THREE WEEKS LATER, one day after they removed the cast from his arm, Michael Darko scowled at the flat, dry fields as they approached Corcoran, California, and thought, This must be the far side of the moon. Darko was surprised that morning when he was herded onto a bus and told he was being relocated to Corcoran State Prison. Darko had spent the past two weeks at Terminal Island, a federal facility he thought would be his home for the next many years. He asked why he was being transferred, but no one offered an answer.

Another inmate on the ride up told him Corcoran was a very bad place with many dangerous people, but now, after four hours in the bus and seeing the prison in the distance, Darko was not so much scared that this place would be dangerous, but disappointed because it was ugly.

After what he had known in Bosnia, American prisons and American prisoners did not frighten him, just as American policemen did not frighten him. Michael Darko had come from a dangerous place, and was, himself, a dangerous man.

Even as the prison grew in the van’s dusty windows, Darko was planning to establish contact with other East European inmates, and forge relationships with the Aryan Brotherhood. Many of these associations were already in place, and would be useful in building an empire.

Ten minutes later, the van entered the facility through a rolling gate, then drove into a small parking area where several guards waited. Darko and the two inmates sharing the ride had to wait for the guards to enter the van and unlock them. Each of the three were wearing hand and ankle restraints, and had been locked to separate seats well out of reach of each other. This was done because violent inmates often tried to kill, maim, fornicate with, and sometimes eat each other on the long drive up to nowhere.

The guards entered the van one by one, unhooked an inmate, and walked him off—one guard per inmate. Darko was taken off last. He gave his guard a merciless leer.

“Home, sweet home! It is a beautiful place, is it not?”

The guard had seen tough-guy swagger before, and paid no attention.

The three new inmates were herded through the admitting process. They were stripped, searched, probed, and X-rayed, then were fingerprinted, photographed, and had a DNA sample removed and recorded. They were sprayed with de-louser, made to shower, and given new clothes and shoes. The clothes and shoes they were wearing when they arrived were discarded. The allowable possessions transferred with them were inspected, logged into their records, and returned.

The admission process took forty minutes, during which the chief guard-of-the-watch lectured them on the dos and don’ts of Corcoran, read them a set of written rules, and issued their housing assignments.