I encouraged them to ask questions, as Sylvie’s therapist had suggested. (And let’s be clear: the only reason Syl ever needed to start seeing a therapist was because of my arrest, trial, and subsequent incarceration. That’s on me.)
As it turned out, the kids’ questions would come later, in the following weeks. They were heartbreakingly simple, Cam’s especially. “Can you explain why you have to go?” or “Why can’t you just stay with us and be my dad?” or even just “Why?”
Oh Cammie, I will always be your dad. But the “Why?”
That was the question. That was what I was still trying to figure out myself.
The more challenging questions came from Syl: “If you didn’t do anything wrong, then why do you have to go to this … camp?”
Talk about a rock and a hard place. Her queries forced me to explain the difference between “I didn’t do anything wrong” and “I did something that was later ruled illegal.” That can be a lot for a kid to try to understand.
Again and again, as I spoke with my children, I found myself going back to an old refrain.
“I did something wrong because I chose bad partners. I knew they weren’t nice people, but I went into business with them anyway because I thought they could make me money. That’s called ‘greed,’ and it’s something I hope you won’t fully understand for a little while.”
I might have told them what Lou Mannheim told Bud Fox in the movie Wall Street: “The main thing about money, Bud, is that it makes you do things you don’t want to do.”
Looking into their confused eyes, it finally crystallized for me in a way that pride and stubbornness hadn’t allowed it to in the previous two years while I agonized over the decision to fight or fold. In this waking nightmare, the dark alleys were mostly of my own making.
It would now fall entirely to me to walk out of them on my own, and make sure my children had a father when this was all over.
* During my trial, the government played a wiretap featuring Karpel and Zvi and didn’t even bother to notify Karpel that he was going to be publicly outed as an informant beforehand. Karpel, a married father of three like me, read the news in the paper like everyone else, and then hung himself in his office. The next morning in court when Sommer asked AUSA’s Fish and Tarlowe whether they were aware of Karpel’s suicide, Fish shrugged his shoulders dismissively and snickered, “Not my witness”, before resuming small talk with Tarlowe.
* At trial, the only witness the government had that was able to link me in any way to the 3Com trade was Dave Plate, who testified that he thought I might have been in a crowded bar during happy hour and heard Zvi discussing the trade. On cross exam, Plate admitted he wasn’t sure I was even present.
* http://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/a11784/the-verdict-608992/
CHAPTER TWENTY
SURRENDER
______________
“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 f
ive 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 upen
ded, 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.”
Confessions of a Wall Street Insider Page 30
