The Prologue, Texarkana, Texas, April 12th, 2024

My name is Carl Keith Battie, Aka, Carl Hampton, Antony Sinclair and David Sheppard to name but a few.  I’m a sixty-seven-year-old British subject currently sitting on my rack in an old rundown Federal prison in the State of Texas, drinking what I hope will be my very last cup of nasty ass prison coffee.   It’s ten minutes after four and as dark and silent as any prison ever gets. I have less than three hours to go before my jailers allow me to walk out of the main gate and once again become a free man.  The date Friday April 12th, 2024.  I have at long last reached the end of my sentence.  Having successfully assisted the US Government and their Justice system with my rehabilitation.  According to my jailers, they have now converted me into a well-rounded human being, capable at long last of being reinstated back into society.   This process took them nine years eleven months and four days but who’s counting.  It’s the end of what can only be described as “My Lost Decade”.   An adventure through the great American Justice System.  At this point it would be extremely remiss of me not to point out that my incarceration is and was, totally self-inflicted.  In fact, it was more than thirty years in the making.

Many years ago, a very wise young lady once told me that “self-praise” is no praise at all. She was of course, right.  But.  There’s    always a but, even if I do say so my-self, I had one hell of a wild ride before they, the Feds (F.B.I) felt my collar.  I was finally             arrested in Decatur, a very beautiful suburb a mile or so from Atlanta, Georgia.  The beautiful south as the locals liked to call it.   It was by far my favourite of the three homes I owned across America. The other two were in Dallas, Texas and St Charles, Missouri. It happened (my arrest) at 6am on Thursday the 8th of May 2014.  A date and time that shall remain in my memory until the day I die.  It was the day my whole life would to be turned upside down.  Nothing would ever be the same again.  It was the day they, the F.B.I finally came for me.  I had no idea at that time how long it (my life) would be put on hold. I had after all successfully spent the precious thirty plus years doing what I lovingly called, “Living and Working in the Gray Area”.  The truth of course was far more   sinister.  I was in fact, nothing more than a lifelong working criminal.  Deep down inside I always knew this day would come.  It had to.  One day that thing we all call karma was always going to turn up and bite my ass. 

It was now my time to pay the piper and pay I did.  My mother (my old lady), a Hungarian Jew by birth, gave birth to me on Tuesday September the 11th 1956.  I was born in St Mary Abbotts Hospital in South Kensington, London.  It was one of the few  hospitals in England at that time that allowed unmarried women to have their illegitimate child in a clean and safe environment.  My old lady was in her early twenties.  Over the next ten years she and my father (my old man) went on to have four more children, two boys and two girls, they never did get married.  My old man was for that time, the mid fifties a giant of a man. Six foot two,  barrel chested with hands the size of shovels.  An Irish man born in the south’s third city Waterford.  A soft spoken kind-hearted and gentle man.  At least that’s the way I saw him at home.   He had spent his entire working life on the road gangs. Not a job for the faint hearted. In those days the bulk of the work was done by hand, there was very little in the way of the big equipment you see now.  The work was hard and the hours long, but the money was good.  It needed to be.

How or why, I drifted into a life of crime is something I have never really been able to work out.  There was nothing in my            childhood that could or would have pushed or pointed me in that direction.  Both my parents were honest and hard working.  I’ve never had a problem earning money.  Compared to most of my friends and people I knew at the time I had always been a big earner; I was never short of money.  From the age of ten I would normally have two or three jobs on the go at one time.  The only problem I have ever had, if that’s what you could call it, is “Boredom” the moment I have learnt or mastered something I lose       interest, fast.  On the surface it sounds like a ridiculous, absurd excuse and of course that’s what it is, an excuse. 

My move into the criminal world was planned.  I knew what I was doing.  I simply weighed up the risk, against the reward, if the numbers worked out, I did it. So, as I sit here watching and waiting as the minutes slowly tick away before one of the guards, shouts out the words I have been waiting to hear for almost ten years.  “Battie, roll up your shit and get your old ass out of here”.  The final question I must surely ask myself is?  “Was it all worth it

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Copyright Carl Battie March 2025