I learned that a conspiracy charge, rather than identifying individual lawless acts, accuses a group of people of plotting to commit a crime. Conspiracy charges are often brought against a person just on the strength of testimony from a “coconspirator” or, even worse, a “confidential informant,” someone who has agreed to rat out others in exchange for immunity. Conspiracy charges are beloved by prosecutors, because they make it much easier to obtain indictments from grand juries and are a great lever for getting people to plead guilty: once one person on a conspiracy indictment rolls over, it’s pretty easy to convince their codefendants that they won’t stand a chance in open trial. Under a conspiracy charge, I would be sentenced based on the total amount of drugs involved in the operation, not on my small role in it.
In the United States mandatory minimum sentencing was a critical part of the late-twentieth-century “War on Drugs.” Guidelines established by Congress in the 1980s required federal judges to impose set sentences for drug crimes, regardless of the specific circumstances of a case, and without discretion to evaluate the person being sentenced. The federal laws have been widely duplicated by state legislatures. The length of the sentences completely freaked me out: ten, twelve, twenty years. Mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses are the primary reason that the U.S. prison population has ballooned since the 1980s to over 2.5 million people, a nearly 300 percent increase. We now lock up one out of every hundred adults, far more than any other country in the world.
Gently but firmly, my lawyer explained to me that if I wished to go to trial and fight the conspiracy charge, I would be one of the best defendants he had ever worked with, sympathetic and with a story to tell; but if I lost, I risked the maximum sentence, probably over a decade in prison. If I pleaded guilty, make no mistake, I was going to prison, but for a much shorter time.
I chose the latter. There were some agonizing conversations with Larry and with my still-reeling family. But it was my decision to make. My lawyer negotiated hard and smartly on my behalf, and ultimately the U.S. Attorney’s Office allowed me to plead guilty to money laundering rather than conspiracy, for which they would require a minimum sentence of thirty months in federal prison.
On Halloween Day 1998, Larry and I traveled to Chicago in costume as “teenagers”; maybe my misery was masked by the disguise. That night we hit the town with our friends Gab and Ed, who had no clue about my predicament and thought I was in Chicago for work. The next morning I was standing tall, if pale, in my best suit as we went to the federal building where the court was located. With Larry looking on, I choked out three words that sealed my fate: “Guilty, Your Honor.”
SHORTLY AFTER I pleaded guilty, something surprising happened. Alaji, the West African drug kingpin, was arrested in London on a U.S. warrant. Suddenly my date with prison was postponed-indefinitely-while the United States tried to extradite him to stand trial. They wanted me in street clothes, not an orange jumpsuit, to testify against him.
There was no end in sight. I spent almost six years under supervision by the feds, reporting monthly to my pretrial supervisor, an earnest young woman with an exuberantly curly mullet and an office in the federal court building down on Pearl Street in Manhattan. Once a month I would go through building security, ride the elevator up to Pretrial Services, and sign in, waiting in a dingy room decorated with inspirational and cautionary posters that reminded me about Perseverance and to Use Condoms. I was often alone in the waiting room. Sometimes I was joined by young black or Latino men, who either sized me up silently or stared straight ahead. The occasional thick-necked older white guy with lots of gold jewelry would appear-and he would look at me with frank surprise. Once in a while there would be another female, never white, sometimes accompanied by children. They always ignored me. When my Miss Finnegan would finally appear and beckon, I would trail her to her office, where we would sit awkwardly for a few minutes.
“So… any news on your case?”
“Nope.”
“Well… this sure is a long one.”
Every now and then she would apologetically drug-test me. I always tested clean. Eventually Miss Finnegan left the department to go to law school, and I was transferred to the equally mild-mannered Miss Sanchez. She had long Frito-chip fingernails painted Barbie pink. “You’re my easiest one!” she would say every month, cheerfully.
Over more than five years of waiting, I thought about prison in every imaginable way. My predicament remained a secret from almost everyone I knew. Initially it was too terrible, too overwhelming, and too uncertain to tell anyone what was happening. When the extradition delay struck, the situation grew too weird to broach with friends who didn’t know: “I’m going to prison… someday?” I felt that I just had to gut it out in silence. My friends who did know were mercifully quiet on the subject as the years dragged on, as if God had put me on hold.
I worked hard at forgetting what loomed ahead, pouring my energies into working as a creative director for Web companies and exploring downtown New York with Larry and our friends. I needed money to pay my huge ongoing legal fees, so I worked with the clients my hipster colleagues found unsexy and unpalatable-big telecom, big petrochemicals, and big shadowy holding companies.
With everyone but Larry, in my interactions I was partially absent. Only to him could I reveal my fear and shame. With folks who knew nothing of my criminal secret and looming imprisonment, I was simply not quite myself-pleasant, sometimes charming, but aloof, distant, perhaps even indifferent. Even with close friends who knew what was happening, I wasn’t fully engaged-I was always observing myself with an unstated foresight, a sense that whatever was happening now didn’t matter much given what was to come. Somewhere on the horizon was coming devastation, the arrival of Cossacks and hostile Indians.
As the years passed, my family almost began to believe that I would be miraculously spared. My mother was certainly logging a lot of hours in church. But never for a minute did I allow myself to indulge in that fantasy-I knew that I would go to prison. There were times when I was pretty damn depressed. But the revelation was that my family and Larry still loved me despite my massive fuckup; that my friends who knew my situation never turned away from me; and that I could still function in the world professionally and socially, despite having ostensibly ruined my life. I began to grow less fearful about my future, my prospects for happiness, and even about prison, as more and more time passed.
The main reason was Larry. When I was indicted, we were definitely in love, but just twenty-eight and freshly arrived in New York, we were not thinking about the future beyond where we would move when the guy we were subletting from reappeared from London. When my criminal past reappeared, who could have blamed him if he had sat me down and said, “I did not sign up for this crazy shit. I thought you were good crazy, not scary-crazy”? Who could predict how a nice Jewish boy from New Jersey would process the information that his ex-lesbian, boho-WASP girlfriend was also a soon-to-be-convicted felon?
Who knew that my extroverted, mercurial, overcaffeinated boyfriend would be so patient, so capable, and so resourceful? That when I cried myself into hyperventilation, he would hold my head and comfort me? That he would guard my secret and make it his own? That when I moped for too long, letting the poor-me blues clamp around my ankles and drag me down to very bad places, he would fight to get me back, even if it meant terrible battles and tough days and nights at home?