Confessions of a Wall Street Insider

by Michael Kimelman

  I waited for that all-important “but don’t worry sweetheart, you know I’ll support you” … but it never came.

  “That’s it, Lisa? Are you serious? You want me to make the most important decision of OUR lives completely on my own?”

  “Mike, you are the biggest grass-is-greener person I’ve ever met. When we were in the city, you wanted to move to Westport or Larchmont. Remember that?”

  “We were trying to have kids. I didn’t want to raise them in the city! I love the city, but I like trees … and driving … and clean air … not having to worry about a bum spitting on my child in a stroller. And the Towers had just crumbled within walking distance of us. On friends of mine.”

  “No, I understand that,” she said. “But then even when we settled in Larchmont, you would regretfully throw out Los Angeles every once in a while, just to torture me. Then it was Sarasota. You’re always unsatisfied with the choices you made, Mike. You always think a different decision would have been better.”

  She went back to work at the butcher block, carefully rolling the transparently thin spring rolls. For the moment, I gave her only stunned silence. What was there to say?

  “Nothing is ever good enough,” Lisa continued. “Nothing was ever the right choice. And that’s when you make the choice. I’m not going to allow you to turn me into the scapegoat for your unhappiness, whether you’re in jail, or you’re a confessed felon who regrets not fighting for your good name … because your damn wife didn’t want you to. I don’t want that burden. I can’t, Mike.”

  I stepped back. Decided not to reply. There was no point in continuing.

  While Lisa would only visit me twice in prison, my parents came every eight weeks or so. They’d fly in from their home in southern California, head out to Larchmont to pick up their grandchildren, and then drive the four hours west to spend the weekend at a Hampton Inn in Lewisburg. I thanked God for my parents, who were broken up about my situation, inside and out, yet never failed to remind me of their unwavering love and support. Without them, I never would have been able to get through it as well as I did. Eight weeks was one hell of a long stretch to be alone, but I could manage that. Once a year, frankly, would have driven me to some sort of edge I’m grateful I never had to face.

  For the kids, going to visit dad in prison seemed like a vacation … of sorts. They would swim in the hotel pool, eat the foul processed food out of the vending machines, play Hangman and Go Fish, or just chill out with me. All at once it was amazing and uplifting, but equally awful and heart-breaking. How can you entertain three young kids, or have them truly enjoy themselves, when they can’t really do anything with you. You’re just sitting on folding metal chairs for three straight hours. Boys of three and six aren’t much for sitting still and talking anyway. To have been able to go outside and toss a baseball or football, or to wrestle, would have been pure bliss. Yet for me this was life. This was my taste of the real world, as we inmates called it. And each time the visit was over and my children left, escorted by Grandma and Grandpa, I was emotionally drained and despondent, counting down the days until I might see them again. Then it was back to the dreary, debilitating monotony of my shared cell.

  You get a strange sense of how your kids are aging when you’re incarcerated. I received drawings or letters once in a while. I guess that these creations came at the urging of my parents, because the return address was always in my mom’s scratchy handwriting. I wrote to them regularly, and assume they still have the letters, but it’s a subject I don’t want to raise with them. Still, what do you say to kids at that age, to the children you love more than life itself? At a loss for words most times, I generally kept it simple.

  “Daddy misses you a lot and loves you to the moon and back, forever and always.”

  And so forth.

  I wrote to Syl in a little more detail, trying to joke about how the prison food was gross and telling her that she had to be good—helping her little brothers and listening to her mom—and always emphasizing how much I missed her and that I would see her soon.

  Soon … what a dangerous word to use with a child. A child’s sense of time is so different than an adult’s. I’m sure the term soon lost all meaning for her.

  My two boys seemed to age normally, though it was as inevitable as it was painful that I would miss so many of their milestones while in prison.

  Cam, who invariably smiled, seemed more subdued during his visits. That initial burst of enthusiasm when they entered and saw me was never anything short of miraculously uplifting … but things had a way of fading after a few minutes. It was painfully apparent that seeing me in this situation had caused him to lose some of his typical spark.

  Syl, already a bright, complicated kid, became even more so. She was smart and picked up clues. “Why does it say prison camp?” I didn’t know what to tell her.

  It was painful having them see me in “uniform”—head to toe brown khaki—or having the guards bark at them, which inevitably happened. There was an older guard, a spiteful drunk, who seemed to burn up when he saw what I had—three beautiful children and parents that loved me. Said guard would snap at them, yank away their coloring books, yell about a chair being too close to an aisle, or caution a kid whose only crime was being excited about getting an ice cream from the godawful vending machines.

  In prison there were arbitrary rules for everything. You got used to it as an inmate, and then it was hard to see outsiders—like people you loved—confronted with it. They would also change rules constantly. I think it was just to keep us on our toes. On some days rules were enforced, and on others they weren’t. It depended on who you got as a guard, and what kind of a mood he was in. There was a large sign posted in the cafeteria—NO REMOVING FOOD—yet inmates would openly walk out with a pint of milk and an apple, or an extra slice or two of Wonder Bread to feed the ducks, and no one seemed to care. But if one of those COs got in a fight with his girlfriend, or was chewed out by his boss, suddenly walking outside to finish a mushy apple meant you’d be written up and cited and have privileges revoked (no shopping, no visits, no phone).

  Heaven help you if you complained about anything; you’d disappear to solitary for a week or never to be heard from again.*

  During one visit, that bitter old alcoholic guard decided he didn’t like my three-year-old son slowly rolling his McDonald’s Happy Meal plastic car down the table, so he snatched it roughly right from Phin’s hand. You should have seen the look of shock on Phin’s face, and the tears that followed. Phin looked violated and quickly became inconsolable—it was something I will never forget. To be forced to watch, powerless, as this piece of human garbage went out of the way to hurt my child, was beyond painful. My only option was to fantasize about what I might do if I ever ran into him on the streets.

  Once, my brother flew out to Chicago to visit, and the guard at the front gate said he wasn’t on the visitor list—except for the fact that one’s immediate family is automatically on the list. Someone had removed him. All they had to do was look on the computer; my probation report listed two parents and a brother—all automatics.

  “We printed the list for Kimelman, and if he was on it, he would have been on it.”

  This garbled nonsense was, verbatim, what they said to him.

  Then they sent him away without even allowing me to see him. The fucking gall. The financial and emotional cost of a flight from Chicago, two nights at a hotel, cars to and from the airport, just so a guard could have some adolescent fun at my expense. And there was never any recourse, no right to complain, nothing you could ever do. Sometimes the guards would punish every visitor and his family, simply because one inmate had been busted smoking a cigarette. It’s a level of pitiful sadism that’s still hard for me to fully fathom. My parents were also turned away once, with my kids in tow, after a 3000 mile flight and four-hour drive, just because another inmate had been caught smoking. They made us all suffer, inmates, families and children, for one man’s carelessness. Fro
m my vantage point in the yard, I could see my three-year-old and six-year-old sons sobbing hysterically as they were escorted back to the car.

  Try doing time with that image seared into your conscience on a loop.

  But now I must admit something. I’ve been holding out on you. There was one other factor about life at Lewisburg that made it close to unbearable. One other detail that—had I disclosed it earlier—might have obscured your ability to appreciate the other, nasty aspects of the place.

  This missing detail is the presence of Zvi and Nu.

  That’s right. Both Goffer brothers were also inmates at Lewisburg.

  I’ll start with Nu.

  Always the weaker of the two brothers—a man whose poor liver must have howled through the long prison nights, begging for its fix—Nu remained the faithful, unflinching sidekick throughout his time inside. Zvi’s power over him would never wane. It had existed as long as long as I’d known the two. It would exist in prison as well.

  At Lewisburg, Nu and I had the distinct pleasure of spending nine months together in the RDAP, or the Residential Drug and Alcohol Problem. When I got sent into the RDAP (Nu would arrive about one month after me, a total wreck), I was moved from my cellblock known as “Vegas”—a totally lawless place where literally any vice was available: alcohol, drugs, gambling, even women*—to what was purported to be a medically strict environment. Yet despite its being quieter and stricter than Vegas, there was still illicit gambling, cellphone use, and most amusingly, obvious drug and alcohol use. I had done my best to get in the program as soon as I’d learned of it. Not only would it mean time away from snoring roommates; I would also receive six months off my sentence.**

  The building that housed RDAP looked like a rundown greenhouse or barn. It had been built as temporary housing in the 1950s with a five-year designated lifespan, but was still standing. There was limited heat, and they shut that off in March, so we had to spend a solid two months coping with nighttime temps that were often down to twenty degrees. It was like sleeping outdoors. I wore two sets of clothes, a hat and gloves, and still had to wrap myself in newspapers at night to keep warm. The windows could not have been any thinner, and most of the walls were uninsulated aluminum sheets, barely half an inch thick. And when it warmed up—you guessed it—there was no AC. The greenhouse-like window orientation meant we could expect experience temps above 110 degrees during summer. The air was stale and miserable, with around two hundred souls surviving in a space the size of a basketball court, stacked with bunk beds. It was very tight quarters. At night, if you leaned over even slightly you’d smack the person sleeping next to you. Nu slept no more than twenty feet away from me. Despite this, we hardly communicated at all. We might give one another looks, or bump shoulders occasionally in passing, but that was that. No real contact. Nothing to say. Just frustration and a good deal of mutual antipathy. I blamed Nu in part for my place here. I’m sure he blamed me for his.

  In sharp contrast to me, Zvi seemed to have been born for success in a prison environment. Somehow he managed to have an iPad and quickly became known as a reliable source for cigarettes and alcohol. Zvi drank regularly, yet always avoided getting caught. He acted as a bookie and took bets on things. But perhaps more than anything else, he succeeded inside because of his ability to spin tales.

  Zvi boasted about having $300 million stashed overseas, in Israel and elsewhere. He played on the inmates’ gullibility, promising them jobs and payoffs if they helped him out with this or that. When a few of the less-gullible inmates asked me if Zvi’s stories were true, I asked them whether a guy worth $300 million would have hired an ex-public defender from Florida, as opposed to any of the top white-collar attorneys in New York City, who all would have chomped at the bit to represent him—for the right price.

  ’Nuff said, fellas.

  Yet Zvi seemed to acutely understand that he was free to make up anything he wanted. He was an artist, and prison was a blank canvas. For a while, this did not concern me. I might have felt pity for the other inmates he duped, but they would eventually learn the truth about Zvi the hard way. Just as I had. But then word reached me that—among his many tales—Zvi had said that I was a rat who had informed against him.

  Zvi spread a rumor that I was the one who ratted our group out, and that the only reason he and Nu and the whole guilty bunch were behind bars was because I had squealed. Such rumors could cost you your life, even in minimum security. (The only thing worse than being a rat was being a child molester.) And the threat did not end once you were released. Plenty of prison justice got carried out years later, on the outside.

  I couldn’t let this bullshit go unchallenged. To save my own life, I had to resort to prison tactics myself.

  I sent my new friend Irish to have a word with Zvi’s people. He was only too happy to oblige.

  To say Irish looked intimidating would be an understatement. He towered at six foot three, 260 pounds, and was covered in tattoos. His hair was shaved into a buzz cut, and he moved like a tightly wound bundle of in-your-face swagger. But the most threatening part of him might have been his eyes. He had the icy stare of someone who had done things and seen things beyond the imaginings of most people. His eyes made him look a decade older than his forty-three years.

  At first, Irish’s “inquiries” got us nowhere. All we learned was that it was rumored Zvi had paid someone to hurt me. This might have just been talk, but I wouldn’t have put it past him. Life is cheap on the inside, and many people with nothing to lose are willing to provide a beatdown for very little money.

  Then another rumor found its way to me. It concerned something I wouldn’t have thought anyone capable of—not even Zvi, if I hadn’t heard it myself and also had it relayed to me. Zvi said he was going to pay someone on the outside to rape my eight-year-old daughter. And he had added in person that, once he got out, he might even rape her himself if the opportunity arose. Even if this was pure psychotic bravura—nothing but a power-play smokescreen created by a sicko to boost his standing in prison—it was still an unbelievable new low. It spoke volumes about the kind of man Zvi Goffer was. He would do anything, hurt anyone, to make himself even slightly more powerful and comfortable.

  The threats played on my worst fears. This was, of course, by design. Inmates hate the fact they cannot be personally present to protect the ones they love. For months, Zvi’s threat made my headspace into a constant nightmare. Would I soon receive a call telling me that some monster had hurt my Syl?

  Post-sentencing, I’d had a recurring, vivid nightmare. I’m with my family. We are up in Vermont, with my college buddy Stan and his family. The property is vast and breathlessly beautiful—trees, mountains, and cold clear streams running through it. We’re camped in a log cabin, getting ready to barbecue, while our kids toss and kick balls, or climb small trees. Lisa and Stan’s wife Rachel walk up the hill towards us, smiling, carrying flowers. Stan is playing with his son, Harris. Phin and Syl are nearby. But where’s Cam? I slowly spin around to find him, making a 360-degree circle, my hand over my brow, a visor to block the late fading sun. I do not see him, and soon become panicked.

  “Stan,” I yell. “Is Cam over there?”

  Stan looks all around and says he doesn’t see him.

  I yell to Lisa: “Is Cam with you?”

  “No, I thought he was with you!” Her voice cracks.

  Cam was just here, watching a darting chipmunk. As loud as I can I yell, “CAM!”

  Nothing but the echo of my own desperation. My heart begins to race. I tell Syl to watch Phinnie and start jogging back towards the cabin.

  “CAM!”

  Maybe he went in to get a drink, or use the bathroom. If he’s in the house, he’ll be okay, I realize, so I reverse away and begin running toward where I last saw him. Maybe he’s just lost. I get around a hill and the land flattens out. I can hear a creek, and then I see the creek, and then I see Cam, standing in the creek, body upright, arms above his head in his black bubble North Fac
e down jacket, his feet touching the bottom of the creek, clear and calm enough so I can make out his red hair and his yellow SpongeBob T-shirt. My boy’s not moving. I run as fast as I can, praying I’m not too late. Cam can swim. What happened? Did he panic? Did the freezing water disorient him? How long has he been like this? Is he dead? The odds spin through my head. If it’s been ten minutes, he’s dead; if it’s two I can still save him; but if it’s more than that, he might have brain damage. Will I be able to resuscitate him? Crying, screaming, I dive into the water …

  And the icy coldness of the creek always jolted me awake. I sat up in bed, barely able to breathe, my chest constricted. I would bolt into the bathroom, nauseated, feeling like I might throw up. I’d certainly never thrown up over a dream before. It felt so real that I had to see Cam right away. When the dream happened, I would have to go glance at him in his room.

  So when I was faced with an actual threat to my children from an incarcerated monster, I felt determined to exact the worst sort of revenge. Somehow. I would skin the fucker alive, and relish his screams. I’d pour salt on his wounds and keep him alive until his body could take no more, and then I’d castrate him. Things like that. These were my fantasies.

  In the months that followed, Zvi’s threats came and went. Nothing ever happened. Over the rumor wire, I heard that Zvi was ready to take back what he’d said. He wanted to let bygones be bygones. I didn’t know whether or not to believe it.

  As it turned out, these overtures of retreat were just a calculated move designed to protect Zvi’s hide. Word had reached him that my guy Irish could really do some damage. This was confirmed when Irish got sent to the hole, and Zvi felt emboldened again. The threats started back up.

  Then another strange twist. Zvi learned through third parties that I was spending time writing. That I was working on the manuscript that would eventually become this book. The wheels in Zvi’s mind began to turn, and he worried about what the larger world might think of him after his release if I told the truth about him. He soon sent out new olive branches via third parties.