Luis Charlesman, known among friends and family for his brilliant green eyes, grew up in Puerto Rico, stealing cars and selling them to the chop shop for fast cash, eventually dropping out of school at fourteen. He was in prison for two years before he turned eighteen. “Green Eyes” moved to Brooklyn in the late 1980s and began selling drugs to support his mother and brother also living in New York City. He spent about twenty years in the city, selling drugs, doing legal jobs, battling his own drug addiction and moving in and out of jail and prison.
In 2008, Green Eyes and his then wife, India, moved to Syracuse, where they opened a small car repair shop on the Southside. Green Eyes relapsed shortly after he was cut off from his methadone treatment program. Soon after, the auto shop shut down. India was able to get a job at SUNY Upstate Medical Hospital. Green Eyes’ most recent arrest was in September 2014 as part of “Operation Horseback,” which led to the arrest of 34 people in a heroin ring that stretched from NYC to Puerto Rico.
Deemed a kingpin, the judge set Green Eyes’ bail at $250,000 and offered him a sentence of 25-to-life, to which he responded, “Who’d I kill?” A private lawyer got his bail lowered to $10,000, and a seven-year sentence in exchange for a guilty plea.
At Cayuga Correctional Facility, the 47-year-old is known as “Viejo,” the old man. By the time he gets out he will have gone to prison five times, totaling between thirteen and nineteen years of his life. This essay follows Green Eyes and his family at home and on the streets of the Near Westside and Southside neighborhoods of Syracuse, during his last months out, as he as he prepares to leave his family for yet more time behind bars.
