CHAPTER TWENTY

SURRENDER

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“Sometimes the wrong choices bring us to the right places.”

—Unknown

WHILE I WAS FINISHING THIS BOOK, one of the biggest hits on TV was the Netflix original series Orange is the New Black. Anyone even remotely familiar with the plot—which is based on a true story (at least it started that way)—might wonder if there are parallels to my own trip upriver. In the show, an educated woman is sentenced to a minimum security prison. Out of her element, she is forced to adapt to a strange, surreal, unnatural, sometimes dangerous and often inhuman world. She’s even ratted out by her former partner, who also ends up in the same prison, making for an awkward situation, to say the least.

All of these things were true with me.

And yet, I was also miles away from Orange is the New Black. First, Piper Kerman, who penned the memoir of the same name, was actually guilty of a crime. True, she was lured into breaking the law by her lover, Cleary Wolters, who was a much bigger fish among international money-laundering drug smugglers. But being blinded by love, or lust, will not change the basic legal facts of Kerman’s case. And as I have tried to make clear—and as the evidence amply demonstrates—Zvi Goffer did not lure me into a life of crime. He simply decided that he would break the law and then, once arrested, would not do a goddamned thing to help me once I had been taken down, despite his knowing full well I wasn’t part of his scheming. For almost two years—two fucking YEARS, from arrest to trial to sentencing—Zvi could have come forward and tried to make things right, to say I was not involved, that he never told me he was trying to bribe lawyers, etc. And this is why Zvi’s words to Pete Bogart, outside the courtroom on the eve of the verdict—“Why is Mike even here?”—will haunt me for years to come.

When I was going through them, experiencing them, I believed that my prison experiences were novel and unique. They weren’t.

What I now understand is that prison is about leveling everything, regulating everything, and wearing you down. What takes over, behind the barbed wire, is the mind-numbing monotony and depression—and all that time on your hands. It gives you an uncanny, unique ability to reflect on your poor choices, with no real distractions except getting through the day in one piece. Some cold evenings, your internal monologue becomes the greatest punishment of all.

That, and separation from the ones you love.

It took me three interminable days at Lewisburg FPC (official name: United States Penitentiary, Lewisburg) until I finally found the courage to take a shower. Every kid that grew up with a television set knows about how you should never drop your bar of soap in prison. I learned the hard way that walking into to the shower in only a towel and flip flops was also a very poor idea.

“Hey, Jew with the tattoo, you got a nice ass,” was the immediate response from the peanut gallery.

A guard pulled me aside, warned me that I was “inviting trouble,” and said to cover up until I was actually underneath the showerhead.

Clearly, I had a lot to learn. I was prisoner #62876054. They didn’t tattoo it onto my forearm, but in a metaphorical sense it sure felt that way—and still does. Even today, I can’t say or hear my number without breaking into “Look Down” from the musical Les Miserables.

That I had even attended a Broadway show differentiated me from 99 percent of the other inmates in the facility.

Located in the Susquehanna Valley of central Pennsylvania, Lewisburg was minimum security and gave us views of a lush landscape that always struck me as something out of a Van Gogh. Not quite Saint-Remy de Provence, but we did have our share of starry nights. I wondered why the government built prisons in such beautiful (and relatively valuable) locations. Sing Sing, nestled on the bucolic banks of the Hudson River, is another example. “The Camp,” as Lewisburg was known within, was also not too far from my alma mater, Lafayette College. With a rival school that was our college football nemesis literally visible in the distance on clear days, it was a stark reminder of how far I had fallen.

Lewisburg had seen some heavy hitters over the years. Gotti, Capone, and Hoffa were just a few who had called it home. Illustrious ghosts who roamed the halls unseen.

On my first day on the inside, my deer-in-the headlights expression spoke volumes. One observant inmate smiled and asked, “Hey, did your lawyer lie to you too, and tell you that this was a white-collar camp?”

Yes, I confirmed. He had.

But to be fair to Sommer, most lawyers know next to nothing about the post-conviction process. This explains why “prison consulting” is a budding, burgeoning industry.

Adjacent to the “camp” was a maximum security federal penitentiary, which housed roughly one thousand of the Bureau of Prisons’ most violent inmates. On my first day there, a surly guard warned me that if I misbehaved I would be sent there, pointing up the hill to the imposing structure.

“That’s a gladiator camp,” the guard explained, when I didn’t react. “We pull people out of there with holes in them every night.”

The guard wasn’t joking. I could hear the screams from behind the walls there at all hours, and it sounded terrifying. By comparison, my five hundred camp compadres were relatively tame.

Even though Lewisburg was technically a “camp”—or a “country club prison,” as law-and-order hardliners disdainfully dubbed it—there were some extremely tough convicts there, men who were being “reintroduced” to society after stints at maximum security prisons. I had to learn to interact with them.

One of these men was known as Irish. He was into his twenty-fourth year behind bars and was rumored to be associated with the Aryan Nation. Most recently, Irish had been serving time for credit card fraud and drug possession. His reputation preceded him. Those who (quietly) spoke his name told me he was a genuine “career criminal” who had spent literally half his life in jail. I learned this included an unimaginable eight-year stretch in solitary, at a prison out in Arizona. I also overheard that he was scheduled to be released around the same time as me.

One day soon after my arrival at Lewisburg, I found myself standing next to Irish in the yard. Because I was new and did not know any better, I tried to strike up a conversation. Some part of me said that maybe this man had had a rough life and could use a friend.

“Hey man,” I said. “I know we don’t know each other but I’m Mike. I know you’ve been locked up forever and are getting out soon … I just came off the streets so if you ever want to have a conversation or pick my brain about what it’s like out there, or the job situation, I’m happy to do that all day.”

These were words and sentiments and customs wholly foreign to him. That much was obvious to me immediately. He just stared at me as though he were considering killing me, and then stalked off without saying a word.

Then, about three weeks later, I ran into him again. I didn’t know what else to say, but made the split-second decision to double down. I made the same offer, and mentioned that I would be happy to talk to him about things like using computers and smart phones and other things he might need in order to find a job.

He stared at me again, but this time he said: “I might do that.”

Then he stalked off again. And I relaxed again.

Two weeks after that, Irish sought me out and said he wanted to take me up on the offer. It never became a scheduled thing, but whenever we ran into each other, I told him everything I could about life in the outside world in the 2010s. I talked about how to get jobs, and what kind of jobs there were for ex-cons. I talked about what jobs you could do if you didn’t “know computers” and how to get those jobs. I talked about finding housing and managing money and everything else I thought might be useful. I never asked anything from Irish in return.

Day-to-day life at the camp felt like Groundhog Day—with each activity strictly regimented and stripped of all spontaneity. You faced the steady, mind-numbing cadence of automatic moves and static schedules. From meal to meal, prisoner count to prisoner count, time seemed to lose meaning as days and weeks blended into a wretched, indistinguishable blur. Surprises were few and far between.

I initially shared a three-bunk cubicle with two sizeable black inmates. On the outside, I never paid much attention to race. In prison it was a big deal, playing a role in everything from where you sat for meals to what you watched on television and who you watched it with. I didn’t give a crap about the color of anybody’s skin, but my cubicle-mates treated me with total contempt. They may have truly hated white people, or just hated me personally, but I expect they were simply acting out the way the culture of the prison expected them to act toward me. Their glares told me I was not welcome. One of them, Bo, was older, enormous, and borderline obese, with the worst sleep apnea you could imagine—an ear-splitting rumble that drove me nuts. The other was basically—and, in retrospect, amusingly—almost an exact clone of Bo, but on a much smaller scale. I never knew if he also snored, but if he did, nothing could be heard above Bo.

Trying to sleep on my bed (or maybe it should be “bed”) was pure torture. It was a steel plank half the size of a twin, the mattress no better than a worn yoga mat. It had been used for years before I inherited it, and I would wager the ranch that some poor soul is sleeping on it tonight. The SUV I’d driven my three kids to school in was bigger than what was now my home. Framed pictures weren’t allowed, so I taped a few shots of my family on the inside of my locker—wanting to keep my private life private, and images of my kids away from any leering pedophiles.

That was it, my home for the next thirty months. A long, long way from the leafy suburb of Larchmont, New York. The only thing I had to look forward to while serving time—the one thin ray of hope that kept me going—were the family visits. They were my best link to the outside world, to any tangible sense of life as it used to be. Yet, during my entire time at Lewisburg—remember, we’re talking almost two years, for good behavior—Lisa came to visit me just twice, both times with the kids. Never a letter, and not nearly enough phone calls—and those seemed designed exclusively to remind me how difficult everything had become because of my incarceration.

Lisa’s tone in these calls always made me recall very specific exchanges we’d had in late 2009.

One happened a week or so after my arrest. We were in the car, and we were pulling into our driveway following a visit to her Grandma Gladys out on Long Island. The three kids were dead asleep in the back of the SUV, with nothing but a deafening silence between Lisa and me all the way from the Whitestone Bridge.

Then Lisa had suddenly sighed and said: “I just don’t know if I can ‘be’ with somebody who’s guilty.”

I looked over at her. Her eyes were red from crying, glassy with resignation.

I gripped the steering wheel tightly, twisting and choking the leather. For the first time since I’d been cuffed and perp-walked, I couldn’t prostrate myself anymore. It had been a week of apologies, of trying reassure her that we would get through this intact.

I was done.

“Jesus, Lisa. I’ve apologized again and again, over and over. I don’t think this is fair, or right, and I’m confused too. But I didn’t rape or kill anyone. I played a tip—what thousands of people on Wall Street do every day, and what you’ve never had a problem with before. Look, this situation isn’t what I expected either—not in my wildest dreams—but I gotta tell you, honey. ‘I’m not sure I can be with you if you’re guilty,’ doesn’t work for me. This marriage was for better or worse. In sickness and in health. Our vows—remember those? Or is all that ‘bullshit,’ as you’re telling me now. If you can’t be on my side, or with me, then it’s on you. But I’m done apologizing. I’m done second-guessing myself. I’m done asking why, or what I could have done. I’ve got nothing left.”

Lisa turned her head away from me, and said nothing. The kids slept on. But I was suddenly worked up, and continued:

“Remember when you mistakenly didn’t pay sales tax on your business for a couple years and I had to talk to our accountant to fix it? Did you intend to break the law? No. But do you know that’s still a felony? Do you know Wesley Snipes is doing three years for not filing a tax return? If you were arrested for that, do you think it would be fair if I said to you, ‘Sorry but I’m just not sure I can be with someone who is guilty?’ I didn’t even break the law, Lisa. I may have chosen a really fucking bad person to go into business with, but I didn’t break the law.”

Realizing I had just sworn like a sailor, I looked back at our kids again. Still comatose. Thank God for that.

“I told you, Mike. I never liked Zvi.”

“Yeah, you did tell me that. And good for you for spotting it. Bravo. But that was after the fact, Lisa. That was when it was already too late.”

“Something was so slick and oily about Zvi.”

More Monday-morning quarterbacking.

We were home. I yanked the keys out of the ignition and stepped outside, into the cold November night air, and took a deep breath.

From that point on, communication between my wife and me changed forever. Something was gone. Something was different. It was small, but it was there. Her life as she knew it had been upended, destroyed. She was scared and confused. Our future had gone from consistency and complacency to total uncertainty. She felt alone, with three little kids that might soon depend entirely on her for their needs. I got it, and my heart ached for her, and for the fear she was feeling. But I needed her, too. And she was emotionally gone. Checked out.

The other memorable exchange occurred a little later, when I asked her opinion on the government’s offer to me—plead guilty and serve no time.

I wanted my wife to weigh in on the most important—and difficult—decision of my life, of our lives.

She was totally unable to do so.

“How can you not have an opinion?” I asked in frustration. “The Decision” consumed me at that moment, simultaneously devouring my stomach lining and what was left of my sanity. Everything rode on it. Each day it consumed my waking thoughts.

“I have an opinion,” she allowed, in an even-keeled, remarkably relaxed voice. “I’m just not going to tell you.”

“What the … You won’t share that with me?”

“Nope.”

“Can I ask why?”

“You already know why, Mike.”

But it seemed to me that I did not.

“I do? Humor me. I might have an idea, but I’m tired and depressed and don’t feel like playing the guessing game on something this serious. This is our lives. I’m the one that can end up in prison, but it’s still our lives.”

After a long pause, while she obsessed over a platter of spring rolls that I wanted to sweep onto the floor, she looked over at me with those beautiful green eyes and said: “I’m not going to be responsible for the outcome. I’m not going to allow you to blame me for the next forty years, as you sit there, miserable, because you took the plea, or because you fought it out in court and lost. This is your decision, and yours alone.”

I waited for that all-important “but don’t worry sweetheart, you know I’ll support you” … but it never came.

“That’s it, Lisa? Are you serious? You want me to make the most important decision of OUR lives completely on my own?”

“Mike, you are the biggest grass-is-greener person I’ve ever met. When we were in the city, you wanted to move to Westport or Larchmont. Remember that?”

“We were trying to have kids. I didn’t want to raise them in the city! I love the city, but I like trees … and driving … and clean air … not having to worry about a bum spitting on my child in a stroller. And the Towers had just crumbled within walking distance of us. On friends of mine.”

“No, I understand that,” she said. “But then even when we settled in Larchmont, you would regretfully throw out Los Angeles every once in a while, just to torture me. Then it was Sarasota. You’re always unsatisfied with the choices you made, Mike. You always think a different decision would have been better.”

She went back to work at the butcher block, carefully rolling the transparently thin spring rolls. For the moment, I gave her only stunned silence. What was there to say?

“Nothing is ever good enough,” Lisa continued. “Nothing was ever the right choice. And that’s when you make the choice. I’m not going to allow you to turn me into the scapegoat for your unhappiness, whether you’re in jail, or you’re a confessed felon who regrets not fighting for your good name … because your damn wife didn’t want you to. I don’t want that burden. I can’t, Mike.”

I stepped back. Decided not to reply. There was no point in continuing.

While Lisa would only visit me twice in prison, my parents came every eight weeks or so. They’d fly in from their home in southern California, head out to Larchmont to pick up their grandchildren, and then drive the four hours west to spend the weekend at a Hampton Inn in Lewisburg. I thanked God for my parents, who were broken up about my situation, inside and out, yet never failed to remind me of their unwavering love and support. Without them, I never would have been able to get through it as well as I did. Eight weeks was one hell of a long stretch to be alone, but I could manage that. Once a year, frankly, would have driven me to some sort of edge I’m grateful I never had to face.

For the kids, going to visit dad in prison seemed like a vacation … of sorts. They would swim in the hotel pool, eat the foul processed food out of the vending machines, play Hangman and Go Fish, or just chill out with me. All at once it was amazing and uplifting, but equally awful and heart-breaking. How can you entertain three young kids, or have them truly enjoy themselves, when they can’t really do anything with you. You’re just sitting on folding metal chairs for three straight hours. Boys of three and six aren’t much for sitting still and talking anyway. To have been able to go outside and toss a baseball or football, or to wrestle, would have been pure bliss. Yet for me this was life. This was my taste of the real world, as we inmates called it. And each time the visit was over and my children left, escorted by Grandma and Grandpa, I was emotionally drained and despondent, counting down the days until I might see them again. Then it was back to the dreary, debilitating monotony of my shared cell.

You get a strange sense of how your kids are aging when you’re incarcerated. I received drawings or letters once in a while. I guess that these creations came at the urging of my parents, because the return address was always in my mom’s scratchy handwriting. I wrote to them regularly, and assume they still have the letters, but it’s a subject I don’t want to raise with them. Still, what do you say to kids at that age, to the children you love more than life itself? At a loss for words most times, I generally kept it simple.

“Daddy misses you a lot and loves you to the moon and back, forever and always.”

And so forth.

I wrote to Syl in a little more detail, trying to joke about how the prison food was gross and telling her that she had to be good—helping her little brothers and listening to her mom—and always emphasizing how much I missed her and that I would see her soon.

Soon … what a dangerous word to use with a child. A child’s sense of time is so different than an adult’s. I’m sure the term soon lost all meaning for her.

My two boys seemed to age normally, though it was as inevitable as it was painful that I would miss so many of their milestones while in prison.

Cam, who invariably smiled, seemed more subdued during his visits. That initial burst of enthusiasm when they entered and saw me was never anything short of miraculously uplifting … but things had a way of fading after a few minutes. It was painfully apparent that seeing me in this situation had caused him to lose some of his typical spark.

Syl, already a bright, complicated kid, became even more so. She was smart and picked up clues. “Why does it say prison camp?” I didn’t know what to tell her.

It was painful having them see me in “uniform”—head to toe brown khaki—or having the guards bark at them, which inevitably happened. There was an older guard, a spiteful drunk, who seemed to burn up when he saw what I had—three beautiful children and parents that loved me. Said guard would snap at them, yank away their coloring books, yell about a chair being too close to an aisle, or caution a kid whose only crime was being excited about getting an ice cream from the godawful vending machines.

In prison there were arbitrary rules for everything. You got used to it as an inmate, and then it was hard to see outsiders—like people you loved—confronted with it. They would also change rules constantly. I think it was just to keep us on our toes. On some days rules were enforced, and on others they weren’t. It depended on who you got as a guard, and what kind of a mood he was in. There was a large sign posted in the cafeteria—NO REMOVING FOOD—yet inmates would openly walk out with a pint of milk and an apple, or an extra slice or two of Wonder Bread to feed the ducks, and no one seemed to care. But if one of those COs got in a fight with his girlfriend, or was chewed out by his boss, suddenly walking outside to finish a mushy apple meant you’d be written up and cited and have privileges revoked (no shopping, no visits, no phone).

Heaven help you if you complained about anything; you’d disappear to solitary for a week or never to be heard from again.*

During one visit, that bitter old alcoholic guard decided he didn’t like my three-year-old son slowly rolling his McDonald’s Happy Meal plastic car down the table, so he snatched it roughly right from Phin’s hand. You should have seen the look of shock on Phin’s face, and the tears that followed. Phin looked violated and quickly became inconsolable—it was something I will never forget. To be forced to watch, powerless, as this piece of human garbage went out of the way to hurt my child, was beyond painful. My only option was to fantasize about what I might do if I ever ran into him on the streets.

Once, my brother flew out to Chicago to visit, and the guard at the front gate said he wasn’t on the visitor list—except for the fact that one’s immediate family is automatically on the list. Someone had removed him. All they had to do was look on the computer; my probation report listed two parents and a brother—all automatics.

“We printed the list for Kimelman, and if he was on it, he would have been on it.”

This garbled nonsense was, verbatim, what they said to him.

Then they sent him away without even allowing me to see him. The fucking gall. The financial and emotional cost of a flight from Chicago, two nights at a hotel, cars to and from the airport, just so a guard could have some adolescent fun at my expense. And there was never any recourse, no right to complain, nothing you could ever do. Sometimes the guards would punish every visitor and his family, simply because one inmate had been busted smoking a cigarette. It’s a level of pitiful sadism that’s still hard for me to fully fathom. My parents were also turned away once, with my kids in tow, after a 3000 mile flight and four-hour drive, just because another inmate had been caught smoking. They made us all suffer, inmates, families and children, for one man’s carelessness. From my vantage point in the yard, I could see my three-year-old and six-year-old sons sobbing hysterically as they were escorted back to the car.

Try doing time with that image seared into your conscience on a loop.

But now I must admit something. I’ve been holding out on you. There was one other factor about life at Lewisburg that made it close to unbearable. One other detail that—had I disclosed it earlier—might have obscured your ability to appreciate the other, nasty aspects of the place.

This missing detail is the presence of Zvi and Nu.

That’s right. Both Goffer brothers were also inmates at Lewisburg.

I’ll start with Nu.

Always the weaker of the two brothers—a man whose poor liver must have howled through the long prison nights, begging for its fix—Nu remained the faithful, unflinching sidekick throughout his time inside. Zvi’s power over him would never wane. It had existed as long as long as I’d known the two. It would exist in prison as well.

At Lewisburg, Nu and I had the distinct pleasure of spending nine months together in the RDAP, or the Residential Drug and Alcohol Problem. When I got sent into the RDAP (Nu would arrive about one month after me, a total wreck), I was moved from my cellblock known as “Vegas”—a totally lawless place where literally any vice was available: alcohol, drugs, gambling, even women*—to what was purported to be a medically strict environment. Yet despite its being quieter and stricter than Vegas, there was still illicit gambling, cellphone use, and most amusingly, obvious drug and alcohol use. I had done my best to get in the program as soon as I’d learned of it. Not only would it mean time away from snoring roommates; I would also receive six months off my sentence.**

The building that housed RDAP looked like a rundown greenhouse or barn. It had been built as temporary housing in the 1950s with a five-year designated lifespan, but was still standing. There was limited heat, and they shut that off in March, so we had to spend a solid two months coping with nighttime temps that were often down to twenty degrees. It was like sleeping outdoors. I wore two sets of clothes, a hat and gloves, and still had to wrap myself in newspapers at night to keep warm. The windows could not have been any thinner, and most of the walls were uninsulated aluminum sheets, barely half an inch thick. And when it warmed up—you guessed it—there was no AC. The greenhouse-like window orientation meant we could expect experience temps above 110 degrees during summer. The air was stale and miserable, with around two hundred souls surviving in a space the size of a basketball court, stacked with bunk beds. It was very tight quarters. At night, if you leaned over even slightly you’d smack the person sleeping next to you. Nu slept no more than twenty feet away from me. Despite this, we hardly communicated at all. We might give one another looks, or bump shoulders occasionally in passing, but that was that. No real contact. Nothing to say. Just frustration and a good deal of mutual antipathy. I blamed Nu in part for my place here. I’m sure he blamed me for his.

In sharp contrast to me, Zvi seemed to have been born for success in a prison environment. Somehow he managed to have an iPad and quickly became known as a reliable source for cigarettes and alcohol. Zvi drank regularly, yet always avoided getting caught. He acted as a bookie and took bets on things. But perhaps more than anything else, he succeeded inside because of his ability to spin tales.

Zvi boasted about having $300 million stashed overseas, in Israel and elsewhere. He played on the inmates’ gullibility, promising them jobs and payoffs if they helped him out with this or that. When a few of the less-gullible inmates asked me if Zvi’s stories were true, I asked them whether a guy worth $300 million would have hired an ex-public defender from Florida, as opposed to any of the top white-collar attorneys in New York City, who all would have chomped at the bit to represent him—for the right price.

’Nuff said, fellas.

Yet Zvi seemed to acutely understand that he was free to make up anything he wanted. He was an artist, and prison was a blank canvas. For a while, this did not concern me. I might have felt pity for the other inmates he duped, but they would eventually learn the truth about Zvi the hard way. Just as I had. But then word reached me that—among his many tales—Zvi had said that I was a rat who had informed against him.

Zvi spread a rumor that I was the one who ratted our group out, and that the only reason he and Nu and the whole guilty bunch were behind bars was because I had squealed. Such rumors could cost you your life, even in minimum security. (The only thing worse than being a rat was being a child molester.) And the threat did not end once you were released. Plenty of prison justice got carried out years later, on the outside.

I couldn’t let this bullshit go unchallenged. To save my own life, I had to resort to prison tactics myself.

I sent my new friend Irish to have a word with Zvi’s people. He was only too happy to oblige.

To say Irish looked intimidating would be an understatement. He towered at six foot three, 260 pounds, and was covered in tattoos. His hair was shaved into a buzz cut, and he moved like a tightly wound bundle of in-your-face swagger. But the most threatening part of him might have been his eyes. He had the icy stare of someone who had done things and seen things beyond the imaginings of most people. His eyes made him look a decade older than his forty-three years.

At first, Irish’s “inquiries” got us nowhere. All we learned was that it was rumored Zvi had paid someone to hurt me. This might have just been talk, but I wouldn’t have put it past him. Life is cheap on the inside, and many people with nothing to lose are willing to provide a beatdown for very little money.

Then another rumor found its way to me. It concerned something I wouldn’t have thought anyone capable of—not even Zvi, if I hadn’t heard it myself and also had it relayed to me. Zvi said he was going to pay someone on the outside to rape my eight-year-old daughter. And he had added in person that, once he got out, he might even rape her himself if the opportunity arose. Even if this was pure psychotic bravura—nothing but a power-play smokescreen created by a sicko to boost his standing in prison—it was still an unbelievable new low. It spoke volumes about the kind of man Zvi Goffer was. He would do anything, hurt anyone, to make himself even slightly more powerful and comfortable.

The threats played on my worst fears. This was, of course, by design. Inmates hate the fact they cannot be personally present to protect the ones they love. For months, Zvi’s threat made my headspace into a constant nightmare. Would I soon receive a call telling me that some monster had hurt my Syl?

Post-sentencing, I’d had a recurring, vivid nightmare. I’m with my family. We are up in Vermont, with my college buddy Stan and his family. The property is vast and breathlessly beautiful—trees, mountains, and cold clear streams running through it. We’re camped in a log cabin, getting ready to barbecue, while our kids toss and kick balls, or climb small trees. Lisa and Stan’s wife Rachel walk up the hill towards us, smiling, carrying flowers. Stan is playing with his son, Harris. Phin and Syl are nearby. But where’s Cam? I slowly spin around to find him, making a 360-degree circle, my hand over my brow, a visor to block the late fading sun. I do not see him, and soon become panicked.

“Stan,” I yell. “Is Cam over there?”

Stan looks all around and says he doesn’t see him.

I yell to Lisa: “Is Cam with you?”

“No, I thought he was with you!” Her voice cracks.

Cam was just here, watching a darting chipmunk. As loud as I can I yell, “CAM!”

Nothing but the echo of my own desperation. My heart begins to race. I tell Syl to watch Phinnie and start jogging back towards the cabin.

“CAM!”

Maybe he went in to get a drink, or use the bathroom. If he’s in the house, he’ll be okay, I realize, so I reverse away and begin running toward where I last saw him. Maybe he’s just lost. I get around a hill and the land flattens out. I can hear a creek, and then I see the creek, and then I see Cam, standing in the creek, body upright, arms above his head in his black bubble North Face down jacket, his feet touching the bottom of the creek, clear and calm enough so I can make out his red hair and his yellow SpongeBob T-shirt. My boy’s not moving. I run as fast as I can, praying I’m not too late. Cam can swim. What happened? Did he panic? Did the freezing water disorient him? How long has he been like this? Is he dead? The odds spin through my head. If it’s been ten minutes, he’s dead; if it’s two I can still save him; but if it’s more than that, he might have brain damage. Will I be able to resuscitate him? Crying, screaming, I dive into the water …

And the icy coldness of the creek always jolted me awake. I sat up in bed, barely able to breathe, my chest constricted. I would bolt into the bathroom, nauseated, feeling like I might throw up. I’d certainly never thrown up over a dream before. It felt so real that I had to see Cam right away. When the dream happened, I would have to go glance at him in his room.

So when I was faced with an actual threat to my children from an incarcerated monster, I felt determined to exact the worst sort of revenge. Somehow. I would skin the fucker alive, and relish his screams. I’d pour salt on his wounds and keep him alive until his body could take no more, and then I’d castrate him. Things like that. These were my fantasies.

In the months that followed, Zvi’s threats came and went. Nothing ever happened. Over the rumor wire, I heard that Zvi was ready to take back what he’d said. He wanted to let bygones be bygones. I didn’t know whether or not to believe it.

As it turned out, these overtures of retreat were just a calculated move designed to protect Zvi’s hide. Word had reached him that my guy Irish could really do some damage. This was confirmed when Irish got sent to the hole, and Zvi felt emboldened again. The threats started back up.

Then another strange twist. Zvi learned through third parties that I was spending time writing. That I was working on the manuscript that would eventually become this book. The wheels in Zvi’s mind began to turn, and he worried about what the larger world might think of him after his release if I told the truth about him. He soon sent out new olive branches via third parties.

Having to deal with Zvi was the worst part of prison—but probably also the most fitting. It was my partnership with him that had been my undoing. I’d ignored the aspects of his personality that had always pointed toward evil and psychopathy. The confirmation that I had been a very poor judge of character was something that confronted me daily.

And then, when I thought I might have seen the worst, seven months before my release, Lisa served me with divorce papers. This was connected to the threats from Zvi because of the way it came to my attention.

A Pennsylvania state trooper arrived at the prison and I was summoned over the loudspeaker to the “Bubble,” the guard office where you never wanted to be called. Of course, I expected the worst—that Zvi had indeed been able to orchestrate something horrible happening to one of my kids.

The trooper asked me to confirm that I was Michael Kimelman, then handed me a blue-backed envelope. It was about the size and shape of the menu for a Chinese food restaurant. I opened it and immediately realized what it was.

Thinking like a lawyer, I asked the trooper what would happen if I refused to accept it. The nearest CO said, “That’s easy; I’ll put you in the hole until you beg to accept it” and flashed a sadistic smile. I should have expected no less.

It turned out that Lisa had prepped the kids several months earlier, telling them that I wasn’t going to be coming back home to stay with them. To her credit, she told them I would have my own house nearby, that we both still loved them, and that I would always be their dad. I’m sure it was horrible for them to hear, and for her to say. (The next time my parents brought my children to visit, Cam asked point-blank why I couldn’t come home to them when I was done serving my time. I had had weeks to think about it, and still had no answer for him.)

Talk about feeling trapped and powerless. I couldn’t understand why Lisa needed to do this now. I couldn’t help wondering why the hell her friends, brother, even her father hadn’t tried to convince her otherwise. I was heading home soon enough, and a sober man to boot. A different world and life lay before us. My head would be clear for the first time in almost twenty-five years. Was it a second chance with her I wanted and thought I deserved? Maybe. Maybe it was a third chance, or even a fourth. Maybe we’d both lost count of what we felt we owed each other. But with the future of three little ones—our three little ones—on the line, was one more chance too much to ask?

I asked her to wait until I got home. If it didn’t work once I was back then fine, I wouldn’t contest a thing and move on—while also telling her that if she did this now, by abandoning me in this hellhole with nothing to think about but this pain for the next seven months, then I doubted that I could forgive her. Our marriage would be over.

In the days after being served with my divorce papers, I felt genuinely abandoned, lost and alone, drifting inside my cage. The feeling did not ease. I simply learned to maintain. I focused on my release, which was growing nearer and nearer, and was soon right around the corner.

Then, at the last moment, another twist.

Just a few days before my release, Lisa got in touch to say she had had a change of heart. She wanted to pick me up with the kids, and to try and reconcile. I was skeptical. Heartbroken. I did not really respond.

When she did come to pick me up with the children (no running into one another’s arms like in a movie, just me slowly walking out the prison door to the car and never looking back), I still couldn’t commit. Communication was hard. I told her I wouldn’t rule anything out, but it had to be different. I wasn’t going back to what we had before. She had to understand that. Our previous style of togetherness was over forever. This would be something entirely new.

Despite losing almost everything in life, I fought to remain positive after my release. I wanted to be an optimist, who understood he had a second lease on life. I couldn’t spend my new life on the outside with someone who saw the glass as half empty—or with a defeated, depressed person. I did not hesitate to remind Lisa that she had abandoned me at my lowest point, when I needed help the most. I made her understand that such an act could never be immediately forgiven.

We tried for a while.

Every time it seemed like there might be a chance of making it work, some small tiff would set off our massive geysers of resentment. It didn’t take much for the old, angry Lisa to come out (or the old, angry Michael). I couldn’t handle the Jekyll and Hyde of it.

In the end, if I’m being honest, I was never able to fully forgive her for abandoning me in prison, for not visiting me, and for not keeping the faith that things would one day get better.

I ended up moving into a small two-bedroom apartment in Mamaroneck, New York. And that, as they say, was that.

* While I was never sent to solitary, I heard from those that had been that it was, even in a minimum security prison, nothing short of torture. Yes, actual torture, like the UN/CIA definition of torture: huge fluorescent lights shining on you 24/7, the heat turned up beyond bearable, or else ice cold. There was food and sleep deprivation, and only sporadic showers. You had no contact with others, and could only leave your cell for an hour a day, tops.

* A few of the more entrepreneurial inmates had once used a contraband cellphone and Facebook account to meet a local prostitute whom they smuggled into the prison (don’t ask how). The pro ended up getting angry and going to the authorities after several inmates demanded unpaid freebies. That was the only way we found out it had even happened.

** And it paid off: along with an additional three months taken off for good behavior, I was able to “walk” in twenty-one months, as opposed to serving the thirty months Sullivan had sentenced me to.