Grad School Diaries: The Prison Visit

I went on a field trip today to a medium security prison in El Reno, Oklahoma.

One may not think much of a medium security prison, but it's the federal prison location that has housed the likes of Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, several Gotti family members and many other criminal offenders.

It was eye-opening to say the least, especially the speeches by two inmates who are serving 50 month and 51 month terms for white collar crimes at the federal prison camp located on the same campus.

Our professor wanted us to see the slippery slope of "ethical" decisions and how one even presumably small misstep can lead to big trouble.

Roy Driscoll is serving time for money laundering. He worked for a semi-conductor business in Plano, Texas, and had been salesman of the year for roughly 15 consecutive years, driving the company's business from $300,000 to $7.2 million. But he was under pressure from management when they discovered the company's largest customer had been overbilled in the amount of $1.8 million. It's a longer, more involved story than what I'm typing here, but suffice it to say that they justified not being able to return it to the customer for fear of losing the customer.

Pray tell, how can we explain that we'd been overcharging them to the tune of nearly $2 million?

But they also had to make it disappear from the books because a British company was acquiring their company. They had to clean up the books, and they tasked Roy with getting rid of the $1.8 million. So Roy opened a separate account under a fake business and lived the high life on the money. He talked about the season tickets to the Dallas Cowboys, the Mavericks, and the Stars. He talked about the $400,000 home and how he gave $500,000 to his church.

Now Roy is doing time.

Mr. Banks (his first name not disclosed) fully understands the current mortgage and home-lending mess. The charismatic 55-year-old was trained in the title business by his father. Together under the Banks name, they built up a multi-million dollar business in Dallas.

But Banks was signing off on fraudulent loans, and he was betraying the lenders. He was president of his company, also living the high life.

It all came crashing down. Banks, along with his brother and son, were implicated in the mess and his business closed forever.

He still has the entrepreneurial spirit, he says, so when he is released from prison in 2011, he plans to enter the ministry.