Originally posted by stephinrazin
Also, learn the train yards, bc the trains are the bumbs way to travel. Enjoy cramped, cold, smelly, dirty, box cars for the limited price of one half-smoked cigerette.

When you think of hoboes, do you picture harmless, crusty old characters, like Boxcar Willie, who carry their worldly goods wrapped in bandannas and dispense gentle wisdom by rail-yard campfires? Well, meet Mississippi Bones, aka Marvin Moore, age 56. Meet him just before he unloads a bunch of .22-caliber bullets into his old pal, fellow hobo F-Trooper.

The first slug hits F-Trooper in the head, slapping him back against the wall of an empty boxcar. Buzzing on 14 Percodans and too much booze, Mississippi keeps pulling the trigger of the pistol—five times in all.

Best take-out weapon there is, he thinks to himself. He remembers how F-Trooper had stabbed him about a year back in a fight over a woman, and how F-Trooper had later apologized—as if saying he was sorry would make everything fine between them. "I'm gonna make you feel sorrier," he had vowed before getting his revenge and hopping a freight headed the other way.

As it turns out, Bones' outgoing train wasn't fast enough to outrun the law, and he's now serving 13 years in a federal pen in Atlanta. Which is where I caught up with him, and where I got a glimpse into the life of America's new-style, media-savvy hoboes. Driven by their anger at the government and society, they've formed the Freight Train Riders of America (FTRA), as if they were a consumer activist group trying to make the country a better place. But they aren't civic do-gooders at all. They're Crips on rails, a dangerous brotherhood of outlaws and crazy, cold-blooded killers.

Tramps, addicts and yuppies
An estimated 30,000 train-hoppers "catch out"—the phrase used for jumping on a freight train—every year on the nation's 170,000 miles of rail. They come in every shape: old-school tramps, carny workers, rail buffs, punk teenagers and Mexican migrants hauling entire families. A small but growing portion are college students and professionals, toting cell phones and PowerBars, the kind of yuppie thrill-seekers who are especially despised—and targeted—by authentic hoboes. The real deals are down-and-outers—they're homeless, mentally ill, drug-addled, alcoholic losers, surviving on petty theft and food stamps. If this sounds like yet another Democratic-party constituency group, just visit their neighborhoods—the warrens of tents and cardboard boxes next to switchyards, mostly in the open expanses of the American West. Nobody's out jogging and listening to NPR on their Walkman. Hobo camps are what the world would look like if there were no landlords; they resemble makeshift ghettos where the residents are not just poor, but often violently insane. It was in one of these hobo jungles that the FTRA took shape in the early '80s as a loose organization of Vietnam vets, white supremacists and bikeless bikers who pledged to watch one another's backs and share beer, food and women. Anyone else riding the rails should consider himself prey. "If you're not FTRA, they'll grab you, roll you and throw you off a train," says Officer Robert Grandinetti, a Spokane detective who has been tracking the group for more than a decade. "And then maybe the train cuts you in half." Grandinetti has compiled rap sheets on 800 FTRA members, files that document assault, robbery, rape and manslaughter. There were at least 300 unsolved murders on the rails in the 1990s. Most of these homicides, he believes, are the handiwork of the FTRA, and all of them are hard cases to crack. "The problem is," he says, "the suspects and all the witnesses disappear."

A serial killer rides the rails
Although Grandinetti claims that FTRA membership may run as high as 3,000 nationwide, most hoboes will tell you the real number is more like 200 to 800. What everyone agrees on is that the gang rules the rails of the Northwest, concentrated largely along the 1,500-mile High Line, which runs from Seattle to Minneapolis. Splinter factions ride the Southern and Midwestern lines, like the CSX, out of Georgia, or the Kansas City Southern, snaking through Oklahoma and Texas. Riders recognize one another by neckerchief bandannas fixed with silver conchos, shell-shaped metal disks. Like urban drug gangs, the FTRA factions sport colors: black bandannas for the High Line, red for the Southern corridor and blue for the central U.S.

Perhaps the most notorious FTRA member was a rider known as Sidetrack, aka Robert Silveria, presumably the world's first railroad serial murderer. A scrawny guy with freedom tattooed on his throat, he was dubbed the Boxcar Killer after he was arrested in 1996 and confessed to a bloody, five-year killing spree that left at least 14 bodies strewn from Florida to Montana. Silveria usually killed homeless transients ("I preyed on the weak," he told one cellmate), but his victims also included college students, such as weekend rider Michael Garfinkle, who was found clubbed to death in a switching yard outside Emeryville, California. Police say Garfinkle was camping in the Emeryville jungle when he encountered Silveria, who said he didn't belong there. When Garfinkle was away for a moment, Silveria took over the 20-year-old's camping spot. Garfinkle protested, to which Silveria reportedly replied, "I go anywhere, and this is the last day you've spent." And, indeed, it was. Silveria hit Garfinkle at least 13 times with an ax handle. "Silveria had a very distinct way that he killed," recalls Grandinetti. "He would bash his victim's head in, but then he couldn't stand to look at what he'd done. So he'd cover the head with whatever he could find: dirt, cardboard, clothing." Many of Silveria's victims, says Grandinetti, were found with their shirts pulled up over their heads.