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.
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