Without running—and with no AA meetings to attend—my anxiety level was skyrocketing. I knew I had to try to run, no matter how sore my knee was. One evening after dinner, I put on my black Nikes for the first time and walked out to the yard. A few guys were exercising, and as usual the smokers were out in force. Smoking was against the rules, but this stopped no one from lighting up in a wooded area near the track.
I walked four laps and then started to move a little faster. I leaned into each step, trying to prepare myself for my first running strides since my surgery. I picked a starting mark and pushed off with my good leg. When I landed on my bad leg, it buckled and I went sprawling to the ground. I scrambled back to my feet as quickly as I could and started to walk again, trying to act as if nothing had happened.
When I came around to the smokers, nobody said a word. Good, I thought, they didn’t see me fall on my ass. Then I made eye contact with one of them.
“Nice one,” he said with a smirk. I said thanks and kept walking. As I got past the group, they all busted out laughing. I turned around and gave them a little wave, and they went back to their cigarettes. This was worse than high school.
I was depressed and worried after my running experiment—but I could do nothing to speed my recovery. I couldn’t see a physical therapist or take fish oil or glucosamine—things I would have turned to in my normal life. In prison, the prescription for every ailment was “vitamin I”—ibuprofen, the duct tape of prison medicine—which had never worked well for me. All I could do was ice my knee and wait and hope.
One day, I was on my bunk, and Rowdy, one my cellmates, walked in. His jacket was bulging with things he had stolen from the kitchen: tubs of cottage cheese, fresh tomatoes, bags of broccoli. I was a vegetarian and I was in a serious nutritional deficit: not one fresh vegetable had crossed my plate in the cafeteria since my arrival. Maybe it was being stolen before it could be served.
Rowdy intimidated me, not physically, but because of his comfort with this place. I was still learning, and Rowdy had a PhD in the economics of prison. I asked him how I might be able to acquire tomatoes and broccoli.
He looked at me as if assessing whether I was worth his time and effort. “Let me lay it out for you. Every prison has its own economy. In some places, it’s tuna or mackerel packs. In the old days, it was cigarettes. At Beckley, it’s mostly stamps. So if you want this tomato, it’ll cost you four stamps. Broccoli, five stamps. This tub of cottage cheese, which I don’t see how anybody eats, will run you a full book—twenty stamps.”
“So where do I get stamps?”
“You ain’t shopped at the commissary yet?”
“No, Whacker is holding me up.”
“I hate that motherfucker and he hates me back—because I beat him at this game. You can get stamps two ways. You can buy two full books at the commissary every week for full price, like nine dollars apiece, just like on the outside. Or you can get them from me for six dollars a book. I give you the stamps, and when it’s your turn to shop at the commissary, you get me six dollars’ worth of shit that I want. Once you have stamps, you can buy vegetables or porn or drugs or damn near anything you want. On the streets I had to work for my customers, but in here, I got over four hundred guys want what I got.”
“You worried about getting caught?”
“I been caught a few times but it don’t matter. This is my life. I ain’t got nobody on the outside, so this is the only way I can get something for myself. Believe me when I tell you, everybody got they hustle in here. You may not think so, but you gonna find your hustle, too.”
- - - -
After a few weeks in the bubble, I was moved into a two-man cell in what was called the Trailer Park section of the prison, populated mostly by white guys who had been meth dealers and addicts. Meth heads usually made their own drugs, but they were bad businessmen—because they liked their product too much. The other side of the housing unit was known as the Hood and was occupied mostly by black guys who had been crack dealers, but not addicts. The Trailer Park talk was all about NASCAR and fishing and hunting and pussy. The Hood was all about basketball, hip-hop, Jesus Christ—and pussy. At least there was some common ground.
My new roommate was Whitey, a meth head whose brother was on death row in Georgia for murder. Whitey was trying to get his own sentence reduced by testifying against some guys on the outside that he used to do drugs with. I knew I had to be careful around him; I certainly wouldn’t be talking to him about my case.
I continued to have daily e-mail exchanges with my father. He’d contacted Joe Nocera, a business columnist for the New York Times. Nocera had written an op-ed saying that no one had gone to prison for the financial crisis. Dad contacted him to say he was wrong about that; Dad’s son was incarcerated. He hoped Nocera might mention me in an article. On March 25, I got an e-mail from Dad saying that in that day’s Times, Nocera had devoted his entire column to me—and that he’d come down heavily on our side.
I went to the library to see if the New York Times was in yet. Howell was there reading it.
He looked up at me and grinned. “Chuck! This is your ticket out of here!” He brought the paper over to me. On the front page of the business section was “In Prison for Taking a Liar Loan.” I sat down and devoured it:
Mr. Engle’s is a tale worth telling for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its punch line. Was Mr. Engle convicted of running a crooked subprime company? Was he a mortgage broker who trafficked in predatory loans? A Wall Street huckster who sold toxic assets?
No, Charlie Engle wasn’t a seller of bad mortgages. He was a borrower. And the “mortgage fraud” for which he was prosecuted was something that literally millions of Americans did during the subprime bubble. . . .
I kept reading, my excitement growing with each paragraph.
. . . The Engle case raises questions not just about the government’s priorities, but about something even more basic: did he even commit the crimes he is accused of?
. . . The more I looked into it, the more I came to believe that the case against him was seriously weak. No tax charges were ever brought, even though that was Mr. Nordlander’s original rationale. Money laundering, the suspicion of which was needed to justify the undercover sting, was a nonissue as well. As for that “confession” to Ms. Burrows, take a closer look. It really isn’t a confession at all. Mr. Engle is confessing to his mortgage broker’s sins, not his own.
“Holy shit,” I said. “This is fantastic!”
“This changes everything for you!” Howell said. “We need to file an appeal right away. By God, your old man pulled off an amazing feat here. The New York Times!”
I headed straight for the phones to call my father.
“Dad, you did it! I can’t believe it! You think there’s a chance I could get out of here?”
“I’m certain of it. Nocera embarrassed the Feds. I can’t imagine why they would keep you locked up after that article.”
“Yeah, but they aren’t going to just let me go.”
“Fuck them. They ought to. Those dickheads ought to just open the doors and let you walk out of there today.”
“Okay, Dad. Be careful what you say on here. I’m not out yet.” I knew the call was being monitored.
“I hope they are listening, those assholes!”
I hung up. I was ecstatic—and ready to start packing my bags.
Joe Nocera’s story brought a slew of interview requests: reporters from the CBS Evening News, Dateline NBC, PBS, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, and Men’s Journal all asked to come to Beckley to talk to me. Media requests were processed by Assistant Warden Mullins, a large black woman with a perfectly coiffed weave. For each interview request, I was required to sign a separate approval form, so I made many trips to her office. I would fill out the paperwork and she would give me her practiced bureaucrat’s smile and say, “I’ll see what I can
do.” I assured her I simply wanted to talk to them about my own case—not about life in Beckley.
Nocera’s article had mentioned my run across the Sahara, and word started getting around the prison that I was a well-known runner on the outside. One day, an inmate named Anthony stopped by my cell and asked if he could borrow my copy of the Times. He wanted to read the article about me. I’d seen him around; he was a workout fiend who spent hours doing push-ups, pull-ups, and crunches—and he had the body to show for it. I handed him the newspaper. A few hours later, he returned with it.
“The Feds really stuck it to you, Running Man.” He shook his head. From that day on, whenever he saw me, he’d say, “Yo, what’s up, Running Man?” Eventually other inmates started calling me that, too.
Nocera’s column also mentioned my blog, Running in Place, which I had started writing before I reported to Beckley. I’d been able to keep it up from prison thanks to my friend Chip, who posted entries I e-mailed to him. Writing it was cathartic—and entertaining. In mid-March, I had posted one I called “Beckley Prison 101”—meant to be an amusing primer to life behind bars. I talked about the crummy food and the endless paperwork and confounding rules and my ass-busting counselor (though I didn’t reveal his name). Mostly, I wrote about how I had decided to view being in prison as a challenge, and how I was adapting to my new routine—and learning “to keep the flames low without allowing my fire to be extinguished.”
Suddenly, scores of online comments appeared on my blog—mostly from people who had read Nocera’s piece and were offering their support.
Several days after the article appeared, I left the cafeteria and noticed the warden standing near the exit. I had seen him around but had never spoken with him.
I was surprised to see him hurrying toward me. “Engle, you screwed up.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Warden.”
“You said you wouldn’t talk about the prison in interviews. But you did. Ms. Mullins showed me this morning.”
“Sir, I don’t know what you are referring to, but I have not spoken to any media outlet about this place. I want to talk about my case, not Beckley.”
The warden poked me hard in the chest with his finger. “You . . . are . . . a . . . liar.” Then he threw several sheets of paper in my face. “I can guarantee you there won’t be any cameras allowed in my prison,” he snarled.
He turned and walked away. I was dumbfounded. I picked up the pages he had flung at me. It was a copy of my “Beckley Prison 101” post. All I could think was that he thought a journalist had written it after interviewing me. But these were my own words. Shortly after the encounter, I heard my name called over the intercom; it was Mullins.
I went to her office and she closed the door behind her, something she had never done in all my previous visits. She walked around her desk and sat down, but did not ask me to sit.
“You know you really riled up the warden. He is not a happy man.”
“I got that impression. But he’s talking about a blog, not an article. I wrote it myself.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have done that. But, you did me a favor. This makes it easier for me to turn the media away.”
“That’s not fair!” I said a little louder than I probably should have. “They only want to talk to me about my case.”
“That may be true, but it doesn’t matter anymore.”
“Just because I am in prison doesn’t mean that I lose my right to free speech.”
“You are right. But if you keep talking about Beckley, somebody might just decide to use a lock in a sock on you.”
“Is that a threat?”
“You take it however you want to. Now you go on back to your unit and have yourself a nice day.”
I went straight to the library to find Howell. I asked him to walk with me.
Once we reached the relative privacy of the track, I told him what had just happened. When I got to the part about the “lock in a sock,” he stopped in his tracks.
“What the hell does that even mean?” I asked.
He told me that it was common practice for an inmate to drop a combination lock into a tube sock and use it as a weapon, usually while his target was asleep. It was used to break bones—and spirits.
Howell and I met every night at the library to work on my appeal. We combed through paperwork; I answered his questions. My situation was complicated, he said, primarily because I had not filed a direct appeal. After sentencing, my lawyer had explained that if we challenged the judge’s ruling, the government might appeal the sentence and I could end up serving a lot more time. Given how hard the government had come after me to this point, I didn’t feel I could take that chance. Now, there was no legal basis to appeal any of the issues argued during my trial. Instead, we had to come up with an appeal strategy based on newly discovered information—if we could find any.
Dad was on the job researching real estate fraud and illegal foreclosures from around the country—hoping he might stumble upon something that could help. One afternoon just before dinner I checked my in-box and found an e-mail from my father. The subject line was “JACKPOT.” I hurriedly opened it.
You are not going to believe this but I found out last night that Jim Alberts, the property developer who sold you the condo in Cape Charles, was convicted of conspiring with Hellman on several properties. They used straw buyers and falsified loan documents and every other illegal thing you can think of—including forgeries and falsely inflated appraisals. And your loan officer who worked with Hellman, Michael Schmuff, was also convicted in the conspiracy. The judge in his case asked him if “all of the business they did was fraudulent” and he admitted that it was. They suppressed evidence. That’s a violation of your rights under the Brady Rule. If Hellman, Alberts and Schmuff did the crime, then you couldn’t have been guilty. But, Charlie, the real point is that we had the right to put those assholes on the stand at your trial.
I was stunned. We had always suspected others were involved because we found internal memos buried in the discovery materials that pointed to a “conspiracy involving several others.” I hurried to catch up with Howell in the dinner line so I could tell him what Dad had discovered.
“Those crooked bastards,” Howell said.
- - - -
The warmer temperatures and longer days of April fanned my desire to get back to running. But my knee was still painful. I was going crazy—waiting to be able to run, waiting to hear if something was going to change in my case. One afternoon, I decided that no matter how much it hurt, I was going to run. I would do what I’d often advised others to do when they asked me about beginning a running program: just get started. I set my sights on running one lap. I walked several laps as a warm-up, and by the time I finished the fourth one, I was walking as fast as I could.
I leaned forward and tried to roll smoothly into a run. Instead, I did a strange hop-hitch-slide thing, like a newborn colt trying to take his first steps. I felt as if I had forgotten how to run. One awkward stride rolled clunkily into the next. After about a dozen steps, I pulled up to take a quick inventory. I think I actually looked behind me to see if any parts had fallen off. Nothing there. I took a deep breath and started up again. This time I made it about one hundred yards. The pain was manageable. It wasn’t pretty, but I was running.
I finished my lap and then walked once around the track. I had achieved my goal. The prudent thing would have been to stop for the day. But, of course, I didn’t. I ran another lap and then another and kept going until I had completed a mile. My knee felt sore but not injured.
I went to the track every day after that. Even though I still limped, I felt stronger with every outing. I upped my distance and my pace, and my mood improved dramatically. Every athlete who ever had an injury knows what it’s like to have it taken away for a while—and knows what it’s like to get it back. It felt like a resurrection.
After three months at Camp Cupcake, the bewildering newness of it had worn off. Day by day, I’d gotten more adept at getting what I wanted and staying away from anything that looked like trouble.
In the chow hall, I’d learned how to negotiate deals with my meat-loving fellow inmates, who eagerly traded their vegetables and fruit for my burgers and chicken. I’d gotten wise to the practice of bringing a big plastic bag to every meal—you had to be ready if some treasure appeared. When sweet potatoes were served, I’d fill my bag, take them back to my unit. Then I’d scoop out their insides, put the mush into a plastic container that I’d bought at commissary, and sweeten them with brown sugar I’d scored from Rowdy for five stamps. I never once saw anything served in the cafeteria that I thought might contain brown sugar—but somehow Rowdy always had a supply.
I had also mastered the nuances of Beckley bathroom etiquette. There were only eight toilets for more than two hundred men. When you went into a stall to take care of business, you were expected to do a courtesy flush, that is, to flush immediately after pooping to minimize the stink. Once you did that, it was fine to linger in the stall—wiping, reading, whatever. But if you neglected to flush right away, you would be shouted down. The showers, too, demanded a certain protocol. With only ten showers, men were often lined up waiting for a turn. If you went more than five minutes, you’d hear about it. Even keeping it that short, the water was rarely warmer than tepid.
I had also learned the proper way to walk down the corridors. Under no circumstances were you to idly gaze into the cell you were passing. However natural it might have been to glance around, prison was no place for people watching. I became adept at looking only at the floor directly in front of me as I moved through the unit.
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