A gangly hobo, much younger than Mike, comes over to bum a cigarette. He peers at Mike and says, “Hey, man! You fucked up?”
Mike sits up, unsteady, managing to maintain a sort of tilted half-lotus, but he says nothing.
“You the guy’s been askin’ ’bout the FTRA?” The gangly hobo asks this of me and stoops to light his cigarette from an ember.
“Yeah,” I say. “You FTRA?”
“Hell, no! Couple those motherfuckers lookin’ to kill my ass.”
“Oh, yeah? FTRA guys? What happened?”
The gangly hobo eyes me with suspicion. “Nothin’ happened. Just these pitiful fuckers decided they’s goin’ to kill me for somethin’ they thought I done. They been goin’ round three months sayin’ I better keep the hell off the rails. But—” he spreads his arms, offering a target “—here I am. You know? Here I fuckin’ am.”
I try to question him further, but he’s stalks off back to his camp. Mike’s eyes are half-closed, his head begins to droop. Then a long plaintive blast of train sadness issues from the switchyard, and he stiffens, his eyes snap open. I get the idea he’s listening to a signal from the back of beyond, a sound only he can interpret. His features are gathered in harsh, attentive lines, and with his ax handle held scepter-style, his beard decorated with bits of vegetation, in the instant before he loses consciousness, he looks dressed in a kind of pagan dignity, the image of a mad, primitive king.
The immense neighborhood of the rails, 170,000 miles of track, supports a population no larger than that of a small town; yet this population is widely variegated. Yuppie riders, prosperous souls for whom freight-hopping is a hobby. Eco-activist riders, most of them young, who view riding as a means of using the system against itself. Crusty punks, drunk punks, gutter punks: the order and suborders of the next generation of hobos. Pierced; tattooed; homeless; they travel from squat to squat on the trains. Then there are the hardcore hobos, those who spend their lives moving along the rails. Included in their number are the FTRA, who distinguish between their membership and the general run of hobos by calling themselves “tramps” (or “train tramps”) and “trampettes.”
This attenuated neighborhood and its citizenry constitute a grapevine that stretches coast to coast, conveying information such as how to get the best dumpster pizza in Denver, and where to find water near the Rio Grande yard in Pueblo. It also serves to carry horrific tales concerning the FTRA: a woman raped under a railroad bridge; a man left tied up and sodomized in a freight car, lying in his own blood and feces; two gutter punks and their dogs slaughtered by the gang in a boxcar, their girlfriends raped and then thrown from the train. Such stories are seconded by the majority of media reports. A week-long series on Portland’s KOIN-TV identifies the FTRA as Freight Train Killers, and features an interview with a yuppie rider named K-Line who says she flung herself from a moving train to avoid rape by a group of gang members. A Los Angeles Times article speaks of a “mysterious brotherhood” and states that the gang has “set up rail lines out of Texas as drug-running corridors.” The Spokane Spokesman-Review, under the heading “Killers Ride The Rails,” says that “a racist gang of hobos may be responsible for 300 transient murders…” Internet websites show pictures of hideously damaged corpses and print stories about FTRA atrocities. These and other print and electronic sources, inspired to a great extent by the exploits of hobo serial killer and alleged FTRA member Robert Silveria, paint a picture of a murderous criminal organization that holds barbarous initiation ceremonies involving rape and beating, along with ritual urination. Hardcore felons armed with weighted ax handles called Goon Sticks, who prey upon other transients, create an atmosphere of terror in switchyards and hobo jungles across the nation.
Estimates regarding the size of the FTRA’s membership range from seven or eight hundred to upwards of two thousand—most riders would subscribe to the lower figure. Several police officers have put forward the idea that on occasion FTRA members serve as mules for biker gangs, bringing in heroin from Mexico; but none have gone so far as to say that this is endemic. The crimes with which FTRA hobos are most frequently charged are trespassing, disorderly conduct, and petty thievery, and these incidents are handled by railroad bulls, who usually let the offenders off with a ticket. Local cops don’t spend much time in the rail yards, and, according to one detective, the average hobo’s hygiene is so bad that most officers don’t want them in their patrol cars.
There’s little consensus on any subject among FTRA members themselves, not even concerning the origin of the group. The most believable story has it that a group of 12 hobos, Vietnam vets all, were partying beneath a bridge in Whitefish, Montana (or a bar in Libby, if you’re to credit a variant version) in 1985, watching a freight train roll past. When an X-TRA container came into view, a hobo named Daniel Boone said jokingly, “We oughta call ourselves the FTRA—Fuck The Reagan Administration.” Thus Daniel Boone is acknowledged to be the founder of the gang, an honor he reportedly now considers an embarrassment (he’s given up life on the rails and become an itinerant preacher in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana, living out of a camper van). But Mississippi Bones (aka Marvin Moore, a gang member currently serving a sentence for first degree murder) claims the organization was founded in the 1940s by a black hobo named Coal Train, who died some thirty years later in a lean-to next to an abandoned Texaco station in Desert Center, California. Bones says he “carried the old man some wine” and sat with him a while, and has no doubt that he was the actual founding father.
The chief source for almost every news story concerning the FTRA is Officer Robert Grandinetti, a heavyset, affable man closing in on retirement age, who works out of the Office of Special Police Problems in Spokane, Washington. He has made the gang his special project, not only pursuing and arresting them, but also devoting considerable time to raising the national consciousness as regards their particular menace. He’s appeared on America’s Most Wanted and makes presentations on the subject to federal commissions and law enforcement groups. Days, he patrols beneath the city’s railroad bridges, areas where riders gather to “catch out” (the hobo term for hopping a freight). He carries a Polaroid camera with which he takes the picture of anyone he suspects of associating with or belonging to the FTRA, and these pictures are then mounted in hefty scrapbooks, along with mug shots and photographs of FTRA graffiti. He’s compiled an extensive database on the gang’s membership, and has a collection of FTRA artifacts, the most impressive being a Goon Stick (he calls it a Goonie Stick), an ax handle to one end of which has been welded a softball-sized lump of lead. He speaks with relish about the subject, expressing what seems a gruff fondness for certain gang members.
As we sit in his office, a fluorescent-lit cube with several desks and a prominently displayed employee award, Grandinetti utilizes visual aids—photographs, FTRA bandanas, and so forth—with the facile air of someone who has given the same show many times before (this due in part, I assume, to the fact that over the years he has lectured on police matters in the Spokane school system). His awareness of the FTRA derives from a series of unsolved murders in the early ’90s, bodies found near the tracks along the Highline route from Cheney, Washington, to Sandpoint, Idaho, all with their jackets and shirts pulled over their heads, and their trousers pulled down. “If there’d just been a couple, I could buy them as accidents,” he says. “But after six of them, the accident theory didn’t fly.” He goes on to say that there were over 450 trespass deaths on railroad property during the past year, and he believes a significant percentage of these were homicides perpetrated by the FTRA. To support this assumption, he cites cases in which the victim was struck by a train in a switchyard, yet there was little blood at the scene, suggesting that the victim was killed elsewhere, and the body placed on the tracks so the impact of the train would cover up the actual cause of death: blunt force trauma. But Grandinetti admits that in most of these cases it’s impossible to determine whether the crimes were committed by the FTRA or independent hobos…or by anyone else, for that matter. Switchyards are generally situated in or near dangerous neighborhoods, and the idea that an indigent may have murdered a hobo is hardly unthinkable.