rats,' he said early in June as we drove the Deville down to check out a barbecue place outside of Shawnee. 'One thing the author seems to focus on is keep to yourself, mind your own business, leave everything alone and don't rat anyone out, which is understandable. But I guess I'll just have to risk that, and I could justify that by saying I guess I'd rather get the [expletive] beat out of me four or five times than I would spending another fifteen or twenty years in jail.'
On Friday, June 27, with just three more days to go before prison, Jones announced that he would like to put on his special electric blue Porter Wagoner suit and his high-crown white cowboy hat-his Tom Mix hat, he calls it-and drive up to play country music that night in Chelsea, fifty miles north of Tulsa. Jones has played the guitar ever since he was a boy, mostly songs from the fifties and sixties dealing with loss, heartbreak and premature death of girlfriends and close relatives. His suit had been tailor-made by the famous Manuel of Nashville, sewn with thousands of sequins in a gambling motif, with cards and dice and dollar signs. It cost $10,000 and was in the style of the one Manuel had made for Wagoner to wear at Grand Ole Opry shows. He had worn it only three or four times since he bought it in 1997, which was obvious that night from the difficulty he had buckling his trousers.
Jones would play country music anywhere they allowed him to, but he particularly liked going up to Chelsea because hardly anyone knew him there. The gig was at the civic center near the Burlington Northern railroad tracks, where every Friday night thirty or forty farm couples, many in their seventies and eighties, gather for potluck supper and to push and pull one another around the dance floor. Jones usually plays backup rhythm, but this time he stepped up to the mike to employ his thin, reedy voice in service of a blue-grass song that started off 'There's a cabin in the pines in the hills of Caroline/and a blue-eyed girl is waiting there for me.' During a smoking break outside, he took some ribbing about how Porter Wagoner must be missing his suit by now, when the lead guitarist in the group, who hits more than seven feet in his boots and cowboy hat, slipped Jones a piece of paper with his name and address on it and said quietly, out of anyone's hearing, 'You write me a letter, and I'll write ya' back.'
June 30 started with a blinding rainstorm that for half an hour forced cars on the freeways encircling Tulsa to pull off to the side. Jennifer had taken two Ambiens the night before, but still didn't manage to sleep. Jones was awakened at 4:00 a.m. by the cat pouncing on his chest. The prison wanted him there by noon, and I volunteered to drive him the two hours down to Oklahoma City because friends had advised it would be too wrenching for the family to drop Jones off. Holly wasn't there because the doctor said that she was too close to her delivery date to travel up from Dallas. Jay's younger daughter Terri, twenty-nine, arrived with her husband, Jay Q., and a dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts, while Jones attended to a list of last things to do. Yes, he fitted a fresh propane tank onto the cooker out on the deck. Yes, he canceled his cell phone, and he told Jennifer where to go in case of a tornado. Get down into that little closet in the basement, where she keeps Miss Celie's dog food, he says. The whole house can blow away, and that room will still be standing.
Terri started reading out of the prison manual. 'Daddy, it says to take your eyeglasses and a lot of change for the vending machine.'
'Sweetheart, they don't let you have money.'
'Yes, they do, and you can take your wedding ring and-' Jennifer cut in to tell him not to forget his medicine.
'Mom, I don't know if you can take your medicine,' Terri said. This made Jennifer start to cry.
'He has to take his medicine.'
'No, he can take his eyeglasses, he can take his Bible or a religious medal and he can take his wedding ring, as long as it doesn't have any stones, and that's it.'
As it neared 9 a.m., Jones wanted to get going, get it over with. He hates good-byes. 'Jennifer, if it comes down to it, and you have a choice to make between taking the advice of some psychologist or your daughters, take your daughters' advice. They know you better.'
Jennifer wasn't hearing much because she was sobbing uncontrollably. 'Oh, Jay,' she said. 'You know, this is the first time I haven't had to pack for you when you're going somewhere.'
They hugged for two or three minutes at the front door, and then Jones broke off and got in the car and waved.
Home for Jones now is an eight-foot-by-fourteen-foot room in F pod on the seventh floor of the Transfer Center, a newly constructed high-rise near the Will Rogers World Airport. It has orange brick walls and tall slit windows, eight inches wide, that from a distance look like the loopholes in a medieval castle. He sleeps in the top bunk and shares a toilet and writing desk with his cellmate, a fifty-six-year-old white-collar offender also from Tulsa. (Following the advice in his handbook, Jones doesn't want to say what crime he committed.) Like Jones, permanent members of the service cadre are doing time mostly for nonviolent offenses-parole violators on drug charges, counterfeiters, child pornographers-and no fighting is tolerated. The only major fight on Jones's pod so far occurred one morning when he was awakened by two inmates trading blows just outside his door, spattering blood all over the day-room floor. From what Jones heard, it was over a piece of chicken smuggled in from the kitchen. Both men were taken immediately to the special housing unit, or 'hole,' and shortly thereafter transferred to a higher-level institution.
For a time, Jones's job was in the prison library, where he photocopied pages for inmates' law cases and wheeled around the book cart. He regarded it as the highlight of his day, taken up otherwise by watching TV and playing endless rounds of bridge and pinochle with three of the older inmates. Recently, he was reassigned as an orderly on the 'smoke deck,' an outdoor area covered with razor wire where he picks up butts and wipes down tables. His family sends him books, but he never got much pleasure out of reading. 'Weekends are the hardest because of the utter boredom,' he says. 'You don't work, but you get up at the same time because you can only sleep for so long, and then there's nothing to do.'
His spirits rose considerably last August when the chaplain issued him an old guitar to practice with in his room so he could play along with the hymns during the Thursday and Sunday services. He lost the guitar, though, when he was transferred to the Tulsa County Jail for the Bartmann trial and it was given to someone else. Adding to his disappointment was the fact that unlike Jones, Bartmann ended up getting off without any punishment. The government put up fifty-three witnesses and spent thirty-eight trial days laying out its case, but besides what Jones had to say, its evidence was all circumstantial. After a week of deliberation, the jury decided that the U.S. attorney had not proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Bartmann knew anything about the Dimat scam. They voted to acquit.
Jones's testimony for the government was covered heavily in the Tulsa paper, which meant it got all over the prison. A few of the inmates now snub him in the cafeteria. But not many, he says. 'The rat issue is one that doesn't bother me,' he says. 'There is a certain population, very small, maybe ten percent, that that would bother. But the people who have a problem with it are generally not the people I would care very much about anyway.'
Jones's visits from family members-spread among Jennifer and his daughters and his brother Joe, they average one every weekend- also come with a certain amount of discomfort. Depending on the guard's mood of the day, Jones may or may not be required to strip naked after the visit and bend over in a duck squat so that anything secreted in his anal cavity would drop out onto the floor. The one plus side of prison is that he is now getting a full night's sleep, 'better than I have for four years,' he says. 'After all, I've got no worries anymore. The only worries you have are the ones you create, and it's hard to create one in here. It's a very controlled, very organized environment. Anticipation of the unknown was a factor before, and now that that's been realized, there's nothing left. It is what it is, and you learn to live with it.'
As for Jennifer, to the general surprise of her family, she seems to be doing just fine. 'I've enjoyed myself, going to movies, out to dinner,' she said last December, as Miss Celie still pranced about on the plush carpet. Outside there was a for-sale sign on the lawn, and Jennifer had been looking for a smaller place near Holly's in Dallas. 'I wondered what it would be like, being without a man, but it's kind of fun,' she said. 'Do you know every strong relationship that I had with another woman Jay has always made fun of?' She now sees Dr. Ferraro only every other Thursday and misses no more appointments because she is in bed crying. 'Right now we're going through my hate for my husband,' she said. 'I love him, but I get so mad at him-thinking what he did just boggles my mind sometimes. Dr. Ferraro suggested that when the time is right I write Jay a letter and tell him how I feel. Sometimes when I go see him, I want to tell him: 'Yes, it's hugs and kisses and love right here, but I can't tell you how I feel in front of the inmate population and the guards. Sometime we've got to discuss that.'
'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.
