The worst part of prison?
The food, of course. But that was second worst. First worst was the sheer, unrelenting, oppressive boredom of it.
The best part? The best part was all the interesting, intelligent, and complex people I met there. No, not everyone you meet in minimum-security federal prison is a nice person. Not by a long shot. Some of them are downright evil. But surprisingly few.
The food was the institutional slop provided by the same private contractor who ran the cafeterias at Haverford. As bad as the food was at Haverford, it was much worse at Hoover. I assume the food-service company had a range of plans they offered their clients from the Caviar Plan to the Dogshit Plan. Hoover was on the latter. The best thing you could say about the food in prison was that it was capable of sustaining human life. Barely.
The biggest difference between the food at Haverford and the food at Hoover, however, was not the food itself, but the role food played in your life. At Haverford, there were lots of interesting things to do each day from attending classes to going on panty raids at Bryn Mawr. Food played a relatively small role in campus life. It was bad, but so what?
In prison, you lived for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Those three occasions were the highlights of your day. When the highlight of your day is terrible, then your life really sucks. We did have a commissary where you could buy snacks, candy, and an occasional piece of fruit. When you purchased something from the commissary, they deducted the cost from the money in your prison bank account.
How did you get money into your account?
Either by working a prison job or having your family send it in from the outside. There was a limit to how much money you could keep in your account, and the Bureau of Prisons deducted a certain amount each month to pay restitution to your victims. That’s right, a few pennies of the measly paycheck I earned from scrubbing prison toilets went into the mailbox of Steven Dubois—where I’m sure it was lost among the thousands of dollars he earned from Star Trek residuals.
As I said before, the worst part of prison was the crushing boredom. Every day you faced hours with nothing to do but tedious manual labor, three god-awful meals, and the constant blare of a communal television set that was tuned to the lowest of lowest-common-denominator programming.
Different inmates dealt with the boredom of prison in different ways. My cubie Charlie, for example, who wrote letters for a living (he was a freelance junk-mail copywriter by trade) was writing a series of long letters to his two young sons. He wrote in a spiral notebook and when he finished ten pages or so, he’d rip them out and send them home. He let me read each installment before he put it in the mail.
“Are you sure it’s not too personal?” I asked. “It’s a letter to your family, after all.”
“You’re part of my family now, Joey. Besides, I’m going to publish them someday. I’ll charge ninety-nine nighty-five and discount it to forty-nine bucks. I’ve got a mailing list in the millions. At a two percent response rate, I’ll net several hundred thousand dollars from this project. When I get out of the slammer, I’m going to need that money.”
“No offense, Charlie, but why would anyone want to buy your letters to your kids from prison?”
“There’s a lot of advice in there on copywriting and marketing. That’s what I’m known for. Don’t worry, people will buy it.”
So I read the letters. They were beautiful. They contained a lot of advice about advertising. I wasn’t in any position to tell whether the advice was brilliant or bullshit. But the affection he felt for his two boys was palpable on every page. On one page he’d tell them how to write a headline on an envelope, then on the next page he’d talk about how to use a razor without nicking your chin. He was such a good writer, he could make anything interesting. I got more pleasure out of reading Charlie’s letters than any of the hundreds of books I read in the prison library—except, of course, for Shakespeare.
As I mentioned earlier, my cubie Steve, the Wall Street broker, tried to fight the boredom with exercise. He’d hit the gym at dawn and wouldn’t stop until lunchtime. After lunch, he’d go back and exercise some more. Four hours, five hours, six hours a day he’d be jogging on the track, lifting weights, climbing the Stairmaster, or cycling on the stationary bike. But he never lost much weight. He was still doughy, bloated, and unhealthy looking. Probably because our food was loaded with simple carbs and other empty calories. I wondered if the exercise was doing him more harm than good and I told him so a few times.
“Steve, why don’t you back off on the exercise for a day or two? Give your body a chance to repair itself. That’s how you build muscle. Or so I’ve heard.”
“Naaah, I’m not doing it to build muscle. Just to pass the time.”
“That much exercise isn’t good for you. Not unless you’re an Olympic athlete. If you don’t mind me saying so, I don’t think you’re an Olympic athlete.”
“It gives me something to do with my day, Joey.”
“Why don’t you take a job?”
“I hate those prison jobs. Look at your job, for chrissakes. Do you think I want to clean toilets all day? I used to have lunch every afternoon at Le Bernardin. I had a house on the beach in the Hamptons, for heaven’s sake. I still do! I’ve got plenty of money in my prison account. My wife sends a check to the prison every month. After all, she’s got a hundred million in the bank. That money will be waiting for me when I get out in ten years. But I’ve got to make sure I live that long. That’s why I exercise.”
Nigel was a different story. He liked to read. He liked to talk to people. I think he knew every single inmate in the joint. And he loved to play cards, especially poker. Of course, we weren’t allowed to play poker. But Nigel came up with a system whereby four guys could play poker and make it look like they were playing bridge. They didn’t use poker chips. Instead, they’d make their bets using code words. When somebody said, “I bid four no-trump,” for example, it meant “I bet four stamps.” (Stamps became the main currency in federal prison after cigarettes were banned.) One of the guys kept track of the bets in a notebook. The guards didn’t know bridge was played with thirteen cards to a hand and poker with five. Or maybe they did, but didn’t care.
Nigel almost always won at poker. I think the only times he didn’t win were the times when he thought it would be a good idea to let someone else win for a change.
“They shouldn’t let me play cards in this place, Joey,” he said to me one day in our cubicle.
“Why not?”
“I’ll show you why not.” He pulled out a deck of cards and fanned them in front of me on the bunk bed. “Pick a card. Any card you want. Look at it and memorize it, but don’t show it to me.”
I pulled the nine of spades.
“Put it back in, but be careful not to let me see it.”
I did so.
“Shuffle the deck thoroughly.”
I played a lot of bridge at Haverford, so I was a pretty good card handler. I shuffled the hell of that deck and slid it over to him on the bunk.
“No, I don’t need to touch the deck,” he said. “Just leave it in the center of the bed. Now take off your left shoe.”
“Take off my left shoe?”
“Do as I say.”
I slipped off my left tennis shoe.
“Hold the shoe upside down over the bunk and shake it.”
When I did that, a single card fluttered out of the shoe and landed face down on the bed.
“Turn over the card.”
Do I need to tell you which card it was?
“And that, my dear boy, is why they should not allow a scoundrel like me to play cards in prison,” he said with a devilish glitter in his eye.
What about me? How did I pass the time in the joint? Reading. Mostly drama, because that’s what I loved best. I read all of Shakespeare. Again. I memorized a lot of the soliloquies and other famous passages, so that I could quote them even more than I used to—which drove my friends crazy, but tickled me to no end. I read the Holy Bible front to back, just for the hell of it. The prison library would order any book or play you wanted, so I continued to study the work of my favorite modern playwright, David Mamet. I tried to keep up with what was happening on Broadway and off-Broadway, ordering the plays when they were available and reading reviews in the newspaper when they were not. I nurtured a dream of working as an actor when I got out of prison.
Oh, and I also worked on my appeal, of course. I asked the government for a new public defender. He assured me I had been wrongly tried under the RICO Act and I would be out of jail in no time.
“What exactly is ‘no time?’” I asked him during one of our first meetings. “From start to finish, how long will the appeal process take?”
He said, “About two years, give or take.”
“That’s the length of my sentence.”
“Oh.”
“What happens if we win?”
“You walk out of here a free man with no criminal record.” He hesitated. “Unless …”
“Unless what?”
“Well, there’s a chance that if the RICO charge is vacated, the State of Ohio might want to try you for armed robbery.”
“Isn’t that double jeopardy?”
“We would make that argument, of course, but I can’t guarantee we’d prevail.”
“What is the penalty for armed robbery in Ohio?”
“I’ve never taken the bar exam in Ohio, but I guess it’s around twenty years.”
“So I could walk out of here a free man with no criminal record in two years and then go into some Ohio state prison for the next twenty years?”
“The good news is you’d only serve half of that,” he said.
I decided to fire my lawyer, serve my two stinking years at Hoover, and be done with this nightmare once and for all.
But I spent most of my time in prison thinking, thinking, thinking.
I thought about my wife, even though I didn’t get many letters from her and no visits. I came to realize the reason I kept cheating on Caitlin was because I felt guilty for not being able to support her and Bianca. I didn’t feel like a real man, so I tried to make up for that by screwing any woman who walked into my life. Richard Burton once said, “An actor is something less than a man, but an actress is something more than a woman.” How true! I was something less than a man, that’s for sure. I was starting to realize Caitlin was something more than an ordinary woman.
I spent most of my time thinking about how I got into this mess. Thinking about Rosetti. Thinking about revenge. Could I really get revenge on a Mafia boss? Don’t be ridiculous, I told myself. You’ve heard the expression cutting off your nose to spite your face? Getting revenge on a Mafia boss would be like slitting your throat to get revenge on your head. I’d be a dead man.
Speaking of dead men, one afternoon after lunch something awful happened.
Steve had a heart attack.
Let me give you some advice. If you’re planning to spend any time in federal prison, please don’t get sick in there. See your doctor and dentist before you go. Your podiatrist and chiropractor, too. The quality of the medical care you get in prison is abysmal. Prison is where young doctors go when they’ve graduated from medical school in a small Caribbean island. At the bottom of their class. After cheating on the final exam.
Even worse than the quality of prison medical care is the speed at which it’s delivered. If you’re suffering from a minor illness like the flu, for example, the doctor will see you a month or two after the disease has run its course. If you’re suffering from an urgent illness like a stroke or a heart attack, medical care will arrive much faster. Six or seven hours, or so.
I happened to be in the gym when Steve’s heart attack hit. I wasn’t exercising. I was looking for a quiet place to read. I chose a different place to read every day, just to add a little variety to my life. I was reading Troilus and Cressida near the running track, and every three minutes Steve would jog by me. Once in a while, he said something snarky like, “Keep at it, Lord Olivier.”
“You, too, Jesse Owens,” I replied.
Troilus and Cressida is not exactly gripping reading, but I was getting into it and I didn’t notice that Steve hadn’t passed me in a while. When I looked up I saw him lying facedown on the track opposite from where I was sitting. At first, I thought he was stretching or cooling off. But he wasn’t moving. I got up and walked over to him. I wasn’t worried until I saw his face.
“You okay, Steve?”
“No.”
“What’s the matter?”
“Chest hurts.”
Then he vomited.
I rolled him over on his side. His face was as pale and pasty as a fan at a Star Trek convention. I knew he was having a heart attack.
“Guard!” I yelled. “Emergency!”
No guard was in sight. They were never around when you needed them. There was one other inmate in the gym lifting weights. I said, “Go find a guard. My cubie is having a heart attack.” The guy dropped a two-hundred-pound barbell on the ground and ran out the door.
Everything after that seemed to happen in super-slow motion. It must’ve taken fifteen minutes for a guard to show up. He took one look at Steve and got on his walkie-talkie to call some more guards. Ten minutes after that, two more guards arrived. They talked among themselves for five minutes or so and concluded that Steve was indeed having a heart attack. They talked about calling the medical unit at the big-boy jail, but decided it would take too long for them to send a doctor to us. We were fifteen minutes into Steve’s cardiac arrest when one guard had the bright idea of calling 911.
I held Steve’s hand and said, “It won’t be long now, buddy. They’ve called the ambulance. It’s on its way. You’re going to be fine.”
His eyes were starting to glaze over.
Unfortunately, an ambulance cannot pull up at a prison and let the EMTs run inside and do their job like they would anywhere else. It’s not that easy. First of all, this was Nowheresville, Arizona, and the nearest hospital was forty-five minutes away. Secondly, the ambulance has to stop at the gate and pass a security check. Third, the EMTs cannot rush inside without being frisked, questioned, and cleared. Ironically, at a federal minimum-security prison, it was much easier to break out than break in.
All told, it took ninety minutes for the EMTs to reach us. Steve was just barely alive when they got to him. They did CPR on him again and again, but it wouldn’t take. They couldn’t get his heart in rhythm. Finally, it stopped.
Steve was dead.
That night, after lights-out, the three of us stayed up late talking in the dark. The emptiness of Steve’s bunk bed was a heavy presence in the room. We replayed the events of the day over and over again.
“Ironically,” said Charlie, “I think Steve was the only one of the three of us who was truly innocent. He told me the whole story once. They railroaded him. Somebody had to pay for the stock market crash and they chose Steve. Even if he didn’t dot every I and cross every T, I don’t think he was any more guilty than ten thousand other assholes on Wall Street. In fact, I think he was completely legit.”
“What about you, Charlie? Were you innocent?” I said.
We’d never talked in detail about our crimes before. Something about lying there in the dark after Steve’s untimely death made it seem like a good time for confession.
“I was innocent,” he said, “but not very smart. I wrote an ad for a guy who was selling nutritional supplements for high cholesterol. The capsules were supposed to be filled with an exotic herb from the rainforest in the Amazon. The Federal Trade Commission didn’t seem to think baking soda was an exotic herb.”
“That’s your client’s fault, not yours,” I said.
“Yes, but I made some stupid mistakes. I should’ve checked out the client more carefully. It turned out he had a long history of pulling the same kind of scam. He’d done some time in prison himself. Plus, I didn’t take a fee for services. He talked me into sharing the profits with him. So from the government’s point of view, I wasn’t just a copywriter for hire. I was a full partner. They made a deal with the bastard to testify against me, and they let him off with a slap on the wrist. I wound up with two years.”
“For what it’s worth, you sound innocent to me,” I said.
“Thanks,” said Charlie. “What about you, Joey? How did you find yourself pursuing a career in armed robbery and organized crime?”
So I told them the whole pathetic story. It took thirty minutes from beginning to end. I left out the part about Rosetti kidnapping my dog and threatening my family.
“One thing I don’t understand,” said Charlie. “Why did you do it? When your acting gig dried up, was robbery really the only way you could earn a living?”
There was a long silence. Finally, Nigel spoke up. “He was forced to do it.”
“Who forced you?” said Charlie.
Another long silence.
“He’d rather not talk about it,” said Nigel. “And frankly, I don’t blame him.”
“What about you, Nigel?” I said, eager to change the subject.
“I’m guilty, my dear boys. I’m not only guilty, but I’m also unrepentant. I’m a career criminal and proud of it.”
“What kind of criminal exactly?” I asked.
“I told you on the first day we met. I’m a confidence man. A grifter. A flimflam artist. A swindler. Scoundrels of my ilk go by many names.”
“But what crime did you commit to land here?”
“It was pretty much the same crime I’ve been committing for the last thirty years, but this time I got caught. I can’t give away all of my trade secrets. There’s a code of honor among con men. The basic scenario goes something like this: I have a team of people around the country who are good at spotting individuals who have a unique combination of great wealth and lack of sophistication. We call them marks. We call the people who find them ropers, because they rope the marks and bring them to me.”
“Like a cowboy roping a calf,” said Charlie.
“Precisely, my dear boy. I am the manager and grand poobah of something we call the big store, which in my case is a stock brokerage firm. Much like the one our dearly departed friend Steven once ran—only his was legitimate, and mine is entirely phony. Once we get the mark inside the store, we convince him we’ve come up with a clever way to beat the stock market. Our store, or office, looks just like any other brokerage firm. Desktop computers and printers are cranking out important-looking documents. Secretaries and clerks are running around looking busy. But they are all actors. Just like you, Joey. In fact, I might have some lucrative employment for you when we both get out of here.”
“It’ll be the first time I’ve worked as an actor in years.”
“You don’t need to be Lionel Barrymore for this kind of acting. You don’t need to say a word. I do most of the talking myself. I show the mark some fancy computers and some wires. All very hush-hush, you know. I explain how my brokerage firm has figured out a way to get the stock prices from Wall Street a hundredth of a second before everyone else gets them.”
“One hundredth of a second?”
“Yes. That’s all you need nowadays. Computers can execute a trade in a thousandth of a second, ten times faster. In that blink of an eye, you can make money by knowing which way the stock is moving before anyone else does. I show them a closet full of wires and cables and mainframe computers that make all this happen.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Actually, we bought the wires and cables at a hardware store for a hundred bucks. They’re not hooked up to anything at all.”
“And the computers?”
“Big empty boxes with lots of dials and flashing lights. I hired a theatrical set designer to build and paint them. He did a lovely job and charged me a pittance. They look quite realistic.”
“The marks believe this is real?”
“The play’s the thing, my dear boy, the play’s the thing.”
“Hamlet, Act II, Scene Two,” I said.
Then Charlie asked, “What happens next?”
“Well, now it’s time for The Convincer. We show the mark how our secret system works. Then we ask him to test the system for himself by investing a small amount of money. Let’s say a thousand dollars. He writes us a check. We show him a computer with the ticker prices from Wall Street. The computer goes through all sorts of gyrations. Bells and whistles go off. The next thing you know, we’ve turned his thousand dollars into five thousand. So we write him a check for five grand.”
“Is it a good check?” I said.
“It’s as good as gold. Do you think I’m a common paper hanger?”
“Paper hanger?”
“Someone who writes bad checks,” Charlie said.
“Sometimes we give the mark five thousand in cash. Cash works even better. Something about all that green triggers the hormones in his greed glands.”
“Then what happens?”
“Then we put him ‘on the send.’ In other words, we send him home to get some real money. A hundred thousand at least. Preferably a million or two. The biggest score I had was five million. Ah, what a lovely day that was.”
“You mean he withdraws a million bucks from his bank and gives it to you?”
“You catch on fast, Joey. Are you sure you’re an actor? You seem too sharp to be a thespian.”
“What happens next?”
“Well, we have to wait for his check to clear. Meanwhile, the mark stays in the finest hotel in town at our expense. He’s drinking champagne and eating caviar on our tab. Having a lovely time. When he shows up at our office three days later to execute the stock trade, a curious thing has happened.”
“What?”
“Our office has quite thoroughly vanished, dear boy. ‘Melted into air, into thin air.’”
“Prospero from The Tempest.”
“Actors may be a bit slow,” said Nigel, “but you cannot deny they have prodigious memories. Rather like elephants, I should say.”
We were silent for a while. A scary thought crossed my mind. So scary I almost didn’t say anything. But I couldn’t help myself.
“These con jobs of yours, Nigel, do you always do them for money? Or do you sometimes do them for revenge?”
“Money, mostly. That’s the beauty of con games. They work well for both money and revenge. Why do you ask? Is there someone you want vengeance on?”
“Maybe.”
“Who?”
“I’d rather not say. Besides, it probably wouldn’t work. He’s rich, but he’s not stupid. In fact, he’s very intelligent. Just a little unsophisticated.”
“We’re not looking for stupid people, Joey. We’re looking for greedy people. Stupid people don’t work. They can’t grasp the opportunity and act on it quickly. But smart people who are too greedy for their own good work like a charm. They see the chance and grab it before they take the time to think it through.”
“Well, the guy I have in mind is perfect for the part. But he’s too dangerous to mess with. Besides, I’m taking the straight and narrow when I get out of here. If I can’t make it as an actor, I’ll wash dishes to support my family.”
“Not sure whether you want to take revenge or not, Prince Hamlet? I understand. If you ever want to talk more about it, you know where to find me. I’m not going anywhere for the next seven months and twenty-three days.”
“Okay, but I’m too tired to talk any more tonight.”
“Me too,” said Charlie.
“Sweet dreams,” said Nigel.
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on.” I continued Prospero’s famous speech from The Tempest. “And our little lives are rounded with a sleep.”
Soon the three of us were rounded with a sleep as well.