. He could score from the corner. He could put spin on the ball. He could move with the ball, too; trap, chop, hook, pass, whatever. He had technique. He played all the time, every weekend—even during Ramadan he played while fasting. The crack law was repealed in 2010. Salah got time back. He still had more than ten to go. Which was why he was at a low instead of a minimum. When he got below ten, he could go to the minimum: ‘the camp’, it was called. At the camp there was no fence. But it was far from home.
Home was in Yemen. Salah Mohammed was a naturalized U.S. citizen, but he was born in Yemen. His family was in Yemen. His family owned the only five-star hotel in Sanaa. Salah had owned and operated a convenience store in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Money went back and forth sometimes. That didn’t make anybody a terrorist. The informant had kept asking about guns and explosives. Salah said he didn’t know anything about them or about how to get them. He said his family was only in the hotel business.
While he was down, his brother took care of him from the outside. Salah didn’t want money. He didn’t have to work. He could pay for a no-show job. He chilled. He went to the commissary once a month, to Jumu’ah once a week. Saturdays and Sundays were soccer days, weather permitting. He went, in part out of a sense of responsibility. You had to hold the field down. The soccer pitch was the left field and the center field of the outfield of the softball field. You had the frisbee football guys out in right field and they were always trying to expand. If enough guys didn’t show up for a game enough times then pretty soon you lost control of centerfield, and you might never get it back.
And then it didn’t matter anymore. It took a while, but Salah finally got his two point reduction when they agreed to that in the second Obama administration. The two point reduction was across the board for non-violent drug offenders. It put Salah under ten years from the door. All of a sudden he was camp eligible, and his transfer was a foregone conclusion. Salah, on paper, was a model inmate. He had been down the better part of a decade, in which time he had zero incident reports. He was quickly designated to the camp at Fort Lee, Virginia, where he had a decision to make.
Salah had a wife. Salah had two wives, to be exact. He had children. None of them resided in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Not since Salah went away. They were living in Yemen. Yemen was in a state of war. Yemen was being bombed and starved by Saudis and Americans, whilst being occupied by Emiratis. Salah’s family was sleeping outdoors in the hillsides on the outskirts of Sanaa, to be far from any targets. They didn’t want a roof over their heads; not a roof to crush them in their sleep. Salah wasn’t at the camp long before he walked away. He had met people in the prison system. Those people knew people, who, in turn, knew yet more people. Money, remember, wasn’t an issue. He walked away from the camp and proceeded directly to a private jet and flew to Mexico. Take from that what you will.
He made the news and everything. Back at our low-security prison, everybody was talking about it at the weight pile by lunch time. Roy was out there talking about it. Roy used to lift with Salah before Salah went to the camp. Roy was an English guy, kind of a legend truth be told, who’d gotten busted with a metric ton of cocaine on a private jet whilst dressed as a flight attendant. He had actually tried to hit them with a “I’m just the flight attendant”. The feds had really fucked Roy, as a matter of fact. Roy hadn’t had anything to do with the United States to avoid exactly these kinds of situations. But an informant in the DR had set him up, switched the aircraft on him, put him in one with a US tail number for jurisdiction, they’d said, and suddenly Roy was doing 17 years. Roy had done a lot of business with jets on the outside. Naturally Special Investigations wanted a word with him. They’d called him up to the lieutenant’s office. They wanted to know about an email he had sent that morning, four words: yippee ki yi yay. It was sent to an address Salah had left for him for the purposes of keeping in touch. But the email was sent after the news had already broken, Roy pointed out. And then, he said, he told them what he knew, which was nothing.
We didn’t know it yet, but Salah’s plan got a little shaky once he got to Mexico. For whatever reason, he ended up staying two days before boarding an international flight to Canada, where he was to take a connecting flight across the Atlantic. He made it as far as the plane, then the law came for him and arrested him on it. And so he made the news again. We learned of his arrest on Univision. There were mugshot pictures on the Spanish TV in the housing unit. Word of Salah’s apprehension spread across the compound. Everybody felt like somebody had died. But it was nice to have believed he’d gotten away for a day or two.
Now and then came word of Salah’s situation. Salah was being held here. Salah was being held there. Salah got another six years.
Six years for walking away from a camp… It may come as no surprise that this wasn’t an uncommon phenomenon, prisoners walking away from a camp, seeing as the camps had no fences and nobody sentenced to the camp wanted to be there. The guidelines for “escape” maxed out at six years, but when a prisoner “escaped” from a camp (i.e. walked away) the penalty was often somewhere around 18 months. The judge said he maxed Salah out because Salah had crossed international borders. It was the usual racist shit, though. When people walk away from camps they usually go home. Salah just got sentenced to an extra four and a half years because his home was in Sanaa, instead of, say, Baltimore. Or maybe he got the six years because he never told the feds who’d given him a private jet to run on.
Either way, instead of having less than ten years to go, Salah had fifteen left. Which was a terrible thing to think about. He’d had freedom for less than three days at the cost of another six years. But on the bright side, being over ten years again put Salah back at the low with all his friends. We were sad he wasn’t in Yemen, but we were glad to see him anyway, because the league needed him. The year he was gone had been a bad year for soccer on the compound. It was during the first Trump administration and the Trump DOJ was relocating all non-citizens in BOP custody to a prison in Tompkins, Illinois. That year we lost eighty percent of our good players. It was devastating. Salah was now the second best player on the compound. He still played every weekend. That first month he was back, I saw him score on a bicycle kick. It was springtime, the sky overcast, a light rain falling, long-sleeve weather. He had his head wrapped, as always, with a cut up T shirt. He was laughing. That was how easy it came to him, to be like that.
Nico Walker is a formerly incarcerated author.
I love this. What a story!