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The Probation Paradox (Part One), by Fellow Traveler Jeff Krantz

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Jeff Krantz is a member of the Ministry’s White Collar Support Group that meets every Monday evening on Zoom.

It will be on the short list of things your mind will immediately focus on once the federal prosecutors inform you that they intend to charge you. “How do I stay out of prison?” Deferred prosecution having been removed from the table; probation now becomes the golden ticket.

At this point, if they haven’t informed you already, your lawyer will update you on the federal government’s ever-present prosecution success rate of 99%. You are likely to plead out. Everyone knows it. The government knows, your lawyer knows. If you haven’t come to it yet, you will. Nearly no one fights. I didn’t fight.

My case was as likely winnable as any you would encounter. I was charged with one count felony conspiracy to sell counterfeit electronic components. The government acknowledged that the entirety of their case was based on the testimony of ONE individual, who himself had taken a plea and was claiming that I was his co-conspirator. After three years of an intensive investigation no other evidence was produced to support the government’s case. If I had chosen to go to trial their case would likely fall to pieces upon cross examination.

Once I made my decision to enter a plea agreement it was incumbent upon me to prep for my plea hearing and sentencing, and to explain to family and friends why there was no point in fighting. That by going to court, and even with the possibility of winning, the result would likely have a prospectively more damaging outcome than to plea. The continuation of a heated investigation by the government would decimate my still somewhat intact finances along with any prospect of saving our family business (a reasonable probability that drove most of my decisions).

All of this is by design. The prosecution seeks victories, regardless of whether it is for justifiable cause, political pressures, pure careerism, or a mix of all three. There is no other instance in life, in business, in relationships, or in any organizational entity that entails decision making, where the margin of error is nil. As I experienced it, in our US criminal justice system, regardless of fact, and or contingency, one party is always right, and it has the power to ensure that it always is.

Almost everyone pleads out. There is nothing else to be done.

Once you have reached a plea agreement with the prosecution you will know the sentencing guideline that you will be subject to. I was looking at a maximum of twenty-four months. The conditions surrounding my case made it unlikely that I would receive a sentence for the maximum. I was also informed by my lawyers that depending upon the judge, the stance of the prosecution and the perspective of the PO writing my PSR, that I stood a reasonable chance of receiving a non-custodial sentence. Probation.

As it happened, everything aligned and I was sentenced to three years’ probation, 100 hours of community service and a restitution and fine amounting to just over half a million dollars.

It was as good an outcome as I could have hoped for. I wish that it had been otherwise.

White Collar Support Group 350th Meeting Reflection: “The Wrong End of the Looking Glass”, by Fellow Traveler Jeff Krantz

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Jeff Krantz is a member of our White Collar Support Group that meets on Zoom on Monday evenings. On March 6, 2023, we will hold our 350th meeting – 7 years of community!

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Below is an excerpt from an email exchange between Jeff Grant and I discussing my blog submission for the 350th meeting. Below that is my original piece. – Jeff Krantz

Jeff Grant:  “Experience, strength and hope. You discuss the experience, but you never get to the strength and hope parts. These 350th meeting reflections have to show people how we help people navigate their issues. You have a better story that can help people.”

Jeff Krantz: “Every morning that I open my eyes and get out of bed is an exercise in hope and strength.”

The thing that I’m fairly certain that distinguishes my white collar prosecution from everyone else within our group and almost certainly in the realm of white collar prosecutions universally is that I was tacitly and ultimately explicitly being held responsible for the crash of a military helicopter and the death of two service people. Of course, were this true, I would be writing to you from your local supermax. 

It’s this absurdity that has ruined my life. It is also painful in a way that is different than the ways we are used to hearing about in the normal course of sharing in our group. Because people’s deaths are attached to my experience,  I have not spoken about it up until now. The eternal twilight of this single event is that I carry with me always, like Jacob Marley’s chains, the echos of guilt for a crime, the worst possible crime, for which I’m not guilty nor is it the one they could hang on me so they made one up that they could . How do you begin speak about that? Nonetheless, for ten years I’ve gone about my life making progress, in a manner; overcoming setbacks to a degree; taking joy where I can find it; and small solace in knowing the truth even when it doesn’t matter one whit.

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In 2012 , microcircuits that my company sold to a customer turned up in a tragic helicopter crash. The chips were never considered as the cause of the crash.We were investigated for three years for being suspected of having sold suspect counterfeit electronic components. The parts that we had sold had been documented as passing the highest levels of military testing, the gold standard at the time for detecting counterfeit parts; nonetheless the government proceeded with charging me.

Below is a meditation on the absurdity of my prosecution.

It had been thought by some, in isolated pockets of the government, that I bore an ancillary responsibility for the crash of a military helicopter in 2011 causing the death of two active duty service people. The facts of the matter were clear with regard to the cause of the tragedy which had been thoroughly documented in the ensuing investigation as being attributable to a failure of the ship’s FADEC, The Full Authority Digital Engine Control, which functions exactly as the name implies, a mechanical piece of technology that manages engine function, taking control out of the hands of the pilot,making thousands of minute adjustments per second based upon readings taken from sensors, located throughout the ship and inflowing environmental data.

The apparatus in question was manufactured by what would come to be known in legal documents and public filings only as “the Connecticut Company”. Once I was charged the narrative entered the public domain therefore preventing the name of the responsible entity into the public record to protect its reputation from being associated with a criminal investigation when not having been formally charged. In fact the entity, the Badpoor Company, who had previously bore responsibility in another instance of a failed FADEC, also resulting in loss of life, was the manufacturer, and in both cases resulted in the levying of substantial civil penalties against the corporation but no criminal charges whatsoever.

The imperative to determine a source of prosecutable responsibility, other than the one that had universally and conclusively been determined to be at fault, demanded a stretching of the facts beyond what could reasonably be considered the viable elasticity of the truth. Those with a vested interest in the matter, however, were untroubled by their roles in heedlessly defying the fundamental guidelines in determining criminality and intent for the sake of their own closely held motivations of pursuing my prosecution.A fruitless three year endeavor with the ostensible objective of bringing to justice for a crime that did not occur, but that seemed to need someone to pay the price. I was the available if unlikely candidate chosen for the sole purpose of a civilized public pillorying and having his life ruined.

The cadre of government prosecutors, investigators, witnesses, and assorted silent bystanders, all of whom either directly or peripherally engaged in my prosecution, had no motivation or interest in upholding the truth or the law, both of which could be recognized with the luminosity of a high visibility jumpsuit lit by headlights in the middle of a nighttime highway. There was barely enough stretch left in the fabric of their convictions to ensure that their balls didn’t drop out from the sides or that their asses remained covered, while I took the fall for everything, with a single plea of wire fraud, allowing for the resolution blithely accepted by, investigators, prosecutors and managers straight up the line even the judges, all content to disregard the flagrant absurdity of my lone criminal count, to claim victory.

Throughout my prosecution the true tragedy of the helicopter is never referenced and for which neither the investigation, nor the presiding Magistrate could find a convincing crime that I was either responsible for, or that I could allocute to, despite the hours long negotiations between myself, my attorneys and the line AUSAs prosecuting my case. The end result was to fabricate a seemingly viable criminal act for me to plea to that would fulfill their ambitions and bring the whole fucking ordeal to a close.

What I couldn’t perceive from that vantage point, but one that became visible once my vista had been raised high enough, was to clearly see the catastrophe that my life had become was never going to resolve. In defiance of the most basic laws of physics, the ripples emanating out from the pebble cast into the relative tranquility that had been a self satisfied existence of school auctions, two star restaurants and luxury holidays with friends, were now growing to tidal proportions the further out they receded from the event horizon of the stone’s drop, ameliorating the generative event’s relevance until it no longer mattered leaving only the all encompassing waves to pull me under.

Unseen by me, the Magistrate ultimately gave way to the desperate ministrations of my lawyers who were acting reluctantly, upon my instructions, to compel her to accept the fabricated conceit that was agreed upon by all parties. A fatalistic recognition that whatever we came away with would be nothing that anybody wanted and the best that anyone was going to get. For me in particular, whatever deal I was able to cut all other options would be worse than the one that I would ultimately be confronting, at least that was how it had appeared to me waiting outside of the courtroom. It was as though Joseph K from Kafka’s “Trial” had entered through the wrong end of the looking glass, insistent upon remaining in the courthouse prostrate before the judge to willingly plead guilty to the unknown crime and take the consequence, despite his innocence, and the judge refusing to to accept his ministrations insisting he should leave the courthouse to face the consequences of his freedom.

Journal of Failure, Vol. 3, By Fellow Traveler Jeff Krantz

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Jeff Krantz is a member of our White Collar Support Group that meets online on Zoom on Monday evenings.

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Reprinted from substack.com, March 29, 2022

Slow Roll

Reflections on a recent trip to the MoMA

This is how I planned for it to begin.

Corpulent as he was, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, otherwise held fast to his most famous adage of less being more.

Paunchier than he was corpulent, Mies seemed determined to deprive me of a pretty good opening sentence. Such is the way of things when what you want and what is true refuse to jibe.

In either event here’s the rest of the thought:

In contrast to the high priest of modernism’s guiding principle, the current keepers of the movement’s most prominent shrine, the Museum of Modern Art, in New York, have determined to take a more maximalist view of things, keeping their less than gimlet-eyed view, focused squarely on the latter half of the clichéd but still cogent maxim, by expanding the museum into every available inch of the north side of West 53rd Street, that their endowment, their trustees’ wallets, and the city’s zoning laws would allow. Mies, I suspect, has been doing a slow roll in his understated grave ever since.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

It had all begun well enough, when the small cabal of wealthy, industrialist’s wives with aspirations towards posterity; determined, in the late 1920s, to erect a museum dedicated to the housing of their growing collection of modern art, called upon Edward Durell Stone to design the original building. Taking up less than a quarter of a block, that was otherwise filled with brownstones; the white unadorned, marble and glass, facade was a pleasing and clear enough statement of intent to set expectations for the radical nature of the work to be found within. Nearly a hundred years later, while still visible; the Stone building has been couched within the expansionist ambitions of subsequent museum leadership, to such an extent that it can now be easily missed by anyone on their way to the main entrance or to Uniqlo, depending upon which direction one is traveling.

With a free afternoon and an as of yet expired membership, I walked up Fifth Avenue to visit the reopened institution and acquaint myself with the newly designed museum and re-curated collection.

The original Edward Durell Stone Building, 1939.

Upon passing through the new airport-style security entrance, I was carried unceremoniously to the fourth floor by the still cramped escalators where I negotiated my way through the artwork of the latter half of the 20th century. As a result of the fully rejiggered arrangement of the heretofore reliably staid collection, I was left disoriented in a space that had long since been comforting in its familiarity. In an attempt to regain my bearings, I sought refuge among the Rothkos and a particularly fine Krasner. Unfortunately, I wasn’t left feeling any steadier.

The Stone building, 2021

There is a newly acquired funhouse quality to the galleries. The effect is the result of art being hung in a manner where one painting appears to be reflected back upon itself in the form of another painting from an entirely different era bearing a visual relationship to the older work; and which is hung in opposition to it, causing your eyes to reverberate jarringly between the two. The effect can leave one standing in the middle of the gallery immobilized inside of an eye rattling, dissonance-inducing loop

The disorienting juxtapositions are exacerbated by the physical nature of the expansion itself. Having expanded the gallery space 50,000 square feet since the last growth spurt, which itself grew the available exhibition space by nearly 40,000 square feet. The scale of the museum can now leave one feeling that the artwork extends off into a far-away horizon. Having walked a distance that felt perilously close to  exercise, I thought that I might have landed  inside an old Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover, wondering if I was going to exit on the shores of the Hudson or possibly somewhere in California.

'View of the World from 9th Avenue.' Cover print by Saul Steinberg, Published in The New Yorker on 3/29/1976: Posters & Prints - Amazon.com

Up until this most recent iteration, MoMA’s permanent collection was ordered chronologically and segregated according to discipline, allowing one to view the works of the collection within their milieu and the epoch in which they were created. Given this stabilizing framework, the viewer could discern the logical underpinnings of the movements that informed the century’s latter half.  While these organizing principles can still be observed throughout the galleries, they have since taken on an elasticity, warping the narrative thread and blurring the previously cohesive flow of work.

If it had once been thrilling to walk the galleries in anticipation of seeing the likes of DeKooning, Pollack, Kline and Motherwell et.al., sequenced in room after room, all glaring at each other from opposing gallery walls, as though they were back at the Cedar Tavern drunk and duking it out, challenging each other for artistic primacy and for the right to each other’s women; the energy has now been dissipated with a good deal of the pugilistic dynamic having been directed to neutral corners.

Gone, sadly, are the dedicated galleries for photography, prints and drawing, all of which have now been incorporated into the painting galleries, adding to the already disjointed and crowded nature of the display. Gone also is the pleasure of being able to sequester oneself within the history of a single medium, to be fully immersed within the lone discipline and explore, uninterrupted, its chronology, rather than having to negotiate a collection of disparate works interspersed throughout the broader collection.  .

I exited the museum, with my head spinning and the symptoms of my fairly severe ADD inflamed. Characteristic of the affliction is the ease with which one is susceptible to overstimulation. A state of mind that I was experiencing throughout my tour of the new curatorial direction of the permanent collection. My condition hadn’t been helped any, by the expanded museum having been piled to the rafters with work and by the substitution of the formerly regimented, chronological orderliness for juxtapositional chaos. By superimposing works of varying media, eras and cultural context from which the viewer is intended to draw broad associations regarding influences, zeitgeists and contexts; the museum had left me feeling unmoored and with the uncanny sense that the familiar works, which for so long had hung austerely in their designated places, had suddenly been thrust, unaccompanied, into a boisterous cocktail party, drink clutched nervously in hand, hoping to see a familiar face to rescue them from the chaos.

I don’t go to see art as much as I would like and unless I’m visiting a permanent collection, I mostly come up against names and works that are unfamiliar to me. My days of complete immersion in the artworld and of being informed as to its vagaries, are long in the past and don’t register with me as they once might have. But having once lived in that world, I retain a thread of attachment to it and am not without the capacity for forming opinions. What I’ve come to recognize in my recent travels to the shrine on West Fifty Third Street, is that those who are in charge of steering the vision of what is seen and what is said, have looked squarely into the face of Mies’s dictum and rejected it wholesale. In having taken a more expansive curatorial route there is now recognition that the “less” in Mies’s dictum, in the case of the history of the museum’s collection, has equated to orthodoxy and the exclusion of a broad swath of artists; both of which are ideas that are anathema to the ideals from which Modernism was sprung.

Today in the rarefied world of museum curators, where the gatekeepers who have traditionally been the vigilant guardians of the fixed ideals of their institutions, change comes hesitantly and in increments. Arguably, the most influential of all museums, the MoMA, has used their most prestigious platform: the permanent collection, to take a stand for a broader purview of thought and a greater diversity of artists. It would appear that they have thrown their long since stacked deck in the air and celebrated the broad change that is the result and that has been a long time coming.

Recognizing that my own views around art may have long ago calcified into something closer to taste and discernment, it gives me pause to consider that I have come to rely upon the comforts of reliability to inform my museum going experience. My couple of hours spent in the galleries at MoMA were a reminder that  discomfort and being challenged were a large part of what brought me into this world years ago. In revitalizing the museum, the leadership at MoMA they have opened the door wide for rediscovery 

The Journal of Failure Vol. 1, by Fellow Traveler Jeff Krantz

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Jeff Krantz is a member of our White Collar Support Group that meets online on Zoom on Monday evenings. We will celebrate our 300th meeting on March 14, 2022, 7 pm ET, 4 pm PT.

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Reprinted from Medium, Feb. 18, 2022

“…They’ve got a name for the winners of the world, I want a name when I lose”

An Introduction

Even without wading too deeply into the sea of affirmational pablum that populates the internet, particularly that which lives on in the self-publishing platforms of Medium and Substack; the trend of couching one’s topic of choice, within a format of bullet-pointed, Panglossian optimism, is pervasive and appears to be the prevailing method of acquiring the number of readers necessary to give voice to one’s literary aspirations and maybe earn oneself a couple of bucks to supplement a day job’s wages to boot.

Admittedly I’ve based my observations above on an impossibly minuscule sample size that in no way should be mistaken for something that could be substantiated with any plausible, statistical credence. To be blunt, my conjecture is wrong. Wrong and easily disproven for any one who’d like to have a go. The research is perfunctory with enough factual truth to keep things on the rails. All in all, it’s a nice piece of writing that fails.

Most stories of failure that come over the transom, tend to be tales of those who have overcome impossible obstacles while bucking stiff odds. Defeat arises to amplify victory, mutating into validation; a banner of triumphant determination in the face of sacrifice. Stories of true failure are rendered quietly. The soundtrack of defeat lacks an orchestra. There is no moment of uplifting accompaniment. It’s a day-by-day grind, that eventually wears smooth.

Failure stands in stubborn opposition to articles like: “Grit is a Key Ingredient for Success”

Over the past ten years I have frequently been wrong and wronged, both mundanely and spectacularly. Much of my experience, whether voluntarily or compelled, has been re-examined as anecdotes recounted to a predictable cast of recipients: family members, friends, lawyers, therapists, doctors, and support groups. All of whom, to a lesser or greater degree, have, seemingly, had only my best interests at heart. In my recountings of defeat, there have been moments of petty ridiculousness and those of life-altering tragedy. The implications of these stories have burrowed deeply within my mind; hibernating only now and again to deliver moments of occasional respite for my otherwise preoccupied mind. I hold no illusion that attempting to exorcise the collection of failures stored securely in the terrariums, bell jars and shadow boxes of my mind where such things are maintained and where I spend far too much time and where they occupy far too much space, will be a futile endeavor. Maybe I can reduce their footprint some, perhaps they’ll become a bit more subdued.

I don’t have a plan for this, the little corner of the self-publishing world that I appear to be claiming, but whatever it turns into, (if anything) I don’t foresee telling it in order, I will, however, try to to give enough context so you have some idea where you’ve landed in the narrative. I absolutely promise to leave out the punchy, bullet-pointed sentences and the optimistic promise that some aspect of your life can be resolved reading whatever I put forth in seven hundred and fifty words or so.

“In this the most dubious of worlds everything happens dubiously”

White Collar Support Group 300th Meeting Reflection – Jeff Krantz, NYC

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Jeff Krantz is a member of our White Collar Support Group that meets on Zoom on Monday evenings. We will celebrate our 300th meeting on March 14, 2022, 7 pm ET, 4 pm PT.

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I cleared the obligations of my prosecution five years prior to coming to the White Collar Support Group. I had navigated the legal aspects of the ordeal relatively successfully, receiving three years probation and having paid down my fine and restitution a month after my sentencing. Nonetheless, as time passed, I found myself becoming increasingly isolated and I struggled with navigating day-to-day life.

There are some Mondays when I’m running late and not particularly enthused about logging on to the weekly meeting. I rush to make dinner, get it on the table and log on by seven. Most nights I make it in time for “announcements and resource sharing”. Sometimes I don’t appear in my rectangle until the topic leader has started to speak. I’ll do an initial scan across my screen to see who’s on the call while I settle in for the next hour. In short order, my resistance has dissipated and I’ve become absorbed as the meeting proceeds. When new people introduce themselves, they identify where they reside in the process: whether they are  being investigated, soon to be sentenced, or are facing a report date. Often they are short of resources and information and  desperate for a life line that will give them some guidance on how to proceed forward. Others arrive better provisioned or they are past the legal mechanics of their ordeal. The bottom having come out from under their lives, they seek comradeship and guidance to cope with the long term fallout of their ill considered choices. The twenty to thirty or so participants who join the weekly group represents the continuum of experiences had by those engulfed in the realm of white collar crime. Each one at some point or another has either sought or gained the support of the group and similarly, purely in being present, each person showing up provides support and comfort to those who arrive at the group in need.

The meeting has wound down and Bill is speaking. As always, he’s a fount of information, delivered in a low-key, self-effacing manner. Sun-je, the last to speak, is tuned into the message of the night’s speaker, as he sums up the overall vibe of the evening. The session comes to a close, Jeff thanks everyone in attendance and reminds them of the Spiritual Urgent Care meeting on Thursday morning. It’s 8:15 and we all wave as one by one we disappear off of our respective screens.

Over the week, I text Jeff to see if he has some time to chat about a justice-related non-profit organization with a promising job opportunity and whose vetting process has proven to be challenging to navigate. We speak for a while later in the day and his counsel is pragmatic and helps to take some of the weight of the frustration off of my shoulders. Later in the week, Craig and I meet in Brooklyn for coffee. We both live in New York and have been talking about getting together to meet in person but I’ve also sought him out to get his advice on building a writing practice. Finally, I called M to talk about her plea.  She knows that the deal is fundamentally a good one but it bothers her that she doesn’t have an option but to take it. She knows that my circumstance was similar to hers and we spend 40 minutes or so venting about the unfairness of our respective situations with at least half of that time laughing at the absurdity of it all.

The week closes out with planning for next week’s meeting already having begun. Texts and emails fly steadily back and forth while queries and articles get posted up on Slack. The group is active throughout the week, riding atop the myriad crests and troughs of victories and setbacks. A steady flow of information keeps things moving irregularly, but undeniably forward, the inexorable benefit of people supporting each other, bringing us all a little more into ourselves. – Jeff Krantz, NYC

 

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White Collar Support Group 250th Meeting Reflections: Fellow Traveler Jeff Krantz, New York

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Jeff Krantz is a member of our White Collar Support Group that meets online on Zoom on Monday evenings. We will celebrate our 250th weekly meeting on Monday, March 29, 2021, 7 pm ET, 4 pm PT; all Fellow Travelers are invited.

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I met Jeff 5 years after I had pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud and two years after I cleared probation. I reached out to him as a result of having found myself heavily burdened by the implications that my conviction had placed upon me and my family.  There was no aspect of my life  which hadn’t been touched by my experience of being prosecuted by the government.  At a point  when I thought I would have put the ordeal of my conviction behind me, I found myself more confused, isolated and lost than ever.

In my initial conversation with Jeff I recounted the events leading to my conviction and described the details surrounding my present circumstances. Jeff was an astute and thoughtful listener who left space for me to  get through the story in my own time. His personal experience informed our conversation with compassion, empathy and understanding.It was, perhaps, the first time I had been able to recount the events without being asked to explain my thinking or justify my actions. I breathed a little more freely knowing that the person I was speaking to had first hand knowledge of what  I had been through.

Jeff suggested that I participate in the Monday night White Collar support group where I could engage with others who had become similarly embroiled in the criminal justice system and who were at various stages of processing their experiences. 

The weekly meeting is populated by a diverse group whose reliable wisdom, respite and thoughtful help,  informs each session.  Through their listening and the open sharing of their experiences  an alchemy of healing is evinced. 

Though I am still early to the group, I have found  it to be a supportive, welcoming environment from which I can begin to rebuild. 

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White Collar Week Podcast: An Evening with Our White Collar Support Group. The support group meeting on this podcast is different than most, because all of the 16 group members appearing have agreed to share their names, faces and very personal stories in an effort to reach out to individuals and families suffering in silence. All on the podcast are post-sentencing or back from prison. Watch on YouTube, Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and SoundCloud, link here.