Taming the Beast: Charles Manson's Life Behind Bars by Edward George, Dary Matera Read Free Book Online Page B

pinning him against it.
    “When I say move, asshole, you better move!” a gooner shouted. Charlie was searched, cuffed, and dragged out of B section. Swept down the corridors in a mad rush, his route took him past Rinker, a man he was, surprisingly, meeting for the first time.
    “Who the hell are you?” he asked.
    “I’m Ted Rinker!” the starched officer announced with all the piss and vinegar he could muster. “Associate Warden!”
    “Well, I’ll be damned,” Charlie responded. “Another fuckin’ asshole!”
    In the interrogation room, Charlie defiantly faced the army of accusers and denied everything, insisting that Squeaky had acted on her own and that he had had no prior knowledge of her plans.
    The following morning, I received a call at my home from Warden Rees. The warden had handpicked me for the job of helping him clean up San Quentin. Until that moment, I’d always considered him to be an ally. “Ed,” Rees opened in a stone serious voice. “Ted Rinker wants you fired.”
    “What? What for?”
    “He said you disobeyed a direct order to move Manson.”
    “Well yeah, he did tell me to move him, but he didn’t say when.”
    “Rinker said he told you Tuesday at his staff meeting, and expected it to be done the next day.”
    “The next day? I don’t remember that,” I dodged. “It was more like, ‘I think you better move him.’ That’s how I read it. We disagreed about it, but he cut me off. I tried to explain what I was doing, but he wouldn’t listen. So I waited to get a psych report from Dr. Sutton before discussing it with him again. If he didn’t buy it after that, I was going to appeal to you.” Rees said nothing, letting me twist in the wind. “Let’s see,” I continued. “He told me at the Tuesday staff meeting. I was busy Wednesday. I asked Dr. Sutton for a report on Thursday, then I took off Friday. So that makes two lousy workdays that I delayed. For that, he wants to fire me?”
    “Well, damn it, it’s bad,” Rees said, finally speaking up. “Real bad. He wants you fired, and he has witnesses. It’s a bad situation.”
    “He has witnesses? Who? That suck-ass associate warden and Rinker’s pet security chief? Look, Bob, whatever I did, I didn’t do it thinking I was disobeying a direct order. Rinker’s directive didn’t come across with urgency, like a command. It was more like a request, something I should do soon but not immediately. He’s only making a big deal because that goof-ball Squeaky tried to shoot President Ford! Sure, that looks bad, but you can’t hang that on me! I don’t know why Rinker hates my guts. The day I got here, he told me I didn’t have the balls for the job. He wanted one of his gooner buddies to get it. Ever since then, he jumps on my ass every chance he gets. He treats me like shit, and he’s just using this Squeaky thing to try and get me. Frankly, I’m damn tired of him!”
    By then, I was so angry I was shaking.
    “Look, Ed,” Rees said, trying to calm me down. “We can’t solve this over the phone. We’ll work it out next week.”
    Great, I thought, hanging up the receiver. String out the misery.
    After a nerve-racking weekend, the other shoe dropped that Monday. I received a chilling letter from Squeaky that hit me like a sledgehammer. The newly imprisoned Manson disciple wrote that she had tried to kill the President to focus attention on my denying her access to Charlie. Fromme wrote: “Had I had a chance to see Charlie, most likely I would never have gone to confront the Pres.” I put the letter down and sat stunned at my desk. It was only a one-in-a-million lucky break that kept Squeaky from being successful. The ramifications from my perspective were immense. In my dark corner of the world, a forgotten place populated by society’s worst outcasts, I had made a decision that could have altered the course of world history.
    I finally began to realize why nobody in the penal system wanted anything to do with Charlie