The Seventh Letter of the Samourai: Handwritten from Within

In her latest prison letter, imprisoned Samourai Wallet developer Keonne Rodriguez documents the entire process of moving from FPC Morgantown to FCI McKean - a journey that should have taken only four hours and ended up taking 30 days, passing through two transfer facilities, two transcontinental flights and three long-haul buses.

Why 30 days?

On June 5, Rodriguez was informed that he would be transferred to another prison for a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program, completing the approximately nine-to-10-month program with one year's reduction in sentence. He applied on the same day for his mother's transfer leave, which meant traveling at his own expense to the new prison.

According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) process, transferred prisoners are usually flown first by a U.S. Marshals Service-operated plane to an Oklahoma City transit hub and then flew to their destination days later. Rodriguez had previously heard that transfers typically take one to two weeks and was told it would cost about $10,000 per prisoner through central Oklahoma.

Five hours on the bus

On June 10, six inmates from Morgantown were handcuffed, chained at the waist and unable to raise their hands above their hips except for a short walk. The bus was located between school buses and long-distance coaches that carried prisoners of all security levels from several nearby prisons.

After driving for about an hour, the bus stopped twice on the side of the road. The officers took turns getting off to buy breakfast and cigarettes and energy drinks, staying over an hour altogether. Rodriguez's breakfast bread fell on the ground and he was only hungry.

About five hours later the bus arrived at Greenbriar Valley Regional Airport, where several prison buses were already waiting by the runway. After about an hour of fumbling for chairs and a name-dropping ceremony, the inmates were transferred to the United States Marshals Service on board a white plane with only a small American flag on its tail wing.

A turkey sandwich on a plane

The seats on the plane were filled in order from back to front. Rodriguez's neighbor was a man with full facial tattoos, who had served 15 years of his sentence and learned that he had been sentenced to camp but stopped talking after serving only six months.

The plane looked like a product of the Cold War era, with no smoking and life jacket placards in both German and Russian. About two-thirds of the passengers were prisoners; the first third had at least 30 marshals seated on board. After about an hour's flight, the marshal distributed lunch bags: four loaves of bread, one sack of peanut butter, two slices of toast, and a small packet of biscuits.

As they approached Oklahoma City, the pilot broadcast that it was sunny with a temperature of 88 degrees Fahrenheit. But Rodriguez wrote that the pilots did not mention that no one had seen the sun during their stay at the Federal Transit Center in Oklahoma City.

The Oklahoma Transit Center

After landing, the plane glided past the main terminal building and stopped in front of a brown concrete building that was about six stories high. The prisoners were taken one by one through the boarding bridge directly into the airport jail.

Rodriguez writes in the letter that almost immediately, several prisoners picked up a lighter from nowhere and started smoking K2 (aka Deuce). In prisons, Deuce was usually made by dipping pepper spray or rat poison into small pieces of paper. After lighting the paper to smoke it, smokers often stood on the spot for minutes, hunched over losing all awareness of their surroundings.

Rodriguez said that the letter could be published in two parts because of its length. At the end, he called on readers to sign a petition calling for the release of Samourai Wallet developers Keonne Rodriguez and William Hill.