Chapter 1: (What a) Cast of Characters!

Late-October, 1986

Darren James POV:

The first person I should introduce you to is Ibera.

She’s the caretaker of an ‘area’ where all the prisoners were originally brought. They were brought here because it’s inescapable ... that’s because it resides in a different dimension! I was told that it’s in the 5^th dimension and things work wildly different here.

Ibera is a very pretty woman in a MILF sort of way. She stands about five foot eight inches tall, long platinum blonde hair, sparkling blue eyes, an innocent-sweet smile and would appear to be about 38 to 40 years old.

Don’t let that fool you, because she’s anything but innocent.

She’s also well over 1000 years old ... or so I’ve been told.

She has psychic powers, that from my experience, have almost no limits. She can create jail cells simply by thinking about what it is that she wants and what it should look like.

This whole area works on psychic commands.

As I discovered, if she gives you ‘permission’, you don’t even have to be a psychic to take advantage of them. For instance, if I want an iced tea, all I have to do is think about it and it appears in my hand. The same thing goes if I want a Burger King Whopper or virtually anything from Taco Bell. All I have to do is think about it and I have it.

Anything that Ibera has ever had before, this place will re-create exactly, simply by thinking it.

I’m glad her friends, who I’ll mention later, have made many trips here sharing their ‘delicacies’ as Ibera puts it, with her. Her ‘menu’ is pretty impressive!

A word of warning: her ‘delicacies’ are heavily Chicago based. Like if you ask for pizza, you’re going to get Connie’s deep dish. It tastes great, but if you’re looking for a New York style pie, you’ll be somewhat disappointed. The same as if you want a Roast Beef sandwich. You’re going to get Portillo’s (Which IS the best Italian Beef ever!), but she has no idea what a Philly cheesesteak is!

I’m just sayin’.

She is also one of the horniest women I have ever met!

Poor old JB is absolutely smitten with her and I have a feeling he may become distracted at some point.

I’m just sayin’.

I might as well introduce JB next. Jim Bob Hornsby is one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet. He stands about six feet tall, long brown hair, that he usually wears in a ponytail, and a smile that makes you wonder what he’s been up to.

He’s also a self-proclaimed hillbilly of the highest ranking. Straight out of the mountains of Tennessee. The man is a whiz with any kind of camera you could put in his hands. He has a knack of knowing where to be to get the best vantage point to capture virtually any shot might ever want.

I’ve known JB for over six years and he’s been my exclusive cameraman both at the Chicago Tribune and at WGN television, where we both currently work our ‘day jobs’.

That brings me to my two other coworkers, professors Bradley and Brenda Lowenstein. They’re both in their late 40s or possibly early 50s and are college professors in the psychology department at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle campus. When they were informed of the situation with the prisoners they jumped at the opportunity to study them.

Both of them have a sharp sense of humor and quick wits. They are also on opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to their expectations of what might happen when the prisoners are finally left to be on their own. One of their favorite things to do is to ‘bet’ on their areas of disagreement with their standard one-dollar bet. Right off the bat, they invited JB and me to get in on it with them whenever we felt ‘froggy’. They explained they kept it all in a ledger and every time someone hit $20, we all had to pay up.

This promised to make things even more interesting as time goes along.

There are a few other ‘helpers’ who need to be mentioned before getting to the objects of this experiment.

The first is ‘Jonah’. Two books have been written about him and I have no desire to rewrite them ... so, I’m just going to say that he (and his ‘Friends’) are how these prisoners all came to be here.

He made his first appearance about a year ago when the media and law enforcement community had been referring to him as the ‘Invisible Man’. I was there at the Illinois State Police HQ when they held his ‘coming out’ press conference. It was amazing watching a nine-ton truck getting picked up and turned around then a police cruiser was gently lifted out of the back. All without any equipment of any kind. It was all done simply by the force of his PK or psychokinesis.

JB had a hard time recording it since he was freaking out by the incredulity of it all. It was explained by Jonah’s typed letter that while he would try to work with the police, certain crimes would be ‘adjudicated’ by his Boss who was of some ‘higher power’.

The media and some legal-eagles argued about that philosophy, wondering if Jonah might end up being an out-of-control vigilante at some point. The law enforcement establishment, for the most part, didn’t seem overly concerned, however. That’s most likely because Jonah did prove that he would work with them more times than not. Jonah showed that only the most reprehensible crimes may not be left to traditional courts to deal with.

There’s much more to Jonah ... I’m just sayin’.

On the night that all of the prisoners were brought here even the Federal Court judge was present when Jonah held a press conference. He explained the particulars of who and why the crime syndicate leaders and their assassins were going to be prisoners on a ‘remote’ island.

I found it interesting that they seemed to be in total agreement with Jonah dealing with the criminal’s punishment.

I was at that press conference.

It was there that JB and I were offered the chance to document everything!

Now that you know some of our background, I’ll fill you in on the prisoners, more or less in the order they arrived here at Ibera’s.

The Prisoners.

Lin Su Chen was the first to be sent to ‘Perdition Island’ about four weeks before any of us became involved. He was also second in command of the CIA at the time of his ‘incarceration’ by Jonah. I was never told how he managed to achieve the Deputy Director’s position, only that he had a lot of help from several crooked politicians. In case you didn’t know, that position was only obtainable through Congressional approval.

His incarceration, first at Ibera’s then being sent to the ‘Island’, had the backing of the Director of the CIA as well as the Director of the FBI. They were enamored with the idea since they just wanted him gone. The Agency was saved much embarrassment knowing that nobody would ever see or hear from him again.

When Chen was first sent to the island it was done expeditiously and the poor bastard only had the clothes he was wearing!

More on him later.

While not the next one up here, E (Elmer) Normistronzo, was the head or ‘Boss’ of the five families that comprised one of the most powerful ‘Mobs’ in the country. He was also high up in the command structure of the clandestine crime organization known as the Co-op.

He was accompanied by his thugs, Fredo, Lugo and Hugo. His thugs or body guards had been with him since High School and averaged 6’1” to 6’ 3” tall and weighed between 300 to 345 Lbs. While having experience and ‘street smarts’, their IQ’s were somewhere between Moron and just plain stupid. They were just really big dudes with looks that were intimidating even when they didn’t have weapons.

We were told, in no uncertain terms, that Elmer absolutely hated that name. Mostly because, from the time he was a young kid, many called him Elmer Fudd! He actually had his name legally changed when he was 21 to just ‘E’ because he hated it so much.

He did bear an uncanny resemblance to the cartoon character.

The next one brought up here was FBI agent Fred Callas. He was on Elmer’s payroll and kept the FBI and State Police one step behind catching him by tipping him off whenever a bust was imminent.

Fred said he ‘turned’ because he was passed over for a promotion he felt should have been his. Unfortunately, he got caught red-handed the night Elmer got busted. Jonah and the SAC of the Chicago FBI set up the bust without telling anyone. By the time Fred found out, his call of warning only cemented his fate.

The next ones brought here were E Norm’s youngest brother, Vincent and Vinnie’s four kids. They were caught after killing the wife of the man E Norm was forcing to set up several shell companies. The financial guy (who just happened to be one of Jonah’s friends) figured out E Norm was going to launder both his and the organization known as the ‘Co-op’s’ money and had alerted the Feds.

Vincent sent his kids, who he and E Norm were using as enforcers, to kidnap the man’s wife. That plan went sideways when they accidentally killed her then accidentally blew up the house that E Norm’s other brother, Guido, had meticulously booby-trapped to later kill Jonah!

Basically, they looked like and WERE like the Three Stooges and even though there were four of them, they LOOKED like all four of the Stooges. Mario looked much like a young ‘Moe’. Enrico looked like Curly, Stephano closely resembled Shemp while their little sister, Lolita, due to accidentally losing some of her blond hair in an explosives accident, looked like Larry.

Lolita was also as flat-chested as her brothers.

These were not the brightest bulbs in the Normistronzo string. Vinnie and his kids were the family’s ‘gophers’ and tasked with doing all the dirty work that didn’t require much in the way of brawn or brains. They distributed the drugs to the street level pushers and often retaliated against the Family’s adversaries with bombs and random physical violence. As a group they were mildly formidable and they rarely ever acted alone.

They were caught fleeing the scene and Jonah’s subsequent interrogation of Vinnie’s kids caused E Norm’s entire organization to unravel.

The next group of Normistronzos brought up here was Guido and 20 of his paid assassins who just happened to be all together celebrating what they thought was Jonah’s demise!

Guido’s guys were the ones who wired the house with over 500Lbs of explosives and when they heard of the explosion on the news they just had to get together to celebrate. What they didn’t know was that Vinnie’s idiot kids had triggered the explosion prematurely and only managed to blow up an unoccupied house!

These guys were the most egotistical and malevolent of all the prisoners. They’d been plying their trade for more than 15 years in some cases and had never been caught. That Jonah and his helpers nabbed them all at once was something that made their blood boil.

Guido’s part of the business was the protection racket as well as delivering bribes and/or extending extortion demands to the crooked cops and politicians that were on the family payroll. His motto was, ‘Once we buy an official or crooked cop, he stays bought’!

The next group to arrive was Lola Normistronzo and her two daughters Precious and Cecilia along with their ‘muscle’, Brutus and Otis.

I rarely say this, but, Lola is a sadistic, despicable cunt!

We discovered that she was in charge of the family’s sex slave operation. She and her two daughters, Precious and Cecelia are so evil that all four of the ‘Stooges’ are deathly afraid of them. It was the daughters’ job to run roughshod over Lola’s stable of 10 to 15-year-old kids! Both boys and girls, whose bodies were sold to very wealthy scumbags for their sick, carnal and often sadistic pleasures. Those kids were also subject to some of the most brutal sexual and physical abuse I had ever heard of.

Stefano told Jonah that Lola and her daughters ‘owned’ nearly 100 of these kids! They were spread all over the city, hidden in prison-like cells while waiting for the families’ next clients. Lolita guessed that nearly half of them had been ‘bought’ from various branches of the Chicagoland DCFS.

The three women were soon just referred to as the three bitches, especially by Ibera. That was because Ibera had been watching everything that happened the night of their arrest on one of her ‘portals’ while it was happening. (More on those portals later.) She’d been given a ‘heads-up’ by Jonah and wanted to know all she could about her soon to be ‘chargees’.

Jonah literally had to beg her NOT to just kill the three of them!

He didn’t say she had to be nice to them, however.

The next group was Marcella Normistronzo or Marcy. She had two sons, Markus and Sonny, before her husband, Arnold, disappeared under suspicious circumstances. Since then, her job had been running a string of high-end brothels while her two sons were responsible for recruiting high-level drug dealers and keeping them supplied with merchandise.

Marcy and her sons also worked with Guido and his muscle, using her high-end call girls and a video camera to help extort lascivious politicians and high level law enforcement officials. Her motto was, ‘Why pay for something when we can get the dumb, cheating bastards to do it for free!?’

This broad was another real piece of work.

The next group brought up here bears some explanation.

George Sachs and his girls, Naomi, Ruthie, Meredith and Margo were busted for running many brothels that employed underage girls. Many of those young girls were recruited by George’s four girls.

George was also one of the key players in the ‘Co-op’.

The point that needs to be made is that, unlike Lola Normistronzo, none of George’s ‘working girls’ were prisoners or forced into prostitution. They were all paid well and treated even better. The younger girls were even encouraged to go to school and even college so that one day they could leave the business.

Naomi (21) and Ruthie (19) were actually adopted by George when they were only 11 and 13. Meredith (20) and Margo (21) were friends of Naomi and Ruthie’s and the four of them were all George’s lovers. Their love for him was proof enough for me that he had never once abused any of them.

Their story was somewhat heartwarming I have to admit.

While George’s level of evilness was nowhere near the Normistronzo’s, the fact that he often took advantage of some of Guido’s assassins made him guilty enough to deserve going to the island. He had on many occasions used Guido’s guys to ‘eliminate’ certain gang members and anybody that tried to muscle in on his territory.

The four girls, in my opinion at least, in no way deserved life sentences on the island.

Problem was, they were complicit in using underage girls for prostitution, so they were going to do some jail time. They understood how the deal worked and begged Jonah to offer them the same deal as he was doing with everyone else. They were so in love with George they didn’t care that it was for life and that life wouldn’t be easy. Both Jonah and Ibera explained to them that once they all got to the island they could be in a lot of danger as there would be no guards and no rules.

That didn’t do anything to dissuade them.

It was their desire to take advantage of the deal to go to the island as opposed to going to jail.

Since the cell that all the Normistronzo’s were in was getting rather full, Ibera created a second cell just for George and his girls. She also constructed a solid half-wall that kept them somewhat isolated from everyone else.

The final group to arrive had three crooked CIA agents, most notably Executive Director Jordan Franklin, his underling Assistant ED Chad Marek and Agent Shawn Peters. Franklin had been angling to take Chen’s job and all three were complicit in trying to assassinate Jonah and FBI Special Agent TJ Johnson.

Quickly joining that group was two of the heads of the crime organization known as the ‘Co-op’. AL Hunt along with his daughter Annie Hunt, Howard Humbacker and their private assassin Jasmine Tran, Sam Sparks, a bomb maker and Maxwell Lester another assassin employed mostly by Howard Humbacker and AL Hunt.

Little Annie Hunt was a real piece of work and was Jasmine Tran’s protégé. She had personally carried out five contracts while under the tutelage of Jasmine.

That brought the total of prisoners awaiting transfer to the island to 53.

Shortly after the last prisoners were settled, Jonah made an announcement, “You will all be held here until you decide whether or not you’d like to take advantage of a deal we have for all of you. Since everyone here is almost certainly going to be found guilty of charges that, at least, will mean life in federal prison with no parole, you will be allowed to choose to be part of a unique experiment ... instead.”

Jonah decided to show them a quick overview of what the island looked like.

He shouted for silence, then said, “Portal, zoom in to Perdition Island, please?”

As a huge movie-like screen appeared, every single prisoner gasped. It showed that the island was divided into quadrants by a small mountain range. He then gave them some commentary, “Portal, zoom in to approximately 100 feet above the treetops and do a flyover so we can see some of the natural resources.

“If I can have your attention, there’s a few things you need to know. That mountain range that divides the island into quadrants is approximately 1900 feet high at its tallest point. The Mesa at the top is where the natural spring flows out of, forming streams, waterfalls and ponds on its way down. Looking closer, you’ll notice many trees bearing fruit. Due to the island’s remote location some of the fruits, nuts and vegetables you will find might be somewhat different than what you’re used to. Some of the deeper ponds in each quadrant also have freshwater fish in them. It should be obvious that you will not starve to death or die of thirst. All of you will be given a ‘Survival Toolkit’ that will have all of the rudimentary tools you will need to build shelters, fish and fashion other items you can use to hunt the game that is on this island.”

As the flyover ended he had the portal stop, temporarily.

Many of the prisoners began talking things over while keeping an eye on the aerial view of the whole island.

One of them asked, “Just where is this island located? It looks like Fiji ... is it in the Pacific Ocean?”

Jonah grinned, “That’s the thing. We aren’t going to tell you exactly where it is, only that it will be impossible for you to ever get back home again.

“It’s more than 500 miles from the nearest inhabited continent and there’s a very strong current that would take you straight to the South Pole if you were to try and get there by raft or small boat. You will, for all practical purposes, be stranded on this island for the rest of your lives. The upside would be that you would have no outside interference from me or any other government official, ever again. It would be up to you all to make whatever rules you want.”

That got many evil grins and knowing looks that suggested they didn’t believe that escape wasn’t possible. And that, left to their own devices, this might be a good deal. Certainly better than prison.

E Norm scoffed, “And you swear that once we get there we’ll be free to do whatever we want, with no interference of any kind? Just what does this ‘toolkit’ have in it?”

Jonah passed around a list of everything in the toolkit before adding, “And to answer your first question, Yes, once you’re dropped off, nobody besides your fellow prisoners will ever see you again and vice versa.”

There were many smirks before Jonah ended, “And to give you some ‘added incentive’, for everyone who treats your jailer, Miss Ibera, with the utmost respect, you may even get some ‘comfort’ items. That, however, will be entirely up to her to decide. Either way, when I am not here, she is in charge. You’d BETTER treat her with respect or you WILL be sorry.”

With that, Jonah and Ibera disappeared leaving them to discuss this development amongst themselves.

All of this happened before any of the four of us, JB, Brad, Brenda and I were here to watch in person. We were shown everything by Ibera using some kind of portal-like thing that seemed to be like a video viewer, only it had a far better resolution than any video system I’d ever seen. As surprising as that was, what happened next blew us all away!

Ibera told us that it was only a couple of days after their arrival that several of the prisoners began complaining of being fed the same porridge every day. Each cell had a large water jug with a metal ladle to drink from, so they certainly weren’t being abused and some of the prisoners had been treating Ibera nice and were reaping the benefits of much better food.

So they weren’t exactly starving.

However, many of Elmer’s group started bitching and many of them began cursing and berating Ibera. When she asked them to calm down, assuring them she’d attend to them soon, Guido and several of his assassin buddies tried to grab her through the bars.

Huge mistake!

In less than 5 seconds Guido and 11 of his boys were frozen into what looked like stone! As soon as she pulled away from Guido’s grasp the 12 of them collapsed into big piles of salt.

Chaos ensued as E Norm and his sisters responded with outrage that their brother and so many of his guys had been annihilated right before their eyes.

Ibera was still in tears when Jonah showed up with a small entourage which included Brad and Brenda. (JB and I hadn’t been brought here as yet.) Jonah was pissed off that these jerks had done something to make her cry and it took a few minutes for Ibera to compose herself enough to show everyone what had transpired.

The poor lady thought that Jonah would be angry at her for what she did!

WRONG.

Jonah simply took her in his arms, kissed her consolingly and apologized for not being here when she needed him. He then lit into all of the prisoners with a tirade that would have made a Marine Drill Sgt quake in his boots!

“I FUCKING TOLD you assholes to be nice to Ibera! That wasn’t for her sake, it was to keep you bastards and bitches from getting killed! Now do you understand? If Ibera wishes to, she could kill every one of you fuckers right now and none of you would ever be missed! Anything that you will ever have for the rest of your miserable lives is going to have to come from her. Those toolkits that we told you about were HER idea. I was all for just sending you to that deserted island with nothing but the clothes you’re wearing! From now on, I suggest you all get your acts together and maybe tomorrow Ibera might just feed you something besides porridge for breakfast...”

That all happened just before Jonah brought me and JB up here right after the big news conference in Chicago at McCormack place.

When Jonah brought us here Brad and Brenda were already here in a kitchen-like area, seated around a table.

This would end up being our ‘Command Center’.

Jonah introduced everyone and we shook hands as he introduced us to Ibera for the first time. He explained that this ‘meeting’ was just to introduce us to Ibera and get us all up to speed on what happened here a short while ago. He told us he couldn’t believe things had gotten out of hand so quickly.

After seeing everything that happened, JB looked like he was scared out of his mind. He kept looking at Ibera like she was Medusa with a head full of snakes.

Jonah chuckled, “Darren and Jim Bob, please don’t let what just happened here scare you off. I have some special ‘Gifts’ I’m going to give you that will ensure that you’ll be safe.”

JB gasped, “Okay, but, ummm, Miss Ibera, please just let me know if I’m doing something you don’t like, okay?”

Ibera smiled demurely and came over to JB, “Oh Cutie, don’t worry about anything! Please give me a hug, okay?”

When Ibera took a still trembling JB into her arms I could feel the tension start leaving him. When she kissed his cheek, I thought JB was going to pass out! I’d never seen my buddy blush like that.