Conrad Black

by A Matter of Principle

  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microwaves in the unit) who eventually fell to fisticuffs with a competing pizza supplier, wrote a six-hundred-page (unpublished) book, explaining that General Patton and Field Marshal Montgomery had successfully won the battle for Sicily in 1943 because the Mafia had thrown grenades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 wh
en 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.