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you've supposedly been brought to be punished. There was one fellow who was in for 

raping a little girl and exposing himself to dozens of others; I got him three pieces of pink 

Vermont marble and he did three lovely sculptures out of them - a baby, a boy of about 

twelve, and a bearded young man. He called them The Three Ages of Jesus, and those 

pieces of sculpture are now in the parlour of a man who used to be governor of this state. 

Or here's a name you may remember if you grew up north of Massachusetts - Robert 

Alan Cote. In 1951 he tried to rob the First Mercantile Bank of Mechanic Falls, and the 

hold-up turned into a bloodbath - six dead in the end, two of them members of the gang, 

three of them hostages, one of them a young state cop who put his head up at the wrong 

time and got a bullet in the eye. Cote had a penny collection. Naturally they weren't going 

to let him have it in here, but with a little help from his mother and a middleman who 

used to drive a laundry truck, I was able to get it to him. I told him, Bobby, you must be 

crazy, wanting to have a coin collection in a stone hotel full of thieves. He looked at me 

and smiled and said, I know where to keep them. They'll be safe enough. Don't you 

worry. And he was right. Bobby Cote died of a brain tumour in 1967, but that coin 

collection has never turned up. 

I've gotten men chocolates on Valentine's Day; I got three of those green milkshakes they 

serve at McDonald's around St Paddy's Day for a crazy Irishman named O'Malley; I even 

arranged for a midnight showing of Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones for a party 

of twenty men who had pooled their resources to rent the films ... although I ended up 

doing a week in solitary for that little escapade. It's the risk you run when you're the guy 

who can get it. 

I've gotten reference books and fuck-books, joke novelties like handbuzzers and itching 

powder, and on more than one occasion I've seen that a long-timer has gotten a pair of 

panties from his wife or his girlfriend ... and I guess you'll know what guys in here do 

with such items during the long nights when time draws out like a blade. I don't get all 

those things gratis, and for some items the price comes high. But I don't do it just for the 

money; what good is money to me? I'm never going to own a Cadillac car or fly off to 

Jamaica for two weeks in February. I do it for the same reason that a good butcher will 

only sell you fresh meat: I got a reputation and I want to keep it. The only two things I 

refuse to handle are guns and heavy drugs. I won't help anyone kill himself or anyone 

else. I have enough killing on my mind to last me a lifetime. 

Yeah, I'm a regular Neiman-Marcus. And so when Andy Dufresne came to me in 1949 

and asked if I could smuggle Rita Hayworth into the prison for him, I said it would be no 

problem at all. And it wasn't. 

When Andy came to Shawshank in 1948, he was thirty years old. He was a short neat 

little man with sandy hair and small, clever hands. He wore gold-rimmed spectacles. His 

fingernails were always clipped, and they were always clean. That's a funny thing to 

remember about a man, I suppose, but it seems to sum Andy up for me. He always looked 

as if he should have been wearing a tie. On the outside he had been a vice-president in the 

trust department of a large Portland bank. Good work for a man as young as he was, 

especially when you consider how conservative most banks are ... and you have to 

multiply that conservatism by ten when you get up into New England, where folks don't