In the Belly of the Beast

By Claudia Wolffs

After a dream of heaven, a nightmare intervenes

You are both alone in his cell. You 've slipped out a knife (eight-to ten-inch blade, double-edged). You're holding it beside your leg so he can't see it. The enemy is smiling and chattering away about something. He thinks you 're his fool; he trusts you. You see the spot. It's a target between the second and third button on his shirt. As you calmly talk and smile, you move your left foot to the side to step across his right-side body length. A light pivot toward him with your right shoulder and the world turns upside down: you have sunk the knife to its hilt into the middle of his chest.

The author of those words, Jack Henry Abbott, 37, had practiced that lethal sidestep on a fellow inmate while doing time in Utah state prison. He described the art of murder in one of some 1,000 letters that he wrote to Author Norman Mailer between 1977 and 1980, providing a cool but furious description of life behind bars. It was an existence filled with violence: the violence done to Abbott in roach-infested solitary-confinement cells and the violence that Abbott, long a prison incorrigible, did to others. His was a voice so choked with rage that he admitted, "I have to intentionally gauge [it] in conversation." That anger, he wrote, "could consume me at any moment if I lost control."

Abbott began his correspondence with Mailer after reading that he was at work on a book about Gary Gilmore, a Utah inmate who was executed for murder in 1977. Abbott, who had spent all but 9 1/2 months of his adult life in prison, offered to give the author a sense of "the atmospheric pressure" endured by long-term convicts like Gilmore. Mailer accepted the offer and was stunned by the hard-edged eloquence of the self-educated Abbott, who boasted: "Nine-tenths of my vocabulary I have never heard spoken." Wrote Mailer: "I felt all the awe one knows before a phenomenon." He helped Abbott publish the letters; In the Belly of the Beast appeared to critical ovations in July. Then, by attesting to the convict's talent and promising him a job in New York, Mailer helped persuade the Federal Parole Board to release him last June. A $15,000 book advance paid three lawyers who handled his release.

Abbott arrived in New York on June 5 with something "only one in a million convicts ever get," as Ed Henson of the federal Bureau of Prisons put it. Not only was Abbott suddenly free--a condition he had once likened to "a free man's dreams of heaven"--he was also a celebrity, invited to literary parties and interviewed on Good Morning America. His work would be hailed in the New York Times Book Review as an "awesome, brilliant, perversely ingenuous . . . articulation of penal nightmare." Says Henson: "He had everything a man needs to start a life outside." Then a new nightmare intervened.

Abbott was staying at a Salvation Army halfway house in Lower Manhattan until his parole became official on Aug. 25. He was required to check in seven times a day, but otherwise was free to enjoy the city. He was doing just that on early Saturday morning, July 18, in the company of two attractive, well-educated young women he had met at a party. At 5:30 they stopped at the Bini-Bon Restaurant near the halfway house; it is a threadbare bohemian place, open 24 hours. Behind the counter was Richard Adan, 22, an aspiring actor and playwright who worked the graveyard shift in the cafe, which is owned by his father-in-law Henry Howard. Adan took the "toughest duty," explains Howard, "because he was interested in people. Some curious types come in after midnight."

Abbott asked Adan the direction to the men's room and was told it was for the help only. Abbott calmly asked if he could use it anyway. Adan told him it was against health rules; if opened to the public, it would not remain clean. Could this have touched the consuming rage Abbott had written about? He quietly asked Adan to step outside to "talk this over." The younger man agreed. Around the dark street corner, a knife appeared. Adan was stabbed in the chest, in almost exactly the way that Abbott had described in his book.

As Adan staggered toward the restaurant, Abbott ran in and told his two friends, "Come on." Minutes after they left, the police arrived. No charges have been filed, but Abbott is wanted for questioning in the murder. Federal authorities have a warrant out to arrest him as a fugitive, should he leave New York State.

"What happened?" asked Scott Meredith, who is both Mailer's and Abbott's literary agent. "Every conversation I had with Jack, we talked about the future. Everything was ahead of him." John Dockendorff, director of the halfway house, was "absolutely baffled how Jack got the knife and how he hid it." Abbott had been "cooperative" and had even appeared for one of the attendance checks after the murder, before vanishing into the streets.

Others glimpsed the handwriting on the prison walls. Erroll McDonald, Abbott's editor at Random House and one of his guides in the complexities of free life --how to order from a menu, where to buy toothpaste--noticed the ex-convict's tendency to "interpret indifference as rudeness." Novelist Jerzy Kosinski, who had had his own correspondence with Abbott since 1973, said, "Looking at him, I had the feeling there could be uncontrollable anger one moment and a very easy embrace the next." Finally, anyone who read his work noticed, as Kosinski did, that "he wrote in such a sheer rage that I could feel his letter burning in my hand."

Kosinski faults himself and Abbott's other literary friends. "We pretended he had always been a writer. It was a fraud. It was like the '60s, when we embraced the Black Panthers in that moment of radical chic without understanding their experience." There is another analogy from the 1960s, when Conservative Writer William F. Buckley Jr. championed the cause of a literarily gifted convicted killer, Edgar Smith, and helped set him at liberty to attempt murder again. Years later, Buckley acknowledged in an article how easily conned and naive he had been. Mailer, whose writings attest to his fascination with outlaws, has made only one comment on the Abbott affair: "A tragic situation all around."

--By Claudia Wolffs.

Reported by Dean Brelis/New York

With reporting by Dean Brelis/New York

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