Doin' Time: My Year at MCC Federal Prison With Jeffrey Epstein and Paul Manafort

After playing what seemed like an endless cat and mouse proffer game with the United States Department of Justice for 5 + years, spending north of 100k on lawyers, and living in a sort of purgatory during which I knew I might serve 3 years in prison at the end of that endless process, I was finally at age 69 mercifully sentenced to serve a year and a day in prison for the first time in my life. And not just any old prison, mind you, but a facility that one reporter called "the Guantanamo Bay of New York City," the frequently maligned MCC federal prison in Downtown New York City. The crime I committed to suffer what I have come to call "the federal grinder," was forwarding several million dollars to municipalities to improve their infrastructure rather than pay income tax on cash I'd earned as an adult advertising agency (read escort agency ads). I'd actually spent none of the money I fraudulently did not report on my 1040 and had sent it all to a Vanguard Money market fund (though that's no excuse for not paying my taxes. I own that). Regardless, so stressful were those 5 + years that when I finally heard the judge say the magic words, "a year and a day" in between all the legal jargon that surrounded them, a wave of relief came over me. Finally, I'd be out from under the yoke of the Department of Justice and on my way to the Bureau of Prisons. All the uncertainty was behind me. After a year, it would all be over. The light at the end of the tunnel finally shone brightly on my felonious butt. What awaited me in prison was in some ways exactly what I expected (ennui, bad food, bad company, cacophony, and little privacy). But what I didn't see coming was having Donald Trump's disgraced campaign manager, Paul Manafort, as my celly - nor Jeffrey Epstein as one of my closest friends during the last month of his life. Initially, I was going to title this work "Lifsetyles of the Rich and Infamous" in reference to Paulie and Jeffrey and my interaction with them. But upon proofreading the manuscript before publishing, I came to realize that the book is less about them than it is about the manner in which the government prosecuted me, and the incredible incompetence displayed by the bureacrats who ran MCC federal prison. There's a reason the BOP shut that dump down. And it's not just because Jeffrey Epstein killed himself while they weren't looking. The facility was a tragicomedy of errors emblematic of a penal system that fosters recidivism like few others in the world. The 6.5 years I suffered at the hands of the federal government (and my own stupidity for forwarding my money to a place I thought it would best utilized) were not fun. And the 5+ years leading up to my incarceration I found punitive, petty, and most unnecessary. But I certainly learned a lot along the way. It is my hope that those who read this book will feel the same as I do after finishing the manuscript.