University Daily Kansan, March 30, 1981
Page 5
Bosket
From page 1
some circles around here as 'that smart- nigered.'.
"I don't let it make me negative. I'm so much richer from the people I've met because of school. Really, it's difficult for me to say what is going on around here without sounding negative, but I'm a totally positive person."
EXCEPT FOR a few select prisoners and staff, Bosket is an isolated man. A man who studies, and practices yoga alone in his cell at night. He explains himself as a man of very high discipline, a man who possesses internalized discipline to survive.
"From a young man of very little discipline, I have become a very disciplined man."
Basket is still paying for the late discipline in his youth. In 1962, at 22, two years out of Elmira, he was tried and convicted of first-degree murder in Wisconsin. He was in the prison in Wisconsin for 10 years, then he escaped.
He is in Leavenworth for two bank robberies he committed while he was a fugitive from New York.
BOSKET CAME out of Elmira a street huster. He had learned to play stud pot, how to街战-fight and buy and sell contraband, and he discovered that without job skills, he could make more money on the streets than he could working.
For a while he made the poker circuit—New york, St. Louis, Chicago, Evansville, Im. He played in NYC and New York.
Twenty years later, at 39, Bosket is still lean at 6-2 and 200 pounds, but he looks more like he is in his late 20s, despite spending almost 20 years in prison.
and he street-fought for money, finding someone who thought he was good and betting that he would succeed.
It is difficult to imagine anyone who would bet against Bosket in a street fight. And it was just such a fight that got him a life sentence in Wisconsin.
BOSKET HAD just been married, and he said the street life had begun to wear on him.
"I had decided somewhere along the line to put the streets away," he said. "I thought that if I moved away from New York I might be able to do that. We went to Milwaukee looked for work, but there wasn't any. I was broke, so I went back to Chicago and made a connection for some pornographic materials on consignment.
""The guy I got from them said not to move them in Chicago and gave me the name of a hotel. It was called Hotel McGregor."
Basket passed the materials on to the man in Milwaukee, a man he didn't know. When he came to get his money, the man put him off. He caught back the next day and there was a fight.
"It was fast," Boket explained, "no organized order to it. A knife came into play, and a big pair of cutting shears; it was in a cave, where violence a-falling out among thieves."
ACCORDING TO BOSKET, 1962 was not a good year for a black man to face an all-white board.
"It was a fight. The state never disputed that the murder weapon belonged to one of the
men who was killed," Bosket said. "Just the same I was convicted of murder one and sentenced to life in prison."
Basket entered the Wisconsin prison with the idea of "stopping this madness that had bad consequences."
It takes 11 years and three months to be eligible for parole in Wisconsin. Basket said.
"There was no educational opportunity in the Wisconsin system," Bosket said, "so I literally lived in the prison library. I became very well-read. I spent six years reading through the institution's library and the lending library at Madison.
"After I had been there six or seven years, they started a college program. I took an SAT test and score higher than anyone who had taken it. There were blacks and blacks were. It was that kind of institution."
ACCORDING TO BOSKET, he became vocal about the situation. About the same time, his boss asked John Anderson's vice-presidential running mate, was organizing a task force to investigate the corrections system in Wisconsin. Bosket was elected as a convict for the crime.
"I had been vocal about the ethnic situation so some efforts were made to instill empathy."
When the task force had made its report, the booklet said that the administration came after.
"A few weeks after the task force hearings they scooped me up, three me in segregation, put me in chains and sent me to a maximum room, put a dark cell with a mattress on the floor."
Sometime after his 14 months in solitary,
"There is a possibility of a lawsuit against that institution for conspiracy to violate my consent."
Basket escaped. He won't talk about the escape.
BOSKET HAD ESCAPED but he still had to face the realities of being an escaped prisoner, the bad Social Security card that meant he would have to leave a job after three months, when Social Security was turned in by his employer.
He couldn't go back to the streets because he was too well known, and, by that time, he was psychologically incapable of it. He had chosen a bad time to escape from prison 1972-74 were hard times economically for everyone, let alone an escaped convict.
The choice that Basket made was to rob banks. He describes it as a rational decision, once he convinced himself it was necessary to break the law.
"I chose banks because I knew that the teller in New York had orders not to resist—to hand over the money," he said. It was the工资 committee来填 where I knew no one would be hurt."
Bosket doesn't want to minimize what he did and said repeatedly that he did not really have to rob a bank, that he rationalized the need. But he also said there had been three bank robberies, even thought he was only charged with two.
"I passed a note to this woman in a bank on the lower east side of New York and she looked me dead in the eye and said that she wouldn't give me the money," he said. "She flat out-nutted me. I left rather than hurt someone."
ACCORDING TO BOSKET, the judge who sentenced him for bank robbery thought that he could be rehabilitated.
"He gave me 15 years when he could have given me 50," he said.
Booket was eligible for parole in the summer of 1808 but he was turned down by the authorities.
"They can keep me here another 32 months," Bokset said. "But why? I can't be rehabilitated any further. I have job skills as computer programmer and I have been offered a job at $20,000 to $22,000 a year on the outside. It will cost the taxpayer some $48,000 plus to keep me in here until my mandatory release date."
Basket is appealing his parole decision and the National Association for the Ad- vocation has attached a legal team to both his parole decision and the murder conviction in Wisconsin.
BOSKET HAS his doubts whether the murder conviction would be overturned. He does not dispute what happened, only the degree of murder that he was charged with.
But for Willie Basket an escape into books and into scholarship is no longer possible.
Basket would like to get out of prison. He would like to become a scholar, an academic.
"The attitudes of the administration—the atmosphere here—has made me spend most of my time researching prisoners' rights law." he said.
"I have acquired a very high level of education and analytical skills in an environment that is not used to that. I'm a stranger in a strange land."
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