What to Expect When You’re Convicted
Credit to Author: Elana Klein| Date: Tue, 20 May 2025 10:00:00 +0000
From Sam Bankman-Fried’s fraud-ridden crypto empire to Elizabeth Holmes’ sham biotech company to deepfakers on the internet bilking grandmas of their retirement savings, white-collar crime seems to touch every last corner of tech. For the business titan who may one day end up in custody and can’t count on a presidential pardon, it never hurts to know a guy.
WIRED spoke with a self-described former “troubleshooter for the mafia” who was incarcerated in US penitentiaries for a decade and found a new role for himself on the outside: He became a prison consultant. Now he works with an array of white-collar offenders. He berates and curses the ears off his clients—but it’s all part of the no-bullshit approach he says he uses to help them reduce and optimize their time inside.
Once when I was in prison and we were walking out of the dining hall, I stopped and I looked out the window. I said, “Do you see it?” And the other inmates are like, “What?” I go, “It’s right there.” And they’re stopping and gazing into the sky. Then more people come out of the dining hall and start looking too, and before you know it, so do the correctional officers. Finally, I said: “Gee, see how easy it is to take control of stupid people?”
I had a prison psychiatrist say that I treated the prison system like it was my own personal amusement park. I was just having too good of a time in there. I would get on the telephone, calling home or whoever, and I’d go, “Well, if the staff hates me right now, they’re going to despise me by this weekend. I have something special planned. I really can’t say. The staff’s listening in on the phone calls.” So the weekend rolls around, they put extra staff members on duty, wondering, “All right, what’s the dude going to do?” I’m lying in my fucking bunk reading a book. I ain’t going to do shit. But I fucking manipulated these people.
WIRED profiles the people who make trouble—scams, drug deals, even murder—and also, occasionally, save the day.
I also spent my time helping people. I would help people who were over-sentenced on their charges get into RDAP, the Residential Drug Abuse Program, or an extra halfway house called the Second Chance Act program. I would go through their legal paperwork and say, “You know what? Let’s file in court on this,” and boom, all of a sudden somebody gets resentenced. That made me a folk hero. I thought, “Well shit, I could turn this into a business.”
When I first got out of custody, there was nobody doing this. My primary clients were people that had financial fraud. Some drug clients, but it was people who ripped people off. Your white-collar offenders. It’s people who are scared, angry, and confused. If they reach out to me before they’ve gone in, I can get them prepared.
Between people on the outside and people on the inside, I may have like 50 clients, maybe 100, at a time. Sometimes my services are free, sometimes they’re $3,500, $5,000, $10,000. I even had one guy pay me $50,000. It just depends on the person, their circumstance, what they can afford. I’ve got four other people who work with me, two women and two men.
When my clients come to me, I tell them: “OK, so shut the fuck up and listen to what I have to say. You’re in deep shit. I’m going to pull your head out of your ass, because your lawyer probably screwed you, made you false fucking promises that they can’t keep. First let’s take a look at your charges, your federal indictment. What are you charged with? Is it drugs? Is it some type of wire fraud?” And we’ll just break your case down.
I’m not a lawyer. I can’t give you legal advice. But what I can do is explain the law to you, and I can help you determine whether or not you should go to trial or take a plea agreement. I also teach my clients how to lie on the witness stand effectively, how to beat the polygraph machine. So I’m a full-service kind of business.
I got hit with narcotics trafficking, securities fraud, racketeering, obstruction of justice, and possession of machine guns. I’m not here to fucking judge anybody. I know within five minutes of seeing the indictment whether this person’s going to prison. There’s no question about it, unless they’re ratting people out.
So a dumbass gets sentenced. I have a chemical dependency assessment done on them to determine whether they have a substance abuse issue. If I have a report generated for them and it gets put into their probation report at sentencing and they submit it to the prison, it creates eligibility for them to get into a program to get out up to one year early.
I explain to them it’s not what they’ve seen on TV. I hold their hand and their family’s hand, because their families are busy watching prison shows and they’re all freaked out. I calm them down. Prison is boring. It’s Groundhog Day. Every day is the last day, unless people get into a fight or something. I explain to them the different types of prisons. A majority of my clients go to minimum security institutions, known as federal prison camps. Many have no fences, no walls. They often don’t lock the doors.
I’m teaching my clients the politics of prison life—how to deal with staff, how to deal with other inmates. You don’t want to hang out with informants or child molesters. And some of the staff members are fucking cuckoo. They’re unprofessional. They’re not well trained. They have their own emotional and personal issues.
I give people that psychological peace of mind. I have a lot of clients that are family members of people in custody. I’m like a cross between a marriage counselor, a psychologist, a life coach, and a priest. So that calms the people.
My wife said that I need to be nicer to the clients. I think maybe I’m desensitized because I’ve been doing this shit for so long. I get frustrated. I sometimes go off on people. I say, “I don’t know who’s dumber, you or a fucking lawyer, listen the fuck up.” I mean, my ex-wife said I didn’t have one ounce of human kindness. She knew me the best.
—As told to Elana Klein