[CHAPTER FIFTEEN]

ON MONDAY, MARCH 3, Barbara and I got up wordlessly. We had held each other during the night. Barbara walked her puppy in the garden to the pleasure of the press who were on the other side of the road waiting for my departure. The puppy was too young to understand his routine anywhere but on the little strip of grass that had become familiar to him – and now to the press. This tiny, white, lamblike puppy: I wondered if he would remember me.^* I looked at the sparkling-blue, foam-capped Atlantic crashing onto our beach from our drawing room for a couple of minutes and then the stately progress of yachts and criss-crossing of small boats in the placid Intracoastal Waterway out our loggia windows for a little longer. The recollection of these perspectives would be a source of serenity in the sober, contemplative times to come.

We drove away in a rented SUV that had windows largely impenetrable to cameras. The trip was uneventful after we got clear of the photographers outside our gate at Palm Beach, who pressed their cameras against the windows. They were only doing their jobs, but to what awful tastes they pandered.

Barbara and I held hands during the ride and spoke little. There wasn’t much left to say. The scrubby topography of the Florida interior, with its endless commercial signs, strip malls, and one-storey buildings, provided little visual diversion. The only phone call was to the tireless Carolyn Gurland, who was already hard at work on the menu of strategies we had developed for mitigating my stay in the prison I was now approaching. The long struggle against my accusers could have gone much worse, but it had gone badly. Therefore, it must continue.

My thoughts were that this was the worst the enemy could do, that it had loomed darkly in my thoughts for four and a half years, and that if I could endure it, the end of the ordeal would finally be in sight. My imprisonment should also slake the blood thirst of my more vociferous enemies. The sated prosecutocracy and its cheerleaders would move on to other prosecutions of real or imagined crimes. I was determined, above all things, whatever indignities might occur that I would not give way to self-pity, affected hauteur, or anger, much less despair.

To the chroniclers, I had had a crushing reversal. I had. It was all that and more. Having hoped so much and proclaimed so forthrightly that I would be vindicated, I had lost more than I could ever have imagined. That is what made it also a huge challenge and opportunity. To rise above what I was about to face after years of calumny, persecution, and heavy collateral financial damage would at least temper in my mind the unjust and fleeting victory my opponents had achieved. I was sustained, on that and future days, by the solidarity of the growing army of my supporters; thousands of messages of goodwill arrived in the last days before I passed through the prison gate. I would keep faith with those who had maintained or developed faith in me, and especially with those who had loved me, living and dead, above all with my magnificent wife and family.

Nor was my faith shaken. I had realized from the beginning that it was a severe challenge, but the facts that my mental and physical health and my marriage and family had borne it showed I was not God-forsaken. As Pope John Paul II told Emmett Cardinal Carter about the cardinal’s stroke, to bear such a burden was a divine gift, a demonstration of God’s confidence in the afflicted, and a subject of rejoicing. Like the cardinal, I found the flourish about rejoicing a rather stiff challenge. I had long believed the Jesuit formulation that resistance to tyranny is obedience to God (though I frequently disagreed with the definitions of tyranny targeted by members of the Society of Jesus). In any analysis, there was no practical alternative to fighting it out, and there was never a thought of any other course.

John Hillier delivered us to the long-imagined destination after a three-hour drive, right on time. There had apparently been a media attempt to follow us and attempts to televise us, as in the flight of O.J. Simpson, as if there were any suspense about our destination, but it wasn’t very successful, and we weren’t aware of it.

My first views of my new address were not reassuring: relatively modern buildings, watchtowers in the adjoining higher security facilities, a generous use of barbed wire. Quite a large press delegation was at the gate but was kept back and got no view of us as we entered the complex. I learned later that the recreation area had been closed, to prevent the press from photographing inmates at leisure, and that an atmosphere of some anticipation had been generated.

The Coleman Federal Correctional Complex has two penitentiaries (often referred to as the “thunder domes” or “gun clubs”): a medium-security facility, a women’s camp, and the low-security facility to which I was assigned. With a total of about eight thousand inmates, it is the largest correctional complex in the vast U.S. federal prison system. Though the architecture is red-brick, low-rise, and relatively unforbidding, it possesses the monolithic, dehumanizing arrogance of banal official buildings of all times and governments.

The indifferent visage of the buildings is studiously replicated by many of the personnel. Barbara and I entered the reception centre; I waited for someone to speak. We were ignored. Barbara, thinking I had been struck dumb, said, “My husband, Conrad Black, is here to self-surrender.” We sat for a few minutes in the waiting room, and then a beefy correctional officer, unarmed but heavy-laden with gadgetry, surged into the room and pointed at me with well-rehearsed purposefulness. I answered a few questions and handed over $2,500 in cash for my commissary account and a little paper carrier bag from a pharmacy with sleeping pills, cholesterol-reducers, and lip balm, which was confiscated. They gave Barbara the lip balm and told us to say goodbye. A kiss, a searching look, a very few words, and I walked forward, not turning back to wave lest I be reproved in front of her and add to the distress of us both. She departed.

The process of accustoming arrivals to their absence of rights was, as I had assumed, begun at once. I was handcuffed, in accord with the inexplicable American official compulsion, for no reason, to manacle as many people as possible as often and publicly as possible, in this case for the challenging one-hundred-foot walk to the induction centre (after I had voluntarily come two hundred miles), and delivered over to another uniformed official, a large, black, bald man who evidently considered himself endlessly intimidating and riotously witty. I removed all my clothes and satisfied my captor that nothing was concealed in my mouth, underarms, behind my scrotum, or in the approaches to my rectum. (I would receive a great many medical and security anal inspections over the next couple of weeks, and was slightly mystified at the extent of official curiosity about that generally unremitting aperture.) A brief medical consultation and a few words of elemental guidance followed, and, dressed in painter pants, a T-shirt, and blue canvas shoes, with some bedding in my hand, I debouched into the compound and was pointed toward my unit (B-1). The blithe wit who had conducted the body search with such exuberance told me that if I departed the correct paths, I would be “shot.” Withal, the official greeting was quite civilized, and my first glimpse of the regime was of a tolerably good-natured group. (The man who had inducted and handcuffed me soon proved quite convivial.)

That evening I began a prison diary, which for security reasons I wrote in French, with many abbreviations, words spelled backward, and argot. It would not have taken a skilled cryptographer five minutes to decode it, and there was nothing of much interest in it anyway, but it assisted me in a slight Chateau d’If fantasy, easing those first days. I wrote: “I proceeded a bit reticently toward my unit, and was accosted by some very affable residents, who seemed like typecasters’ simulations of the charming rogue: easy, toothy smiles, relaxed and jovial conversation, an oddly warm welcome to a total, though apparently much-publicized, stranger.” I was well received by everyone, residents and personnel, and some of my neighbours in my unit generously provided me with necessities. It soon emerged that I was in a completely black-market environment. Initially, most of the people that I met were relatively presentable, white-collar offenders (or at least people convicted of white-collar offences). On my first night, I was summoned to the lieutenants’ office and greeted with the words: “Black, I don’t consider you to be different to anyone else, and you won’t be treated differently.” I responded that I was not different to anyone else, and what earthly reason possessed him to imagine that I wanted to be treated differently, “which I do not”? We quickly crossed that drawbridge together and I was urged, in an almost avuncular manner, to “antiquate” to the community. I resisted the temptation to lure the lieutenant further into the tenebrous thickets of polysyllabalism, divined that he was urging me to “acclimate,” and promised to do my best, but added that I “don’t expect to grow old here.” A round of knowing nods ensued and I departed the citadel of local authority. I would shortly learn what an intensely and credulously gossipy place I had arrived in: my arrival had been endlessly discussed. I was greeted as something of a celebrity, as well as one of the few who had fought the government with what was perceived to be relative success, as everyone seemed to realize that I had won 85 per cent of my case and was pursuing a serious appeal.

It was not a great challenge to be a refreshing surprise to those who had been expecting me to be an aloof hoity-toit. I always find almost anyone somewhat interesting, and many of my new co-residents actually were rather interesting, albeit often in a Damon Runyon way of hoods and scoundrels. The top of the pecking order appeared to be the few authentic Mafiosi. They were elegant, extremely courteous, even courtly, and had a sardonic sense of humour. On my first night, one of them approached and said that mutual friends had said to look out for me, that I was not to be “bothered” and wouldn’t be. If I caught “a cold, we will find out from whom” and “that we have a lot in common.” I surmised that he meant the comradeship of persecution by the U.S. government. He replied, “Yes, but more than that, we are industrialists.”

The interior of the residential units had laundry and microwave rooms, a games room (chess, cards, board games), three television rooms, and a residential area of about sixty feet by one hundred and fifty feet, divided into four rows of fifteen to twenty two- or three-man cubicles, divided by painted, concrete block walls about five feet, six inches high. It was to one of these that my snug defence perimeter, which a few years before had linked continents, had shrunk, as I plotted the next phase of my struggle to save or recover my interests and reputation. I was now in the belly of the beast. After most of the lights went out, at 10:30 p.m. (it was possible to read by night-light for as long as desired), only red overhead lights provided any illumination. In this eerie light someone of my height could see the constant movement of quasi-sleeping men in the upper bunks, an unearthly Dante purgatorial scene. Many of the Hispanic inmates, finding the air conditioning cool, wore long underwear as outerwear in the evenings and wandered unselfconsciously about like giant bunny rabbits and slept with the covers over their heads like pre-natal caterpillars. It would be in this bizarre ambiance that I would listen to Barack Obama’s election victory speech in November. I had to stand up to get clear reception on my handheld radio and earphones. On this one night, almost all the African Americans were also awake and listening on their earphones, in their upper berths, in the roseate gloom. I thought of Henry Ward Beecher’s famous eulogy of Abraham Lincoln. America had come full circle from the despair of the recent slaves following the murder of the Great Emancipator: after 143 years, the stifled sobs of the liberated black man, in the dark, had given way to the quiet and deserved celebration, also in the dark, of his imprisoned descendants.

My accommodation reminded me of boarding schools. (Not an unpleasant memory, as I had somewhat enjoyed them: people relied on their personalities. Nothing on the outside, such as family prominence, much mattered.)

–

THERE WAS A LUMPY, NARROW BED with a thin pillow, one metal locker, and two other occupants in bunk beds in a ten-foot by eight-foot cubicle. There were demeaningly precise rules governing almost everything. Yet there was almost unlimited access to emails, five hours of telephoning per month, full access to newspapers, periodicals, television, and radio, and visitors up to five days a week for up to six hours a day, but not more than nine days a month. I would soon learn that the six hours were sharply reduced on many occasions by the often lengthy waits visitors had to endure and by the habit of ending visiting hours early. The personnel at what was called, with unintentionally pious overtones, the visitation centre oversearched and harassed visitors and were themselves searched by other correctional officers in a futile effort to reduce smuggling. In my cubicle with me were two extremely pleasant and unobtrusive Hispanics, including one who had paddled from Cuba to Key West on the detached roof of an ice-cream cart. He assured me that he preferred an unjust sentence in an American prison to “freedom” in the Castroite paradise. Their English was limited, but we got on quite amicably. I did not sleep badly on this first night, after the strain and apprehension of the last few days. This was the grim fate that had been hanging over me for almost five years. On first sight, it was not as grim as I had expected.

Relief almost became serenity on discovering that the worst the enemy could do would be quite survivable. There had been much speculation in the Canadian media that I would be sexually assaulted, beaten up, blackmailed, and made to clean latrines (preferably, no doubt, with my tongue and bare hands). I quickly found that these fates were rare in this place and that I was not in the categories of people to whom any of them occurred. There was no violence, except in occasional scuffles that were easy to avoid, and sometimes toward child molesters. Homosexual activity was not apparently widespread and was by consent only. The rudest jobs were correctly the best paid and were sought by those who needed the money. I resumed my column in the National Post and often the New York Sun, and when the Sun closed, in the online Daily Beast of Tina Brown, and then the National Review. This was made possible by email access and agreement with the unit manager. After a lapse of only two weeks (to a heartening volume of comment), I felt I was in touch with the outside world again and made it clear to visitors that this life, though no country club, was not onerous. The media sought information from sundry inmates by letter and email, and soon discovered and published that I was tutoring high-school-leaving students in English, giving lectures on U.S. history that were well attended, and getting on with inmates and guards in a perfectly normal way. My experience in more complex, if perhaps less unsavoury, milieus taught me to be polite to everyone, reveal nothing to anybody, outwardly respect the authorities, and give no hint of self-importance nor self-consciousness at the temporary loss of status. I regarded my confinement, though not voluntarily assumed, as like St. Thomas More’s hair shirt, an abrasive but bearable reminder of my imperfections. It was also reassuring to confirm that I could equably forego all luxury and revert to a less sumptuous life than I had had since my expulsion from my last boarding school forty-eight years before, almost to the day (for insubordination).

I was fortunate that the inmate to whom I was handed over in my unit was a street-wise, corn-fed Southern boy of integrity and intelligence, whom I could always rely on for solidarity, guidance, and companionship. We agreed that, when we could, I would accompany him to a NASCAR race and that he would come with me to an opera. He was of the other Florida I did not much know: beer, air-boating, and hunting everything from bullfrogs to alligators, panthers, and bears. These authentic Floridians are a far distance from the condominium towers of Miami and the movie-set estates of Palm Beach, only ninety minutes or so away from them, and no less estimable a part of what FDR used to call “the great voice of America.”

After the genuine Mafiosi, the leading figures in the compound seemed to be real executives, prominent drug dealers, artful swindlers, lawyers who had strayed from the rules of the profession, such as they are in the United States, before descending into overzealous telemarketers, common or garden fraudsters, routine drug dealers, petty larcenists, and, finally, child molesters. There were many original characters, some by virtue of the elaborate impostures they made for themselves, aggregating grand theft auto up to Professor Moriarty–like criminal fiendishness in the telling. In the valley of the designated wrongdoers, next to those who have the money and the muscle, the most flamboyant are the kings. I sat down at lunch one day, in the noisy dining hall, opposite someone I had seen before but did not really know and asked him why he was here. “I steal airplanes.” When one of the men in my cubicle had to go to court to testify and was away a few weeks, a pleasant Puerto Rican moved in. I asked him his occupation: “I rob banks,” he replied with a touch of self-importance. I met other bank robbers, including one proud scion of a family of bank robbers, whose matriarch, his aunt, had robbed scores of rural banks, from the Carolinas to Florida, and had always arrived and fled on horseback. Another neighbour in the unit was proud of having sold, on cold calls, an astounding number of DVD-dispensing machines at “prime locations” that were in fact at rural road crossings or in the most remote or undesirable places. Outrageous though it is, in its apostasy from the world of affected, bourgeois respectability, it was almost refreshing.

I was automatically enrolled in a crash course in the parlance, mores, and folkways of the carceral state. One of the first people I encountered was a former armaments dealer who had, he claimed, roamed the world of mercenaries and irregular warfare. In these circumstances, it mattered little whether the talents of raconteurs were devoted to truthful accounts or fables, as feats of the imagination are also worthy achievements, and some of my fellow residents were Jules Vernes of autobiographical embellishment. The armaments dealer claimed that he wore an SS officer’s spruce black uniform at home, that he had been arrested by a flying squad of thirty FBI agents at his home, and that of all his experiences in selling, testing, buying, and evaluating weapons from side arms to battle tanks and ground-to-air missiles (all for freelance operations all over the world), his greatest satisfaction was in firing rocket-propelled grenades at cows in Cambodia. His descriptions of the cows blowing up reminded me of Mussolini’s son’s description of the joys of bombing defenceless Abyssinians in the Duce’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.

Because of the fussing about my arrival, some of my new neighbours surmised that with their brains and my presumed money, much could be done. I had been fielding this sort of pitch for more than forty years and generally replied with suggestions that instead we try my ideas and my interlocutors’ money. One of the early candidates in this crowded field started out explaining to me his relationship with a U.S. senator but was exposed as an FBI plant and shortly shipped out after being threatened with grievous bodily harm. He was also under suspicion of impregnating one of the (female) correctional officers.

Another early acquaintance, who had apparently damaged his mind with his drug habit, answered almost any conversational gambit either by describing his subterranean marijuana-growing facility or by holding forth on the anthropological insights of the animated cartoon television series The Simpsons. This inmate had a wisp of a goatee, like Ho Chi Minh, and had such large-bore ear piercings, he occasionally suspended padlocks from each ear, creating a very bizarre effect.

The child molesters (chomos, they are called) were a peculiar group. Some hobbled about with canes or walkers from the beatings they had received from some other prisoners because of their perceived moral degeneracy, or to provide themselves with weapons of defence against such attacks. One, with the massive spectacles provided by the Bureau of Prisons (BOP), but otherwise slight and with a shaved head, had been sentenced for performing circumcisions on underage girls. He always took a cup with him to the bathroom because he had modified his own urinary tract by self-administered surgery and required the cup to avoid unsanitary spillages at the urinals.

There was an informal group of chomo-bashers (literally). One of the most colourful was a central Floridian, always friendly to me, at whose home police had allegedly discovered a severed human hand. He told me that the hand was planted by the police, in their unfailing incompetence, ten feet beyond his property line, and that he had self-righteously demanded that his neighbour be interrogated and chastened for besmirching the reputation of the neighbourhood. He was a physically formidable man with a delightful sense of humour but was accustomed to beating or shooting those he disliked. He was banished to the isolation accommodation (Special Housing Unit, or SHU, pronounced “shoe”) for threatening an alleged chomo who was blocking the door to my room, but he returned to the unit after three months in the SHU and shouted, on re-entering our unit, “Fuck the chomos.” For my part, I found the alleged chomos that I met quite pleasant and sometimes rather intelligent. It was impossible to know whether they were really guilty of anything. Some had answered email enticements from middle-aged policemen claiming to be young girls. Some had huge collections of lewd photographs. I am not convinced that these are facts that justify imprisonment. If they were guilty of physical abuse of defenseless people, their offences were disgusting and the fate of their victims was pitiful; but I also sympathized for the maladjustment that would have driven them to such acts. If they were not guilty, they were fellow victims of the corrupt prosecutocracy. In either case, it was not ultimately my place to judge them.

MANY OF MY NEW ACQUAINTANCES assuaged the inborn anxieties of imprisonment by professing to believe that they were immensely wealthy, or that a legislated or litigated liberation was imminent, or in intense religious practice or obsessive physical exercise. Some would periodically announce that they had just scored another epochal financial coup, and that their already large net worth had grown by billions. Invariably, these captains of industry and finance were represented by the public defender, and they usually did not have the resources to buy anything at the commissary and were relying precariously on the regime for soap and deodorant.

Rumours were launched with conviction every week that legislation to shorten sentences had passed through the Congress and was about to be signed by the president. Carolyn Gurland was monitoring this front for me, and I was able to hose down febrile expectations of early release as diplomatically as possible. The fiancée of an inmate telephoned Barbara to say that I would be home soon of just-adopted legislation. Barbara’s great joy was dashed by going to the BOP website, and discovering that no such law had been passed. A large number of inmates were very heavily medicated and were essentially incomprehensible zombies, shuffling aimlessly about. One very presentable and well-spoken Cuban was paying a contact in Seoul to journey to North Korea to discover something that could be traded to the CIA in exchange for a shortened sentence. He eventually left our facility after an anonymous report was made to the regime that his life was in danger for selling participations in this scam. Another inmate in our unit, a pleasant expert in cooking pizzas (there were six microwaves in the unit) who eventually fell to fisticuffs with a competing pizza supplier, wrote a six-hundred-page (unpublished) book, explaining that General Patton and Field Marshal Montgomery had successfully won the battle for Sicily in 1943 because the Mafia had thrown grenades into German artillery bunkers.

There were several Vietnam War veterans, quite nonchalant about having killed a good number of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. Their fairly reliable accounts of conditions there were quite interesting and squared with what I had learned when I visited Vietnam in 1970. There was an expatriate French-Canadian film financier and marketer of self-cleaning toilets. He hosted a select gourmet luncheon every Saturday, and was one of the leading music teachers in the compound. His astute mastery of the official tides and currents, shoals and opportunities, created by the shambling operation of the system reminded me almost every day of how the French Canadians have effectively governed Canada for most of its history without having more than 30 per cent of its people.

Partly to satisfy a frustrated childhood ambition, partly to please my dear Barbara, and to make what I could of this captivity, I took piano lessons from him. The sessions were a triple win, as we spoke French, brushing up our practice, and reminisced about old times in Quebec. He often mimicked Duplessis, and I responded with my imitation of Cardinal Léger,^* both distinctive speakers. He gave me his well-thought-out theory of music, and I determinedly inched ahead with the piano. In a particularly entertaining version of a familiar pattern, he explained how (unknown to him at the time, he said) some of his investors in his self-cleaning toilet business had randomly telephoned people in the United States, telling them that they had won the Quebec Lottery, and that their net winnings would be sent as soon as they sent the caller their windfall income tax assessments. In his florid French-Canadian patois, it sounded like Rocket Richard reciting a translation of Mark Twain’s “The Royal Nonesuch.” They “raised” millions of dollars in this way.

The telemarketers and newsletter circulators were among the most entertaining and engaging of all the sharpers in the compound, full of amusing stories, fast talk, and entertaining cynicism. Various of the financial scammers were still inveterately hustling, undeterred by former reverses or current impecuniousness. Like kindred creatures tightly confined in zoological experiments, they acted out the roles they knew and hustled each other with the most fantastic propositions. It was interesting to see them compulsively peddling and promoting their moose pastures and Ponzi schemes in all directions. Eventually, several of them explained to me the addictive pleasure of swindling people, and confounding the hypocrisy of the system that claimed to protect the weak but really only served the incumbents. I understood their dislike of some officialdom but have always found exploitation of the defenceless or unwary to be repulsive.

My other effort at self-improvement beside the piano was weight loss and exercise. I became concerned by spiking blood pressure, especially when I contemplated the outrages inflicted on me in the name of justice, and put myself in the hands of our unit’s wellness experts, a perfectionist former U.S. Marine and a former telemarketing muscle-builder. I lost thirty-five pounds over a couple of months of their program and daily work on a rowing machine (in the air-conditioned leisure centre) and what was called “resistance training,” but which I likened to the Death March in Bataan, put me in the best shape I have been in for decades. Barbara and I made a pact that we would do the necessary so that when I left here, we would both be in better physical condition than when I came in.

Another colourful figure had been convicted of conspiring to murder a wealthy Chicago society doyenne (and disposing of her remains in a blast furnace of the Inland Steel Company). He was one of eight or ten inmates who wanted me to help him publish his story. And there was an eminent businessman, university regent, and political organizer shafted by the absurd McCain-Feingold Campaign Financing Act. I had had some hope for McCain’s campaign, having met him quite often over the years. I even predicted early on in the New York Sun that he would win and make the eighty-five-year-old Henry Kissinger secretary of state. But I lost all hope for his candidacy in the week when he started by quoting Herbert Hoover about the soundness of the economy, spent Tuesday excoriating greed, Wednesday demanding regulatory mummification of the financial industry, Thursday calling for the firing of Chris Cox as chairman of the SEC (and replacement by the Spitzeresque New York Attorney General and later Governor Andrew Cuomo, who would have been an appalling choice), and on Friday “suspended” his campaign to return to Washington to fight for the emergency financial rescue bill by failing to say anything at the bi-partisan White House strategy session, or to persuade his Republican colleagues in the Congress to support their president’s and presidential candidate’s bill.

One of the peppier of the younger inmates, almost a mascot to the grizzled old-timers in our unit, performed in the Coleman Idol musical competition, and presented a spirited rap piece that ended: “Fuck the BOP.” The lieutenant present apparently imagined that this might not be a widely shared sentiment, and asked the cheering audience if he should send the vocalist to the SHU. He apparently hoped for a “Give us Barabbas” response, but the crowd supported the performer, who was banished anyway. He was an ingenuously, spontaneously mischievous young man, whom it was hard not to like. He was imprisoned for burning down part of his school, an impulse for which I had some sympathy.

I became fairly friendly with some of the prominent African-American inmates. The leaders of that group were large drug dealers, legendary figures in their milieus. The older ones were like the stars of the old Negro Baseball Leagues, honoured pioneers, and the younger ones were more like rappers. Perhaps the most formidable was an old gentleman in a wheelchair, universally known as “Mr. Bobby.” He told one of the bright, presentable, younger black inmates: “I know your mother, boy. You’re lucky I’m not your father, or maybe I am.” Despite his infirmity, he asserted himself, on one occasion chasing a white inmate out of the television room for changing the channel away from one of Mr. Bobby’s favourite programs. He was wheeled by one of his acolytes while brandishing his cane like a Dickensian school master. He died in captivity a few months later.

I was honoured to be invited to address Black History Month, the first white inmate to do so. In deference to the older members of the audience, who remembered the days of outright segregation, I said it was not my place to tell them of their history, but that I had a few thoughts on some white statesmen who had advanced the cause of the African-Americans. I spoke of five or six of the presidents, concluding with the quote from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural: of “every drop of blood drawn with the lash” being repaid “by the sword.” An unconditional commitment from America’s greatest leader.

The compound had a rich religious life. The Nation of Islam had, as in the days of Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X, the fittest, most well-turned-out, and courteous lay officers. The most alluring circumstances of any of the religious groups were those of the self-proclaimed Native Americans. There were probably only a very few real American Indians on the compound. But as they took off all Wednesday to sit in the so-called “sweat-lodge,” smoking (and there was a good deal of speculation about what they really were smoking), playing cards and board games, beating their tom-toms, and telling ribald stories, the ranks of the religious Indians increased, and inmates with head bandanas from which immense feathers protruded were the compound’s most numerous beneficiaries of the grace of conversion. Dietary factors also seemed to play a role in the movement between denominations, depending on menu fluctuations. One inmate entered and departed the compound group of approved Jews five times in one year, after consulting the BOP monthly menu.

Coleman Low’s principal clergyman, the chief chaplain, was a beefy, guitar-strumming white southern Baptist who was essentially a cop, visibly carrying handcuffs, the universal American icon of authority, and helpfully patting down inmates exiting the dining hall to see if they had stolen inventory from the massive black-market operation in the kitchen. His handcuffs were even sometimes in evidence when he gave his Sunday service. He used his position to harass Jews and Roman Catholics, and even prevented our priest from showing his own DVD of It’s a Wonderful Life with James Stewart as Christmas entertainment at which people of all faiths, and none, were welcome. In fact, he was an overbearing loudmouth, lacking any semblance of spirituality or even concern for others. He was singularly disagreeable and unecclesiastical.

Our Roman Catholic group had a kindly Vietnamese pastor when I arrived, followed by a scholarly but not altogether comprehensible Nigerian. The Nigerian improved his homiletic delivery and by October was scourging the regime as corrupt and degraded, and urged us not to yield. It was a refreshing recurrence of the traditional role of the Church as a conscientious monitor of secular affairs, especially the omnipotent state. There was a bit of the Mindszenty and Wyszynski in him, and he regularly reviled politicians and politics as “the most hopeless thing in the world.” He was the victim of the Baptist film censor, and gave another stirring address, drawing on his experience as a veteran of the Nigerian army during the Biafran War. He sometimes opened his remarks: “You are in no one’s bondage while you are here.”

Since I respect sensible religious opinion and am a religious person, I found the profusion, at the beginning and end of each day, of inmates kneeling in their cubicles in prayer, reading their Bibles, or pressing their foreheads to the floor and inclining to the East quite reassuring. The African and Latin Americans were generally quite practising, even fervent. I had a natural bond with my fellow worshippers, as I always attended Roman Catholic services, where I was regularly a lector, often read from the Bible a kind British stranger sent me, and believed that if it were feasible, we all should spend a good deal of time on our knees before a Godly effigy, trying to comprehend the sacred, potentially noble, and comically absurd qualities of life. (It seemed to me from when I first read him that Santayana was correct when he wrote that life was “admirable in its essence, tragic in its destination, and amusing in its experience.”) In that narrow channel where people are unaffectedly and even gracefully religious, without being ostentatious or distracting, there is room for swift, tacit empathy. Less agreeable is the frequently overheard hazardous admonition of one religiously impassioned friend to another that “God has said” and so on. And altogether jarring can be the antics of outspoken Christians claiming to find Revelation even in the most mundane acts.

I was astounded when I first visited the library to find whole rooms of jailhouse lawyers toiling on their own and “clients’” cases. They ranged from reasonably informed and clever drafters of motions to outright frauds bilking blacks and Hispanics not fluent in English with nonsensical petitions to the Supreme Court of the United States, handwritten on lined paper. Religion and legalism intertwined in certain nostrums for reducing sentences, which were devised and shopped around by some of the inmates, both professional scoundrels and some relatively earnest amateur lawyers. Some of these ideas were embraced and preached with a fervour worthy of the Godly zealot. Somewhere in the bowels of the U.S. prison system, the idea arose and began lurching about that the Universal Code of Commerce forbade imprisonment in the United States because the federal government was unconstitutionally borrowing against the lives of the people of the country after Roosevelt largely abandoned the gold standard in 1933 and that the country had supposedly gone bankrupt. It is a slightly more intricate argument than this but just as preposterous, but the law library is full of people beavering away like Nibelungen, preparing petitions on this point.

One such believer, a slight, sixtyish man with a full white beard and mane that made Santa Claus look like Hank Paulson, packed himself up, prepared a full copy of his extensive petition, and arrived at the receiving and departing centre (R&D) early one proud morning and told the rather torpid officials there to call him a taxi and be quick about it. He gave them a copy of his legal claims and said that if he wasn’t released at once, he would add these correctional officers to the warden and others as defendants to his lawsuit. He was sent to Miami for psychiatric examination and, at writing, has not been heard from since.

ON MY SECOND DAY, A DISTILLERY was uncovered in the space above the artificial lighting in one of the unit bathrooms. These discoveries recur fairly often. Almost anything can be had, including liquor, hard drugs, and cellphones. It is an unnatural milieu in that it is like a cat-and-mouse game where the ostensible mice are often smarter than the cats. The correlation of forces is with the regime, so it is unwise to mock or defy it too brazenly, again like a shabby but not totalitarian despotism. The applause of the insubordinate is an insufficient incentive for the risk involved in affronting the system. I was careful from the start to avoid unpleasantness with anyone. Most of the correctional officers, unit and case managers and counsellors, and even some of the lieutenants I met were reasonable people. But there were some conspicuous exceptions, and the system itself was moribund, punitive, and largely ineffectual. Even as a semi-detached observer, I was sorry to see the lives of recuperable men reduced to such narrow parameters. As with the decrepit dictatorships of bygone Eastern Europe and Latin America, issuing pompous pronunciamentos but only stirring itself to any energy when perceiving some threat to its incumbency, the more mundane and farcical the function and official, the more pretentious the recourse to the symbolism of the state. Notices about use of the recreation yard were apt to be emblazoned with the great seal of the United States. Posted warnings against suicidal temptations were on paper with faintly printed American flags streaming over the whole page. It has been my honour to receive correspondence from every U.S. president from Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush, the last four while in office, and I have extensive examples of many previous U.S. presidents’ correspondence. The insignia of their great office was, in every case, very discreetly deployed. The BOP’s style reminded me of the eagle-, Minuteman-, and flag-festooned Spirit of America Car Wash near Midway Airport in Chicago.

When my unit counsellor, a generally fair and intelligent man, decided that because I had not left the unit by eight o’clock one morning, I should work with the orderlies, I expressed delight at the prospect and thoroughly cleaned the shower stall that I normally use. It was such an occasion, he had other officials from our and the next unit in to watch “a millionaire cleaning a shower stall.” I did so with some feigned gusto and when asked at the end by one of the little knot of officials if I had enjoyed it, I replied that domestic work was “morally uplifting.”

A spectacular farce occurred when I noted on the callout list that is posted each night that I was to pack out to leave the facility the next day. I ascertained from available espionage that it was for a court appearance in New York. This could only be my civil case against Sotheby’s Realty for its collusion in the improper seizure of the proceeds of the sale of the New York apartment on the basis of the false FBI affidavit. We already had a court authorization for me to give evidence in the legal section of the Coleman visitors’ centre, by video. After a somewhat frantic call to Barbara, counsel was mobilized and all seemed to be resolved. The following morning I was awakened early by one of the palookas from R&D and told to get up. I assured him that I wasn’t going anywhere, which my unit counsellor kindly confirmed, and I went back to sleep. When I awakened, my name was being incanted on the compound public address system to report to Receiving and Departing (R&D), and I did so, to, I assumed, recover what I had packed the previous day for the trip to New York that I would not be making. I was ordered to come in, strip naked in the little voyeurs’ paradise where I had arrived, contribute my clothes back to the taxpayers, and put on the orange jumpsuit of the higher security convict. I was shackled, hands, waist, and feet, and put in a holding room with others about to enjoy “diesel therapy:” being shunted in this demeaning state all around the country in buses and BOP aircraft. Casual efforts I made to explain that this was a mistake were greeted with torrents of threats and epithets. At one point, it was appropriate to say: “I recognize a fellow officer,” and I had the pleasure of telling the more officious of them that I was a colonel in a historic guards regiment. It bought a slight moderation in their demeanour. I didn’t want to muddy the waters by adding that I was really an honorary colonel. The lieutenants masqueraded as an ersatz elite guard, and reminded me of nothing so much as Hemingway’s description in A Farewell to Arms of Italian officers shooting their soldiers who retreated after the Battle of Caporetto: they “looked very military in the early morning” as they executed survivors of a battle they themselves had managed to avoid. After about fifteen minutes with my fellow transportees, as I considered whom to recruit to replace the lawyer responsible for this fiasco, I was asked with distinctly more courtesy than earlier in the morning to leave the holding room, and the previous process was reversed. The judge’s order had been received and had registered with the custodians. The officials offered no apology and I neither gloated nor reproached, but I was quite undeservedly feted throughout the compound for facing down the regime. Delegations of total strangers came by my room to congratulate me. I was not about to provoke the authorities by claiming that I had merited any such distinction. Nor had I.

In theory, everyone works at this facility, but like most other aspects of this Ruritanian dictatorship, things are not what they seem. The real jobs, which pay tolerably well, are working in the Unicor furniture factory, or as an orderly doing the more challenging cleaning work. In fact, it is a Potemkin village, where most of the jobs don’t really exist, and most of those that do require a maximum of five minutes a day. One friend’s “job” was to write out on a blackboard in the recreation area an inspirational quote for the day, which he took from a book of famous quotations. I suspected him of testing the borders of philistinism in some of this by presenting gradually more outrageous or banal comments and improbably attributing them to famous people: a stirring martial tocsin from Mae West, complicated metaphysical deductions from Yogi Berra, Chauncey Gardener and Forrest Gump statements from Caesar, Napoleon, Lincoln, and Bismarck. (I must confess to a slight role of complicity by incitement.) Other friends spent two minutes a day emptying recycling bins.

Occasionally the regime would flex its muscles and demand the presence of all registered yard maintenance people at the little hut in the middle of the compound, which squats contentedly under an aluminum flagstaff. The Stars and Stripes were lowered, in a pretentious little ceremony where a few inmates were dragooned into a clumsy simulation of a Marine colour party, at sunset and when a BOP official was killed in the performance of his job anywhere in the country. The death of an inmate passed unnoticed. On these occasions when the nominal ground staff was mustered, the public address announcer called repeatedly for up to half an hour, rousing them, as in the immortal Peter Sellers–Terry Thomas send-up of 1950s British labour and industry, I’m All Right Jack, from their beds, card games, showers, and leisure activities. Eventually, the stentorian summoning produced an astoundingly numerous host of ostensible compound maintenance workers, milling dazedly around the little hut. After a lengthy and chaotic roll call, the demobilized pseudo-workers repaired to their previous pastimes with the countenances of perplexed sheep. The regime, having noisily asserted itself, lapsed back into an inertia as comatose as that of most of its charges.

I was advised that if I did not arrange a job for myself, the regime would produce one, and it might be unimaginably absurd or tedious. Because of the books I had written about Franklin D. Roosevelt and Richard Nixon, I was known to some of the library and education community, and recommended for a job as an English tutor for high-school-leaving candidates, in the vocational training department.

This proved to be a turn of luck. There was initial skepticism that there was any need for a tutor, but I was given a desk and a comfortable chair and those entering the vocational training pavilion could see me at a distance, at the end of a room about a hundred feet deep. It was a little like a scene from The Great Dictators, as I watched people approach for half a minute before they reached me. Like anything in such a climate, it grew from a desk and chair to three tutors, a group of desks and filing cabinets, and a steady stream of students. Our success rate at helping people graduate from secondary school was high. The number of matriculants more than doubled because of the tutors, and we had the pleasure of helping some people seriously in need of it.

At first there would be a few people straggling back and I would help them with essay writing, sentence structure, and spelling. I would start with light conversation to put them at their ease and to get a preliminary idea of how much of a challenge it was going to be. It quickly became obvious to me that even after desegregation the education of African Americans had largely been a mockery designed in many parts of the country to keep the blacks in ignorance and subordinacy. I had always disliked teachers, except for a few very good and stimulating ones I remembered with gratitude and admiration. But with this experience, I saw the joys and frustrations of teaching. Many of those entrusted to me started out surly and skeptical, but after a bit of jocularity and clear evidence that I was not part of the custodial apparat, but a victim of it also, things loosened up; we both made an effort and all my candidates graduated, though some required two or even three tries at the examinations. It was often important to make the point that we owed it to ourselves to make the most of the sojourn. I represented high-school graduation as opening up a possibility to develop a solid legally unassailable income, through higher education or a skilled trade, an alternative to drug-related law-breaking, which led straight back to prison with one denunciation, inevitable in that activity. I had some motivational success, and it was very fulfilling helping them to get a foot on the Up escalator. Because of the pride of successful students and their families, and the generous applause I received, the graduating ceremonies were among the more moving occasions I have attended.

THE EXCITEMENT OF MY STUDENTS when they learned that they had graduated was affecting, and I shared in it. One of them – a twenty-nine-year-old African American with gold teeth and a shaved head who had the equivalent of perhaps a grade five education and had six children with five women, none with the antiquarian benefit of wedlock – turned up religiously every day and worked his heart out. The day he learned that he had matriculated, he risked being banished to the SHU by entering my unit, finding me at the computer, and embracing me. Rarely have I been so happy for anyone, or so happy to have been helpful to anyone.

The essays I received from students were sometimes unexpectedly memorable. A three-hundred-and-fifty-pound man writing about his favourite sport explained in graphic detail his love of contact, especially of the variety that broke other people’s bones, which he described vividly. A lusty young southern lad wrote of his favourite and least favourite cities. He had been short-changed by call girls in New Orleans, which left him so disgruntled that he welcomed Hurricane Katrina because New Orleans “needed a good washing down.” But he had been so splendidly served in the Korean bath houses of New York that he revered the Big Apple as the “world center of creative perversion.” He seemed to be qualified to express such an opinion.

One of my fellow tutors, who often worked at the front of the vocational training area, had the habit of screening out the most idiosyncratically sluggish learners and wandering back to the area I shared with my other tutoring colleague, a very pleasant and conscientious former U.S. Navy nuclear submarine torpedoman and graduate of the Navy’s nuclear propulsion course. The screener always wore a hangdog look of grief as he approached, as if his best friend had just died, to explain that he had to inflict “Will” or “Alphonse” on us. One of them believed verbs were just nouns with “to” in front of them and was not certain that General Washington had been correct “to revolution.” Another thought that any effort to persuade him to learn anything was a government conspiracy to dominate him, as he explained through narcotics-blackened teeth. Yet another was so sex obsessed that to hold his attention for more than a couple of minutes, it was necessary to resort to the most innovatively salacious, foul-mouthed language that had crossed my lips since I left Australia.

Our efforts to help our assignees took place against a backdrop of the culinary arts instructor holding forth in a loud voice about every subject under the sun on the other side of a seven-foot partition, including, within earshot of the female supervisors, the inadvisability of allowing restaurant waiters to “scratch their balls” in the presence of paying customers. If we rose above a whisper he appeared like a rotund Prometheus at the door of his enclosure, complaining of distractions to his “important” work, vastly outdistancing our efforts to help people graduate from high school and become eligible for university. It was impossible not to overhear his stentorian pontificating about the French Revolution, the history of restaurants, and the eating habits of U.S. presidents, or conducting hour-long lamentations about the theft of a minuscule container of garlic powder. He was a very agreeable man, and was an able self-promoter. For giving his part-time cooking course, he was apparently paid more than the wages of two correctional officers annually. (He made wickedly good cookies.)

It was impossible not to hear some strange things at times. On one occasion, I was picking away at the emails when someone on the telephone, about twenty feet away, bellowed into the receiver: “I didn’t kill the mother fucker, but he deserved it! Don’t make me break out of this prison and come and give you a whuppin.” Street-level dialect is a cultural and acoustic challenge, but it has its rewards.

One of the country bands that specialized in old-time Hank Williams, Merle Haggard songs reached an affecting state of vocal drama with prison songs: “Mama Tried” and “My daddy warned me, but I didn’t listen!” There weren’t many genuine cris de coeur in this place.

One of many comical diversions of my life at Coleman arose from the libel suit launched by the owner of the London Daily Express, Richard Desmond, against the calumnious Tom Bower. Desmond sued over Bower’s claim, in his malicious novel allegedly about Barbara and me, that I had taken Desmond over the barrel in my lawsuit against him in 2003, referred to in Chapter 3. I sent him a supportive email and in his scatter-gun enthusiasm, Desmond flew from London to Orlando and bustled to the Coleman facility to concert with me, despite warnings from Barbara and Joan that gaining entry required certain formalities. I managed to get approval for him for the following day, but he returned to London, rebuffed by the impenetrable pettifogging of the BOP. He had nothing to show for his whirlwind excursion (but perhaps the obligatory Mickey Mouse cap from Disney World given to most Orlando visitors). Unfortunately, Bower won the case, but it was a pleasant, glancing reacquaintance with Desmond who is nothing if not an entertaining character.

My schedule was not too uncivilized. On weekdays I normally got up at about 7:15 a.m., had some granola and tea in bed, washed, dressed, went to my tutoring functions, ate lunch about 10:30 in the dining hall with my colleagues, worked on emails for about two hours, returned to work from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m., worked on emails and read the just-delivered mail and newspapers, took a nap from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m., rowed 5,000 metres on a machine in the leisure centre, practised the piano for an hour, socialized over Colombian coffee until recall at 8:30 p.m., spent the evening reading, writing, and phoning (mainly Barbara), showered and so on just before midnight, and read in bed and did the USA Today or National Post crossword puzzle until between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. I usually had visitors on Monday and Friday, and on the weekends slept until 10 a.m. and spent the days as I pleased. There was always a heavy correspondence and columns to write and a lot of reading to do. Our Roman Catholic weekly service was on Sunday at the civilized hour of 12:30 p.m., and I was often a lector. The only television program I regularly watched was Damages with Glenn Close, on Monday nights. It was a fairly predictable but also productive routine, and it beat breaking stones.

I sometimes stopped in my thoughts and reflected on what brought me to this singular way station, as when one of the senior officers, a sociopath who prorupted noisily around his little domain, started raving at me for taking too long to answer a recall to the units at night. (One of his early brainwaves was to remove an air-changer from the leisure centre because it might be used by inmates to launch a projectile at the captain’s and lieutenants’ office. The idea is not entirely without merit, but there are easier ways to accomplish it.) I stared at him quizzically, as I often did here, but generally I just soldiered on, making of it what I could, serene yet that “The night will end.”

ROUGHLY ONE-FIFTH OF THE people in the Coleman low-security facility, discounting a good deal of fabulism, are, like myself, not guilty of anything. Approximately an equal number love it here, and if the gates were opened and the fences taken down, they would remain behind and cling to the sparse furniture like tree-huggers. They would be skidrow alcoholics or drug addicts on the outside, and at Coleman they have a roof over their heads, three meals a day, free medical care (of indifferent quality but better than they would receive on the outside), and companionship, and they watch television and play cards all day and have cheap access to email.

The population of U.S. mental asylums has declined since 1975 from 600,000 to 50,000, so these unfortunates are treated as criminals. Their contingent at this facility are much in evidence, shuffling about in an almost comatose state. Most of the remaining inmates are guilty of some genuine offence but at least half have received draconian sentences. And many of the offenses, including almost anything to do with marijuana, are nonsense.

The inmates who are grateful, resigned, or medicated into insensibility rush, or even run, to the dining hall and generally walk with a spring in their step (apart from those who are too sedated) that I have never observed in the confined members of any other species (a discouraging contrast to the hauteur of caged lions and tigers and the majestic indifference of confined bears and elephants). They adjust to close horizons; most have no interest in the outside except perhaps for some sports matches and bets, and juvenile, violent, and vulgar videos and films. They make appointments to see each other, shake hands whenever they meet a friend or acquaintance, even if it is just ten minutes since they had last met and shaken hands on parting. This is the result of living in a shrunken world, circumscribed by fences, endless instructions delivered by an ear-rattling public address system, or an even more acoustically irritating correctional officer screaming banalities at point-blank range. There is an eerie movement of people; men one has become quite friendly with are suddenly gone. There may be a letter or two after, but they vanish into the vast, seething underclass of America, remembered but unlikely to be encountered again.

There is not one that left without my good wishes, but many will be back in a system that thrives on its recidivism rate and has every economic incentive to maintain it. The United States is alone among advanced countries in seeking an ever larger prison system, the longest possible retention of all incarcerated people, and the maximum possible likelihood of their return to custody. It makes only a token effort, entrusted in practice to the teaching inmates such as me, to assist the prison population in relaunching their lives. It is an evil system that awaits the millions of unwary, improvident, and felonious, after they have been crowded through the debased gauntlet of American justice, which in practice, as prosecutors win an implausible (and almost totalitarian) 95 per cent of their cases, is less a due process than a demonstration of the force of gravity by the operation of a trapdoor when an accused is frog-marched onto it.

I had thought that the U.S. custodial system discouraged and despised the squealer, the snitch. But with the suffocating pervasiveness of the plea bargain, the prisons are full of people who have borne false witness, and of their victims, and of those who have been severely oversentenced to make an example of them. Like the whistleblower in the workplace, the squealer-plea bargainer has become the key figure in the contemporary American courthouse, the Minuteman of the new American Millennium. The Coleman Low facility, like many others around the country, is full of people who constitute a brimming information pool for the FBI centre at the complex, which endlessly dangles reduced sentences before convicts in exchange for incriminating testimony about others, whether accurate or not. Its informants honeycomb the inmate population, scouring for plausible scraps of damaging information or possible fabrications that might transpose some of their sentence on to someone else (a reduction in their sentence for a conviction or augmented sentence for someone else). The cancer of the plea bargain has spread through the prison system and jaundiced or otherwise afflicted everything within. Before and after the trial, it is a regime of unrelieved subornation. The prison is a seething mass of informers and fabricators, in what must be almost the greatest possible affront to the constitutional (Fifth Amendment) guaranty of due process. This atmosphere didn’t particularly affect me, as I am innocent and no one else here could plausibly claim to know anything about my case. But this cynical bartering of human souls – prisoner betraying prisoner – contributes to the systematic degradation of all inmates despite the human qualities of a reasonable number of the people here, both personnel and residents.

Arriving visitors are harassed, sometimes in an almost sadistic manner. When an old friend from Palm Beach in his seventies, now wheelchair-confined, arrived with his wife, he was sent to the WalMart store twenty miles away to change his trousers, which were not an admissible colour. When he returned, his wife was not admitted because she did not have the photo identification that they required, though she did have other photo identification. My friend’s driver could not push his wheelchair to the visitors’ centre because he was not an approved visitor, and the helpful correctional officers declined to push it, ostensibly because of legal concerns, even when the visitor offered to write out and sign a legal waiver right there. So my friend, who did not have the strength in his hands to turn the wheels, turned the chair around and pushed it slowly and painfully backward with his feet, until other arriving visitors took charge and pushed him the hundred feet or so to where I was waiting. He exited in the same way.

My wife, who visited nearly one hundred times, and my daughter, suffered through various inanities about their clothing. The rules change arbitrarily, different colours are prohibited, and knowing visitors bring several alternatives stashed in their automobiles. Dashes to the carpark to change to accommodate the latest official sartorial whim are, apparently, a feature of the front entrance.

There are problems with the medical facilities. An inmate of nearly six years, a Spanish citizen with a cardiological condition, who had fifteen stents and had undergone four bypass operations at the taxpayers’ expense, was spuriously denied a treaty transfer to Spain, which had requested his return and promised the surgery he urgently needs. Another resident, a very pleasant former reserve player for the Detroit Tigers, was told to shape up and “be a man” for a year as he reported blood in his stools and assured the medical officers he did not have hemorrhoids. He was eventually moved, a year late, and probably too late, to a medical facility to treat his rectal cancer. There are many such cases. One of the regulars at our tutors’ table, a delightful former Havana roué and anti-Castro CIA operative, had various problems of eyes, teeth, legs, and back and spent much of his time with us brushing up his English by writing protest forms, railing against various medical personnel, frequently commenting on what he alleged to be their deviant foibles, and latterly always headed: “For the Love of God!” He wasn’t well served, but protesting his mistreatment undoubtedly assured his survival to release and return to his home and yacht (and real doctors) in Puerto Rico. I helped him with his protest forms, devising elaborate wordings that would express his contempt for the regime without transgressing permissible standards of impolity. We confused the authorities by writing an ironic message of commendation for every four or five complaints. It was more mouse and cat, but quite amusing, and better for my friend’s medical condition than all the regime’s ministrations.

Although many individual BOP employees are pleasant, or at least civilized, many senior people of the regime and some of their subalterns in the ranks are specialists in swaggering, shouting, belittling; in adolescent, verbally challenged emulations of a John Wayne figure. It is all part of the process designed to break the morale and destroy the lives of anyone who becomes ensnared in the U.S. criminal legal system, despite the tired and inconsequential pieties about rehabilitation. (I shall comment in the postlude on the gap between the espoused aims and the facts in what are called re-entry programs.) Much of such efforts as there are in that direction, apart from some of the high school teaching, tutoring, and technical training, are just exercises in hypocrisy designed to maintain the fiction of rehabilitative ambitions.

The bureaucracy is impenetrable. A friend asked why he would not benefit from regulatory changes about reduction of sentences for extended halfway house or home confinement. He received back, by post, despite the short distance between him and the responding official’s workplace, the information that he wouldn’t receive a reply because he had not returned a four-page version of the official three-page form, but that the regime would generously consider his request if he did produce the non-existent four-page form within ten days of its December 3 mailing of the response. Unfortunately, the form only covered its two-hundred-foot route of delivery after three weeks and arrived on December 24, 2008. Sagas of this sort recur almost every day to one acquaintance or another in this relatively gentle and bumbling gulag. It took me four months of negotiation to give two of my Roosevelt books to the library.

Staggering amounts of inventory leave the kitchen in unauthorized ways, and plausible rumours are that a good deal of stock marches determinedly out the back of the commissary also. After thirty seconds in the dining hall, it was a bath of nostalgia for my 1960s and 1970s visits to Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Portugal, Cuba, and the markets of West Africa, the Middle East, and Vietnam. The dining hall was an anthill of people haggling over contraband, a scarcely concealed bazaar, determining the destination of mountains of the taxpayers’ inexplicably shrinking food inventory. It also reminded me of my piping days in the supermarket business at Dominion Stores, when the customers stole $10 million of product annually and the overachieving employees stole $30 million while their union leaders whined of their exploitation. (The employees’ self-help surpassed the annual net profit to the shareholders.) A year into my sentence, security at Coleman was tightened up a good deal, and inventory shrinkages became less conspicuous, if not much reduced in volume.

The residential units are beehives of ingenuity: distillers, opticians, carpenters, metal-workers, reconstructors of mattresses, modifiers of prison pillows, talented chefs, purveyors of authentic Colombian coffee, launderers, pressers, seamsters, radio technicians, cleaners, and the jurisconsults all abound, clever and nimble and highly motivated, as long as it is all outside the ambit of the official command economy, and they are adequately compensated for their efforts (usually in postage stamps, which is the local currency). The regime soaks its captives at the commissary and overcharges for use of the telephones. Of course the brighter official lights know generally what is afoot. The counsellors have a small army of informants, sycophants, and favourites, a microcosm of American society’s lionization of the denunciator.

There are regularly arrests and prosecutions of correctional officers for smuggling and related offences. They only make about $40,000 to $60,000 per year and many are eager to add to their incomes. Almost $1,000 can be made from just one smuggled carton of cigarettes. Hannah Arendt famously wrote of the banality of evil; the U.S. justice system, even in this relatively up-market house of detention, and at every preceding stage, reveals and enforces the evil of banality.

FROM WHEN I ARRIVED ON March 3, 2008, my ambitions were fixed on the court of appeals in Chicago. The fact that it had agreed to hear the appeal expeditiously, and the general reputation of the Seventh Circuit, and the juridical tradition of higher court Chicago judges, the famous law schools in that city, and the fame of the former chief judge Richard Posner, who seemed likely to hear the case as he had sat on the appeal bond panel, seemed good auguries. Peter Atkinson and Jack Boultbee had been granted bail though I was not, and the court had expressed interest in the honest services question through the eminent (despite the fact that he went to high school in Buffalo with our avaricious former employee at the Jerusalem Post, Wolf Blitzer of CNN) Chief Judge Frank Easterbrook’s written reasons for granting the appeal. Almost the whole case in U.S. appeal proceedings is in written pleadings, and ours were very well formulated and, it seemed to me, unanswerable. The contemptible poverty of what the prosecutors had put over on the uncomprehending jurors and their elfin champion on the bench was laid bare. This, I had long before learned, didn’t guarantee anything. But, with unquenchable hopefulness, I thought the most renowned judge on the highest court in such a great and famous jurisdiction might rise at least to simple reason, a task that had intimidated and eluded Strine, Manning, Farley, Campbell, the trans-border securities regulators, and at times even Judge St. Eve. I had strong hopes that I would only be a few more weeks at Coleman as Barbara flew to Chicago and she and Carolyn Gurland attended the hearing on June 6, 2008.

The precise honest services points again were that Judge St. Eve had allowed the jurors to convict either on a money fraud or the withholding of honest services, which need not have required any cost to the company nor an intent to harm the company, without specifying which was the basis of conviction. What was required was some disloyal or unfiduciary act that, while not harmfully intended nor costing anything, could still be construed as materially harmful in an intangible way. Such a vague and arbitrary tripwire for conviction was clearly an invitation to injustice. The Supreme Court had struck down such a law before, in 1989, and an almost identical one replaced it. Thousands of people had been convicted on this argument. Because all the counts alleging a scheme to defraud were rejected by the jury, it seemed clear that honest services was the problem, and this was the exclusive burden of Ruder and Sussman’s summations. St. Eve’s instruction went as far as it could to accommodate a conviction, though she claimed only to be following the precedent in her Circuit (the Seventh). It was contrary to the position taken by most other circuits of the United States, where we would have won all the counts. The further complexity of a special verdict form that would require the jury, if there were convictions where alternate charges were made, to specify the grounds of conviction, caused. The government’s contention that we had lost any right to challenge on this point after we had declined it (because counsel believed, on the basis of research, that requesting one would increase the likelihood of conviction, and that we could poll the jurors later if there were a need, which the judge denied when we asked for it). In this case, there was no evidence of a fraud – money theft – and the cooperating witness specifically denied it, and honest services was a very tenuous proposition. In most other circuits, we would already have won on all counts, including obstruction, if I had a counsel with the stamina to argue it cogently.

I called on Carolyn’s cellphone as soon as I thought the supposedly forty-minute hearing would be over. She and Barbara disabused me at once of any thought that justice would finally raise its comely head at this point. Applicants do not know the identity of the three judges until the day of the hearing. Easterbrook, who had expressed interest in the honest services question, was not among them, but Posner was. Posner had a female judge, new to the court and virtually silent, on his left. The second judge, on his right, seemed intelligent but barely asked a question while Posner ran the court, leaning back and swivelling in his chair with apparent boredom or irritation when the defence pleadings were attempted.

He had not read the defendants’ brief, was almost completely ignorant of the facts of the case, and was gratuitously hostile throughout. The hearing was slightly more than an hour. My counsel, Andy Frey, led off for the defence, a well-regarded former deputy solicitor general for sixteen years. The audio was available on the court’s website and I quickly received the transcript. In my reading of the proceedings, Posner reminded me of newsreels of Hitler’s favourite judge, “Raving” Roland Freisler, who “tried” the July 20, 1944, plotters, shouting at the shambling defendants for the benefit of the cameras, and his Führer. When I felt sufficiently medicated against nausea and headaches to listen to the audio of the hearing, I was reminded of Armando Valladares’s description of his Castroite judge reading a comic book and joking before sentencing him, on no evidence, to thirty years in prison.

Andy Frey was ineffectual against such a belligerent judge. In his ten-minute opening segment, he was interrupted twenty-four times by Posner, twenty-one times after less than two sentences. It is impossible to make an argument under these circumstances, but I was disappointed that Frey wasn’t more assertive to make a better record, as a couple of the other defence counsel were. He did make the point that in forty-five years of practice, he had never seen as weak a case as the government’s on the obstruction count. Posner affected not to understand how Radler could have redesignated a management fee as a non-compete payment and then devised a non-compete agreement that was real.

He either deliberately missed or did not understand how we could argue that the money was voted as a management fee and was then changed into a non-competition fee by the devising of a suitable non-competition basis for it and the retroactive confirmation of those arrangements. Posner kept tediously repeating that the payments in question had to be one type of fee or the other. He professed to be unable to grasp how they could be legitimately re-designated from a management fee to a non-compete fee, but declined to allow counsel to explain it. “You’re arguing with me,” he said. “It’s time to move on to the next case.” He did not wish to be confused by the facts, and was not. He deliberately missed the point that since the money had been voted to us by the Audit Committee and the directors, it could not have been a deprivation of the company. He refused to understand that it had nowhere been made clear where any honest services had been withheld, and how the trial judge could have instructed the jury that they could find us guilty on this charge even where no harm to the company was done or intended.

In the nonsense about removing the boxes, he was reduced, in the absence of any evidence, to a snide, smirking comment about a timing “coincidence.” So the rot in the U.S. justice system had corroded even this high level. There was no chance of a positive outcome here, so I emailed a response to a query from the Globe and Mail that it was obvious that Posner had not read the defence filings, and merely was “part of the prosecution,” that his performance was “scandalous,” but that the fight would go on. Frey was candid in affirming the negative prospects, but other counsel, loyal to the legal cartel, heaped praise on Frey and predicted a favourable outcome, as if it were a real judicial process. By this time, I knew better. Later on, many senior lawyers confirmed that Posner was the nightmare of the Seventh Circuit. He was known for his neglect and lack of thoroughness in his work on the bench, which played a secondary role to his writing and lectures. Though acknowledged as an extremely clever man and very knowledgeable about the law, his very high opinion of himself seemed to have blinded him to any shame he might have been expected to have about flippant and negligent decisions. The consensus was that, feet up, he flipped through a brief, came to a hasty opinion, and would not be moved by anything as clearly intellectually subordinate to his whims and biases as some lawyer merely equipped with the law and the facts. I was already lamentably familiar with the type.

Posner fancies himself an intellectual, and an economist. I cited his book on Justice Holmes – a respectable but far from exciting study, in my Roosevelt book. After the enormity in his courtroom, I looked into his oeuvre a little more closely. On his website, he highlighted his writing back to undergraduate essays. My study was facilitated, and even summarized, by a quickie he rushed out in May 2009 about the economic setback, called A Failure of Capitalism: The Crisis of ’08 and the Descent into Depression. This was an exercise in alarmism and pedantry. Of course there was no descent into depression, and once the Federal Reserve started distributing money with steam shovels and fire hoses, there wasn’t going to be any. Posner, in a surge of imagination, made four points: the profit motive sometimes leads businesses to bad decisions; the country may need more financial regulation; and the government regulators failed the country. And his book on the causes of the recession concluded with a call for a commission to determine the causes. My offer to review this piercing glimpse into the obvious for the Wall Street Journal (properly, in the circumstances) was declined. It would have been my pleasure to give Posner a crisp review. He has all the signs of a judge too much deferred to through decades of drinking his own bathwater.

Frey held out no hope except possibly on obstruction (the boxes). Barbara bravely came to see me the next day, though she returned late from Chicago to Palm Beach and only had forty-five minutes of sleep the night before visiting me. We prepared ourselves for having to serve much of the sentence, and planned yet another defence strategy after a further orderly retreat. Contingency arrangements were already in place. The other (hobnailed) jack-boot fell on June 25 with what I described in my notes as a “cowardly, cavalier, and perversely stupid” judgment by Posner. It was riddled with factual errors and seasoned with painful Strinish attempts at witticisms. At least Strine’s strivings toward wit were spontaneous verbal sallies. Posner couldn’t master that incline, even with weeks of laborious composition.

Yet we managed to recover most of the case, despite an uneven barristerial performance, a prejudicial instruction from the judge, and some serious frailties of perception on the jury. After this dismal cataract, I should not have been surprised by Posner’s infamy, but I was. I thought we would win something. Again, Barbara came the next day, again at huge inconvenience for what on Thursday can only be a short visit ending at noon, and again after little sleep. We would counter-attack on all fronts: try to continue the appeal to the Supreme Court; prepare a treaty transfer application for Britain; pursue the essentially political process of a commutation request of the president; ask for confirmation of my status, as recommended by the judge and the probation officer, as not a security risk, making me eligible for further reductions of the sentence; launch a new series of constitutional attacks based on clear recent precedents for violation of my Sixth Amendment right to counsel with the false cash seizure in New York, which chased off Brendan Sullivan; and assault the outrageous Mareva (Barbara’s assignment, presaging my own attack on it) – all while awaiting, with some justified hopefulness according to the congressmen involved, legislated sentence reductions. I replaced the very gentlemanly and altogether admirable Andy Frey with the more aggressive Miguel Estrada for the application to the Supreme Court. (I had Barbara’s tireless research to thank for this, as it proved to be a fortuitous change.)

Oddly, the U.S. government doesn’t necessarily win a war of attrition against a resourceful individual. As we have seen, it practically always imprisons its target, who has no useful constitutional rights in fact, except entitlement to some sort of counsel in a public show trial. Prosecutors do anything they want including holding inflammatory press conferences, before and along with indictments; defendants are spuriously accused of tampering with witnesses or violating bail arrangements and are harassed by arbitrary asset seizures as part of the effort to deny them counsel, in distracting pre-trial skirmishes.^* The media amplify defamatory leaks from the prosecution, and the trial and appellate judges I encountered and read, with rare exceptions such as federal District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan, appear more often than not to be wise-cracking toadies of the Justice Department, concerned for headlines and often promotion to a higher public trough, which in the current political atmosphere can only be attained by draconian severity.

BUT AFTER WINNING SOME of their cases, the persecutors and the attendant media, having consigned their victims, they imagine, to the dustbin of the “disgraced,” and so on, move on to new victims, and the confined innocent, if he retains the determination and the means, can pick away at the weaknesses of the false case that has been made against him.

The endless much-savoured references to me as “disgraced” caused me to rummage through the Bible the kindly British stranger sent me to find an apposite quote. Like so much else, it came in Isaiah: 50: 6–8. “I have set my face like flint knowing that I shall not be put to shame. Who will prove me wrong?”

AT THE END OF 2008, Richard Breeden, Gordon Paris, and Raymond Seitz announced their retirement from the former Hollinger International and the disbandment of the Special Committee. The vulture funds moved to sweep out the other directors and the pseudo-“management” installed by Breeden. There have been more improbable resurrections than Sun-Times Media Group, though perhaps not without wide spread religious adherences as a consequence. The vandalized hulk of STMG was sold out of bankruptcy to fly-by-night financial buyers in late 2009, in another vintage Chicago court stitch-up. I pipelined in advice to the stakeholders many times on how to salvage something for themselves, but like so many others in this tawdry farce, they allowed their sense of self-preservation to atrophy at the mere Medusan presence of Richard Breeden.

On inauguration eve, January 19, George W. Bush rejected fifty-eight hundred commutation applications and left the other twenty-two hundred, including mine, to his successor. We had a magnificently written and sponsored application, and put it into the president’s hands via both a close family member and his own counsel. But the outgoing president, whose career had been saved by Richard Breeden’s whitewash of his insider sale of Harkin Energy Company stock during his father’s term, said he didn’t approve of people using highly paid lawyers to make such applications, and rode unlamented into the sunset. (I found the monthly requests for contributions to the George W. Bush Library, exactly addressed to me in prison, and warmly machine-signed “George,” though they were obviously computerized, indicative of a man who incited the dispatch of shoes at his head, when visiting Iraq.)

I KNEW THE HOLY GRAIL of justice was out there somewhere, beyond the barbed wire and the comedians in Receiving and Departing. And in May 2009, finally, unmistakably, came the apparition of justice. Breeden, Healy, and the former Hollinger International directors who had published and circulated the Special Committee report and 10Ks had tried to eliminate my libel suits. They claimed in court in Toronto that I was just jurisdiction-shopping to sue in Canada, and that the action should be brought in the United States, where intent to defame has to be proved for the plaintiff to succeed, an almost impossible burden. And they claimed that since some guilty verdicts had been returned, I had no reputation to protect anyway, and so my action was unfounded.

The traditions of Canada as a country of the rule of law, which had partly prompted me to graduate in law in Quebec forty years before, almost miraculously reappeared like a phoenix (or even the well-travelled but infrequent flyer, the Archangel Gabriel, who allegedly appeared to Christ, and six hundred years later to Muhammad). Superior Court Justice Edward Belobaba threw out the change-of-jurisdiction request very declaratively, adding that I appeared to have well-founded grounds of action, without at all prejudging them, and that the misdeeds alleged by the defendants vastly exceeded the convictions of the plaintiff. Then, showing again that when fortune returns, it often comes in a flood, as it had fled, Judge Belobaba added: “Juries, including American juries, are fallible.” He implied that the standard of whether a Canadian court would return any guilty verdicts on the same evidence (it would not) could be applied. This had long been my reserve position, in case nothing further could be achieved in the U.S. justice system. I could arrange, in effect, for that system to be, itself, tried in Canada, Britain, or the European Court of Justice.

At last, now I could be sure of my ability to put Breeden, Thompson, Seitz, Paris, Healy, and the others in the witness box without immunities or a right to remain silent (as I promised Seitz and Thompson would happen when they deposed me as chairman of Hollinger International five years before) and under the full penalties of perjury. It was and is a delicious prospect.

Two weeks later came an even greater seismic change. The Supreme Court of the United States, which consents to hear only 1 or 2 per cent of the applications it receives, but reverses 70 per cent of the verdicts it does review, agreed to hear our appeal. This was a headline news story throughout the Western world. The enemy dug in again, blinking in the unaccustomed daylight, as the rock was lifted away. St. Eve gave Jack Boultbee bail, and he went home to Victoria. Peter Atkinson was treaty-transferred to Canada and released.

The Supreme Court, through its erratic Chicago representative, Justice John Paul Stevens, took the position that bail was beneath its dignity and denied my application. The mask was thrown down; Breeden and Fitzgerald had never cared about the others, except technically. It was my honour to be the sole real subject of their cause. Our informants told us that Judge St. Eve was outraged that the Supreme Court would review her jury instruction that the jurors could convict in the absence of a fraud, or of harm, or evidence of intent to harm, the company. She dug in her Nike-clad, nimble little feet and rejected my bail application without a hearing, I suspect out of fear of the tatters the very able and motivated Miguel Estrada^* would make of her instructions, rulings, and sentence before the international media. She and the private sector’s own Eric Sussman acknowledged the possibility that the fraud counts would be struck down, and clung like drowning people to the flimsy life preserver that what would then happen to the obstruction charge was “speculation,” as St. Eve put it. (So had been that small part of the prosecution case that had not been simply false.)

Our sources also reported (well-founded) consternation in the U.S. attorney’s office in Chicago, and in Breeden’s suddenly jittery camp. Prominent members of the financial media rediscovered our coordinates. Strong amicus curiae briefs supporting us came in from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Criminal Defense Trial Lawyers’ Association. Words of encouragement and congratulation flooded my email terminal and mail box, from most U.S. states, all Canadian provinces, and many countries.

After nearly six dire years, finally, the enemy, which had no more ammunition to fire at me, would have to account for itself in serious courts of law, and not just in echo chambers for frenzied prosecutors, the Chicago political machine, and the media tricoteuses, none of whom have any more interest in justice than a tomcat has in a marriage license. The mills of justice are proverbially slow, but they would finally test Breeden and his accomplices. Of course, the outcome was not a foregone conclusion, but the prospect of a fair hearing was a novelty of inexpressible consolation. I felt, of the judiciary, and soon of the media too, of both countries, in Schiller’s famous phrase: “Late you come, but still you come.”

The Honest Services Statute, appropriately from a draftsman (Joe Biden), who plagiarized a political theme from one of Britain’s most forgettable political leaders (Neil Kinnock), was a menace to all American business. This was now a landmark case that would sort out differences between the U.S. circuits and subject aspects of the U.S. justice system to intense scrutiny. My father used to quote Browning’s “It is a long lane that knows no turning.” I was still in captivity, but my tormentors were doing a fearful tap dance, and the banshees of pharisaical bigotry were finally silent (as surveys confirmed a seismic shift in Canadian public opinion).

It all began, finally, majestically, to turn. The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal (television year-end roundup), National Law Review, Fortune, even the Guardian, and many individual writers and bloggers called for or predicted my vindication. Long silent former friends mysteriously reappeared in my email queue.

The heavily attended hearing at the Supreme Court of the United States on December 8, 2009, could not have gone better. Miguel Estrada and David Debold wrote a brilliant brief, and Miguel’s court performance matched it. The justices, from right to left, challenged the assistant solicitor general representing the Justice Department and expressed concern, and even contempt, for the Honest Services Statute. Justice Stephen Breyer (the only one of them I had actually met) said the statute could convict 140 million of the U.S. workforce of 150 million people. Chief Justice John Roberts said that it was impossible for a reasonable person to read the statute and judge if his own conduct was legal. Justice Antonin Scalia said it wasn’t the place or task of the Supreme Court to rewrite defective statutes for the Congress.

Suddenly, the odds and the omens, and not merely the law and the facts, were with us. There was now room for great hope and cautious optimism. Whatever might happen, I had never felt so strongly how great is the reward for being true to oneself.

ALL THIS RAISES THE QUESTION of why, apart from desperately missing my beloved Barbara, I was not completely miserable as a prisoner, as long as it didn’t go on indefinitely, and I knew it would not. As I had been unjustly accused and convicted, I had the somewhat bracing status of a relatively comfortable martyrdom. No one who has not experienced such an injustice can easily appreciate how repulsive it is, but the enormity of it is morally empowering without being a lifetaking or life-threatening sacrifice. It had deprived me of many pleasures and liberties but reaffirmed my self-confidence that I have not lost the ability to live simply, to socialize easily with, to say the least, a very disparate group, and even to accept an unnatural subordinacy. When the crisis burst and fortune fled, I did not know what I could endure. It has been, in the abstract, a fearful but broadening experience. I will emerge stronger and certainly wiser, and with the actuarial right to look forward to a golden afterburner to my life and career.

It has been an education. People from my socio-economic background may suspect what goes on in the dark, vast, unwashed underside of life, which throbs and heaves just out of sight to the inhabitants of Norman Rockwell’s and Bill Buckley’s Americas. But suspecting how the justice system works, and how it interacts with everything that shares its corrosion, does not prepare someone at all adequately for going through it from the wrong end. Nor does it prepare someone to endure the sudden, completely unwarranted inversion of fortune, and unbidden plunge from one of the powerful to one of the designated pariahs, and to see how strong still is the moralistic, disgracing whiplash of this deeply corrupt process.

No one conscripted me to go into business in the United States, and I knew when I did that there were some wild and woolly aspects of the country’s justice system. But it is becoming a prosecutocracy and a carceral state where what has happened to me could happen to anyone, and often does. In a democratic country, the people are always right, and if the American people are happy with their justice system, their will is sovereign. Once clear of it, it will be no concern of mine. But the majority of Americans have no idea how far their justice system has putrefied. When the victims of official injustice and their families and supporters, tens of millions of people (as there are an astounding 47 million Americans with a criminal record, most of the offenses relatively minor) become so numerous and aroused that every congressman receives fifty messages a week from them and there are, as there will be, extreme actions by people whose lives prosecutors and judges have broken unjustly, change will be possible. That is democracy too, but as long as these problems are not addressed, the human and moral damage to American society will become steadily more severe.

My admiration of the United States is well known – notorious, in fact – and it continues yet, in some ways, despite being so prodigiously unrequited. I do not take America’s persecution of me personally; indeed, the impersonality makes it even more irritating. While my admiration of aspects of America perseveres, my affair with that country has ended. It won’t be revived but is remembered fondly. I am not Captain Dreyfus or Dr. Mudd, but I have a legitimate grievance, and I have been reassured to find that I am happy enough to be who I am. Whatever the sophistries of the law and the vagaries of the bench, I have committed no crimes. This is already widely recognized.

The foregoing is accurate and indisputable in all material respects. By surviving it all, physically, morally, and financially, despite everything and against all odds and disappointments, I win.

Inmate 18330-424

Cubicle 30, Unit B-1,

Coleman Low Security Prison,

Federal Correctional Complex,

Coleman, Florida

May 15, 2010

* He grew quickly to be a large, much-loved dog, but died, very sadly, less than two years later, while I was still incarcerated. Barbara was inconsolable, and bearing this loss alone was another rod at a terrible time. There are many casualties even in a non-shooting war, but fortunately, they were not all on our side. Barbara’s dog outlived, by a few weeks, Bruce Wasserstein, sixty-one, of Lazard, whose passing was observed with commendations of his deal-making talents and general craftiness, though not panegyrics to his ethics or suavity; and poor Christopher Browne, who died pitifully at sixty-three, a hopeless alcoholic, in Palm Beach, a town he had professed to despise. His obituaries referred exclusively to his role in my travails, now generally hinting that it had not worked out quite as he had hoped, and to the fact that his predecessors in his company had done some early work for Warren Buffett. His uprising against me was his only hurrah, apart from a few cultural munificences and his conviviality in the gay community of the Hamptons. He was an intelligent and, at his best, moderately entertaining man. It was obvious to me that he was seriously maladjusted, but while I cannot claim to be crestfallen that he is dead, I do regret what must have been a much steeper and more tortured decline than I ever imagined or would have wished.

* Maurice L. Duplessis was premier of Quebec, 1936–1939 and 1944–1959, and the leading political personality in Quebec for thirty years. He was the subject of my first book, Render Unto Caesar. Paul-Émile Cardinal Léger was archbishop of Montreal 1950–1967, and I was the vice president of his charity for some years.

* The public defenders are usually just Judas goats, paid by the court, intimidated by the prosecutors, part of the charade of preservation of the constitutional rights to due process and advice of counsel and paid by the numbers of people they supposedly represent, not the results they achieve.

* Judge St. Eve jogged many days at noon. Miguel Estrada had been filibustered six times by the Democrats when nominated to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C., by President George W. Bush. He believes strongly in the rights of defendants, and proved a magnificently thorough counsel.