Now I was taken to the brand-new, just-opened Federal Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles, where I was escorted up to the eighth floor, Unit 8 North, and introduced to my new home, a space about eight feet by ten, dimly lit, with one narrow vertical slit of a window through which I could see cars, the train station, people walking around free, and the Metro Plaza hotel, in which, seedy though it probably was, I longed to be. I couldn’t even see the guards or other prisoners, since I was closed in not by bars but by a steel door with a slot that my food trays were slid through.