For some reason Luigi had decided to fly to Malaysia and setup a heroin operation.

He figured being in the Golden Triangle was the way to go and he would get his hands on the source product, flip it and sell it easily back to the market in the states! The logistics were something Luigi didn't much care to think about but he knew that his seed money would get things done. He had opened a Chinese bank account and wired 25 million dollars into it. Luigi had taken a fake alias and gotten all the necessary paperwork to get in the country unseen and start doing business.

Everything seemed simple enough but then he got sloppy.....

He first used some money to buy a lavish estate on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur.

He bribed several local officials and bought some fancy cars and a helicopter. He was going in under the guise that he would be a wealthy foreigner interested in taking over the Palm Oil business. His estate had 1200 acres of palms and this would be the perfect front for his real operation of selling pure heroin. His fake name was William Wheaton and he pretended to be from the United Kingdom.

Everything started off dandy.

Luigi had started employing 250 workers who were there and told them all to plant thousands of poppy plants in between the rows and rows of palms. He would use the trucks and barrels normally carrying palm oil to transport the pure heroin to his huge steam powered tanker ship which he commissioned from the Mississippi steamboat company. The operation started in June of 1923 and things were off to a good start. The poppies grew quick and his first few shipments made it thru customs with no problems.

They boarded the tanker called The Costello and were headed for the shores of Baja California Mexico where they would be off loaded and prepared to be shipped to Detroit and other places via rail cars.

Luigi forget a few things along the line though. He started to order some government officials killed who were asking for more money and eventually the military cracked down on his business and took him into custody.

Fast forward 3 years. Luigi lays in his cell.

His appeals for clemency have been exhausted and he knows there is no leaving this Death Row.

They came for me at dawn. Officer Panumbo and another named Simbichuchu or something like that - I hadn't seen him much. I haven't slept a wink, of course, and they came in quietly anyway, as though they didn't want to startle me awake.

"It's time" Panumbo tells me he looks apologetic.

I shrug off his extended hand and stand up - I'm not going to let someone else help me. I'm going on my own two legs if I can, even if my knees are pretty weak. I've heard their footsteps in the corridor, phantom precursors, so many times thru the long night. Now I feel gritty at the edges and as blurry as a badly developed photograph. I'm tired. Sleep will come though. I'll soon be sleeping forever.

There is no priest or pastor - I told them I didn't want one. What kind of comfort can you get from some stranger babbling to me about something I don't believe in. Panumbo is escorting me and Simbichuchu or whatever his name is holding the door. Only a couple of low-wage prison bulls who need the overtime on a Sunday morning. They'll also pull a little bonus for doing this, of course, since it's one of the genuinely unpleasant jobs - no coercion of anyone but prisoners in the shitty Malaysian penal system. Panumbo must need the money what with all those kids at home to feed. Otherwise, who else but a psychopath would sign up for this particular task?

The last walk.

A shuffle, really, with those heavy-duty leather restraints around my ankles. None of the things I imagined in my head happens. The other inmates don't come to their bars to call terse farewells; most of them are sleeping, or pretending to sleep. No last minute rescue by a guerrilla group of my mates TonyCapazzo, Scarfo, or Joseph_Ligambi. I went thru this myself when they took Garza. What could I say?

And Panumbo doesn't shout: DEAD MAN WALKING!!!

Or any of that other stuff. Never has never will. The closest he ever came to talking to me was when I first showed up on the floor and we had a quiet chat where in the best prison drama style he told me - If you work with me, everything will be smooth..... if not, you'll be doing some real hard time. Now he looks quiet and sorry, like he's taking someone else's dog, run over in the road, to the emergency vet.

They take me to the death chamber. It has the look and smell of any prison surgery. The doctor is a small man - if he really is a doctor: you only need to be med-tech certified to perform an execution. He's obviously been waiting around about fifteen minutes longer than he wanted to with his morning coffee turning acid in his stomach. He nods his head when we all come in, and a weird smile that's probably just dyspepsia and nerves plays across his lips. He nods again, then points a trifle shyly at the stainless steel table, just a regular examination table, with a little shrug as if to say, Wish it could be nicer but you know how times are......

The two guards each take an arm as I slide my backside onto the paper covering - they are helping me, really just making sure my trembling legs don't prompts an embarrassing collapse. They're helping but their grips are very, very firm.

I life my legs onto the table and then let them ease me down onto my back. They begin to secure the straps.

Until this point, it could be any other visit to the prison doctor, except no one's talking. Not surprising, really - there's not much to say. My condition has already been diagnosed, it's terminal.

Dangerous. Useless bastard. Trouble. Poor self-control. Inconvenient to house and expensive to feed. The combination of symptoms has added up. The cure has been decided.

It's no use telling them I'm innocent. I've done that for years, done it in every possible way. It hasn't changed a thing. The appeals, the couple of newspaper articles and headlines changed nothing in the end. The little kid in me the part that believed that if I cried hard enough someone would put it right, is gone now, rubbed out as efficiently and completely as the rest of me will be.

Some prison official is standing in the doorway, a shark-skin-gray shadow. I turn to watch him, but Panumbo's hip is in the way. A brief splash of something cold in the crook of my elbow brings my eyes back to the doctor's pinched face.

Alcohol? For what? They're swabbing my arm so I don't get an infection. A little prison humor, perhaps more subtle than I would have expected. I feel something sharp slip thru my skin, nosing for my vein, but something goes wrong. The doctor curses quietly - just a hint of panic underneath - and withdraws the needle, then probes for the vein like someone running a sewing machine up my arm. I feel something welling up in my chest that might either be a laugh or a long, bubbling scream.

I choke it down, of course. God forbid I should make a spectacle of myself. They're only going to kill me.

My skin has gone clammy all over. The lights shimmer and swim as the spike of steel at last slides into its proper place and the doctor tapes it down. The are going to pump me full of my own drug, that heroin that I was supposed to be selling by the hundreds of tons. The other guard leans over and tightens the strap so that I don't jerk the needle free. They begin on the next needle.

There is something bewildering about this, it's the end of the world, but the people around me are acting as if they were performing some workaday job. Only the tiny beads of sweat on the doctor's upper lip and frowning forehead suggest otherwise. The doctor has started a saline drip, although I feel nothing in my arm but the discomfort of the needle and the stinging from the failed attempts.  I want to snarl, I understand that they're just throwing out the trash and then recycling the empties. I'll be more use to society as a ram-plugged hydroponic fertilizer than I ever would have been as a mouth to feed in an expensive privatized cell.

I want to scream, but I don't. For now, thinking about the pale blue eyes and sweet smile of Karmen , I realize in a way I haven't yet that I'm going to die. No one is going to jump up from behind a sofa and tell me it was a joke, or give me a retarded high five in the face. This isn't a movie either, no group of hired mercenaries is going to blow down the prison doors and set me free. In a moment a doctor is going to connect a pouch full of liquid heroin and let it flow into my veins. The line is going to start to bleed into me and then I'm going to die.

I try to speak but I can't. The cold has me shivering. Panumbo pulls the thin hospital blanket up to my chest, careful not to disturb the transparent tube fanged into my arm like a long glass snake. I nod instead. By God, I'm not stupid. I understand the laws and how they work. It it hadn't been one way it would've been another. They make those laws to keep people like me away from what people like them have. So I nod, trying to say what my dry tongue and constricted throat cannot. I know why you want me dead, I don't need anymore explanation than that.

I close my eyes and remember Karmen's beautiful features and then I open them to see that cold rigid doctor standing over me. I have just met the Angel of Death. He is a stranger, they always are.

Panumbo gives my arm a squeeze which means the doctor has switched the saline for the heroin but I don't dare open my eyes again. Instead I think back to all the good times at the Capazzo headquarters and to my many outings and conversations with Karmen, Uncle Joe and others. I don't want my last sight on earth to be that doctor, he's a nobody.

A short time passes - thick sluggish time that nevertheless hurries. My gaze slides up towards the lights and they shimmer even more broadly than before. There are little fracture of color around the edges, my eyes I realize are filling with tears. At the same time the room is growing warmer. I can feel my skin growing looser, my muscles unkinking.

This isn't so bad.......

But I'm never coming back. My heart speeds. They're pushing me out into the darkness, one passenger too many on the big ship and I've drawn the short straw. Some kind of animal panic races thru me, and for a moment I strain against my bonds, or try to, but the whole thing is too far gone. A muscle twitches in my chest, that's all, a slow contraction like early stages of labor. Like birth.

Wrong way, wrong way, I'm going out not coming in.......

The blackness is tugging me remorselessly, pulling me down, eroding my resistance. I'm hanging by my fingernails over an ocean of warm velve, and it would be so easy so easy to let go......but there's something underneath all that softness, something harsh and final and oh so terrifyingly lonely. Gone, the light almost gone, just a fast-disappearing smear. Gone, the light is gone.

A soundless scream, a spark sizzling through a final instant before being swallowed by the cold darkness. I can only hope that my son back in Italy will get my last letter and the wishes I have for him....... goodbye world.......goodbye........