ChestBuster

In 1970s and '80s Las Vegas, James McKines built one of the most disciplined and invisible drug operations the West Side had ever seen. For two decades he moved product across three state lines using a vehicle marked with a constable's badge - hiding in plain sight, untouchable by design. He left no paper trail. No wiretaps caught him discussing weight. By the time federal agents finally built a case, McKines had become a ghost they couldn't pin down through conventional means - so they reached for a statute that had never been used in his district before. James McKines became the first man in his federal district charged under the continuing criminal enterprise statute - the so-called "kingpin" law, designed for operations far larger than anything seen in that courtroom before. In 1990, a federal judge handed down a sentence of natural life in prison. When McKines responded, the judge laughed. His son, ten years old at the time, got a phone call instead of a trip to Disneyland his father had promised. What followed were twenty-seven and a half years inside the federal system - including stints at USP Marion and ADX Florence, two of the most restrictive facilities in the country. McKines filed four clemency petitions. He testified before a United States Senate subcommittee from a holding cell beneath the Capitol. He watched the world change from behind walls that didn't. On October 27, 2016, President Barack Obama signed James McKines's commutation. On February 24, 2017, McKines walked out of FCI Phoenix a free man for the first time in nearly three decades. CHESTBUSTER: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of James McKines is Book One of a four-part series - and it begins at the beginning. This volume traces McKines's earliest years: a boy born in Quitman, Mississippi, who lost his mother at three years old and was raised on the segregated West Side of Las Vegas. It follows the mentors who shaped him, the back door that led him into a world his front door never showed, and the slow construction of an operation built on discipline, silence, and a code that took decades to break. This is not a dramatized account filtered through outside research or secondhand reporting. After his father's release, James A. McKines Jr. placed a recorder on a kitchen table and asked for everything - not the version with the edges softened, not the story made safe for polite company, but the whole truth, exactly as it happened. What followed were hours of conversation that became this book. CHESTBUSTER is the result: a son's record of his father's testimony, telling the story of an American life that moved through crime, conviction, decades of incarceration, and an improbable second chance - in the words of the man who lived every page of it. Published by Villain Press, an imprint of Villain Global Industries Inc.