Killing Justice is a profound exploration of a life marred by injustice and a betrayal of trust by a friend of twenty years, transformed into a testament of strength. At the center of this riveting prison memoir is Kelly Giles' harrowing experience of wrongful arrest and a 10-month imprisonment.
Read the first chapter below for free.
Chapter 1: Goodbye to My Old Life
October 15, 2009
My old life disowns me in the fall.
It begins just like countless other days over the course of the past two decades. I meet Ling Wei, my female Chinese immigrant client in a coffee shop across the street from the Federal Building in San Francisco. The two of us chat briefly about what to expect during her green card interview, which I will accompany her to in just a few minutes’ time.
“I’m so nervous about how the interview’s going to go. What if he denies my case?” she asks, her hands shaking as she takes another sip of her tea.
“Take a deep breath. Just be yourself, tell the truth, and you’ll be fine. Don’t let the officer intimidate you. It’s nothing personal; they’re just doing their job. If all else fails, try pretending that they’re naked,” I tell her.
“And that helps?”
“Not necessarily. But it can be a lot of fun, just the same.”
The interview goes smoothly, and I then go with her to her favorite local restaurant for a celebratory breakfast. Throughout our leisurely meal of blueberry pancakes swimming in maple syrup, I regale her with tales from my twenty-year career of fighting for immigrants.
I return to my hotel room after breakfast on October 15, 2009, and smile as I see the Japanese Pop art pillows I’d been too tired to notice the night before. I glance down and realize that my cellphone is still on silent mode so that the green card interview would not be interrupted. I toss my slender briefcase on the floor, kick off my shoes, and launch myself onto the bed. My head sinks back into the playful pillows as I flip on my cellphone and try to figure out just how much of a nap I might have time for before I head to the airport. Interrupting my reverie, my cellphone announces that I have two unheard messages.
The first is from my wife Linda. “Some Homeland Security agents were hammering on our door early this morning, demanding to know where you were. What’s going on, Kel?” Her words slice like tiny knives through my throat. My throat feels dry as dust, and I grope for the glass of water I’d left on the bedside table.
The second is from my associate attorney Joann. “Joseph and his wife have been arrested for immigration fraud. Some storm-troopers are here now, tearing your office apart. They want your head on a stick, too.” The knives in my throat have now morphed into a mini-machete, and my throat is so parched that I down the rest of the water in a single gulp. I’ve been working with Joseph for the past decade. This makes no sense at all. Unless Joseph has been hiding something huge. And what does his wife have to do with anything?
I try to stand, but my knees buckle, and I collapse back down onto the bed. I begin scrolling through my cellphone contacts list, searching for my civil litigator friend Tom. He is the only person I know who’s had clients go through similar nightmares. My hands are trembling as I dial his office number.
“Hey, Tom,” I manage to choke out, “Homeland Security agents were at our condo this morning. They’ve arrested Joseph and his wife May for immigration fraud. They’re looking for me. What the fuck should I do?” I have no idea what Joseph might have done. And I’m even more mystified by what they could want with me.
He calmly promises to find me a criminal lawyer, and to call and tell the lead agent that I’ll be flying in later that afternoon, and that my lawyer will bring me in to answer any questions they might have the next morning.
I heave my luggage into the rental car and drive distractedly down the many one-way streets between my hotel and the airport while “Head Like a Hole” by Nine Inch Nails blasts away in the background. San Francisco’s “mellow vibe” from just a few hours earlier has now been replaced by a menacing vacuum.
I call Tom again from the airport. “Were you able to find me a lawyer?”
“Yeah, Kel, I found you a guy named Michael A. He’s a great fighter with a huge heart, just like you.”
“Thanks so much, man. Any luck getting in touch with the lead agent?”
“Not directly, but yeah, I did leave a message for him.”
“What’s gonna happen, Tom?”
“No idea, but hopefully they’ll let Michael bring you in first thing tomorrow morning.”
All I know is that my old life has started flashing before my eyes, but I still cling to the faint hope that normal programming might somehow still be restored.
Unable to imagine what fate might await me in L.A., I lose myself in the classic sci-fi novel Ender’s Game as I fly back. My life has suddenly become so surreal that Ender’s world seems far more familiar to me than my own incredibly alien planet.
When I land at LAX, instead of someone holding a sign with my name on it, I watch in horror as I see myself being suddenly surrounded by a dozen heavily armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, wearing their readily identifiable POLICE ICE jackets and their ICE OFFICER badges.
They cuff me. Hard. My hands are tied together like Malcolm’s had been, thirty-six years before. They tighten the iron until I wince and take me on the “perp walk” through LAX as worried faces of random strangers swim towards me. I do my best to keep from acknowledging the pain of the cuffs as they parade me out to the waiting black car.
Don’t be alarmed, I want to reassure those random strangers, you’re being treated to a shining example of your tax dollars at work. I shudder involuntarily at the cosmic irony. If it weren’t for these officers, I’d be on my way to my screenwriting class right now, to continue what I’d thought was a fictional screenplay about an adopted immigration lawyer who gets falsely accused of a crime. Now life was imitating art, which made it all the more surreal.
Thoughts like this help distract me from the searing agony of the cuffs on my wrists. They shove me in the back of the waiting black car. I complain countless times that the cuffs are cutting off my circulation. One of the agents finally loosens them ever so slightly.
“I guess you thought you’d gotten away with it, huh?” sneers another agent.
I want to scream “What the fuck are you talking about?” Instead, I ask if they’d received my friend’s message offering to have me come in with my lawyer the next morning. They laugh and say, “Of course we did. But what fun would it have been for us if you’d simply shown up voluntarily tomorrow morning?”
That’s great. You think you’re writing a fucking fictional screenplay, while they think they’re the heroes of some movie, and you get to help them with their sexy trailer: “Immigration Lawyer arrested at LAX. Film at 11!”
As we continue the drive to the Metropolitan Detention Center (“MDC”) downtown, the two agents joke about how much fun they had raiding my office and arresting Joseph and his wife earlier that day.
Meanwhile, I’m wishing my screenplay had stayed fictional after all.
Upon my arrival at MDC, I’m ordered by my new minder to strip, show behind my ears, bend over and cough. Once assured I’m not hiding anything, he issues me my carrot-colored jumpsuit. The guard orders me to face the rear wall as I ride up the elevator in shackles. After filling out tons of paperwork and convincing both a social worker and a doctor that I’m not about to either kill myself or die, I wait in line for the phone so that I can make my one phone call. I then call Linda and choke out “you’re my rock,” and weep like a baby.
Later that night, on the upper bunk of my shared cell, I toss and turn until dawn. I feel like I’m in the middle of a slow-motion car crash, and when I finally doze briefly in the pre-dawn darkness, I keep having nightmares about another car crash, the one in which Pops’ old life had disowned him in the fall of 1988.
He’d been forced back out on the road as a travelling salesman when his lifelong employer, Sherwin Williams Paint in Canada, went bankrupt. The new owners, C-I-L, got rid of all of Sherwin Williams’ top managers, including Pops, and an entry level job as a traveling salesman with Glidden was the only work he’d been able to find.
He’d been at that new job a little over a year when, on a business trip one day, a logging truck swerved suddenly to avoid colliding with a school bus full of children. Its load of lumber suddenly slipped free of its moorings, cascading off the back of the truck.
Pops’ car was right behind the logging truck when it happened. He was buried alive. My sister and mom didn’t even call me with the news until several days later, once they knew he was gonna survive. He was left with a permanent traumatic brain injury, his cognitive capacity now that of a ten-year old.
I awake with a start, my whole body shaking.
***
Thank you for reading! If you'd like to read more, Killing Justice is available as a hardcover, paperback, and e-book at all major online booksellers.
Comments