Actually, I rather enjoyed it when my students would come to be later and show off their diploma, evidence that I was, in at least one category, making a contribution. Of course, I found out that whilst teaching is rewarding, it is also quite personally pedestrian when one knows all the answers to the questions. As a lawyer, you are always working on new issues which must be researched and advocated in court, and as a money launderer, one is constantly breaking new ground with innovative techniques, or modifications of tried-and-true methods. Teaching I found to be quietly fulfilling, but a bit boring after the first several repetitions of the same material. However, since it was a better job than most of the manual labor performed at the prison, I did not complain. besides, it would not have resulted in my transfer somewhere else.

I found that around one quarter of the inmates were from the Miami area, notwithstanding that the prison was in the Florida Panhandle, in the extreme northwestern corner of the state, not far from Alabama. Many were in for drugs offences, but there were plenty of white-collar types, too:

•  Doctors convicted of Medicare fraud. It is a long way to fall, from being a respected physician, to lowly inmate, and the loss of prestige affects them most of all the former professionals I came into contact in prison. After all, doctors are a privileged class in America.

• Corrupt police officers who had cooperated with the authorities, and thus received short sentences, and assignment to low-level institutions, whilst  co-defendants who had taken the government to trial, often went to higher-security prisons.

• Lawyers; The Florida Bar, which regulates lawyers in that state, reports 2000 Florida attorneys have lost their licenses during the past twenty years. Only 5% have successfully returned to their former professional careers, indicating just how difficult it is to prove rehabilitation after a felony conviction.

• Accountants and bankers; most are incarcerated for a wide variety of financial crimes.

• Career white-collar criminals; one person I met was in there for his sixth conviction over the course of  twenty-five years; whilst he confessed that he was getting tired of returning to prison, he continued to offend and suffer convictions again and again. Perhaps if he had received other than token sentences each time, he would not have continued upon the same path.

• Judges and politicians; a small but vocal minority of the population, their corruption had been exposed, and

• Crooked participants in religious organisations who participated in corrupt actions.

Their fall from grace landed them in with all the low-level drug dealers and smugglers. Perhaps this is what we know as poetic justice.

One of the first friends that I ran into at Eglin was the accountant for the criminal organisation whose members had given the evidence against me. He had also been named by them for his role in money laundering. We will call him Mike, because his license was not revoked, and he now practises his profession again, though not in Miami.

I sent my clients to Mike to clean up income tax filing issues, and he suggested that he could assist them in domestic money laundering. Representing a number of clients with large inventories of goods, he was running a money laundering operation I call the commission salesman method. This works as follows:

• The accountant, or other professional, obtains the cooperation of a client who will, in exchange for a set fee, launder dirty money through his or her business.

• The criminals who desire to clean their cash are hired as commission salesmen, purportedly to sell the goods held in inventory by the business.

• These individuals show outstanding levels of sales; invoices are cleverly created to support their earnings. There is sufficient inventory on hand at the business to cover these bogus sales.

• The criminals pay taxes on their earnings, cease to participate in criminal activity, and main-steam themselves into legitimate society.

• The statute of limitations recedes into the past, and the chance that they will ever be charged is greatly diminished.

• The former criminals may even seek later to become elected as Members of Parliament. Stranger things have happened.

The only way this scheme is uncovered is through the cooperation of one of the participants. Since criminals are often arrested for other illicit activities unrelated to their major criminal conduct, they may choose to reduce their sentences by giving up the details of a commission salesman operation to the authorities.

Next Week: More about Mike, and his story, then and now.