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Absolute Return: Helping Hedge Funders Cope With Prison: A Q&A with the Director of Greenwich-Based Progressive Prison Ministries (2013), by Lawrence Delevingne

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

On May 13, Level Global Investors co-founder Anthony Chiasson was sentenced to more than six years in prison.

He’ll be joining a small but growing number of incarcerated hedge fund professionals thanks to the government’s aggressive prosecution of insider trading cases. Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam is serving an 11 year prison sentence. FrontPoint Partners portfolio manager Chip Skowron is in for five years. SAC Capital Advisors PM Donald Longueuil is nearing the end of a 30-month term. 

They and others from the industry had elite legal help, but were they ready for life inside the big house? What type of personal transformation is possible once behind the razor wire? And is there anyone to help this relatively fortunate group? 

That’s where Jeff Grant comes in. As founder and director of Progressive Prison Ministries in Greenwich, Conn. and (former) head of prison ministries of the First Baptist Church in nearby Bridgeport, Grant has devoted his life to helping prisoners. While he has focused on poor communities, Grant has increasingly worked with people accused of white collar crimes, including hedge fund managers, in learning to cope with life in prison. 

Grant’s advice comes from personal experience. In 2006, he was sent to a low security federal prison for 14 months after pleading guilty to federal criminal fraud charges. A corporate lawyer, Grant operated an office in Mamaroneck, New York. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, he fraudulently claimed to have a Wall Street office that was hurt by a decline in business following the terrorist attacks in order to obtain a low-interest $247,000 loan under the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Economic Injury Disaster Loan program (he repaid the government $365,000 as part of his civil settlement, including penalties).

Grant is writing a book entitled “The Art of Surviving Prison” due out this fall. Absolute Return asked him about his work and how it relates to the hedge fund community. 

Absolute Return: How did you become involved in helping prisoners? 

Grant: The most obvious answer is that I served time in Federal prison for a white-collar crime, and I had to work my way through my own feelings of shame and remorse. This put me in touch with others’ feelings about these issues, too. Prison served as a time of transformation that influenced me to attend Union Theological Seminary and then to my calling in prison ministries. 

There are a few lessons about prison that I think might be helpful to hedge funders. It might be comforting to know that I never really felt threatened, but there was a big difference between not feeling threatened and the realization that prison could be a very dangerous place. I realized that I had a few things going for me in order to survive. First, I was old. At 48, I was older than most of the other inmates and was outside of my fellow inmates’ need for bragging rights. Second, I had a skill. Once word got out that I had been a lawyer, this was a highly sought after commodity, although I never accepted any money or favors. Third, I learned, albeit the hard way, that the best way to earn respect on the compound was to simply pay respect to everybody. Respect was the absolute most important thing in prison. It came in all kinds of shapes and sizes, and was expected in all kinds of ways in return. It was a wolf pack and I was the omega. 

I walked 3,500 miles around the exercise track in one year there. Whoever wanted to walk and talk with me could. It was a rich beautiful experience in a very stark and barren place. 

How did you begin working with hedge fund guys? 

It happened quite unexpectedly. I live in Greenwich, where there are many hedge funds, and word got around about my personal experience and my work in inner city prison ministry. I had been moonlighting in helping white-collar types on an ad hoc basis for years. Then one afternoon last year I received a call from the friend of a hedge fund manager who had less than five weeks before he was to report to Federal prison. Nobody had ever discussed with him and his family anything that they would need to survive the ordeal ahead. The three of us met together in a diner and it was eye opening because I realized a trend–there were a lot of white-collar families with little or no places to turn for experienced and compassionate support. 

I founded the Progressive Prison Project in Greenwich as a direct outgrowth of my inner city prison work at the First Baptist Church of Bridgeport, and as Vice Chairman of Family Reentry, a nonprofit serving the ex-offender community of Fairfield County – the disparity between how they the legal system treats the rich and the poor is a well documented issue. But I was also hearing these other stories about the isolation felt by people accused of white collar crimes, and the issues of their families who had done nothing wrong but were suffering scorn and ridicule in their communities. I felt that if I could bring people and stories of all communities closer together, everyone could benefit. 

I understand you can’t use names, but can you characterize those from the industry you’ve worked with and what their situations were? 

I am meeting with an ex-employee of a large Stamford-based hedge fund that’s been in the news a lot. He’s been notified as the target of an investigation, so it’s likely he’ll go to prison. Earlier preparedness is always a good thing. For him it was first things first: he needed assistance in finding substance abuse counseling for alcohol and drugs and a rehab program. There are marital concerns: whether his marriage will survive. That’s always the case, by the way. There are also some broader psychiatric issues. And last on the list is vocation. How is he going to make a living? How is he going to support his family? What are they going to do during the imprisonment? 

Another hedge funder, the guy I met with in the diner, told me that he had what he called an army of professionals and had everything covered. As the conversation unfolded it became clear that although the lawyering and many of the other professional pieces had been handled well, nobody had ever discussed with him, or his wife, how to survive the prison experience and then put their lives back together on the other side. 

I asked him, for example, if he understood that once he surrendered he would be a prisoner of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and that it was possible that he would be placed into the solitary unit for days or weeks before he was put on the main compound. Did his wife know how to track his movements if he was transferred to another prison? Did anybody prepare his wife for her first visit to the prison visiting room, so that she wasn’t sent home due to wearing the wrong clothing? Or because of incidental drug residue on her clothes or money she might bring in to buy him food in the vending machines? He looked dumbfounded. I suggested that he start taking notes. We called the waiter over and asked for a stack of place mats and a pen. We talked for the next four hours. 

What do you usually help them with? 

Mostly, I help with the isolation they experience from being cut off from their community, and from their inability to find any prison-related or other services to give them good, dependable information and support. It’s not their fault. There are actually many more criminal justice and prison ministry-type services available in communities like Bridgeport than there are in places like Greenwich. 

My basic advice is to mind your Ps and Qs. Be very respectful and manage your day pretty closely. There was one very well known hedge fund guy in particular who had a very gregarious personality. He decided he would be authentic to himself. It worked out great for him. In being authentic he was able to be friendly and engaging in a non-threatening and very real way. The things that made him successful in the hedge fund world actually made him so in prison. I wouldn’t say that would work for everybody, but his particular manner was not very threatening to begin with. It was very engaging. He was able to befriend everybody. He didn’t use wealth or power as his calling cards. He used humor and vulnerability. He was clearly in the midst of some sort of spiritual transformation that made him more vulnerable in a positive way. 

So being vulnerable can be an asset? 

It’s counterintuitive. In a minimum security prison, there’s a lower ratio of guards to prisoners. You actually have to be more aware of your surroundings. Everything is dramatized on TV. What happens in prison most of the time is very boring. You get to read a lot. But once in a while something happens that is outside of the ordinary where you have to pay a lot of attention to it. For those things you have to be prepared. And unfortunately in prison those things are way outside the ordinary.

What are some of those dangers? 

In a minimum security prison there are gangs. They are not allowed to rove or collect, yet they are there. It’s mostly for mutual protection. There’s generally no pressure to align with a gang when you show up. Outliers in terms of age or socioeconomic background are pretty much left alone. 

You can still do something wrong. It’s unfortunately easy to maintain an attitude of entitlement that wouldn’t be looked upon favorably. Bumped up against people of lesser economic circumstances could lead to an issue. It could be on the chow line. It can be getting a haircut. It can be at the infirmary. Anywhere people have to wait their turn and where they’re not doing that, for example. 

Once you draw attention to yourself, then you can get hurt. I’ve seen people get beat up. I’ve seen people get killed. I never saw a hedge funder or doctor or lawyer or stock broker get killed, but I did see gang members get killed in prison. And I was in a minimum security prison. It was the first time I had ever seen someone get killed in my life. So I help people understand that something like that can happen in a moment with no notice whatsoever. It’s terrifying. 

When people go to prison there’s kind of an egalitarianism that takes over and a relearning state where the things we were supposed to learn in kindergarten get relearned. Please and thank you. 

Respect in prison is mostly a matter of learning what not to say. It can be an incredibly counter-intuitive assignment for the types of people who become Wall Street executives. It is a real comeuppance when they learn that nobody cares about what they have to say about anything, or that if they do it can be for the wrong reasons. In one case, a former hedge funder made the mistake of talking about the sale of his Hamptons property. I think you can imagine some of the difficulties. 

Can they use their money to buy protection? 

Not that I know of. 

These guys must lose a ton of weight and get into shape, right? 

That’s generally true. I lost 60 pounds in prison. That was from my walking and a very specific daily regimen that I embraced. I did pushups and got to the point where I could do 75 in a row. I can only do 35 to 40 now. I’ve put back on a little of the weight [laughs]. 

How do Wall Street skills usually translate in prison? 

I assume by Wall Street skills you mean intellect, ambition, independence, wit, ability to form quick connections. These skills are not only in large degree useless, they are probably counterproductive. More useful are concepts like respect, restraint, care, self-care, compassion, community, transformation, and spirituality. If I had to choose one to remember in prison as I mentioned above, it would begin and end with respect. Of course, respect in prison means something quite different than in a world where people got mostly everything they wanted. 

Here’s my story about how I learned respect in prison: One night, when I was only there about three weeks or so, I was lying on my bunk with a pillow on my face just trying to get some sleep. Or some quiet. Three Latinos were holding a conference of some sort right outside the entrance of our cube. It sounded like they were screaming and yelling at one another. I couldn’t take it so I sat up in bed and screamed for them to “shut the f–k up.” Of course they ignored me. I was lucky that was the end of it. My cellie was sitting on his bunk and stared me down before he asked me if I was trying to get myself killed. I just stared back at him. I told him I couldn’t take the screaming anymore. He looked at me and calmly explained to me that those Latinos were

people. Instead of screaming, he suggested that if I simply peaked my head into the hall and asked them politely to keep it down, or move their meeting to another location, they probably would have obliged.

Are there parallels between your work with those from poorer communities in Connecticut, like Bridgeport, and wealthier ones, like Greenwich? 

The difference is in the communities, not in the people. Places like Bridgeport have an embodied experience of crime, criminal justice and prison. People there live with it in their midst and understand its intricacies. For some, there is no shame in being arrested or going to jail; it’s just part of the deal. In Greenwich, however, prison is so far from the daily life and experience. It’s like a deer getting caught in the headlights. I have found that the only way to minister to those suffering in Greenwich is to bring the two communities closer together so that the experiences and lessons learned by one can be of service to the other. That’s what makes the concept of The Progressive Prison Project so powerful. 

Here’s a piece of useful information that I picked up in Bridgeport that can make a huge quality of life difference immediately. When a hedge funder first gets to prison, his senses are likely to fail him to the point where he is likely forget his own address and phone numbers, and his family’s and friends’, too. Yet, in order to fill out phone call and visitor request forms, he will need all this information. What to do? A couple of days before he reports to prison, he can mail himself the names, addresses and phone numbers. Prison may be a difficult place, but they have to deliver the mail. Brilliant. 

Any other tips? 

Maintenance of a solid long term address and home is important. When it’s time to be released from prison, you have to get released to a home. The problem is that life goes by for the family on the outside. Typically the hedge fund guy in prison isn’t in control of what happens on the outside: the family moves, children get married. If there’s an ability to control one stable piece for as long as that person is in prison, say an apartment–something–then he’s likely to have stable place to come home to which will ease the way for him to be released early and be able to come home early. If a hedge fund guy lives in Connecticut, goes to prison in Pennsylvania, and his wife moves to California, it’s very difficult to get early supervised release because he doesn’t have a place to come home to in his home state. These are issues that can be considered in advance. 

They need advice on getting family in to see you without getting turned away from the visiting room line. It’s not an easy thing to know before you go through it. For example, if females are wearing undergarments with wire bras, they will be thrown off the visiting line and sent away. The metal detector will detect it. It could be perceived as a dangerous object and they won’t check what it actually is. There’s also the drug scanner, which can be used randomly and detects micro amounts of various forms of drugs. You need new or recently washed clothing. Washing up. Not touching money. Not eating breakfast. Not anything where you might come into contact with something that has trace residues of drugs. Money contains huge amounts of trace residues of drugs. Literally when people come to visit they sleep overnight, they get washed up and go right to the line without touching anything and try and get through without these scanners picking up something that might incidentally be on their clothing. 

What do you hope for those from the hedge fund industry during their time in prison? 

Great leaders who have spent time in prison have written about two things they have been able to control: their bodies and attitudes, and their ability to help others. This has been absolutely true in my experience. It is my hope that anybody who is, or might be, heading to prison, uses their time wisely, as a time of great personal transformation in devoting part of each day to mind, body and spirit; and in commitment to helping others. 

What books do you recommend to these guys?

The seminal book for me was “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl. I also recommend “Letters and Papers from Prison” by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. If people can get through it, “The Gulag Archipelago” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Nelson Mandela’s “Long Walk to Freedom.” The hedge funds guys like all of them. I would rather they identify with the concept of captivity than the concept of being criminals. There’s a transformation within the captivity that they can embrace and learn and grow from if they choose to. Other people have. They don’t have to view themselves from the negative. 

Have you watched any significant transformations? 

I was called a few weeks ago by a former hedge funder I hadn’t met with in a couple of years. He looked like the weight of the world was off his shoulders, had lost thirty pounds, and had a smile ear to ear. He looked nothing like the guy I remembered. He told me that he had been to prison and wanted my help in finding a new career. Without the monkey on his back of his old life and former problems, he felt free. Now, he’s in school to become a drug counselor. 

That’s a noble goal for a lot of ex hedge funders, and it’s one of the professions that are open to them. I also know a hedge funder who has become a social worker. There are a lot of transformation stories. 

Maybe it’s a case of viewing the glass as half full, but almost all I see are great transformations. Stock brokers who are now drug counselors, atheists who have found God, absentee fathers who have renewed relationships with their children. Why not? Most white-collar criminals can’t go back to their old live and careers, so what choice do they really have? Why not embrace a completely new life, with new options and new opportunities? The most fortunate are those who figure out that their attempts to solve problems in isolation did not work, and that they no longer have to go it alone. They figure out that some of us have been there before them and are willing to help. I feel blessed to have these families in my life.

This interview was condensed and edited. 

Originally published in Hedge Fund Intelligence, May 20, 2013

 

Absolute Return: Helping Hedge Funders Cope With Prison: A Q&A with the Director of Greenwich-Based Progressive Prison Ministries (2013), by Lawrence Delevingne

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

On May 13, Level Global Investors co-founder Anthony Chiasson was sentenced to more than six years in prison.

He’ll be joining a small but growing number of incarcerated hedge fund professionals thanks to the government’s aggressive prosecution of insider trading cases. Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam is serving an 11 year prison sentence. FrontPoint Partners portfolio manager Chip Skowron is in for five years. SAC Capital Advisors PM Donald Longueuil is nearing the end of a 30-month term. 

They and others from the industry had elite legal help, but were they ready for life inside the big house? What type of personal transformation is possible once behind the razor wire? And is there anyone to help this relatively fortunate group? 

That’s where Jeff Grant comes in. As founder and director of Progressive Prison Ministries in Greenwich, Conn. and (former) head of prison ministries of the First Baptist Church in nearby Bridgeport, Grant has devoted his life to helping prisoners. While he has focused on poor communities, Grant has increasingly worked with people accused of white collar crimes, including hedge fund managers, in learning to cope with life in prison. 

Grant’s advice comes from personal experience. In 2006, he was sent to a low security federal prison for 14 months after pleading guilty to federal criminal fraud charges. A corporate lawyer, Grant operated an office in Mamaroneck, New York. In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, he fraudulently claimed to have a Wall Street office that was hurt by a decline in business following the terrorist attacks in order to obtain a low-interest $247,000 loan under the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Economic Injury Disaster Loan program (he repaid the government $365,000 as part of his civil settlement, including penalties).

Grant is writing a book entitled “The Art of Surviving Prison” due out this fall. Absolute Return asked him about his work and how it relates to the hedge fund community. 

Absolute Return: How did you become involved in helping prisoners? 

Grant: The most obvious answer is that I served time in Federal prison for a white-collar crime, and I had to work my way through my own feelings of shame and remorse. This put me in touch with others’ feelings about these issues, too. Prison served as a time of transformation that influenced me to attend Union Theological Seminary and then to my calling in prison ministries. 

There are a few lessons about prison that I think might be helpful to hedge funders. It might be comforting to know that I never really felt threatened, but there was a big difference between not feeling threatened and the realization that prison could be a very dangerous place. I realized that I had a few things going for me in order to survive. First, I was old. At 48, I was older than most of the other inmates and was outside of my fellow inmates’ need for bragging rights. Second, I had a skill. Once word got out that I had been a lawyer, this was a highly sought after commodity, although I never accepted any money or favors. Third, I learned, albeit the hard way, that the best way to earn respect on the compound was to simply pay respect to everybody. Respect was the absolute most important thing in prison. It came in all kinds of shapes and sizes, and was expected in all kinds of ways in return. It was a wolf pack and I was the omega. 

I walked 3,500 miles around the exercise track in one year there. Whoever wanted to walk and talk with me could. It was a rich beautiful experience in a very stark and barren place. 

How did you begin working with hedge fund guys? 

It happened quite unexpectedly. I live in Greenwich, where there are many hedge funds, and word got around about my personal experience and my work in inner city prison ministry. I had been moonlighting in helping white-collar types on an ad hoc basis for years. Then one afternoon last year I received a call from the friend of a hedge fund manager who had less than five weeks before he was to report to Federal prison. Nobody had ever discussed with him and his family anything that they would need to survive the ordeal ahead. The three of us met together in a diner and it was eye opening because I realized a trend–there were a lot of white-collar families with little or no places to turn for experienced and compassionate support. 

I founded the Progressive Prison Project in Greenwich as a direct outgrowth of my inner city prison work at the First Baptist Church of Bridgeport, and as Vice Chairman of Family Reentry, a nonprofit serving the ex-offender community of Fairfield County – the disparity between how they the legal system treats the rich and the poor is a well documented issue. But I was also hearing these other stories about the isolation felt by people accused of white collar crimes, and the issues of their families who had done nothing wrong but were suffering scorn and ridicule in their communities. I felt that if I could bring people and stories of all communities closer together, everyone could benefit. 

I understand you can’t use names, but can you characterize those from the industry you’ve worked with and what their situations were? 

I am meeting with an ex-employee of a large Stamford-based hedge fund that’s been in the news a lot. He’s been notified as the target of an investigation, so it’s likely he’ll go to prison. Earlier preparedness is always a good thing. For him it was first things first: he needed assistance in finding substance abuse counseling for alcohol and drugs and a rehab program. There are marital concerns: whether his marriage will survive. That’s always the case, by the way. There are also some broader psychiatric issues. And last on the list is vocation. How is he going to make a living? How is he going to support his family? What are they going to do during the imprisonment? 

Another hedge funder, the guy I met with in the diner, told me that he had what he called an army of professionals and had everything covered. As the conversation unfolded it became clear that although the lawyering and many of the other professional pieces had been handled well, nobody had ever discussed with him, or his wife, how to survive the prison experience and then put their lives back together on the other side. 

I asked him, for example, if he understood that once he surrendered he would be a prisoner of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and that it was possible that he would be placed into the solitary unit for days or weeks before he was put on the main compound. Did his wife know how to track his movements if he was transferred to another prison? Did anybody prepare his wife for her first visit to the prison visiting room, so that she wasn’t sent home due to wearing the wrong clothing? Or because of incidental drug residue on her clothes or money she might bring in to buy him food in the vending machines? He looked dumbfounded. I suggested that he start taking notes. We called the waiter over and asked for a stack of place mats and a pen. We talked for the next four hours. 

What do you usually help them with? 

Mostly, I help with the isolation they experience from being cut off from their community, and from their inability to find any prison-related or other services to give them good, dependable information and support. It’s not their fault. There are actually many more criminal justice and prison ministry-type services available in communities like Bridgeport than there are in places like Greenwich. 

My basic advice is to mind your Ps and Qs. Be very respectful and manage your day pretty closely. There was one very well known hedge fund guy in particular who had a very gregarious personality. He decided he would be authentic to himself. It worked out great for him. In being authentic he was able to be friendly and engaging in a non-threatening and very real way. The things that made him successful in the hedge fund world actually made him so in prison. I wouldn’t say that would work for everybody, but his particular manner was not very threatening to begin with. It was very engaging. He was able to befriend everybody. He didn’t use wealth or power as his calling cards. He used humor and vulnerability. He was clearly in the midst of some sort of spiritual transformation that made him more vulnerable in a positive way. 

So being vulnerable can be an asset? 

It’s counterintuitive. In a minimum security prison, there’s a lower ratio of guards to prisoners. You actually have to be more aware of your surroundings. Everything is dramatized on TV. What happens in prison most of the time is very boring. You get to read a lot. But once in a while something happens that is outside of the ordinary where you have to pay a lot of attention to it. For those things you have to be prepared. And unfortunately in prison those things are way outside the ordinary.

What are some of those dangers? 

In a minimum security prison there are gangs. They are not allowed to rove or collect, yet they are there. It’s mostly for mutual protection. There’s generally no pressure to align with a gang when you show up. Outliers in terms of age or socioeconomic background are pretty much left alone. 

You can still do something wrong. It’s unfortunately easy to maintain an attitude of entitlement that wouldn’t be looked upon favorably. Bumped up against people of lesser economic circumstances could lead to an issue. It could be on the chow line. It can be getting a haircut. It can be at the infirmary. Anywhere people have to wait their turn and where they’re not doing that, for example. 

Once you draw attention to yourself, then you can get hurt. I’ve seen people get beat up. I’ve seen people get killed. I never saw a hedge funder or doctor or lawyer or stock broker get killed, but I did see gang members get killed in prison. And I was in a minimum security prison. It was the first time I had ever seen someone get killed in my life. So I help people understand that something like that can happen in a moment with no notice whatsoever. It’s terrifying. 

When people go to prison there’s kind of an egalitarianism that takes over and a relearning state where the things we were supposed to learn in kindergarten get relearned. Please and thank you. 

Respect in prison is mostly a matter of learning what not to say. It can be an incredibly counter-intuitive assignment for the types of people who become Wall Street executives. It is a real comeuppance when they learn that nobody cares about what they have to say about anything, or that if they do it can be for the wrong reasons. In one case, a former hedge funder made the mistake of talking about the sale of his Hamptons property. I think you can imagine some of the difficulties. 

Can they use their money to buy protection? 

Not that I know of. 

These guys must lose a ton of weight and get into shape, right? 

That’s generally true. I lost 60 pounds in prison. That was from my walking and a very specific daily regimen that I embraced. I did pushups and got to the point where I could do 75 in a row. I can only do 35 to 40 now. I’ve put back on a little of the weight [laughs]. 

How do Wall Street skills usually translate in prison? 

I assume by Wall Street skills you mean intellect, ambition, independence, wit, ability to form quick connections. These skills are not only in large degree useless, they are probably counterproductive. More useful are concepts like respect, restraint, care, self-care, compassion, community, transformation, and spirituality. If I had to choose one to remember in prison as I mentioned above, it would begin and end with respect. Of course, respect in prison means something quite different than in a world where people got mostly everything they wanted. 

Here’s my story about how I learned respect in prison: One night, when I was only there about three weeks or so, I was lying on my bunk with a pillow on my face just trying to get some sleep. Or some quiet. Three Latinos were holding a conference of some sort right outside the entrance of our cube. It sounded like they were screaming and yelling at one another. I couldn’t take it so I sat up in bed and screamed for them to “shut the f–k up.” Of course they ignored me. I was lucky that was the end of it. My cellie was sitting on his bunk and stared me down before he asked me if I was trying to get myself killed. I just stared back at him. I told him I couldn’t take the screaming anymore. He looked at me and calmly explained to me that those Latinos were

people. Instead of screaming, he suggested that if I simply peaked my head into the hall and asked them politely to keep it down, or move their meeting to another location, they probably would have obliged.

Are there parallels between your work with those from poorer communities in Connecticut, like Bridgeport, and wealthier ones, like Greenwich? 

The difference is in the communities, not in the people. Places like Bridgeport have an embodied experience of crime, criminal justice and prison. People there live with it in their midst and understand its intricacies. For some, there is no shame in being arrested or going to jail; it’s just part of the deal. In Greenwich, however, prison is so far from the daily life and experience. It’s like a deer getting caught in the headlights. I have found that the only way to minister to those suffering in Greenwich is to bring the two communities closer together so that the experiences and lessons learned by one can be of service to the other. That’s what makes the concept of The Progressive Prison Project so powerful. 

Here’s a piece of useful information that I picked up in Bridgeport that can make a huge quality of life difference immediately. When a hedge funder first gets to prison, his senses are likely to fail him to the point where he is likely forget his own address and phone numbers, and his family’s and friends’, too. Yet, in order to fill out phone call and visitor request forms, he will need all this information. What to do? A couple of days before he reports to prison, he can mail himself the names, addresses and phone numbers. Prison may be a difficult place, but they have to deliver the mail. Brilliant. 

Any other tips? 

Maintenance of a solid long term address and home is important. When it’s time to be released from prison, you have to get released to a home. The problem is that life goes by for the family on the outside. Typically the hedge fund guy in prison isn’t in control of what happens on the outside: the family moves, children get married. If there’s an ability to control one stable piece for as long as that person is in prison, say an apartment–something–then he’s likely to have stable place to come home to which will ease the way for him to be released early and be able to come home early. If a hedge fund guy lives in Connecticut, goes to prison in Pennsylvania, and his wife moves to California, it’s very difficult to get early supervised release because he doesn’t have a place to come home to in his home state. These are issues that can be considered in advance. 

They need advice on getting family in to see you without getting turned away from the visiting room line. It’s not an easy thing to know before you go through it. For example, if females are wearing undergarments with wire bras, they will be thrown off the visiting line and sent away. The metal detector will detect it. It could be perceived as a dangerous object and they won’t check what it actually is. There’s also the drug scanner, which can be used randomly and detects micro amounts of various forms of drugs. You need new or recently washed clothing. Washing up. Not touching money. Not eating breakfast. Not anything where you might come into contact with something that has trace residues of drugs. Money contains huge amounts of trace residues of drugs. Literally when people come to visit they sleep overnight, they get washed up and go right to the line without touching anything and try and get through without these scanners picking up something that might incidentally be on their clothing. 

What do you hope for those from the hedge fund industry during their time in prison? 

Great leaders who have spent time in prison have written about two things they have been able to control: their bodies and attitudes, and their ability to help others. This has been absolutely true in my experience. It is my hope that anybody who is, or might be, heading to prison, uses their time wisely, as a time of great personal transformation in devoting part of each day to mind, body and spirit; and in commitment to helping others. 

What books do you recommend to these guys?

The seminal book for me was “Man’s Search for Meaning” by Viktor Frankl. I also recommend “Letters and Papers from Prison” by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. If people can get through it, “The Gulag Archipelago” by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Nelson Mandela’s “Long Walk to Freedom.” The hedge funds guys like all of them. I would rather they identify with the concept of captivity than the concept of being criminals. There’s a transformation within the captivity that they can embrace and learn and grow from if they choose to. Other people have. They don’t have to view themselves from the negative. 

Have you watched any significant transformations? 

I was called a few weeks ago by a former hedge funder I hadn’t met with in a couple of years. He looked like the weight of the world was off his shoulders, had lost thirty pounds, and had a smile ear to ear. He looked nothing like the guy I remembered. He told me that he had been to prison and wanted my help in finding a new career. Without the monkey on his back of his old life and former problems, he felt free. Now, he’s in school to become a drug counselor. 

That’s a noble goal for a lot of ex hedge funders, and it’s one of the professions that are open to them. I also know a hedge funder who has become a social worker. There are a lot of transformation stories. 

Maybe it’s a case of viewing the glass as half full, but almost all I see are great transformations. Stock brokers who are now drug counselors, atheists who have found God, absentee fathers who have renewed relationships with their children. Why not? Most white-collar criminals can’t go back to their old live and careers, so what choice do they really have? Why not embrace a completely new life, with new options and new opportunities? The most fortunate are those who figure out that their attempts to solve problems in isolation did not work, and that they no longer have to go it alone. They figure out that some of us have been there before them and are willing to help. I feel blessed to have these families in my life.

This interview was condensed and edited. 

Originally published in Hedge Fund Intelligence, May 20, 2013

 

An Excerpt from the Book: "Down & Out in Greenwich, CT: An Insider's View of Opioid Addiction, Prison and the Road Back to the Boardroom," by Jeff Grant (Unpublished)

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I pulled on my sweatshirt and realized just how cold it was.  It was freezing down that end of the hall. Suburbia they called it.  It was the most sought after section of the unit.  Far from prying eyes.  Far from the glaring lights and acrid smells of the bathroom.  Far from the incessant screaming in the television room that could last until midnight.  But also far from the furnace that cranked out insufficient heat to make it down to that distant end of the unit on very cold Pennsylvania mornings.
Out the windows from my upper bunk I could see farmhouses in the distance, windows aglow with the soft light from their fireplaces.  The smoke rose from their chimneys in streams of white until it spread out into a haze mixing with the otherwise flawless starry sky.  The lights turned on one at a time with people that I imagined were awakening for all kinds of reasons.  It was Sunday, and they would be having big family breakfasts.  In a couple of hours they would be going off to church.  This was Amish and Mennonite country, so maybe they would be driving horse drawn carriages to church.  Route 15, the other roads and the churches were not visible to us – they were purposefully hidden around bends in hills and mountains apart from our eyes.  Or, more likely, we were purposefully hidden away from theirs.  The mountains stretched as far as my eyes could see.  In some ways, it was the loveliest spot I’d ever seen. Two mountain ranges on either side of the valley made a majestic backdrop every time a storm rolled in, or as jets flew overhead.  I could time the jets as they flew westward in the mornings, full of businessmen and their promise of glory for the day.  And as they flew home again in the evening, on wings of victory or perhaps empty disappointment.  I dreamt about flying home too.  Or about life as it was before.
I knew I had very little time to spare – maybe an hour to write my letters before the others woke up and needed to share my space by the window at the end of the hall.  First it was the yoga and stretching guys who went through their exercises quietly.  They laid down towels and engaged in an incredibly disciplined daily routine.  It was all about routine there as I’d learned and mine was no exception.  Everyday was like every other day – it was what kept us sane.  Kept me sane.  They say that the hardest parts of a prison bid are the beginning and the end, and this was certainly true for me.  The middle was just a string of Groundhog Days – each day pretty much like the next.  So much so that anything that interfered was an unwelcome distraction.  
After the exercise guys came the Muslims who needed room at the end of the hall to lay down their prayer mats.  The window was on the eastern wall.  Their purpose trumped mine so each morning I silently retreated and gave them their space.  They prayed five times a day, the first time at the end of the hall at about 5:30 in the morning.  Their seven or eight colorful mats tucked close together were a stark contrast to the dull, drab and dark hall.  Shoulder to shoulder they bowed and prayed in unison.  In five minutes’ time they were finished and the hall was mine again. 
Everything was on prison time – so the exercise guys, the Muslims and I had to adjust our schedules to fit the institution clock.  When the doors opened at 6 a.m. for breakfast, we all had to be ready.  The doors waited for nobody.  The prison was on controlled movements, which meant that the doors of the unit opened at the bottom of the hour for ten minutes, except for mealtimes when the doors stayed open until the meal was over.  There were paths to cross the compound to get to the other buildings, such as the library, recreation, dining hall and commissary.  We had ten minutes to get to the other side.  If we were late, or got caught in the compound when the doors closed, we were likely brought to the Head Lieutenant’s office.  From there, it was his decision whether or not we would be thrown into the SHU – the Segregated Housing Unit. Solitary Confinement.
_________________________________
I spent some time in the SHU when I first arrived at Allenwood.   I reported on Easter Sunday, 2006 – none were too pleased to process an intake on Easter Sunday.  But my sentencing judge had ordered me to self-surrender at the prison on that day.  My friends Tom and Alexis had driven me out to Central Pennsylvania from Connecticut.  It was a nice relaxed car ride – I spoke to my kids and some friends on the way.  We had some laughs and a cry or two.  We pulled over in a cornfield across the street from the prison complex to share a prayer together.  I certainly wasn’t a religious person at the time, but my four years in Alcoholics Anonymous were percolating with every prayer we could muster just about then.  Across the street the complex was huge.  There were four prisons inside the gates of the outer complex – had guard towers and patrol cars.  The low security prison to which I was designated was toward the outside – it was staring right at us.  Nothing looked particularly “low” about it.  It had two fences with sets of razor wire circling it.  As we drove inside, I got that tingling, vertigo-type feeling in the back of my knees that I get whenever I get to close to something dangerous.
The building was mildly attractive, as was the entire complex.  It looked kind of like the Long Island Railroad station where I grew up in Merrick, Long Island.  It was Arts & crafts style, made out of cement block and lots of metal – a 1970’s design concept that somehow looked more modern then than when it was built.  We walked into the lobby and I gave my name kind of like I was checking in to a hotel.  Tom and I were asked to have a seat.  About fifteen minutes later a guard came out and asked me what I was doing there on Easter Sunday.  I showed him my court orders – he did not look happy.  Nonetheless, he was pleasant as he asked Tom to leave.  I hugged Tom good-bye and went with the guard as then escorted me through a metal door.  From one moment to the next my life changed forever.
As we went through the door he spun me around, held my hands behind my back and slapped handcuffs on them.  I had been anticipating this moment for over a year and not once did I consider that I would have to be handcuffed.  At that moment I had my first inkling of how little I knew about surviving in prison – and what a naïve I guy I really was.  I was escorted to a bulletproof glass teller’s cage behind which was a guard who asked me for my “register number.”  I had no idea what that was – I’d never heard that term before.  He asked me for it again and when I didn’t know he came out and taped a number on my clothes.  That was my Federal Bureau of Prisons register number, and it became my identity for the next fourteen months.
I was next brought to a section called R & D – Receiving & Discharge – and it felt very much like its title – a place for FedEx packages.  I was processed and then told to strip naked. They took all my clothes and put them in a box to ship back home.  While I was standing naked in this cold room, on a cold cement floor, a man entered who I would later learn was the Head Lieutenant.  He basically ran the day-to-day operations of the prison.  He looked me up and down, and then asked me if I was the lawyer.  I told him no, but that I used to be one.  He seemed pleased with that answer.  He then told me that there were 1500 men on his compound, and I was to be the only lawyer.  There were some jailhouse lawyers working out of the library. He told me that I’d have no problems on his compound if I stayed out of other people’s legal business and I took no money or favors from another inmate.  He told me that I was a short-stayer and he suggested I just do my time and go home without a problem.  He asked me what I thought of that?  I was standing there naked.  I told him that making a few dollars from other inmates was the last thing on my mind.  We got along famously.
Soon, I was given an orange jump suit to put on, re-cuffed and was marched across the compound to the SHU.  It was a time-honored tradition at Allenwood to hoot and holler at new inductees as they were being led through the compound to the SHU on their first day.  I certainly didn’t understand why people were hollering at me.  The guards never told me where I was going or why.  As I later learned, the only information I ever get in prison was from the other inmates, and I couldn’t believe half of that. So working through the information process was basically sifting through, trying to get “reliable” resources, and hoping that where they got their information was reliable too.  As the saying went, in prison believe none of what you hear and half of what you see.  That afternoon, I was a guy in an orange jump suit walking across a prison yard trying to rely upon some of my senses that were failing me rapidly.
When I got to the SHU, it looked like something out of the worst prison movie I had ever seen – it was dark and dimly lit, with rows of metal doors with tiny holes in them.  I was put in a rubber lined holding cell, re-stripped and re-searched.  I guess when they were satisfied that I hadn’t picked up any weapons or contraband in the 300-foot walk from R & D I was brought to a small cell and led inside.  I was never told where I was or why I was there.  I didn’t know if this was what the entire prison was like, if it was a holding area, or how long I would be there.  I was just put in the cell.  Inside the cell was a narrow bunk bed – barely wide enough for a grown man’s shoulders – a combination toilet and sink, a desk and a chair.  And there I met my first cellie – a black man, around 50 years old, with dreadlocks down to his waist.  When I came in, he didn’t smile, didn’t acknowledge my presence at all.  He just pointed to the upper bunk.  I understood – that was mine.
His first words came about ten minutes later when he told me to move fast.  The sound of a cart moving down the hall meant we had no time to lose.  The slot on the metal cell door opened, kind of fell down to the hallway side with a big clang, and quickly, very quickly, four covered trays of food slid in through the slot.  I understood what he meant by moving fast.  If we didn’t catch the trays they would have dropped to the ground and the food would have spilled all over. He caught each tray and quickly handed them to me. I put them on the desk. We sat on the floor, dividing the dinner between us.  I had already decided that I was going to lose the forty pounds I had put on in the months I was waiting to go to prison.  I looked in the trays, and saw there was a little meat of some sort, and lots of bread, potatoes and rice. Starches were apparently the mainstay of the diet – I asked him if he wanted my potatoes and rice.  We became friends in no time.  His name was Raoul.
Almost everybody who came to Allenwood was first brought to the SHU, Raoul explained.  The party line was that they were waiting for a bed to open on the compound, and I found that might have been true to a large extent.  The prison was very crowded, much more crowded than what it was designed for.  So the SHU was used for extra beds.  It’s one reason we didn’t want to be disciplined by a guard – they had an incentive to give our beds on the compound to someone whose been waiting in the SHU for a month.  And it was a way of soothing the savage beasts.  Inmates were being transported from to and from other prisons – sometimes they were on the road for as much a ninety days.  It was called diesel therapy.  In each stop they would get put into a SHU and not into general population.  There was no way to know how long I’d be in the SHU, but Raoul suspected that I wouldn’t have to wait long: first timer, middle age, and most importantly, white.   I later learned that some inmates are kept in the SHU “waiting for a bed” thirty days or longer.  I only had to wait 16 hours before I was released onto the compound.
I was shoved out the door of the SHU without any other instructions than to report directly to the laundry.  It was about nine o’clock in the morning, bright daylight, and my eyes were trying to refocus after having been in a dungeon for the past day or so.  The light was blinding.  I was wandering around in a completely empty compound – there was not a single soul it in except me.  I had no idea that the compound was closed, what that meant, where I was or where the laundry was located.  Of course, my orange jumpsuit was a dead give away that I was coming from the SHU and heading to the laundry.  Where else would a guy in an orange jumpsuit be heading?  A guard was kind enough to point enough to point me in the right direction – I think it was through a bullhorn.
The laundry was located at the far end of the compound, next to the commissary and dining hall.  Once I got the lay of the land, which took me awhile, the layout of the prison kind of made sense.  Things that needed to have loading docks and daily deliveries were grouped together.  They were also strategically located close to trash receptacles.  I had a lot of time to think about these things.  
I got to the laundry and knocked on the big metal industrial door – my big rap was much louder than I intended.  The door opened a sliver and a head popped out to tell me that I would have to wait for the move before I could gain entry.  I had no idea what that meant, but after the door closed there was no way that I was going to knock on that door again.  In about fifteen minutes, a siren went off and people started scurrying around all over the place.  This, I understood, was the move.  The door popped open, I stepped inside and I was first in line.  I presented the clerk with the papers I had been given in the SHU – he sized me up for a uniform, t-shirts, shoes, a laundry bag, duffel, sheets, blanket, towels, a soap kit, and just about everything I would need to make my stay at Allenwood complete.  Labels were ironed onto the front of my uniforms.   I was told to try everything on because once issued, I was stuck with it.  I looked like Gomer Pyle, the shoes hurt already.  But who was I to complain?  This was not a fashion show.
At the next move, I threw my duffel over my shoulder and followed the clerk’s instructions to report to my unit that was, of course, the farthest one on the other side of the compound.  As I passed each unit, it appeared to me that they were named after counties or towns in Pennsylvania – a nice touch.  I arrived at my unit in under ten minutes – Union A.  I walked in the front door and came upon a lot of hustle and bustle.  The guard station was right up in front.  I presented my papers to the guard who looked me up and down, checked my register number and then showed me to an empty upper bunk in Cube 25. 
Union A, Cube 25, Upper Bunk would be home for the next thirteen and a half months.
___________________________

About Down & Out in Greenwich: An “Insider’s” View of Opioid Addiction, Prison and the Road Back to the Boardroom, by Jeff Grant:

 
Redemption stories make good copy. They become even more riveting when about your friends, neighbors, parents in your children’s schools and community members whose actions and addictions cross the line…morally, ethically and legally…until that one miserable day when luck and privilege run out.
Down & Out in Greenwich is not just a redemption story. It’s also a story about surviving, succeeding and finding purpose in the most difficult of life’s circumstances – and the universality of these lessons that can be applied to our own lives.
It is a page-turning account of one man’s epic downfall as he went from ultra-successful family-man, to good guy gone astray through addiction to drugs and alcohol, to disgraced white-collar criminal, to disbarred Jewish lawyer, to the loss of career, home, marriage, family, friends, income, reputation and everything he had known and cared about, to suicide attempt, to incarceration in a barbed-wire, Federal prison as a no-name, numbered prisoner…
But that’s where the story of his old life ends and his new life begins!
…to a life of humility and humanity earning a Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary in NYC, to his calling as a minister in all-black church in a rough neighborhood in Bridgeport CT, to founding in Greenwich CT the first ministry in the country created to provide support and counseling to individuals and families with white-collar incarceration issues, to becoming the first person in the U.S. formerly incarcerated for a white-collar crime to be appointed as CEO of a major criminal justice nonprofit.
Down & Out in Greenwich is poised to be one of the most compelling, no-holds-barred, uplifting and inspiring non-fiction books to come along in a great while.
This book serves as the basis for a long overdue conversation about remorse, retribution and redemption. Then it goes one step further to that middle place that the author calls “the place were the first life ends,” the paralyzing pause that people find themselves in during the aftermath of divorce, the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, the crushing last blow of an alcohol or drug addiction, poor decisions, financial ruin, jail time and more. The place where people mourn the past and fear the future. The place where we need to learn acceptance. The place that’s exactly where we need to be before we can move forward to a new life of happiness, abundance, purpose and dignity.
Want to discuss? Please feel free to email Jeff at [email protected].
Click here to read Jeff’s article, “After Trauma: The Time for Spiritual Growth.”
______________________________
Rev. Jeff Grant, J.D., M.Div. is an ordained minister with extensive experience in crisis management, business, law, reentry, recovery (clean & sober 16+ years), and executive & religious leadership. Sometimes referred to in the press as “The Minister to Hedge Funders,” he uses his experience and background to guide people faithfully forward in their lives, relationships, careers and business opportunities, and to help them to stop making the kinds of decisions that previously resulted in loss, suffering and shame.
After an addiction to prescription opioids and serving almost fourteen months in a Federal prison for a white-collar crime he committed when he was a lawyer, Jeff started his own reentry – earning a Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York with a focus in Christian Social Ethics. He is Co-Founder of Progressive Prison Ministries, Inc., the world’s first ministry created to support individuals, families and organizations with white collar and other nonviolent incarceration issues, and is the first person in the United States formerly incarcerated for a white collar crime to be appointed as CEO of a major criminal justice organization. Jeff has been selected as a 2019 Collegeville Institute Writing Fellow.

Link to Jeff’s full bio here.

An Excerpt from the Book: “Down & Out in Greenwich, CT: An Insider’s View of Opioid Addiction, Prison and the Road Back to the Boardroom,” by Jeff Grant (Unpublished)

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I pulled on my sweatshirt and realized just how cold it was.  It was freezing down that end of the hall. Suburbia they called it.  It was the most sought after section of the unit.  Far from prying eyes.  Far from the glaring lights and acrid smells of the bathroom.  Far from the incessant screaming in the television room that could last until midnight.  But also far from the furnace that cranked out insufficient heat to make it down to that distant end of the unit on very cold Pennsylvania mornings.

Out the windows from my upper bunk I could see farmhouses in the distance, windows aglow with the soft light from their fireplaces.  The smoke rose from their chimneys in streams of white until it spread out into a haze mixing with the otherwise flawless starry sky.  The lights turned on one at a time with people that I imagined were awakening for all kinds of reasons.  It was Sunday, and they would be having big family breakfasts.  In a couple of hours they would be going off to church.  This was Amish and Mennonite country, so maybe they would be driving horse drawn carriages to church.  Route 15, the other roads and the churches were not visible to us – they were purposefully hidden around bends in hills and mountains apart from our eyes.  Or, more likely, we were purposefully hidden away from theirs.  The mountains stretched as far as my eyes could see.  In some ways, it was the loveliest spot I’d ever seen. Two mountain ranges on either side of the valley made a majestic backdrop every time a storm rolled in, or as jets flew overhead.  I could time the jets as they flew westward in the mornings, full of businessmen and their promise of glory for the day.  And as they flew home again in the evening, on wings of victory or perhaps empty disappointment.  I dreamt about flying home too.  Or about life as it was before.

I knew I had very little time to spare – maybe an hour to write my letters before the others woke up and needed to share my space by the window at the end of the hall.  First it was the yoga and stretching guys who went through their exercises quietly.  They laid down towels and engaged in an incredibly disciplined daily routine.  It was all about routine there as I’d learned and mine was no exception.  Everyday was like every other day – it was what kept us sane.  Kept me sane.  They say that the hardest parts of a prison bid are the beginning and the end, and this was certainly true for me.  The middle was just a string of Groundhog Days – each day pretty much like the next.  So much so that anything that interfered was an unwelcome distraction.  

After the exercise guys came the Muslims who needed room at the end of the hall to lay down their prayer mats.  The window was on the eastern wall.  Their purpose trumped mine so each morning I silently retreated and gave them their space.  They prayed five times a day, the first time at the end of the hall at about 5:30 in the morning.  Their seven or eight colorful mats tucked close together were a stark contrast to the dull, drab and dark hall.  Shoulder to shoulder they bowed and prayed in unison.  In five minutes’ time they were finished and the hall was mine again. 

Everything was on prison time – so the exercise guys, the Muslims and I had to adjust our schedules to fit the institution clock.  When the doors opened at 6 a.m. for breakfast, we all had to be ready.  The doors waited for nobody.  The prison was on controlled movements, which meant that the doors of the unit opened at the bottom of the hour for ten minutes, except for mealtimes when the doors stayed open until the meal was over.  There were paths to cross the compound to get to the other buildings, such as the library, recreation, dining hall and commissary.  We had ten minutes to get to the other side.  If we were late, or got caught in the compound when the doors closed, we were likely brought to the Head Lieutenant’s office.  From there, it was his decision whether or not we would be thrown into the SHU – the Segregated Housing Unit. Solitary Confinement.

_________________________________

I spent some time in the SHU when I first arrived at Allenwood.   I reported on Easter Sunday, 2006 – none were too pleased to process an intake on Easter Sunday.  But my sentencing judge had ordered me to self-surrender at the prison on that day.  My friends Tom and Alexis had driven me out to Central Pennsylvania from Connecticut.  It was a nice relaxed car ride – I spoke to my kids and some friends on the way.  We had some laughs and a cry or two.  We pulled over in a cornfield across the street from the prison complex to share a prayer together.  I certainly wasn’t a religious person at the time, but my four years in Alcoholics Anonymous were percolating with every prayer we could muster just about then.  Across the street the complex was huge.  There were four prisons inside the gates of the outer complex – had guard towers and patrol cars.  The low security prison to which I was designated was toward the outside – it was staring right at us.  Nothing looked particularly “low” about it.  It had two fences with sets of razor wire circling it.  As we drove inside, I got that tingling, vertigo-type feeling in the back of my knees that I get whenever I get to close to something dangerous.

The building was mildly attractive, as was the entire complex.  It looked kind of like the Long Island Railroad station where I grew up in Merrick, Long Island.  It was Arts & crafts style, made out of cement block and lots of metal – a 1970’s design concept that somehow looked more modern then than when it was built.  We walked into the lobby and I gave my name kind of like I was checking in to a hotel.  Tom and I were asked to have a seat.  About fifteen minutes later a guard came out and asked me what I was doing there on Easter Sunday.  I showed him my court orders – he did not look happy.  Nonetheless, he was pleasant as he asked Tom to leave.  I hugged Tom good-bye and went with the guard as then escorted me through a metal door.  From one moment to the next my life changed forever.

As we went through the door he spun me around, held my hands behind my back and slapped handcuffs on them.  I had been anticipating this moment for over a year and not once did I consider that I would have to be handcuffed.  At that moment I had my first inkling of how little I knew about surviving in prison – and what a naïve I guy I really was.  I was escorted to a bulletproof glass teller’s cage behind which was a guard who asked me for my “register number.”  I had no idea what that was – I’d never heard that term before.  He asked me for it again and when I didn’t know he came out and taped a number on my clothes.  That was my Federal Bureau of Prisons register number, and it became my identity for the next fourteen months.

I was next brought to a section called R & D – Receiving & Discharge – and it felt very much like its title – a place for FedEx packages.  I was processed and then told to strip naked. They took all my clothes and put them in a box to ship back home.  While I was standing naked in this cold room, on a cold cement floor, a man entered who I would later learn was the Head Lieutenant.  He basically ran the day-to-day operations of the prison.  He looked me up and down, and then asked me if I was the lawyer.  I told him no, but that I used to be one.  He seemed pleased with that answer.  He then told me that there were 1500 men on his compound, and I was to be the only lawyer.  There were some jailhouse lawyers working out of the library. He told me that I’d have no problems on his compound if I stayed out of other people’s legal business and I took no money or favors from another inmate.  He told me that I was a short-stayer and he suggested I just do my time and go home without a problem.  He asked me what I thought of that?  I was standing there naked.  I told him that making a few dollars from other inmates was the last thing on my mind.  We got along famously.

Soon, I was given an orange jump suit to put on, re-cuffed and was marched across the compound to the SHU.  It was a time-honored tradition at Allenwood to hoot and holler at new inductees as they were being led through the compound to the SHU on their first day.  I certainly didn’t understand why people were hollering at me.  The guards never told me where I was going or why.  As I later learned, the only information I ever get in prison was from the other inmates, and I couldn’t believe half of that. So working through the information process was basically sifting through, trying to get “reliable” resources, and hoping that where they got their information was reliable too.  As the saying went, in prison believe none of what you hear and half of what you see.  That afternoon, I was a guy in an orange jump suit walking across a prison yard trying to rely upon some of my senses that were failing me rapidly.

When I got to the SHU, it looked like something out of the worst prison movie I had ever seen – it was dark and dimly lit, with rows of metal doors with tiny holes in them.  I was put in a rubber lined holding cell, re-stripped and re-searched.  I guess when they were satisfied that I hadn’t picked up any weapons or contraband in the 300-foot walk from R & D I was brought to a small cell and led inside.  I was never told where I was or why I was there.  I didn’t know if this was what the entire prison was like, if it was a holding area, or how long I would be there.  I was just put in the cell.  Inside the cell was a narrow bunk bed – barely wide enough for a grown man’s shoulders – a combination toilet and sink, a desk and a chair.  And there I met my first cellie – a black man, around 50 years old, with dreadlocks down to his waist.  When I came in, he didn’t smile, didn’t acknowledge my presence at all.  He just pointed to the upper bunk.  I understood – that was mine.

His first words came about ten minutes later when he told me to move fast.  The sound of a cart moving down the hall meant we had no time to lose.  The slot on the metal cell door opened, kind of fell down to the hallway side with a big clang, and quickly, very quickly, four covered trays of food slid in through the slot.  I understood what he meant by moving fast.  If we didn’t catch the trays they would have dropped to the ground and the food would have spilled all over. He caught each tray and quickly handed them to me. I put them on the desk. We sat on the floor, dividing the dinner between us.  I had already decided that I was going to lose the forty pounds I had put on in the months I was waiting to go to prison.  I looked in the trays, and saw there was a little meat of some sort, and lots of bread, potatoes and rice. Starches were apparently the mainstay of the diet – I asked him if he wanted my potatoes and rice.  We became friends in no time.  His name was Raoul.

Almost everybody who came to Allenwood was first brought to the SHU, Raoul explained.  The party line was that they were waiting for a bed to open on the compound, and I found that might have been true to a large extent.  The prison was very crowded, much more crowded than what it was designed for.  So the SHU was used for extra beds.  It’s one reason we didn’t want to be disciplined by a guard – they had an incentive to give our beds on the compound to someone whose been waiting in the SHU for a month.  And it was a way of soothing the savage beasts.  Inmates were being transported from to and from other prisons – sometimes they were on the road for as much a ninety days.  It was called diesel therapy.  In each stop they would get put into a SHU and not into general population.  There was no way to know how long I’d be in the SHU, but Raoul suspected that I wouldn’t have to wait long: first timer, middle age, and most importantly, white.   I later learned that some inmates are kept in the SHU “waiting for a bed” thirty days or longer.  I only had to wait 16 hours before I was released onto the compound.

I was shoved out the door of the SHU without any other instructions than to report directly to the laundry.  It was about nine o’clock in the morning, bright daylight, and my eyes were trying to refocus after having been in a dungeon for the past day or so.  The light was blinding.  I was wandering around in a completely empty compound – there was not a single soul it in except me.  I had no idea that the compound was closed, what that meant, where I was or where the laundry was located.  Of course, my orange jumpsuit was a dead give away that I was coming from the SHU and heading to the laundry.  Where else would a guy in an orange jumpsuit be heading?  A guard was kind enough to point enough to point me in the right direction – I think it was through a bullhorn.

The laundry was located at the far end of the compound, next to the commissary and dining hall.  Once I got the lay of the land, which took me awhile, the layout of the prison kind of made sense.  Things that needed to have loading docks and daily deliveries were grouped together.  They were also strategically located close to trash receptacles.  I had a lot of time to think about these things.  

I got to the laundry and knocked on the big metal industrial door – my big rap was much louder than I intended.  The door opened a sliver and a head popped out to tell me that I would have to wait for the move before I could gain entry.  I had no idea what that meant, but after the door closed there was no way that I was going to knock on that door again.  In about fifteen minutes, a siren went off and people started scurrying around all over the place.  This, I understood, was the move.  The door popped open, I stepped inside and I was first in line.  I presented the clerk with the papers I had been given in the SHU – he sized me up for a uniform, t-shirts, shoes, a laundry bag, duffel, sheets, blanket, towels, a soap kit, and just about everything I would need to make my stay at Allenwood complete.  Labels were ironed onto the front of my uniforms.   I was told to try everything on because once issued, I was stuck with it.  I looked like Gomer Pyle, the shoes hurt already.  But who was I to complain?  This was not a fashion show.

At the next move, I threw my duffel over my shoulder and followed the clerk’s instructions to report to my unit that was, of course, the farthest one on the other side of the compound.  As I passed each unit, it appeared to me that they were named after counties or towns in Pennsylvania – a nice touch.  I arrived at my unit in under ten minutes – Union A.  I walked in the front door and came upon a lot of hustle and bustle.  The guard station was right up in front.  I presented my papers to the guard who looked me up and down, checked my register number and then showed me to an empty upper bunk in Cube 25. 

Union A, Cube 25, Upper Bunk would be home for the next thirteen and a half months.

___________________________

About Down & Out in Greenwich: An “Insider’s” View of Opioid Addiction, Prison and the Road Back to the Boardroom, by Jeff Grant:

 

Redemption stories make good copy. They become even more riveting when about your friends, neighbors, parents in your children’s schools and community members whose actions and addictions cross the line…morally, ethically and legally…until that one miserable day when luck and privilege run out.

Down & Out in Greenwich is not just a redemption story. It’s also a story about surviving, succeeding and finding purpose in the most difficult of life’s circumstances – and the universality of these lessons that can be applied to our own lives.

It is a page-turning account of one man’s epic downfall as he went from ultra-successful family-man, to good guy gone astray through addiction to drugs and alcohol, to disgraced white-collar criminal, to disbarred Jewish lawyer, to the loss of career, home, marriage, family, friends, income, reputation and everything he had known and cared about, to suicide attempt, to incarceration in a barbed-wire, Federal prison as a no-name, numbered prisoner…

But that’s where the story of his old life ends and his new life begins!

…to a life of humility and humanity earning a Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary in NYC, to his calling as a minister in all-black church in a rough neighborhood in Bridgeport CT, to founding in Greenwich CT the first ministry in the country created to provide support and counseling to individuals and families with white-collar incarceration issues, to becoming the first person in the U.S. formerly incarcerated for a white-collar crime to be appointed as CEO of a major criminal justice nonprofit.

Down & Out in Greenwich is poised to be one of the most compelling, no-holds-barred, uplifting and inspiring non-fiction books to come along in a great while.

This book serves as the basis for a long overdue conversation about remorse, retribution and redemption. Then it goes one step further to that middle place that the author calls “the place were the first life ends,” the paralyzing pause that people find themselves in during the aftermath of divorce, the death of a loved one, the loss of a job, the crushing last blow of an alcohol or drug addiction, poor decisions, financial ruin, jail time and more. The place where people mourn the past and fear the future. The place where we need to learn acceptance. The place that’s exactly where we need to be before we can move forward to a new life of happiness, abundance, purpose and dignity.

Want to discuss? Please feel free to email Jeff at [email protected].

Click here to read Jeff’s article, “After Trauma: The Time for Spiritual Growth.”

______________________________

Rev. Jeff Grant, J.D., M.Div. is an ordained minister with extensive experience in crisis management, business, law, reentry, recovery (clean & sober 16+ years), and executive & religious leadership. Sometimes referred to in the press as “The Minister to Hedge Funders,” he uses his experience and background to guide people faithfully forward in their lives, relationships, careers and business opportunities, and to help them to stop making the kinds of decisions that previously resulted in loss, suffering and shame.

After an addiction to prescription opioids and serving almost fourteen months in a Federal prison for a white-collar crime he committed when he was a lawyer, Jeff started his own reentry – earning a Master of Divinity from Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York with a focus in Christian Social Ethics. He is Co-Founder of Progressive Prison Ministries, Inc., the world’s first ministry created to support individuals, families and organizations with white collar and other nonviolent incarceration issues, and is the first person in the United States formerly incarcerated for a white collar crime to be appointed as CEO of a major criminal justice organization. Jeff has been selected as a 2019 Collegeville Institute Writing Fellow.

Link to Jeff’s full bio here.

Forbes: Feds Bust Prison Consulting Firm, By Walt Pavlo, Forbes Contributing Columnist

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Reprinted from Forbes.com, Jan. 28, 2019

The prison consulting business has been plagued by gimmicks and false promises.  Now a federal indictment in Connecticut could blow the lid off of a number of scammers that have taken advantage of defendants and their families.

US Attorneys in Connecticut have indicted three people who worked at RDAP Law Consultants LLC (RDAP Law) a firm that promised, guaranteed, that its clients would earn up to 18 months off of prison for hiring them.  Tony Tuan Pham, Samuel Copenhaver and Constance Moerland were indicted on charges that they coached people to fake drug and alcohol habits to gain entry into the Bureau of Prisons’ 500-hour program, Residential Drug Abuse Program (RDAP).  Getting into the program can get inmates up to one year off of their prison term and it is the only program in the BOP that offers a reduced time in prison.   The BOP considers it one of their premier successes:

“The Bureau and National Institute on Drug Abuse combined funding and expertise to conduct a rigorous analysis of the Bureau’s RDAP. Research findings demonstrated that RDAP participants are significantly less likely to recidivate and less likely to relapse to drug use than non-participants. The studies also suggest that the Bureau’s RDAPs make a significant difference in the lives of offenders following their release from custody and return to the community.”

The RDAP program is a 9-month program of intensive drug and alcohol therapy.  Those who enter the program participate in a regimen of therapies while incarcerated and counseling sessions after their release from prison.  To qualify, a defendant must state that they have a drug or alcohol dependency within the year prior to their arrest … but that statement must be included in a Presentence Report, a historical report that provides detail on the defendant’s life (criminal past, family history, medical history and drug abuse).  In many cases, defendants, particularly those involved in the drug trade (the majority of federal charges), have a drug problem.  However, having that abuse documented in the Presentence report is imperative to gaining admission.  When it is not, documentation must be provided to support a history of abuse … and that has launched a cottage industry of  “consultants” who are falsifying information for those who did not initially qualify for the program.

When a defendant, a desperate defendant, reached out to RDAP Law, they would direct them to fraudulently obtain one or more prescriptions for medications used to treat withdrawal symptoms, and to bring those medications upon reporting to a BOP facility to begin serving their prison term.  This created the false appearance of substance abuse disorder. RDAP Law also educated clients about how to mimic withdrawal symptoms and instructed clients “who were not yet in custody to adopt a daily habit of drinking alcohol or to have a medical professional provide a prescription for anti-anxiety medication prior to the client reporting to a BOP facility.”  If none of those worked, RDAP Law recommended that defendants show up at prison drunk.  For all of this, they would charge fees up to $10,000.

I have talked to a number of defendants and they all tell me that they are bombarded with emails and phone calls for prison consulting services once they have been sentenced.  These consultants promise results ranging from time off of a prison term to luxury prison designations.  It is a scam that has been going on too long.

RDAP Law’s luck ran out when it promised a defendant entry into RDAP and the defendant was working in cooperation with the FBI and US Attorneys office in Connecticut.  Pham’s pitch had six pieces of advice according to an excerpt from a recorded call:

Number one, you drink every day, including weekday. Number two, alcohol is very important to you. It’s a big part of your life.  Three, you’re a good drinker now. . . . Your first glass of wine you don’t feel anything.  Number four, you’ve tried to quit many times and you can’t. . . . You get sick if you don’t drink, you don’t feel like yourself. Ok? You can’t sleep. You can’t think.  Like an alcoholic, like an addict. You don’t feel good unless you have a drink.  That’s five. And number six, it’s called abuse. Abuse meaning bad things. Ok? You do bad things when you drink.

Now, the defendant in that case is not going to the RDAP program but will likely receive some time off for cooperating against RDAP Law.  The RDAP Law website is still up, but I’m guessing the feds are monitoring it … as well as a few others.

It is also likely that the BOP will look at their requirements for qualifying for RDAP.  For every person who has faked drug or alcohol abuse to get into the program, there are many who did not qualify but had real substance abuse problems that were not properly documented.  The BOP, for all of its shortcomings, has a successful program in RDAP that needs to be strengthened.  Prosecutions like this will start that process.

When Walt is not writing on white collar crime, he works with experts who present on it. Check out 500 Pearl Street Speakers or contact him at [email protected].

Walter Pavlo Contributor

I established 500 Pearl Street Speakers as a boutique speaker bureau that brings together journalists, former law enforcement agents, forensic accountants, lawyers and those involved in white collar crimes to create memorable training events. When I’m not speaking or writing, I’m working with Jack Donson at Prisonology LLC to help everyone facing federal prison. In 2007, I released the book “Stolen Without A Gun” with Neil Weinberg, former Executive Editor Forbes Magazine (now a Reporter for Bloomberg). I write on white-collar crime and try to provide a different perspective than that of the mainstream media.

Criminal Justice Insider with Babz Rawls Ivy & Jeff Grant, with Guest Marcus Bullock, CEO of Flikshop, Fri., June 21, 2019

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On Friday, June 21, 2019, 9 am, Marcus Bullock, CEO of Flikshop, was our guest on Criminal Justice Insider with Babz Rawls Ivy & Jeff Grant – The Voice of CT Criminal Justice. Live on WNHH 103.5 FM New Haven and live-streaming at newhavenindependent.org. Rebroadcast at 5 pm. 24/7 Podcast links below. Sponsored by the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven – Now More Than Ever.

Watch on YouTube:

From Marcus: I launched one of the most impactful apps in the Apple App Store and Android Google Play stores…Flikshop.

Flikshop keeps families that suffer from incarceration connected. Our users can take a photo, add some quick text, and for $0.99 Flikshop prints the photo and text on a real tangible postcard and ships it directly to any person in any jail, prison, youth facility or immigration facility.

In 1996 I was arrested and faced LIFE in prison. I was 15 years old and ended up getting sentenced to serve 8 years in adult prisons throughout the State of Virginia.

Because of my experience, I learned how important mail is to the 2.3 million men and women in prison and ended up creating a business that helps keep each of them connected to their families. After the success of the Flikshop mobile app I went on to create the Flikshop School of Business to assist in building reentry eco-systems for men and women released from prison that center around entrepreneurship, coding, and mobile app development.

Our award-winning and program has won: 2015 Innovator of the Year (The Daily Record) and 2016 Aspen Ideas Festival Award (Booz Allen Hamilton).

I sit on the board of directors of Justice Policy Institute and the advisory board for The Aspen Institute’s Opportunity Youth Incentive Fund.

My other specialties include team building and business development training.

AUDACIOUS. INTEGRITY. BE BETTER.

I encourage you to watch my TEDx Talk “The Prison to Entrepreneurship Pipeline” to learn more about my journey: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycCZrtCkDY8
____________________

Please tell your friends, colleagues and clients:

The Criminal Justice Insider Podcast with Babz Rawls Ivy and Jeff Grant is broadcast live at 9 am ET on the first and third Friday of each month from the WNHH 103.5 FM studios in New Haven. It is rebroadcast on WNHH at 5 pm ET the same day.

Our Web Page:
prisonist.org/criminal-justice-insider
Our Facebook Page:
facebook.com/criminaljusticeinsider
Our Twitter handle: @insidercj
Our Instagram handle: @criminaljusticeinsider

The show is live-streamed and podcasted anytime/anywhere at:
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https://youtube
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The show is also archived at:
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Community Foundation of Greater New Haven website:
https://www.cfgnh.org/LeadingOnIssues/IncarcerationandReentry/CriminalJusticeInsiderRadioArchives.aspx

An article about each show is published a few days later in the New Haven Independent (newhavenindependent.org).

Please “like” us on Facebook!
More info here.
Contact us: [email protected]

Season Two Guests:

Fri., Sept. 9, 2018: Kennard Ray, CT Unlock the Vote and Candidate for CT State Legislator
Fri., Sept. 21, 2018: Louis L. Reed, National Organizer for #Cut50
Fri., Oct. 5, 2018: Sue Gunderman & Beth Hines, CT Reentry Roundtables
Fri., Oct. 19, 2018: Venice Michalsen, Assoc. Professor of Justice Studies, Montclair State University
Fri., Nov. 16, 2018: Andrew Clark, Director of the Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy, Central Connecticut State University
Fri., Dec. 7, 2018: Glenn E. Martin,
Founder/Consultant of GEM Trainers and Past-President and Founder of JustLeadershipUSA
Fri., Dec. 21, 2018: Ferando Muñiz, CEO of Community Solutions, Inc. and Rosa Correa, Community Leader
Fri., Jan. 4, 2019: CJI New Year’s Retrospective Show Looking Back at Past Guests
Fri., Jan. 19, 2019: Peter J. Henning, Professor of Law, Wayne State University & “White Collar Watch” Columnist, NY Times
Fri., Feb. 1, 2019: Jeffrey Deskovic, CEO of The Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation who was Exonerated after Serving 16 Years in Prison
Fri., Feb. 15, 2019: Jeffrey Abramowitz, Executive Director for Reentry Services, JEVS Human Services, Philadelphia.
Fri., Mar. 1, 2019, Hon. Rollin Cook, CT Commissioner of Correction
Fri., Mar. 15, 2019: Dieter Tejada, J.D., Justice Impacted Criminal Justice Advocate
Fri., Apr. 5, 2019: John Rowland, Former CT Governor
Fri., Apr. 19, 2019: Gregg D. Caruso, Ph.D. Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Corning & Co-Director of the Justice Without Retribution Network at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland
Fri., May 3, 2019: Michael Taylor, CEO of Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center in the Greater New Haven area
Fri., May 17, 2019: Tarra Simmons, Esq., Attorney & Criminal Justice Reform Advocate, Washington State
Fri., June 7, 2019: Louis L. Reed, National Organizer for #Cut50, Part Deux!
Fri., June 21, 2019: Marcus Bullock, CEO of Flikshop

Sponsored by the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven – Now More Than Ever.

The Criminal Justice Insider Podcast with Babz Rawls Ivy & Jeff Grant: Guest Louis L. Reed, National Organizer for #Cut50, Part Deux! Fri., June 7, 2019

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Friday, June 7, 2019, 9 am ET, Louis L. Reed, National Organizer for #Cut50, was our guest on The Criminal Justice Insider Podcast with Babz Rawls Ivy & Jeff Grant – The Voice of CT Criminal Justice. Live on WNHH 103.5 FM New Haven, rebroadcast at 5 pm. Live-streaming and podcast everywhere, see below. Sponsored by the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven – Now More than Ever.

Louis Reed is the National Organizer for #Cut50, an initiative of Van Jones’s Dream Corps. He brings to #Cut50 years of experience in government, criminal justice expertise, policy advocacy, business, and public health.

Watch on YouTube:

Listen on SoundCloud:

Louis holds degrees in criminal justice and psychology, and is a board-certified addictions counselor and licensed alcohol & addictions practitioner. Prior to joining #Cut50, Louis was the Connecticut Policy Strategist for the Katal Center for Health, Equity and Justice where he worked on SB-13, and ran his own addiction and mental health practice in Bridgeport, CT, serving clients across Southern Connecticut.

Louis’s experience in government includes conceptualizing and serving as director of the Mayor’s Office for Reentry Affairs in the City of Bridgeport, CT. There, he developed systems and practices for the City to coordinate employment, housing, access to treatment, and other services for all persons impacted by the criminal justice system both in and returning to the City after incarceration.

His policy reform experience includes working with the Connecticut legislature for successful enactment of legislation related to reforms to pretrial practices, expanding access to licenses for people living with criminal records, limiting asset forfeiture practices by law enforcement, and strengthening reentry practices and services for people returning from prison.

Louis is a Huffington Post contributor on Prison Traumatic Stress Disorder, has appeared on C-SPAN and MSNBC, and in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and other publications. He has also consulted for the White House, United States Department of Justice, Fortune® 100 Corporations, private, state and federal agencies, and is a 2017 JustLeadershipUSA fellow.

Louis has received many awards recognizing his work and leadership, including the US Senate recognition for Professional of the Year; 2017 Best Innovative Practices by the US Conference of Mayors; and a 2018 citation from the Connecticut State General Assembly for his statewide contributions on best reentry practices and community service.

Louis lives in Connecticut, consults in special projects management, and also operates his practice part-time.
____________________

Please tell your friends, colleagues and clients:  
 
The Criminal Justice Insider Podcast with Babz Rawls Ivy and Jeff Grant is broadcast live at 9 am ET on the first and third Friday of each month from the WNHH 103.5 FM studios in New Haven. It is rebroadcast on WNHH at 5 pm ET the same day.
 

Our Facebook Page: 

Our Twitter handle: @insidercj

Our Instagram handle: @criminaljusticeinsider

   
The show is live-streamed and podcasted anytime/anywhere at:

New Haven Independent:

YouTube: 

 
The show is also archived at:
 
An article about each show is published a few days later in the New Haven Independent (newhavenindependent.org).

 

Please “like” us on Facebook!    
More info here. 
Contact us: [email protected] 
 
Season Two Guests:
 
Fri., Sept. 9, 2018: Kennard Ray, CT Unlock the Vote and Candidate for CT State Legislator 
Fri., Sept. 21, 2018: Louis L. Reed, National Organizer for #Cut50 
Fri., Oct. 5, 2018: Sue Gunderman & Beth Hines, CT Reentry Roundtables 
Fri., Oct. 19, 2018: Venice Michalsen, Assoc. Professor of Justice Studies, Montclair State University 
Fri., Nov. 16, 2018: Andrew Clark, Director of the Institute for Municipal and Regional Policy, Central Connecticut State University  
Fri., Dec. 7, 2018: Glenn E. Martin,
Founder/Consultant of GEM Trainers and Past-President and Founder of JustLeadershipUSA
Fri., Dec. 21, 2018: Fernando Muñiz, CEO of Community Solutions, Inc. and Rosa Correa, Community Leader
Fri., Jan. 4, 2019: CJI New Year’s Retrospective Show Looking Back at Past Guests  
Fri., Jan. 19, 2019: Peter J. Henning, Professor of Law, Wayne State University & “White Collar Watch” Columnist, NY Times 
Fri., Feb. 1, 2019: Jeffrey Deskovic, CEO of The Jeffrey Deskovic Foundation who was Exonerated after Serving 16 Years in Prison  
Fri., Feb. 15, 2019: Jeffrey Abramowitz, Executive Director for Reentry Services, JEVS Human Services, Philadelphia.  
Fri., Mar. 1, 2019, Hon. Rollin Cook, CT Commissioner of Correction  
Fri., Mar. 15, 2019: Dieter Tejada, J.D., Justice Impacted Criminal Justice Advocate 
Fri., Apr. 5, 2019: John Rowland, Former CT Governor  
Fri., Apr. 19, 2019: Gregg D. Caruso, Ph.D. Professor of Philosophy at SUNY Corning & Co-Director of the Justice Without Retribution Network at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland  
Fri., May 3, 2019: Michael Taylor, CEO of Cornell Scott-Hill Health Center in the Greater New Haven area  
Fri., May 17, 2019: Tarra Simmons, Esq., Attorney & Criminal Justice Reform Advocate, Washington State  
Fri., June 7, 2019: Louis L. Reed, National Organizer for #Cut50, Part Deux!  
Fri., June 21, 2019: Marcus Bullock, CEO of Flikshop

Sponsored by the Community Foundation for Greater New Haven – Now More Than Ever.