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Inside Promises


Securities Fraud. Thirty months at The Camp at Lompoc prison in California. That’s the short story. Insider Trading from my office in Newport Beach, California. My name is Anthony Carter and on March first, 2009 my attorney presented me for surrender to begin serving my time at the minimum security lockup.

I didn’t walk in cold. I bought two books and had two private sit downs in February with penal specialists and my attorneys. On advice of council I went to a preliminary hearing and my arraignment drunk as a skunk. We also laid some groundwork in the weeks before to give me what could be classified as a short but debilitating dependence on alcohol. That exercise got me pre-registered to apply at The Camp for substance abuse rehab counseling. That course of study can reduce non violent crime inmates’ time by a maximum of twelve months. I later found out the system has never granted a full year but many qualifiers have had as many as nine months knocked off their sentences.

To add to my good inmate attitude profile I signed on for work at Vandenberg AFB near the prison where camp inmates are bused to the base to assist civilian contractors in facility improvements and maintenance. I even signed up as a painter which nobody seems to want to do so I got more work than many of my fellow inmates. It pays 90 cents an hour. I have no idea what the prison system gets for our efforts but there’s lots of wild talk about millions, union skullduggery, bending the federal and state laws to allow us to work, bla, bla, bla. No sour grapes here by me but the way everybody talks about the work, the money, it makes some of our crimes seem like the rock through the candy store window compared to what the system is getting away with under the proverbial prison table.

Vandenberg Village is only four miles from our facility and the ride is all too short for some of us. Rolling along through canyons and bottoms sometimes glistening wet-green with mist off the ocean is heaven for me. Any time away from that stinking cubicle is heaven. Not that we live in dungeons but the sterile sameness, the confinement is a thing you just can’t shake off or talk away. Some of the work is hard and tedious but I’m sure I could make a living, make a go of it on the street if I could do industrial spray painting – especially commercial stuff like we do on hangars and superstructure. It often requires special scaffolding and harness equipment. I will admit that sometimes when the week ends I look forward to time to rest and heal my aching hands, wrists, neck from hours of holding different kinds of spray apparatus on various surfaces. I have a great teacher on the base and I swear to God, over time I’m getting really getting good at it. He told me so, so did the prison guards. Made me feel good. I do get some rest time that isn’t planned; they shut us down when the wind or fog or humidity interferes with our safety or the proper application of the appropriate coating material.

When I signed on for the Vandenberg thing, the painting, I couldn’t possibly know how completely it would change my prison life. The one worst thing about this place for most people in here is the noise. There is no one second in any 24 hours that is not filled with noise people make when they all live this close together. When we gather in common areas there are just too many of us talking at once and no place to escape the din. In our cubicles the noise resonates up and down the halls; the snorting, laughing, singing, bitching, kibitzing, snoring never, ever stops. At Van, with the spray gun in my hand I have a firm grip on the sounds around me. For almost eight hours my world is filled with a pleasant white noise of escaping compressed air devoid of all those prison sounds that invade my every fiber when I get off the scaffolds and back on the bus. From sometimes hundreds of feet in the air I need only release the spray apparatus trigger to surround myself with a short but delicious and healing bubble of silence.

Everybody on the phone asks me what I miss the most. There is no most but I have a long list of things I miss. I haven’t bothered to give one thing any more weight than another. They all added up to what my life was like until just a couple of months ago. I was about to say it reflects the fact that I lived well out there but it really has less to do with money than it does with what pleasures a man can find, what he worked for, what he took as a reward.

That other world. That great, wonderful other world out there I could only touch through the ether. I remember it, all of it. My daughter, Hunter, my ex-wife Cindy, my friends in and out of trading keep me up to date, filled in, current. Here, they leave the only TV, the one in the chow hall, on the news all day long. I got a special cheap phone service package to keep the cost down. They have certain times of the day I can use it, they make it available for a certain hour or two and I learn everything that interests me out there. I try not to think about the others, my contemporaries, the ones who got away, off the hook, slipped the noose, how they did it, who they had to pay, etc.

I miss my coffee maker, my special blend from the grinder. I would kill for a cup of that right about now. Decent underwear, bed sheets, towels I miss. My Jag, I really miss driving way too fast up into the Palisades, along highway One along the coast, my big bike, the power of it, the sound of that awesome power. Just shooting the shit with my broker pals at Dooley’s. Boodles gin, Gran Marnier, Dooley’s one of a kind Bloody Mary’s. I miss my massages, manicures, the heat and quiet of the steam room, people waiting on me, smiling, trying to be friendly, good service help.

The Journal – I’ll be damned if I’m gonna pay some slimy guard a hundred a month for my Journal. Anyway Manny Forster reads some of it to me once or twice a week on the phone. Sex, I miss all my sweet sex with Cindy and I’m not gonna talk about the others. I miss my labs, my two big dogs. I miss roughhousing in the pool with Hunter and her friends, our rides up to Big Bear on the bike. I miss the feel, the texture of the incredibly soft and comfortable Pakerson loafers, a good Cohiba cigar, lobster Fra Diablo, naturally I miss my boat, The Keeper, the trips to Avalon, the parties.

I miss my sleep-in days, Saturdays and Sundays when there was no trading. My normal business day started at five A.M. to get into the market when it opened. I was an early birder – I’ll guess I made fifty percent of my profitable transactions in the first two hours of every day. Here we get up at six every day. Of course I miss being able to travel but I was something of a workaholic; in the last three years I can only remember two major trips, the Alaska cruise and the trip to Puerta Vallarta.

I was in the information business. Now I’m being punished for having too much information. What rotten irony – all my life I made money getting information others didn’t have or using the information to advantage more than my competitors. I made money because I saw concepts they could not see, platforms they couldn’t grasp. My crime didn’t involve partners, borrowers, Ponzi games. Now, when I get out I have to find a way to use what I do well in some other area of commerce, in the U.S. or abroad.

I have placed my trust in someone on the outside. I can’t say who for obvious reasons but while I’m in here they will have to be the keeper of the keys, ready to act for me so I’ll have access to money I need to get started again. Even though I paid a big fine of almost $700,000 they still might be watching me as I begin to move about on the outside. They’ll see the same model citizen I was at The Camp but someone else will supply a new springboard for my re-entry.

I sure as hell don’t want to give them any chance to bring me back here or to a worse place. Whatever commercial enterprise I get into I plan to follow all the laws no matter how senseless they may seem. If I can’t make a go of the first or second or so on I’ll just keep looking until something clicks. I’ll still be seven months shy of forty years old when I get out of here so I’m still young enough to start over.

The modern world of commerce is a lightning fast operation – things change in the blink of an eye so I’ll have to be ready to adapt and improvise. If conditions force me to break some promises, use my instincts, be daring, then there’s only one thing this place has taught me and I’ll never forget it. Don’t get caught.