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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 Bartma
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 Je
As for Je
"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 Joh
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.