Over the course of an hour, Grandinetti sketches his vision of the gang. He talks about the various subgroups within the gang—the Goon Squad, the Wrecking Crew, STP (Start The Party). He explains “double-clutching”—the practice of obtaining emergency food stamps in one town, hopping a freight to the next, obtaining more food stamps there, and continuing the process until a hobo accumulated six or seven hundred dollars worth, which are then sold to a grocery store for 50 cents on the dollar. He describes how FTRA tramps will “hustle junk” (pick up scrap metal) and steal wire from freight yards, strip the copper and sell it in bulk to recycling businesses. Otherwise, he says, they “work the sign” (Will Work For Food) in order to get cash for their drugs and alcohol. He talks about the “home guard,” homeless people who serve as procurers of drugs for gang members. But most of these practices are engaged in by hobos of every stripe, not just the FTRA, and little of what he says would be denied by the FTRA; though several members told me they would never steal from the railroads—you don’t shit where you live.
To accept that the FTRA is a menace of the proportions Grandinetti claims—an organization that runs safe houses and has locked down switchyards all over the country—it seems necessary to believe further that there is some order to the gang’s apparent disorder: Officers charged with obtaining revenue and determining goals. Chapters that communicate one with the other. Some sort of structure. Grandinetti tells me that from gang snitches he’s learned of a group within the FTRA called “the Death Squad,” whose function is to carry out hits. He claims that this group is led by their self-exiled founder, Daniel Boone. It’s at this juncture that Grandinetti begins to preface his statements with the phrase “I can’t prove it but…” and he says his informants have told him that two gang members were hired by right-wingers to derail an Amtrak train in Arizona a few years back. He’s also heard a rumor that a white power group is attempting to organize the FTRA into a hobo army.
Under pewter skies, we drive out into the industrial wastes of the Spokane Valley and stop by the railroad tracks beneath the Freya Street bridge, its cement pillars and abutments spangled with FTRA graffiti—cartoon train tracks, swastikas, lightning bolts, along with messages and dates and train names. Among them is a section of wall devoted to a memorial for Horizontal John, an FTRA member who died of liver failure underneath the bridge the previous summer. Two hobos are camped here today, warming themselves by a small fire. Sheets of cardboard lie on the packed dirt nearby, and there are signs of past encampments: a worn-out shoe; a wadded pink cloth that might be a piece of blanket; empty cans; soggy newspapers. Neither of the two men are FTRA, but Grandinetti takes their pictures and checks them for warrants. One has a minor charge outstanding against him. Grandinetti’s associate applies handcuffs and calls for a patrol car to take him to jail. Once this has been handled, Grandinetti strolls about, commenting on the graffiti. He’s amused by one that warns AVOID JABBERJAW. Jabberjaw is a transient hooker rumored to have contracted AIDS, and Grandinetti says that this might be the ultimate cure for the FTRA.
I come across a series of messages left by a rider named Big Ed that insult and taunt the gang, and I make the comment that Big Ed must be pretty damn big to risk FTRA retribution. Grandinetti doesn’t appear to have heard me, and I’m starting to think there’s a lot more relating to the gang he’s not hearing, that he’s disposed to hear only what paints them in the most baleful light. I recall during our initial phone conversation, I mentioned that someone had told me he thought the FTRA was no more than an urban legend. Grandinetti became angry and said he didn’t want to talk to anyone who held that view. It’s important to him, I realize, that the FTRA poses a menace worthy of national attention, more of a menace than it perhaps is. I doubt he’s trying to sell me anything—not consciously, anyway. He’s a true believer, an evangel of the cause, and this work will comprise his legacy, his mark. I ask if he’s going to miss all this when he retires, or if he’s looking forward to going fishing. He looks offended, and tells me he’s going to be kept very busy, thank you, traveling and lecturing about the FTRA.
After Grandinetti drives away, I wander about for a few minutes. These open spaces, under modern bridges enclosed by sweeping arches and pillars, have something of the feel of a church, as if they’re cathedrals upon which construction was suddenly halted, now standing unused except by those who deface them, who have adapted them to some less grandiose form of worship. This one, with its memorial wall and solitary pilgrim, the remaining hobo sitting head down and silent by his guttering fire, a slight bearded man in a shabby brown coat…it has that atmosphere more than most. The hobo turns his head to me, and it seems he’s about to speak. But maybe there’s too much authority in the air, too much of a police vibe. Without a word, he picks up the cloth sack containing his possessions and hurries off along the tracks.
The maximum security unit of the U.S. Penitentiary at Florence, Colorado, a red brick-and-glass chunk of modern penology that sits atop a subterranean high-tech Kafkaville of sanitized tile and electronic gates…it seems way too much prison for Mississippi Bones. He’s a diminutive, frail-looking man of late middle age with a lined face, dressed in chinos and walking this day with a cane due to an injured foot. I meet him in a midsize auditorium ranged by rows of black vinyl-covered chairs, all bolted to the floor, where visitors and inmates can mingle under the watchful eyes of guards. This morning, except for a guard and a prison official who converse at a distance beside a desk, we’re the only two people in the room. Every surface glistens. Dust is not permitted. I imagine there are secret angles involved in the room’s design that will convey our slightest whisper to the area of the desk. Bones sits on the edge of his chair, hands on the head of his cane, and nods at the two men watching us. “I hate those sons of bitches,” he says. “They’re trying to listen to us, so we got to keep it down.”
Bones is serving a 25-year-stretch for killing a fellow FTRA member named F-Trooper, a crime for which he does not apologize; he claims that if he hadn’t done the deed, F-Trooper would have killed him—he had already tried it once, going after Bones when he was camped by the Rattlesnake Creek in Missoula, Montana, attacking him with a skinning knife, twisting it in his side until he had more-or-less removed three of Bones’s ribs. The attack was provoked, Bones says, by F-Trooper’s lust for his wife Jane.