“. . . And it’s not like I’ll be a total stranger up there in Carson City. The warden will recognize me; and the Con Boss - I once interviewed them for The New York Times. Along with a lot of other cons, guards, cops and assorted hustlers who got ugly, by mail, when the article never appeared.

Why not? They asked. They wanted their stories told. And it was hard to explain; in those circles, that everything they told me went into the wastebasket or at least the dead - end file because the lead paragraphs I wrote for that article didn’t satisfy some editor 3,000 miles away - some nervous drone behind a grey formica desk in the bowels of a journalistic bureaucracy that no con in Nevada will ever understand - and that the article finally died on the vine, as it were, because I refused to rewrite the lead. For reasons of my own.

None of which would make much sense in The Yard. But what the hell? Why worry about details?”

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