Thank you to Rachel for making this blog look pretty and helping me
with my first post. People new to this personal blog will probably want
to read
my other post first.
I need to step back and disclose some stuff before I get too far into this.
Yes, me and my husband are ex-convicts.
We are both still on probation. I’m done in two months and my husband
is done in another two years. I have no desire to see me or my husband
violate our probation.
I’ve already talked about him committing a crime when he bought
the SNAP card. People need to understand that I can’t be as accurate
about everything as I wish I could be. I’m called Annie by some
people, but it’s not my first name. Other names and details have to
get changed and I have to be foggy on some stuff to make sure I don’t
get us in any trouble. I hate lying and I would feel like I was lying
if I didn’t tell you this.
I’m writing from my heart, and even if
I don’t make any money from this it’s great therapy for me. I already
feel a lot of excitement from sharing that last entry. This is me, my
soul, and I’m uncorking it for all of you. God, I hope someone will
read this!
So you want to know what I did, huh?
It happened six years ago. I worked as a bookkeeper for a commercial
property company in a city next to Las Vegas. One day I came in and
found out the lead accountant was laid off. He was a good worker who
had no problem with anyone there. Poof. He was gone. The next week
the other accountant was let go. Again, she was a solid employee.
Poof! Gone.
It was 2008 and the economy had tanked, especially in Las Vegas where
the housing bust had busted HARD. Construction was dead. The flow of
investment into Vegas had stopped. Companies were closing or defaulting
left and right leaving us with vacant buildings. I figured I was going
to be out of a job very soon.
I was scared.
My manager called me to her office and I figured this was it. But
no…I wasn’t getting laid off. In fact, I was getting a promotion! I
was taking over the Quickbooks for the whole company.
Basically, I was going to be doing the work of the two laid-off
accountants. Ugh. It was going to be tough, and the small raise I got
was not really fair compensation by any stretch. There would be lots of
late nights in the office. I was cool with all of that though. My
company was going through hard times and I liked it there. Bottomline:
I still had a job—hurray!
Then it started. My boss started asking me to do
fishy stuff with the ledger and to change other entries that had already
been made by the accountants for that quarter.
I’ll admit it. I’m pretty dense. It took me a while to realize what
I was being asked to do. I didn’t understand at first why my boss and
her boss were both treating me so nice.
On my second night working until 10pm my manager and I had a frank
talk about what I was doing. Yeah, I was cooking the books for them.
They were not only going to avoid a huge quarterly tax payment, but they
could put these inflated losses against profits made over the last five
years and refile for large returns.
"Is this really a good idea?" I asked.
She said something like: “We can pay it back. It’s really just postponing things. (Bossman) knows what he’s doing.”
Well, that was good enough for me. There was some naivete there, but
if she had said, “Screw the government. We’re going to rip them off.
Are you in?” I would have still done it. This was partly due to
loyalty to my company, partly due to the fear of losing my job, but
mostly due to an ‘I don’t give a crap’ attitude that I had at the time.
I was cheating the government and everyone who actually pays their taxes (you guys) and I had zero remorse.
I didn’t care about myself so I wasn’t able to care about anyone else.
I was honestly a miserable person at the time. It was easy for the
person I was to commit this crime. I didn’t lose any sleep over it.
We got raided by federal agents. Yes, raided, as in
boots stomping, guns blazing, and men screaming, “Get down on the
floor!” It was horrifying. I’m pretty sure that’s the closest I ever
came to a heart attack in my life. I had no doubt in my mind what was
going on. I can’t describe the sick feeling I had inside me. You want
to talk about major screw-ups? Yeah…I really blew it.
The Department of Justice is a slow and lumbering beast. I had to
endure a year’s worth of terror to get from the raid to my plea
bargain. In the meantime I stopped paying my mortgage so I could pay
my attorney instead. The way the foreclosures were backed-up I figured
I could still live in the house for free until I went to prison, then I
could figure out where to live once I got out.
I was going to lose the house while I was in prison anyway, and it
was underwater, so I figured there was no sense to keep paying it. You
must understand that in my indictment the DOJ was talking about
sentences of 20+ years.
I thought I was going to end up with a much longer sentence than I ultimately did.
I got sentenced to a year and a day in prison and got an astronomical
restitution amount that me and my co-defendants were jointly and
severally liable for.
We all plea bargained and the company had assets seized that paid
back all but around $200,000 of the restitution. They paid the rest of
this off while I was in prison.
The business never closed. To this DAY.
I’m still working there.
I hope this fact is as amazing to you as it is to me. They said I
would always have a job with them, which is the least they can do,
really, but they didn’t *have* to do that. I met a lot of women in
prison who were thrown under the bus by their codefendants. That’s the
norm. My experience was a cakewalk compared to many.
I can no longer do anything to do with accounting as a condition of
my plea agreement. They have me doing a job someone with a lot less
education can do and I’m making a Hell of a lot less money. The fact
is, though, I have a criminal record now and this is Las Vegas where the
unemployment is sky-high. I’m grateful to have any job, especially one
in an office.
Prison is another entry all it’s own, but it was a pretty mild experience in the grand scheme of things.
That’s where I got my head straight and started loving myself.
Anyway, two months after I got to the ‘camp’ I found out that the
second accountant who’d gotten laid off was the one who’d tipped off the
feds about what we’d planned to do.
If I had been as smart as her I would have said, “Nope, not doing
it,” and would have just lost my job like she had. I can’t imagine a
reality where I would have done that, though.
I was all-in, devil may care, and I didn’t think about consequences until it was too late.
A year and a day sentence is actually only 317 days. You get
‘good-time’ credit for any sentence over 12 months. That’s why the year
and a day sentence is so popular. They want to give convicts good time
credit so they have something that they can take away from you if you
misbehave in prison.
I spent seven months in a Federal Prison camp and a little over three
months in a half-way house. A half-way house is a co-ed correctional
facility back in your home community where you can find a job and make
sure you have a place to live. The one in my area is right behind the
Circus Circus casino and it’s a dump. Prison was much nicer. I wish
I’d known this before I asked for extra half-way house time so I could
find a place to live.
As expected, I lost my house while in prison.
The half-way house is where I met Dart.
I can’t be as specific about Dart’s history as I was with mine. Suffice to say
Dart’s been a hustler all his life.
That’s his mentality. He doesn’t think about working hard and saving.
He’s always about the next big score, the scheme, the scam, that gives
him a huge payday all at once. That’s what drives him. He was always
plotting.
He started out in making and selling fake IDs. He got
caught doing this at a young age and was put into the program of the day
to help at risk youths in Las Vegas. All this did was allow him to
network with other burgeoning criminals. When he got out of his program
he started breaking in to businesses with a partner to steal stuff they
could sell around Downtown Las Vegas (the ‘old’ Las Vegas around
Fremont street).
Dart is an exceptional sales man. His charm is what
got people to buy stuff. He was the fast-talking, colorful character
full of clever compliments and insightful jokes that appealed to Vegas
tourists. He would give people an experience, and then they’d be
inclined to buy the watch, or belt, or CD player, or camera, or whatever
the product du jour was. The people could then go home and show off
their items and tell the story of the wacky black guy who sold it to
them suspiciously cheap.
Dart never worked an honest day prior to his taxi job. He was all about the easy score.
He believed he was clever enough to outsmart all the idiots working for the weekend. When he wasn’t hustling Downtown he was getting into poker tournaments where he could further fleece the Vegas noobs.
Back in the day Dart was an exceptional poker player, but this was
before gambling had blown up. While he was in prison online gambling
became popular and poker in particular took off.
He’s a mediocre player compared to the crowd playing the game now.
At any rate, Dart got more ambitious with his scores and started
using a gun for his late night break-ins. He claims he never shot a
bullet in his life, but he was able to threaten rent-a-cops as needed to
escape when he was caught.
Dart always felt he was more noble than other criminals because he never pimped girls, broke into homes, or sold drugs.
Dart does have a conscience.
He’s not a psychopath, and he’s not a cruel person. That said, he’s
perfectly capable of deluding himself into thinking he never harmed
anyone.
He can always play off stealing from a store or warehouse as not a
big deal because ‘they got plenty of money.’ And if he scared someone
by waving his gun during a robbery ‘they’d be ah’ight’ because he never
shot anyone. You and I both know the reality, but because he has a
conscience he has to delude himself like this to be able to live with
himself. I know a lot of criminals do this.
I have taken a hard line with him about his past.
I’ve tried to help transition him from the criminal mentality to going
straight. I don’t put up with him downplaying the crimes of his past. I
can’t change what he did, but I won’t put up with him ever doing stuff
like that again.
I know I probably should have never even given him a chance.
If I could go back in time I wouldn’t have ever married him, despite the fact that I don’t think things are really that bad.
My influence has been a Godsend for him, and I know without a doubt
he’d be back in prison by now without me. On the other side of it, it
hasn’t done my life any good to have him in it.
I don’t feel he deserves me. If he’d come around to the straight and
narrow this would be different. Dart still thinks like a criminal.
No, he’s no longer robbing, but I still think he meets his old partner
sometimes Downtown and hustles the stuff he’s stolen. I don’t have any
proof of this. Just a feeling. I know he loved the performance high he
got from fast-talking tourists on the street.
Dart is still a very active poker player.
He always thinks he’s going to make it big in a tournament.
He never does. The big purses attract much better players than him.
It’s just turned into a place for him to sink all the money he makes
driving his taxi.
For Dart it doesn’t make any sense to save his money. He thinks he’s
got the equivalent of lottery winnings coming in his future. I can’t
put up with this all my life.
I’m not going to be his retirement plan.
I’ve told him this, but he doesn’t see the future the way I do. He
still puts his faith in that big score. It’s no longer about robbing
someone, but it is about crazy investments or other scams. I’ll be
going over his schemes a lot in this blog.
They all involve me turning over my life-savings so he can make millions of dollars.
Every time he pulls this crap he loses me a little bit more. Even
though I make this very clear to him he just can’t stop. It’s the way
his brain is structured. I’ve already given up the hope that I can
change him. That’s too big a job for me, and my heart’s no longer into
it. The one thing that might get through to him is losing me. Then
he’ll realize that I *was* his big score and he blew it.
Obviously, we had a romance while in the half-way house together, and
ended up married. This is mind-boggling to me now, but it happened.
I’ll go over this in my next entry.
If you got some entertainment off this entry could you please use my
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