In the Sanctuary of Outcasts (5 page)

Toward the end of my first week of work in the cafeteria, I was drawing a hot dog in handcuffs on the menu board when a guard told me to report to the visiting room at 9:00
A.M
. for admission and orientation.

About twenty other prisoners were already seated at round tables. On one side, a group of young black men slumped down in their chairs. On the other sat an assortment of white and Hispanic men, young and old, and a couple of men in wheelchairs. They all wore orange jumpsuits, the kind criminals wear during transport by the U.S. marshal. They looked as if they hadn’t slept or bathed in days. I was the only inmate wearing green. I felt uneasy and took a seat in the back away from the others.

Three men sat at a long table in the front of the room: a prison guard, a man who was dressed like the surgeon general, and the monk I’d seen on my first day. The monk stood and held up his arms. The room quieted.

“Hello,” he said in a soft voice, “I’m Father Reynolds. I’m glad you’re all here.” He realized what he’d said and tried to back up. “I don’t mean I’m glad you’re
here
. What I mean to say is—uh—as long as you have to be here…I’m glad to see you.”

Father Reynolds stammered nervously for a few minutes. When he finally calmed down, he told us we were welcome at the Catholic church on Wednesday evenings or Sunday afternoons. He added that we could attend the Sunday service with our families during visiting hours. Then he prayed. I was relieved that I would be able to go to
church with Linda and the kids when they visited. I had assumed we’d be without church together for a long time. I looked forward to holding Linda’s hand while a priest talked about forgiveness.

The guard reviewed the prison rules and gave us each a set of written regulations. He covered inmate boundaries, visiting hours, contraband, and requests for medical needs. He spent an inordinate amount of time on mail restrictions, emphasizing that nude photographs of spouses were prohibited. He also warned that any mail containing pubic hairs would be confiscated and discarded. The guard cautioned that any violation of the rules would result in time added to our sentences. I tried to pay close attention, but I was distracted. One of the men in an orange suit, a black man in his late twenties, had turned his chair away from the presenters. He didn’t listen to what the guard said; instead, he stared directly at me, squinting like he might need glasses. Every so often he shook his head and looked around the room like he expected others would be staring at me, too. He was a small man with huge teeth. He didn’t look particularly dangerous, but I realized I probably wasn’t good at gauging that sort of thing. I tried not to look in his direction, but I could feel his stare.

After the guard finished, a few inmates asked questions about money and television access. Another asked if the female guards were allowed to strip-search us. “You wish,” the guard said.

Then the man who stared at me put his hand in the air and turned back toward the front. “I heard there was a 50 percent chance we was gonna be
leopards
when we get out of here.” The other men in orange nodded and said they had heard the same thing. The man dressed like C. Everett Koop said he would cover that after a break, but he assured us we were not at risk.

We were released for fifteen minutes. Most of the inmates went outside behind the building to smoke. An elaborate wooden deck had been built onto the back of the visiting room. Picnic tables and bench seats were scattered around. The deck led to a small grassy yard surrounded by a low picket fence. A wooden playground set built to look like a pirate ship had been erected for the children of inmates. Neil and Maggie would like it.

I sat on a bench and listened to the inmate with big teeth announce to his friends that he hoped he
did
turn into a
leopard
because he could sue the prison for a million dollars and he would be the richest damn
leopard
in America. Then he noticed me sitting alone. He motioned to his friends and walked toward me with five of his orange-clad buddies in tow. “Goddamn!” he announced. “You look
just
like motherfuckin’ Clark Kent!”

His friends laughed. I straightened my glasses.

“What you did?” he asked. “Fuck the judge’s daughter!?” His voice, high pitched with the tempo of a comedian’s, didn’t sound dangerous at all. He talked loud and laughed at his own words. The other inmates moved closer.

I told him my crime was bank fraud.

“You a goddamn bank robber!?”

“No, no. Bank
fraud
.” I explained I had encountered some difficulty with cash flow. My crime, I told him, involved the transfer of checks from one account to another in order to buy time to refinance my magazine business.

“I don’t know nothing about no checks,” he said, “but let me ask you a question.” He looked around to make sure he still had an audience. “Did you take money from a bank you wasn’t supposed to have?”

The other inmates waited for my answer. “Yes.” I nodded.

“Then you’re a goddamn bank robber!” I didn’t argue the point. No one would have heard me over the hand slapping and laughter anyway. He leaned toward me. “How much you get?”

I told him I used the money for payroll, taxes, printing, and other publishing expenses. I could tell he didn’t believe me.

“How much the bank lost?”

“Two banks were involved, actually,” I said. “Together their losses were about $750,000.”

He looked excited. “So, how much you got?”

“I don’t have any of it,” I reiterated. “I paid bills.”

“I been in jails all over this country,” he announced, still playing to the other inmates, “and you the
stupidest
damn criminal I ever met.”

I was embarrassed to be the brunt of his routine, but he had a point. I was in prison and I had nothing to show for it. I had to admit the guy was pretty entertaining.

“By the way,” I said, “my name is Neil.”

“Ain’t no more,” he said. “You got a prison name now. And it’s motherfuckin’ Clark Kent.”

I asked his name.

“They call me Link.”

“Why Link?”

Another inmate interjected, “As in ‘the missing…’”

I stood and held out my hand, “Nice to meet you, Link.”

“Goddamn!” he said, looking at my extended hand. “This is prison. You ain’t got to be using manners and shit.”

For the second time since I’d been at Carville, my hand had been rejected. I wouldn’t make that mistake again.

After work the following day, I returned to my room to find Mr. Flowers, a tall black man in a cowboy hat, standing in the doorway. Flowers was the case manager for our dorm, which meant he had complete authority over us, including our release dates, security level, recommendations for halfway house, and approval for home confinement. The white inmates in our dorm hated him. Most called him “
Le
Roy Rogers.” Flowers motioned with his clipboard. He and Doc were engaged in a heated discussion. Mr. Flowers said that all federal inmates who were not U.S. citizens were to be deported, and, according to his records, Victor Dombrowsky was born in Portugal.

“I wasn’t born in Portugal,” Doc told him.

Flowers insisted the prison records verified his Portuguese birth. If Doc was lying, he said, he would make it a personal priority to see him deported immediately.

“Fine by me,” Doc said. “I was not born in Portugal.”

Nothing seemed to bother Doc. He put his hands behind his head and lay back on his cot. Flowers gave him a long stare, tapped his clipboard, and walked away.

“What was that all about?” I asked.

Doc shrugged and picked up a medical journal. He was a reading machine. Night and day, he spent every spare moment with his medical publications.

“Where were you born?” I asked.

“Russia,” Doc said.

Doc’s Russian heritage, in a roundabout way, had led to his impris
onment. As a bright, young, bilingual physician, Victor Dombrowsky was hired by the U.S. government to translate Russian medical documents into English. In an obscure paper, Doc found a detailed account of a chemical used by the Russian army. It was not a compound to be used against enemies; it was used on the army’s own soldiers. The chemical, DNP, when ingested, kept Russian soldiers warm in battle during winter months. It increased the soldiers’ body temperatures by three to four degrees. They could bear the bitter cold while the enemy froze to death or retreated.

A tiny footnote, buried among the documents, had caught Dombrowsky’s attention. It was a detail any other translator might have overlooked. The chemical had an unusual side effect. In addition to raising the body temperature, the drug elevated the basal metabolic rate of the soldiers. The result: dramatic weight loss.

Doc held both medical and pharmacy degrees, and he had dabbled in drug development, for which he had earned a number of patents. He never forgot what he’d read about in the Russian archives. Two decades later, in the mid-1980s, Doc opened dozens of clinics that specialized in weight loss. He treated obesity with a “heat pill.” Its primary ingredient was the formula used by the Russians. The advertisements promised that patients would lose up to fifteen pounds per week with no exercise.

“Fat women loved it,” Doc said.

Everything went well for Doc until his financial adviser, the man he considered his best friend, became a government informant. The man wore a wire for almost two years, gathering evidence for the federal investigators. He exposed Doc’s offshore accounts. He even recorded Doc talking about how best to evade taxes.

“The fucking rat told the bastards where every penny was stashed.”

“So you’re here for tax evasion?”

“Not exactly,” Doc said. “The FDA got involved.”

It turned out that DNP, the primary component of Doc’s heat pill, had been outlawed as a drug in 1938, though it was still used as a weed killer. Prescribed in the 1920s as a weight loss drug, DNP had
caused skin rashes, cataracts, and other medical problems, including loss of the sense of smell. A Viennese physician who wanted to achieve rapid weight loss had taken large doses and literally cooked to death from the inside out. DNP’s side effects were the catalyst for the federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938.

Doc insisted there were no permanent side effects to his heat pill because he supplemented the DNP with hormones. In the doses he had prescribed, a patient’s body temperature would level off at about 101 degrees. “Some of our larger patients perspired a lot,” he said. “A small price to pay.”

With DNP outlawed and with Doc’s clinic serving Medicaid patients, prosecutors tacked on Medicaid fraud charges.

“How much Medicaid fraud?” I asked.

Doc said that depended on who you listened to. Doc’s lawyers argued that $40,000 might have been fraudulent. The U.S. attorney’s conservative estimate ranged between $15 million and $37 million.

“Good God!” I said. “How much time did you get?”

“Fifteen years,” Doc said, calmly. “The system’s fucked. Like
I
could really get a trial of my peers.” Doc insisted a jury of physicians would have understood that his heat pill wasn’t a drug violation; it was part of a total treatment. And according to Doc, it fell under the FDA’s Investigational New Drug exception.

The U.S. attorney threatened to prosecute Doc’s children, who were peripherally involved in the business. Doc agreed to a plea deal. He expected a five-year sentence. When Doc appealed the judge’s fifteen-year sentence, the U. S. attorney described in dramatic fashion how Dombrowsky had stolen nearly $40 million by prescribing weed killer to desperate, obese women and harbored the profits in the Cayman Islands.

Doc lost the appeal and was stuck with the sentence. But he was determined to spend the time wisely, learning everything he could about medicine, devouring every medical paper published in America, planning the launch of his impotence cure.

My grandfather Harry, who tried to teach me the value of a dollar, and me.

The guard who had caught me talking to Ella gave me an additional daily task—mopping the inmate cafeteria. My instructions were to move all the tables and chairs, nearly three hundred, to one side of the room, mop the empty side, and then move all the chairs and tables to the opposite side to complete the job.

The cafeteria floor was checkered linoleum, so I outlined a ten-by-ten square grid with the mop, careful not to go outside the lines. Then I covered the interior squares with soapy water. To divide the floor into small jobs, sets of perfectly square, manageable quadrants, was satisfying. I have a minor, but not debilitating, obsession with symmetry. Once a square was evenly covered and cleaned, I could admire a job well done, then move on to the next.

The repetitive motion, the back and forth of the mop, was strangely relaxing. The job required no mental energy, and my mind wandered.

My pay for this work was fourteen cents an hour. The meager wage reminded me of my grandfather Harry’s attempt to teach me the value of a dollar. When I was four years old, we began a Saturday morning routine. As we would drive to downtown Gulfport, Mississippi, he would remind me of my budget. I could spend exactly one dollar on a toy.

“What if I find something I really want?” I would ask. “And it’s a little bit more than a dollar?”

“You’ll have to wait,” my grandfather said. I would need to save the dollar from this week and add it to the dollar I would get next week, he explained gently, hoping the lesson would sink in.

We would park in front of the old gray post office. Men and women darted in and out of the department stores, restaurants, and shops. My grandfather would introduce me to his friends as we passed on the sidewalk or met in the aisle of a store. When my search for a one-dollar toy ended, we would find a seat at a drugstore counter and order a malted milk shake or french fries. Our last stop every Saturday was always the same. My grandfather would take me to Hancock Bank. It was where everyone in our family banked.

We would wait in line on the black-and-white marble floor with the other customers. When it was our turn at the teller window, my grandfather would prop me up on his knee and introduce me to the teller, as if he knew this bank and its employees would play a vital role in my future. Then he would say, “We need to check on our money.” The teller would walk away to check the balance in my college savings account. Upon her return, she would present us with a handwritten balance. I would look at the figure and read it aloud to my grandfather, who, when I got the balance right, would nod and smile.

I was glad my grandfather wasn’t alive to see me in prison. I would be ashamed for him to see me like this. But I was determined not to get beaten down by incarceration. I wanted to hold on to, even hone, my skills so I could start a new publishing business when I was released. With a felony conviction, I might have trouble getting hired, but there was no law that prohibited felons from launching magazines. Doc was planning his future, and I would do the same. I had a year to plan, to design mock-ups, and to create a great business and marketing prospectus. I would use this time to plan my financial resurrection. If I could repay my bankers, investors, and creditors—give them a return on their money—it would feel like the money had been invested instead of lost. And I could be back on top.

In the middle of my fifth square, as I neared the five hundred mark of small tiles mopped and cleaned, a guard walked into the cafeteria.

The guard yelled out, “Too slow! You’re too slow, inmate!” I nodded, picked up the pace. “You ain’t got nothin’ comin’,” he said.

This is what guards told all the inmates.
You ain’t got nothin’ comin’
.
I’d heard it every day, but I figured anyone who worked as a prison guard didn’t have much coming either, so it really didn’t bother me. But I hated to be called “inmate.” I thought about asking him to call me by my name. I also wanted to ask why he never woke Jefferson and the prisoners from their slumber in the cooler. But I just mopped.

I thought about my days of investigative journalism in Oxford, Mississippi. At twenty-four, I had launched an alternative newspaper to take on the small-town establishment. Though I garnered lots of accolades, I offended a number of politicians and powerful businesspeople. But I did have one very important champion: Willie Morris.

The former editor of
Harper’s
and author of
North Toward Home
, Willie was the writer-in-residence at The University of Mississippi. He took great interest in my fledgling career as a newspaper editor and publisher. Not so much because he was impressed with my efforts, but because he had a huge crush on my mother, who had recently moved to town fresh from her third divorce.

Willie would call our newspaper offices late at night, inebriated, after the bars had closed and the stores had stopped selling beer. “Mister Editor,” he would slur. “For a mere six-pack of chilled beer, I will pen a piece for your fine paper on the ten greatest dogs I have ever known.”

I would stop working on the newspaper and take a six-pack to Willie’s home on Faculty Row. His guests partook of the beer while Willie sat at his dining room table and wrote out his piece with a black felt-tipped pen on white legal paper. Sometimes, to avoid interruptions, he would put the telephone inside his oven. When he finished, Willie would stumble over, teary eyed at his own prose, and hug me. Then he would insist I join the group for a beer and give him an update on my mother.

After acquiring Willie’s dog story and another piece on the greatest Ole Miss football players of all time—paid for, in full, with twelve cold beers—Willie forever greeted me as “Mister Editor.” I believed it legitimized my place as a journalist.

As I finished mopping the first side of the room and dragged the tables and chairs from the other side, I remembered Willie inviting
his famous writer friends to Oxford. He seemed more than happy to introduce them to me, especially if my mother came along. Alex Haley, William Styron, and George Plimpton all visited Willie. He knew I was a Plimpton fan. Not so much for his literature, but for his participatory journalism.

I’d always dreamed of being an undercover journalist, secretly documenting conspiratorial practices and exploring hidden worlds. Willie arranged for me to meet Plimpton, to interview him for my newspaper, but it was a pretext. For me, the meeting was personal. I wanted to know everything he knew about immersion into a strange culture, clandestine reporting, and impersonation. I wanted to know what it felt like to go undercover, to write about things no one has any business knowing.

I asked Plimpton about his thirty-yard loss in a preseason professional football game when he posed as a quarterback with the Detroit Lions. And about his short stint in professional boxing. And, of course, about his astounding April Fool’s hoax in
Sports Illustrated
when he convinced the magazine’s readers, and most of the sports world, that a major-league pitcher who had studied ancient Eastern techniques would change the game forever because he had learned to throw a baseball over 120 miles per hour.

Now, as I mopped the cafeteria floor, a hundred checkered blocks at a time, I imagined what Plimpton would do in my place. And it was obvious. He would write about it.

With mop in hand, I decided. I would not be a federal convict. I would simply
pretend
to be an inmate. I would record the stories of the leprosy patients, the convicts, the actions of the guards, and the motives of the Bureau of Prisons. I would uncover why the government decided to experiment with mingling inmates and lepers. And if one of us came down with the disease, I would have the documentation for an exposé.

This was a great plan. This was precisely what I needed to do. As a participatory reporter, I could earn respect. When the guards called me “inmate,” it wouldn’t matter—it would be my cover. I would play the role, but spend my days listening to and befriending other in
mates and, from a safe distance, interviewing any leprosy patient who would talk to me.

Suddenly I felt as if I had escaped. I imagined myself on a stage accepting a Press Club award for the magazine piece I had written about my astonishing adventure. To a standing ovation, I would reach the podium, modestly trying to quell the applause before regaling the audience with my spectacular tales of courage and compassion, bravery and sadness, grit and heroism. That moment would naturally lead to magazine features, newspaper reports, and radio interviews. And, ultimately, perhaps a television special.

I put away my mop and bucket, returned the tables and chairs to their rightful spot, and admired the spotless floor. And I realized I no longer wanted to be transferred. Obviously, I was here for a reason. I was in a remarkable place—one beyond the reach of George Plimpton, even. This was the perfect plan. And I knew the perfect place to start.