By Allen Fletcher

Al Joyce is a career criminal who is approaching seven years of successful drug- and crime-free life outside of prison. He supports himself doing carpentry and stand-up comedy under the stage name Felon O&#39;Reilly, and he is the author of a book titled Laughing on the Inside. Born in Clinton, he moved to Lancaster and attended Nashoba Regional High School. He attended several colleges and earned a degree in criminal justice from the University of Lowell. He worked at juvenile detention facilities in Worcester until turning his attention full time to crime. He has served a number of prison terms, last getting out of the Worcester County House of Correction in 2002. He is 53 years old.

First of all, is there any irony in the fact that you studied criminal justice?

One of the reasons I majored in criminal justice was, I took as many cop classes as I could to find out how they were going to do their investigations. Then I took as many court classes, so I could manipulate the system. Then I took as many corrections classes as I could, because I knew some day I was going &mdash; it was just a question of when and how long.

So you were born to this?

Oh, yeah. From when I was a kid, we would play cops and robber and I was the robber. They have done studies now, and they find that predominantly in adolescent males &mdash; not exclusively, but mostly in males &mdash; they have what they call &quot;T-types&quot; and they are thrill seekers. And that in itself is not a bad thing, if you can harness it: People become snowboarders and bungee jumpers and firemen and policemen. But unfortunately, if you come from poverty, usually the only way to achieve that thrill is through crime and that&#39;s where I went. I would love to tell you drugs and booze landed me in prison, but I was doing crime before I ever found the drugs and the booze.

Are we talking about burglary here?

Stealing cars, everything. I ran with anything that I thought I could get away with and would turn a dollar. I started out with burglaries and stealing cars and then there were big insurance scams back then with the cars, and then counterfeiting titles because I had these stolen cars, and from there we went to the robberies, and the drugs, and from the drugs to the guns.

Now, help me out on the thrill angle. Is there a visceral thrill in robbery?

The best high I ever had was an armed robbery, and it&#39;s better than any drug, because you&#39;ve got three or four days&#39; rush building up to it, and you get the ultimate rush when you are doing it, and then you&#39;ve got another three or four days after that &mdash; that&#39;s if you got away with it &mdash; and then you start your next one. It wasn&#39;t until I got on the heroin that things really started to go downhill. Because once I was addicted to heroin, I lost that ability to pick and choose my crimes. Then I had to steal every day. And that&#39;s when I started doing time.

Stealing was on your mind all the time?

Constantly. Everything you see, you see through a dollar sign: How can you get that, and how much can you get for it? It consumes your whole being, your whole life. Every waking moment, you are chasing the dope.

Does it inevitably escalate?

Oh, yeah, there&#39;s a progression. I think I started injecting cocaine when I was 17. I snorted it three times and I realized I loved the stuff, and was afraid I&#39;d ruin my sinuses, so I started injecting it.

So you did it for health reasons.

That razor-sharp mind of adolescence. And I couldn&#39;t stop. I did it for 22 years, injected cocaine. I couldn&#39;t stop, and the only way I finally stopped was I switched to heroin &mdash; that was my solution. It worked, but it didn&#39;t work the way that I had planned.

I would guess the heroin would calm you down.

Oh, yeah. Plus, with the cocaine, I would inject it 30 to 40 times a day. But with the heroin, when you first start out, you&#39;re only injecting it a couple of times a day, but then your tolerance builds and your habit grows, and at the end I was shooting 40 bags a day. That&#39;s a minimum of four bundles a day, so that&#39;s $600 a day that I had to have. And that&#39;s a minimum, just to stay not sick &mdash; that&#39;s not getting high. I used to have to do eight bags to 10 bags for what they call a &quot;wake-up,&quot; just to think straight in the morning, just to get out of bed. I would have to use the bottom of a beer can, because I couldn&#39;t fit it in a spoon. That would get me started, and then I would go out and steal, get more dope, steal some more, get more dope. It was insane.

That sounds like an absolutely pathetic life.

It is. I would rather die than go back to that. Especially now that I know there&#39;s something better out here. But the life that I have today, that was never in my vocabulary. I never knew it existed, I could never fantasize about it, I didn&#39;t even know it was there. Because I started so young.

How young?

By the time I was a freshman, I was getting high every day. And I started selling a little bit of weed and a little bit of speed in high school and that&#39;s how I got my money. I went to get my speed one day and the guy I got it from said, &quot;If you take 100,000 of them, I can give them to you for eight cents apiece.&quot; I said I didn&#39;t have that kind of money &mdash; I&#39;m 15 &mdash; and he said &quot;You don&#39;t need money, just go in there and sell it.&quot; And I walked out of there with a green trash bag full of speed. And that same guy, he was probably 10 years older than me, he kind of brought me along. So you know, seven years later, now I am getting cocaine from him. And I have a 10- or 12-year business relationship starting with this guy, and I go for cocaine, and he asks if I can get any automatic weapons &mdash; and I don&#39;t think, well, that carries a life sentence &mdash; I am thinking about how much money I can make. It was just a natural progression. It doesn&#39;t happen overnight. When you start out it&#39;s nickels and dimes, but little by little as you move up, half of the people you deal with are carrying guns anyway, so the thought of moving guns is not that traumatic, because you&#39;re around them a lot anyway. So it&#39;s a natural progression of that life. And then it&#39;s explosives &mdash; there&#39;s a market for explosives. The worst thing that ever happened was the peace talks in Ireland.

What do you learn in jail?

You learn how to manipulate the system, and you learn how to do better crimes. That&#39;s about all you learn. I learned how to rig the phone. You run into all different kinds of criminals so you just expand. Now you learn how to counterfeit, and there are many different ways to do that, other than making money. Car titles or vehicle inspection stickers, or prescription drug pads &mdash; there&#39;s a ton of ways. If you have a criminal mind, that&#39;s where you go. You don&#39;t think, &quot;How can I make a legitimate living?&quot; We&#39;re criminals and when you lock us up, all you do is change our theater. We are still criminals; we just have a different venue to work with. And for a lot of us, that&#39;s all we ever knew; that&#39;s all we ever wanted. I never wanted to be straight.

Was rehab in prison serious, or was it just a way to get out of your cell?

A lot of the rehabs I went to were to knock my habit down, because I couldn&#39;t afford it. Forty bags a day is a huge habit. Most people who make it up to six or eight bags a day check themselves into a rehab, to get the habit back down. And I did that numerous times. Every time I ever put together any long-term sobriety, it always started in the jail cell. And it takes a good six months. So these three-to-seven-day rehabs, they are fine for an alcoholic, but for a junkie, you are sick for months.

Do you just get tired of it, as a junkie &mdash; just too old?

Yeah. You don&#39;t see a lot of 50-year-old junkies. You die. And to be honest with you, dying wasn&#39;t that big of a deal. Living without the dope was not an option. When a junkie overdoses and dies, the first thing every other junkie around does is find out where he got it, because they know it&#39;s killer stuff, it&#39;s good stuff. Because you&#39;re killing yourself anyway &mdash; it just takes too damn long. So the death part of it, that&#39;s just the price you pay; but when you are living like that, what do you have to look forward to?

What about the concern about going back to jail?

It got to be a solution for me. I would use it to get cleaned up, to get healthy. I used it to get out of a bad marriage. The first time you go, it&#39;s traumatic, and then after that, it&#39;s pretty simple. It&#39;s a pretty easy way to live. All you&#39;ve got to worry about is don&#39;t get stabbed.

Sounds like a pretty fundamental concern, to me.

If somebody wrongs me, I have to retaliate in prison. It&#39;s self-preservation, because people will prey on you. If someone steals from you, you have to stab them. On the other hand, if you don&#39;t and you go to the cops, someone will stab you. The worst thing in prison is being a rat. But when you&#39;re on the streets, they demand that you do that, and it&#39;s hard to flip that. There are a lot of inmates who get busted once, get sent away, and never go back. But a convict, that&#39;s a way of life, and it&#39;s a moral code and you live by that. When they lock you up in prison, the only thing you&#39;ve got in there is your word. Without that you&#39;ve got absolutely nothing. And then you get out on the street and it&#39;s all a bunch of lies. You&#39;ve got the politicians lying to you, and people in your everyday life that you run into are feeding you bullshit.

Are you saying there is no bullshit in prison?

No, I&#39;m not saying that at all. But let&#39;s say you have a prison population of 2,200 guys. Out of that 2,200, an experienced convict will find other convicts, and you&#39;ll surround yourselves with those you can trust. Professional criminals. The county jails now, there are very few criminals in there. It&#39;s all wife-beaters and drunk drivers, and they are lined up to tell on you if they think they&#39;ll get another meal out of it. And it&#39;s no fun any more &mdash; it&#39;s not. Some of the most carefree times I&#39;ve had were in prison. I played sports all day, I worked at the rec yard, we would go back and have burrito parties in my cell and we would laugh and joke and get up the next day and do it again. It was a pretty simple way to live. The sad reality is we don&#39;t know any other way and we don&#39;t have the balls to finally stand up and say, &quot;You know what? I was wrong about everything.&quot; That&#39;s hard to admit. To be honest with you, getting hooked on heroin was probably the best thing that ever happened to me, because I would still be drinking and doing cocaine and doing crime.

But you needed crime to support your habit.

Yeah, but it took heroin to get me to the point of seeking recovery. Otherwise, I would still be out there, doing the same thing, and by now, I would have caught a life sentence. It would be jails, institutions or death.

Is there honor among thieves?

Not anymore, and the reason is the drug trade. When I was starting out, it didn&#39;t matter how much money you had, you had to be connected to get quantities of drugs. And so you had to have established yourself as a standup guy, a trustworthy guy. Today, everybody with a thousand dollars can be a drug dealer. So no one has proven themselves, and these people who get a little quantity of money to buy, they start dealing drugs, and the minute they get busted, they give up their dealer. That never happened before. This old bank robber from New York told me that the Feds are giving out so much time today, a statue would talk. And he&#39;s right. They&#39;re handing out life and 20-year sentences, and when it comes down to giving up your wife and kids, or giving up some drug dealer &mdash; that&#39;s just how the system works.

Is it a perpetual pre-occupation to not backslide?

Not so much. I mean, very rarely do I think about drinking and drugging today. I think about crime a lot, and probably always will.

As a way to make a living?

Yeah. When I walk into a bank, the first thing I do is count the cameras and I try to figure out which ones are dummies and which ones are live. I do my banking, and it makes banking a hell of a lot more fun, but because I am not drinking and drugging, I don&#39;t obsess on it. Before, I would see an opportunity and be obsessed about it until I went and did it. But because I am clean today, I don&#39;t have that obsession to do it. And getting to a point where I could admit that about myself and accept that that&#39;s how my brain works, then I was able to get past it. Because nobody wants to admit that at heart, they are a thief. That was a step in the recovery.

Tell me about doing comedy. Was that a new adventure? Is it a rush being on stage?

It&#39;s a little bit of a rush; I enjoy it. You can&#39;t compare it to an armed robbery, but you still get that rush. But I have always had the ability to make people laugh, since the first grade. That was always my defense mechanism. I was in the federal penitentiary one night, and there were about eight of them crammed in my cell, and I had them laughing so hard, they begged me to shut up. And later on, at lights-out, I realized I was sitting in the penitentiary with no drugs or booze, laughing harder than I can remember laughing since I was a little kid, and that gave me a little bit of hope that maybe I could enjoy life without drugs and booze. I didn&#39;t stay sober from that day on, but I never forgot that.

Are you on the comedy circuit?

No. I don&#39;t want to run all over the place. I probably could have taken it further than I did, but I didn&#39;t want to do the whole nightclub scene. I figured it took me 25 years getting my ass out of bar rooms, I had no business pursuing something that was going to put me back in. I still have to keep the focus on me and get what I need for my recovery.

Which is what?

I need to be around my support group, my friends &mdash; that spiritual connection &mdash; and on the road you don&#39;t get that. Being on the road is not the same as being centered somewhere and having your daily life. I never really had a home since I was a kid. I was always on the run, always in the joint. I spent 27 years either on the run, incarcerated or on probation or parole. So I appreciate this.

You mentioned spirituality. Is there a spiritual dimension to this?

Absolutely. The most spiritual feeling I&#39;ve ever had, has been when I am helping another human being. The first prison show I did was at Windham &mdash; Maine State Prison &mdash; and I did a show for their substance abuse program, and a week later, I got 60 thank-you letters in the mail from those guys. That was the most spiritual day in my life. I mean, any day you can go into prison and get out the same day is a spiritual day &mdash; but that was the first time in my life I felt like I was doing what I was supposed to be doing. I had a prison minister tell me one time that God prepares you earlier in life for what he needs you for later in life. It kind of made sense. Because to me, there really isn&#39;t any legitimate explanation as to why I am still alive and most of my friends aren&#39;t. So I try to give back.

Were your parents ever proud of you?

Yeah, I was clean and sober when they died and, and I was there for them. I took my father to the Kentucky Derby before he died, and took care of my mother the last four months before she died. If that was all they ever got back was my recovery that was worth it, but to be there in the end, that was cool. o