"This is a big and brand-new experience for me. I don't have as much animosity toward Bill as I did. When you get down to it, Jay has to accept responsibility for his actions, and he can't blame it on somebody else. He says, 'I'm sorry; I don't know why I did it.' He can say that all he wants, but I think he thinks everything is hunky-dory, which it isn't. You know I love him, and I'm not going to leave him. It's just that saying 'I'm sorry' sometimes is not enough."
Bruce Porter is the author of Blow, a story about the rise and fall of a cocaine smuggler that was made into the movie starring Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz. He writes frequently about guns, drugs, and prisons for the New York Times Magazine and on different subjects for Gourmet and other magazines. He teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he is special assistant to the dean, and he lives with his wife and daughter in the Cobble Hill section of Brooklyn.
My editor thought that hanging out with a corporate miscreant in the months before he goes off to prison would make for a good story, and one that no one had written yet. The reason no one had, as I quickly found out, was that none of these guys would talk to a journalist. Lawyers warned their clients that for an executive to talk openly about his crime would not sit well with his soon-to-be fellow inmates. And their wives and children had faced humiliation enough at school and the country club to now have the story spread all over the NewYork Times Magazine.
Then one day in January 2003, I got a call from Jay Jones down in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He'd heard I was looking for a corporate crook to follow and said that he might fill the bill, in that he'd perpetrated a fraud at his company that had cost investors more than $1 billion. The story had been all over local papers, so he had nothing left to hide. And it was six months before he had to report to the Federal prison in Oklahoma City to begin his five-year stretch. Being gregarious, as well as the sort who couldn't abide sitting around doing nothing, he felt that talking to me might at least do to fill up his remaining time.
When he picked me up at the Tulsa airport in his 1975 Cadillac Deville, I knew right away we'd get along fine, one old-car freak to another. So for two or three days every month, I'd fly down and we'd drive that Deville around rural Oklahoma, visiting the little towns where he had spent a threadbare childhood. We'd eat at out-of-the-way barbecue places, and Jay would fantasize that after finishing his sentence-he'd be sixty-seven by then-he was going to open up a rib joint of his own, talked about a special rub he thought might bring in the crowd. And he played country guitar at Friday night dances, where I'd push old ladies around the floor as Jay sang winsome songs in his high-pitched voice about the simple life that had long disappeared.
I also drove Jay down to the prison on the final day, his wife and two grown daughters having been advised that wishing good-bye at the gates would be too filled with pain. The last I saw him was when the correction officer rolled open the chain-link fence at the inmate entrance and put his hand on Jay's arm and said to me, "You can go now, sir," and they disappeared behind the walls.
A little while ago I got word from Jay's daughter Holly that he's getting along okay, except for the bland food and the tremendous lack of activity. And recently they gave him back the prison guitar for accompanying the hymns sung at weekly chapel services. The deal was he could keep the instrument in his cell to practice on; and, if sound could travel all the way up to New York City, I'm sure right now that, along with the church music, I'd be hearing him sneaking in a few of those sad songs about the days gone by.
Jeff Tietz
Fine Disturbances
from The New Yorker
United States Border Patrol operations above the Texas stretch of the Rio Grande often begin with a single tracker on foot, staring at the earth. In the Border Patrol, tracking is called cutting sign. "Cutting" is looking; "sign" is evidence. No technology is involved. Trackers look for tread designs printed in the soil and any incidental turbulence from a footfall or moving body. They notice the scuff insignia of milling hesitation at a fence and the sudden absence of spiderwebs between mesquite branches and the lugubrious residue of leaked moisture at the base of broken cactus spines. (The dry time is a stopwatch.) The best trackers know whether scatterings of limestone pebbles have come off human feet or deer hooves. They particularly value shininess-a foot compresses the earth in one direction, which makes it shine, and wind quickly unsettles this uniformity, so high-shining groups are irresistible.
Low-light cameras and night-vision goggles and thermal-imaging scopes and seismic sensors are useful along the river, but in the brushland north of it pretty much the only thing to do is follow illegal immigrants on foot. Nearly every southern Border Patrol station maintains a network of footprint traps called drags-twelve-foot-wide swaths of dirt that are combed every day with bolted-together tractor tires ball-hitched to the back of an SUV. Agents monitor drags endlessly and follow foreign prints into the brush.
One morning just after dawn, I was out with an agent named Mike McCarson. He was driving a customized Ford F-250 down a ranch road, cutting a drag that ran alongside it. The Rio Grande was close; the sky was unusually congested. The drag and the ranch road extended out of sight through mesquite and prickly-pear cactus and purple sage and huisache and whitehorn, all semiaridly dwarfish: the horizon was visible everywhere. Driving about eight mph, McCarson leaned out the window a bit, his hinged sideview mirror folded flush with the door.
McCarson is forty-three; he has been tracking illegal immigrants for eighteen years. He works out of the Border Patrol's Brackett-ville station, which is about twenty miles northeast of the Rio Grande and thirty miles east of the town of Del Rio. Brackettville's hundred and twenty agents are responsible for a twenty-five-hundred-square-mile rectangle of mesquite flat and limestone breaks. No more than forty agents are ever in the field at once- one per ninety square miles.
Federal guidelines recommend that undocumented aliens be apprehended at least five times before they're charged with illegal entry and held for trial, but Brackettville's agents rarely detain people unless they've been caught more than fifteen times. On any given trip, an illegal immigrant's odds of eluding Brackettville's defenses are extremely good. Immigrants can angle in from anywhere along a fifty-mile stretch of the Rio Grande, and overpowering numbers of people often cross the river simultaneously. Brackettville doesn't have the personnel to track more than five groups at once.
"It's just the luck of the draw which ones we chase," McCarson told me as we drove. "We generally don't even work groups as small as three, four people, or groups that happen to have crossed real early the night before."
I spent many days with McCarson, cutting drags and trails and meandering through mesquite in the F-250. He is a big, sauntering, freewheelingly mouthy guy who says "tars" for "towers" and "boo-coo" for "beaucoup," a word he uses a lot, sometimes as a noun ("There's boo-coos of trails through there"). McCarson instinctively registers the happenstance, ambient comedy of ordinary life, sometimes with a falsetto, arc-of-joy cackle. He likes to stop for lunch on hillsides and in old Seminole cemeteries, and he can be precipitately melodramatic. ("Now, the seasoned journeyman agent will see the totality of circumstances in his area and know precisely what's normal activity and what's not.") McCarson is married but doesn't have kids, which may partly explain his widely entrepreneurial imagination: he owns a scuba business on Lake Amistad; he's a partner in a San Angelo real-estate venture; he's a successful self-taught stock picker.