6: Mousey Is Dead

Every day you can trust what you hear on WBEC. That reliability is a two-way street. When you listen, you shape our coverage. When you donate, you shape our future. Chicago deserves information that comes from trusted members of our community. And that's free from outside influence. You make it possible. This public service thrives because listeners like you support it. So keep public media strong for Chicago. Give now at WBEC.org/donate. What a fucking idiot. So you didn't write that? No. This is Brian Nelson, a former leader of the Simon City Royals, T.J.'s gang. And that was his reaction when I showed him a bunch of emails defending T.J. They'd been written in Brian's name. I was very shocked when you called here. I knew your name from some other stuff you've written. Brian told me he's certain that the emails came from T.J. himself. It took a while to convince him to sit down with me. When we first talked, I got very paranoid of my safety and hold it. What are they saying? I mean, can I get a case over this? Is somebody setting me up for something? And I started panicking as soon as we got off the phone. I'm like, holy fuck. Man, am I going to get caught up in this stupid kid's shit? So this is really annoying to you? It is. When I first met Brian in person, he told me if we did an interview, we'd have to sit with a fair amount of distance between us. He also told me about the knives that he kept with them at all times for his protection. It's a giant understatement, but Brian's been through some stuff. He's been damaged in a way that's hard to imagine. I do everything to make sure I don't go back to jail. I've been out since June 29, 2010. And I did some very ugly stuff in my life. I spent 28 years in prison for a murder I was involved in. Brian went from prison gang leader to a prisoner rights activist. I am in contact with roughly 13,000 prisoners. He's got a full-time job at a nonprofit legal center in Chicago called the Uptown People's Law Center. I run around and help people. I bust my ass. It doesn't matter if you're a Latin King or the same dude or what. It doesn't matter if you've shot me before. You know? You're an ex-con. I'm an ex-con. We need to work together because we've already been down in that hole. Brian and his girlfriend have bought a house. He's got a car. He's got a dog. He pays his taxes. By all appearances, Brian's rehabilitated. I'm a convicted murderer. I spent most of my life in jail. And I'd be dead. In the 70s and 80s, gangs like the Simon City Royals were at their height. Brian grew up on the north side of Chicago just a couple blocks away from where the royals were founded. As a teenager, Brian was in and out of jail. You go to jail. No, it is what it is. If you're a gang member, you expect that. Brian could get out of tight places. One time, he was put in a police car. Brian escaped to a crack in the window. The cops said, "Damn, he's like an itty bitty mouse." He got the nickname "mousey." In 1982, "mousey" was arrested from murder. He was 17. I was told what to do and I did it. I played guilty. We did it. And I hurt people and I hurt their families. It's not to be proud of. I was a stupid kid. Brian and TJ's stories are pretty similar. They both joined the royals around the same age, 11 or 12. They were both charged with murder. TJ was 13, Brian 17. And they were both sent to the same maximum security prison. So far in this show, we've looked at TJ when he started running around with a gang. We've covered the murder that he went down for and how he was convicted. We walked through his exoneration and his release. But the one thing we haven't talked about is prison. The place where TJ became an adult. Almost everyone we talked to said the reason TJ went so out of control was because he spent over a decade in some of the worst prisons in America. Now as much as I've tried, TJ refuses to sit down in person to talk. However, if you want to talk to somebody about gangs in prison and what imprisonment can do to a person, you really can't do any better than talking to Brian Nelson. Some prison 101 from a pretty good authority. From WBEZ Chicago, I'm Frank Maine and this is Motu. Mousy is dead. I got this little freaking dog and somebody else had it and they used to kick the dog around and they broke his freaking leg. His name's Oscar and I changed his name to Puppy. The first day in my freaking house, he shit everywhere. And he's hobbling around the house. Took me six months massaging his leg. That little dog has done more for me. Just sitting in my lap in the house alone, patting him. Do people still call you Mousy? I don't like nobody calling him Mousy. That was my nickname when I was a gang member. Was Mousy a big name in Illinois Department of Corrections? Yes. I tell everybody, Mousy's dead. My name is Brian Nelson and there's one thing you can't call me. That's N-3-1-4-4-9. I don't answer to Mousy, I don't answer to that. I don't care, hey asshole, I'll answer to that. Because I'm an asshole. When Brian became a gang leader, he focused on the other young royals walking into prison and he tried to teach them how to survive inside the walls. I always think of Graham, BamBam. He was a royal for one day and caught a murder. And he tried to tell me he was a royal for my neighborhood. But I beat him every fucking day. Till one day when I walked in the cell and I was ready to start again, but listen, you touched me and Dan, I'm gonna kill you motherfucker. He had been sneaking, making his life. I knew he was. And I hugged him, I said that's all I want. It was what I said, dude, you don't stand up, you're in trouble. And it's just that fucked up. Me and him still talk to this day and he thanks me for this. I listen to Mousy. Brian was sent to State Bill Correctional Center, about 40 miles away from Chicago. It's the same prison that T.J. was for his sent to. State Bill has been around since the 20s and it's tall as some of Chicago's most notorious criminals. And State Bill at the time was huge. I'd never forget, I walked in the front door and I meet this guy named Bo Diddley and Skull and Bolton got to be like six, five, three hundred pounds. What'd you be, white boy? I'm a holy shit. Gangs are often divided along racial lines. But the royals, according to Brian, were never a strictly white gang. They were mixed. Everybody looks at the royals like the other white gangs. There was black Puerto Rican and Korean royals. That is a man, it's he's Hispanic. Mike 50/50 math from South Puerto Fulton, they were black. The names of some white gangs were racist acronyms. You have the sea notes. Chicago neighborhood organization to eliminate spits. Pure racist organization. Most of their fathers were cops. Then you had the daylords. Great American youth love our race, destroy spits. And same popes protect our people, eliminate spits. In prison, your gang membership is your protection. Brian says it because the royals weren't aligned with the white racist gangs. They had it especially rough in State Bill. We were basically priors. Nobody accepted us, nobody respected us. I asked Brian about how he stayed alive. He began pointing around the room. You have a stapler, you have a clipboard. That's all knives to us. I walk in a room when I'm in prison. If you snooze, I'm walking out with your clipboard. Look at the clipboard, look at the top part of that. A stainless steel thing that goes back and forth. You give me a stapler, I'll make you 13 knives out of it. You give me a steel mop bucket, I will make you 20 beautiful knives out of it. I mean I was good, it's my survival. I carried a hexaw blade around for 10 years in my mouth. Homemade knives might be enough in some places, but this was back in the day, in no ordinary prison. The biggest eye opener that I got in State Bill, that caught these guys with 11 guns in the cell house. The guy had a sawed off single shot shotgun underneath his pillow and this wasn't broken to some other guy. The first time I saw it, oozy wasn't State Bill. At that time, the most powerful gang leader in State Bill was a man named Larry Hoover. Hoover is the founder of the biggest street gang in Chicago, the gangster disciples. At their peak, the GDs had more than 30,000 members, most of them African American. For 14 years, Hoover ran the GDs from inside the walls of State Bill. I'd heard the name Larry Hoover or all this stuff. I'm sitting in the childhood and he came and sat down and talked to us. Hoover gave Brian a book. He said, "Read it and tell me what you think." And I come in from yards one day and goes, "How's the book?" And I didn't think nothing else of it. I'd go back to myself. At TV and radio are gone. my TV and radio taken and I had a choice. Brian could either read the book or Hoover would put him to work for the gang on shower security. No problem. I read the book that night that is frigging book report and I've never stopped reading. Here's somebody that didn't have to talk to me, didn't know nothing about me or anything and he made me look at myself. Hoover became a mentor to Brian when he was just a teenager. Brian even ended up being one of Hoover's bodyguards. I would carry two knives and let me ask you what's white too. Well, if something happens and you tell me to give it to you, I got to give it to you, then how am I supposed to watch your back and go as you learn it? With Hoover's support, Brian quickly became the leader of the Simon City Royals in state field. I never asked to be a leader. I never wanted to be a leader. I'm not going to let nobody hurt my guys. Larry Hoover had helped to create a alliance of different gangs called the Folk Nation. African-American gangs like the GDs became allies with Latino gangs like the Spanish Cobra's. They banded together to protect themselves from rivals. It was set up to stop all game violence. Moussey brought the Simon City Royals into the Folk Nation. The Royals now had a lot more backup in prison and if anyone messed with them, they had to answer to Moussey. And I made a statement to guys, if you touch my brothers, I will get you. Brian also made sure that his members followed the rules. First thing anybody knew if you were wrong, you had a right place, I'm going to get you. You shit on our name. If you steal, we put your hands in them doors and I had to do this, kick the fucking doors shut on your hands because you could have got all of us killed by stealing from somebody. According to Brian, he was accountable for his guys. If Royals was a rapist or a stool pigeon and they got admitted into the folks, Brian was the one who would have to answer for it. When I made that agreement with Larry, I knew what I was doing. I forfeited my life, I knew somebody was going to slip through and they didn't. Back then the gangs and statefield were powerful, almost all of the inmates were members. Books and homemade booze were easy to get. Larry Hoover said they even had the keys to every door in the prison except the doors to leave. We didn't run them prisons ever, the world ran, the director ran them. But we were allowed to do things more so than now, a lot more so than now. So that was a statefield of Brian Nelson experienced. But by the time TJ got there in the mid-90s, there had been a tectonic shift in the balance of power between gangs and the prison administration. And a big part of why that happened had to do with one particular inmate. Richard Speck. "Oh God, I had no idea who he was. And I was telling my mom what I do every day. And I was like, "Well I work with a lawn, so this guy, shaky, this guy, this guy, and this guy, Richard Speck, who does all the painting of my mom said, "What are you just saying? Do you know what a fuck he is?" Richard Speck was one of America's most infamous murderers. He had the words "born to raise hell" tattooed on his arm. One summer day in Chicago in 1966, Speck drunkenly broke into a dormitory for student nurses. He killed eight young women, one by one. Richard was the main painter for Stavo. As a painter, Speck had access to the whole prison. His cell door was never locked unless the prison was on lockdown. And there was just a select group of us. The painting crew could move contraband anywhere they wanted in their carts. They also made their own booze and paint buckets. The recipe, five gallons of water, five pounds of raisins, five pounds of sugar, and a pinch of yeast. "You drink your first little bottle like that, you don't feel it. In the middle of the second one is like, holy fuck, then we learn how to distill it and make it into moonshine. Me and Richard became friends in there, you know? Richard had anything he wanted in that joint." Why did he have everything he wanted? Richard did paintings. Besides painting the walls, Speck was also an amateur artist with a fan base outside the prison. "Painting sold for a lot. You know, he had these weirdo followers." Those paintings were currency for respect. "Now could you imagine, and this was an eye opener to me, Richard's spec could walk up and get an ounce of cocaine on his name in prison, and so I'll have you the money by the end of the month. I don't think cocaine was going for 1,500 in 1985 and Stateville. No problem." That's how wide open Stateville was back then? "Yeah." This openness inside Illinois prisons was not widely known, but then somehow, in 1988, somebody made a tape of Speck inside Stateville. In the video, Speck is snorting a pile of white powder that looks like cocaine. He has sex with another inmate on camera. "It's tough to hear, but Speck said, quote, 'If they only knew how much fun I was having, they'd turn me loose.'" But eight years later, TV journalist Bill Curtis got the footage. "How can this happen?" The good life Richard Speck enjoyed is merely a symptom of a far larger problem. The tape created a firestorm. "Tonight, on two news at 10, the Richard Speck tapes. First, they made headlines, then they forced the State investigation in Springfield." "That shamed everybody in the Department of Corrections when that Speck tape was leaked to the news. Everybody that worked in the Department of Corrections in Springfield looked like complete idiots." The gangs are out of control, but the idea of a mass murderer having a good time in prison was too much for the public to stomach. The State of Illinois was already looking into performing its overcrowded prison system, but the release of the Speck tape kicked it into overdrive. "The State of Illinois officials were shocked by the tapes and launched an investigation. Many experts, however, feel the complete breakdown of our nation's prison system is not a matter of if, but when." All of that public outrage set the stage for the opening of Illinois's only Supermax prison. It was a place to isolate gang leaders and other dangerous prisoners, the "worst of the worst." The prison was called "Tams." It's closed now, but "Tams" is where Mousy spent over 12 years in solitary confinement. "I got to the point where there's nothing you could take from me no more." "I'm the highest escape person in the State of Illinois." "Why?" "Because I built a ladder in a escape from the State of Illinois. I climbed out of there in prison." Brian Nelson, then Mousy, got over the 33-foot wall in 1984. He was quickly caught and sent back to Stateville, and he was now considered a major escape risk. That, and the fact that he was a gang leader, made him a prime target for the state's prison crackdown. "They said anybody that stands up for themselves has got up in that ship out. Not the wrong game, but goodbye." Brian was placed on what's known as "the circuit." I was transferred from prison to prison. I was beat horrifically at every prison I went to. They have to take me outside for one hour a week, so they put two pairs of leg arms on me. Two ways change. A dog leash, a collar around my neck that goes down under my testicles. If I move, they pull that, and I ball up and I face first into the concrete, and there's a guy on each side of me with a mini-14, and I'm allowed to take 10 steps that way and 10 steps back this way, for 45 minutes a week. This went on for five years. The ways that Brian and TJ ended up in prison are pretty similar. They both joined the royals around the same young age. They were both charged with murder, and they both ended up in maximum security prison. There is, of course, one big difference. I was guilty on my crimes. I did my crime. But can you imagine being innocent and worthless? One day, in 1998, federal marshals came to get Brian. They didn't tell him where he was going, or why? Brian was transported and shackles to Illinois's new super-maximum security prison. Tams. I spent 12 years in Tams, and I cannot tell you what Tams did to me. At the Tams Correctional Center, Brian was placed in solitary confinement in an 8-by-10-foot cell. He spent 23 hours a day alone. He had no contact with the other inmates. So this is it for us, my life, in this box, and the things they were doing to me, TJ didn't go to none of that. I did 42 days in blackout, no light at all, and I got out because I became an animal trying to bite this guy's arm, that's sliding this tray into this cage. Brian says in Tams, he went from 176 pounds to 108. He spent days scrubbing his cell with a toothbrush, he tried to hang himself. I paced 16 to 18 hours a day in Tams. They literally were sweeping the bottom of my shoes off the floor. They had to cut my feet every other week for the blood blisters. I just walked back and forth, back and forth, for 12 years. Brian would catch spiders and keep them as companions. He became a devout Catholic and prayed for seven hours a day. I copied the Bible word for word. One year, two months and nine days, it took me. But it kept me going. Yeah. That box did something I can't explain. I was writing a book about it and when that's went back and read what I wrote the night before. And I was talking to the cell as if it was a person talking about how long it has to be without me there. And I read that and I'm a fuck. I'm talking to a fucking waltz as if it's a person. TJ was never locked away in a super max prison for years and years like Brian. But he was often placed in segregation cells. He kept insisting he was innocent and didn't belong in prison. He'd break the rules and get 22 hours in the cell alone. TJ would also paste the cage like an animal. Other prisoners around him went insane. Some wrote on the walls with their own feces. In court testimony, TJ said he reached the "bottom of the barrel." That part is seen when I went through. I don't know everything TJ's went through. Me and TJ sort of went through a lot of shit where kids got locked up. We spent most of our life in a box fighting to survive, fighting to get out. I never expected to get out of prison. Brian was paroled in 2010. He was one of the first prisoners released after an extended stay at TAMS. The guy's on the street and he even know about me until I got out. And then it's like, "Nope, nope, nope, I'm done. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye." The Simon City Royals, including TJ, tried to contact Brian after his release. They wanted "Mousey." You're always going to hold "Mousey" over my head. Half of them up, I don't give a fuck about them. Mother fuck all of them. I gave you 28 years of my life. No one thing they want me to do is come out here and be chief. I could have came out here and made a drug bearing or whatever they think I could have been. I've had tattoos taken off my face. I've had a gang emblem that was on my back covered up. I walked away when I got out. I'm not going back. You can't offer me enough money. "Mousey may be dead. But living on the outside, after nearly three decades in prison, has been far from easy for Brian." I tried to open a bank account. I didn't exist. I was nothing. Who are you? We can't find anything. I had never driven a car. They say you don't forget how to ride a bicycle. Yes, you do. It's been tough for Brian to be around, quote, "normal people." I went to Hawaii last year and we're in the hotel and walked a key. And this lady stops. And blocks our way and she's talking on her cell phone. Excuse me. Excuse me. Bitch, move. And everybody stopped. I said, "You arrogant motherfucker. You think you're just stopping block everything? You don't give a fuck about nobody around you?" If I did that to somebody in jail, that could cost me my life. In prison, you have manners. Out here, you're gonna give a fuck. They've got two air buds in and if you're in there way, they're gonna push you out the way. Brian's got a job. He's got a girlfriend. He's able to take vacations. But prison's always there. We'll accept for this one time in Colorado. I jumped in a glacial lake. My nuts were up here. And I just jumped in, you know what I mean? 11,000 feet up in this campground and it's beautiful. No police, no sirens, no gangbangers, nothing. Sitting in front of a fire, you know? I felt free. I knew what it was like to be you guys. No for the first time in my life. There are around 80,000 inmates in solitary confinement in America, more than anywhere else in the world. Most studies say that solitary almost uniformly causes psychological damage. Prisoners become sicker, angrier, and more violent than when they went in. Solitary confinement is also really expensive. That was one reason why Tams, Illinois's only supermax prison, was shut down in 2012. There's not one day that Tams does not come in my head. My aunt, at the first family reunion when I was out, she stopped me. She was there a question. She was, "Do you think God did all this to you so you could do what you're doing?" And I go, "What do you mean?" She was, "You talk to people about what you went through and you're affected because you bear your soul." And I looked at her and I said, "I hope you didn't. I didn't deserve this." No, but that question's always been there. I didn't deserve this. You know? I'm more fucked up now than when I first got out. A couple years after his release, Brian began talking a lot more about prison. He's spoken at universities and conferences. Brian wants to educate people about the horrors of solitary confinement. But talking about it hasn't been liberating. It's led to Brian's self-destructing. I would be found, naked in the closet, in the dark. In coherent, just staring off in space. And I went through 13 different psychiatrists. One of them, I broke his jaw. 'Cause he kept talking about, "It ain't that bad. I know what you went through." I said, "You need to stop saying that to me. I need to leave here if I hurt you." He was, "Oh, you're just being over dramatic. It's not that bad. We just need to talk about it." And I can see him. When I first got home, I was talking and walking around Anglewood three, four in the morning with $10,000 on me. I was trying to get kids. The next time they caught me out for 200 miles an hour, I don't lay short drive on a motorcycle. And the police stopped me, and I'm like, "I'm looking at him." I'm like, "Well, what you gonna do about it?" He was, "What are you trying to kill yourself?" And I said, "Yeah." He goes, "What?" I said, "Yeah." I said, "Why else would I be going this fast?" Imagine what would have happened if Brian had $25 million. Next time on Motive. I go, "Did the car really hit you in there?" And he goes, "Well, yeah, they kicked our ass." TJ in prison. Because he was one of us is why he was safe. And when he got out, he understood that. TJ was about Aristotle, and Aquinas, and Latin, and Greek, and more Catholic than I am, for God's sake. Even at that point, as a priest. Motive is a production of WBZ Chicago based on original reporting from the Chicago Sun Times. I'm Frank Mayn. The producer is Colin McNulty. The executive producer is Kevin Dawson. Our engineer is Shelley Stephens. Special thanks to the listeners whose financial support of WBZ made this podcast possible.