October 9, 2025 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Neil White thought his life was defined by success and appearances—until a white-collar crime sent him to prison in Carville, Louisiana. What he didn’t know was that this prison also housed one of the last leprosy colonies in the United States. Living side by side with patients who had been exiled from the world forced White to confront his own pride, his failures, and the meaning of dignity. He shares how his time in Carville reshaped everything he believed about life and self-worth.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to
the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts up. Next,
you're going to hear from Neil White, who's the author
of In the Sanctuary of Outcasts. For much of his
early life, Neil's appearance and status is what mattered most him.
(00:34):
He'll be sharing his story of a time when all
of that was stripped from him and how he came
to realize the real important things in his life.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
For most of the twentieth century, anyone in the continentally
United States, who contracted leprosy was sent to this colony
in Louisiana, just south of Baton Rouge. It was located
on a bend in the Mississippi River that was rounded
on all three sides by water, and for most of
that time, they were taken against their will and sent there.
(01:08):
They were sometimes brought in shackles, sometimes at gunpoint. When
they got there, they were given an inmate number. They
were made to change their names, they took an alias.
They couldn't vote, they couldn't marry. Some of the most
tragic stories you've ever heard. So that treatment went on
from eighteen ninety six to nineteen sixty nine, and in
(01:30):
nineteen sixty nine they discovered a cure and they threw
open the gates to the colony and said to the
four or five hundred patients who were there, you're free
to go. A year later, only seventeen had left. Their
families had abandoned them. They had no place to go.
They didn't want to go out in public with disfigured limbs.
So they had created this community and this culture with
(01:53):
its own morase and traditions, and so they felt safe
in this colony. In sixty nine, the government decided that
they would be allowed to stay there and they could
live there for the rest of their lives. So jump
forward almost thirty years, and there are only one hundred
and thirty of those patients left, and there are all
(02:14):
these empty beds where the leprosy.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Patients used to live.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
And so a fiscally responsible bureaucrat said, I've got an idea.
Instead of wasting taxpayers dollars on building a new federal prison,
let's put nonviolent offenders and infirmed inmates. Inmates who had
a medical problem because there was a hospital there for
the leprosy patients in these empty rooms. And we'll say
the taxpayer a great deal of money. So just about
(02:38):
the time that they did that, which was nineteen ninety three,
I was a magazine publisher. I was thirty two years old,
and I was going to conquer the world. I wanted
to build the biggest magazine empire faster than anybody else had,
and I stumbled across this technique. It's a crime you
can't commit anymore, called kiting checks, where you could write
(02:58):
a check to yourself from yourself when I was running
short of money until real money came in. I'd been
doing it off and on for years and years. It
is absolutely illegal. And I got to a point after
acquiring Louisiana Life magazine where the House of Cards just
felt The FDC came in and did an audit at
the bank and I ended up pleading to one count
(03:20):
of bank fraud and was sentenced to eighteen months in
federal prison. And it just so happened that I was
sent to the experimental prison in Carville, Louisiana.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
So this was pre internet.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
I had no idea where I was going I knew
it was a mentum security prison and that I would
probably not be in danger physically. I knew I wouldn't
see my kids except in the visiting room, but I
had no inkling of what actually awaited behind those gates.
(03:52):
I packed a leather bag with books and racketball rackets
and tennis shoes and shorts, like I was going to camp,
and I was not going to be late reporting to prison.
So I got there early, and the guard was looking
at his watch, saying, you know you're thirty minutes earlier.
You're still a free man. It's like, no, no, I'm good.
I'll just wait right here, do we You know? I
(04:13):
was so ridiculous, just wanting to do everything right and
figuring that if I did, I would get special treatment there,
which of course I did not. I was standing there
waiting for a guard to come collect me, and I
saw a man walking down this hallway, and when he
got to the window closest to me, he waved to
(04:35):
me and he didn't have any fingers. And so I
went over to this guard house and I said, I
I just saw a guy.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
With no fingers.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
Assumed it might have been like a prison industry accident.
And the guy said, oh, that's a Hansons disease patient.
And I said, what's that? And he said it used
to be called leprosy. And that was the first time
that I knew something might be off. So a guard
came to get me. He strip searched me, he let
me keep two books, gave me a couple of clothes
I could keep, and he gave me a.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
Piece of paper with my room number on it.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
And so I walked out of that office into this
courtyard where the prison was located. It was surrounded by
two story concrete walls and walkways. And when I walked out,
I saw men sunbathing on a shuffle board court. I
saw twenty or thirty men who were over five hundred pounds,
a couple who were six hundred pounds playing dominoes. They
sent the most morbidly obese inmates there for the hospital.
(05:31):
I saw men in wheelchairs who had been amputated so
high they had to be in a bucket so they
wouldn't fall out. It was just this unbelievable crew of characters.
I had been thrown into this place with not only
the last Americans in prison for a disease, but also
these inmates, most of whom I thought would be non
(05:53):
violent offenders, but because the medical inmates, a lot of
them were there for heart attacks or stroke or diabetes
or something like that. And a lot of those inmates
did have a violent passed, and so I was sort
of disoriented that this was not at all the kind
of club fed that I thought I was going to
be going into. I was so appalled that I had
(06:18):
been subjected to these people that I was going to
write an expose and when I got out of prison
revealed to the world as a journalist what this horrible
government experiment was going on that nobody knew about where
inmates could get leprosy, and violent inmates were put in
with minimum security inmates. So I was completely in denial
that I needed to change, that I needed this experience,
(06:41):
and that's how I went in.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
As I was wandering trying to find where.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
I should put my stuff, I saw this woman in
a wooden, antique hand cranked wheelchair. She didn't have any legs,
and she was sort of wabbling down the hall in
this wheelchair, not being able to go straight very well.
And U knew this was an all male prison, And
I'll say she wasn't a prison guard, so I held
my breath and stepped back, And as she cranked her
(07:07):
way past me, she said, there's no place like home.
And then she turned a corner and an inmate came
up to me and said, you see that woman. She
was dropped off here when she was twelve years old,
and her family never came back to see here. And
he said, are you still feeling sorry for yourself?
Speaker 1 (07:24):
And when we come back more with Neil White's story
here on Our American Stories, Lie Hibibe here the host
of our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're
bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from
our big cities and small towns. But we truly can't
do the show without you. Our stories are free to
(07:45):
listen to, but they're not free to make. If you
love what you hear, go to Ouramerican Stories dot com
and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot.
Go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and give And we're
(08:10):
back with our American Stories and with author Neil White's story.
When we last left off, Neil had just entered prison
and had encountered a woman with leprosy. That woman's name
was Elabama back to Neil.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
So later that week I was assigned to a job
in the cafeteria. I was doing the leprosy patient's menu board,
and I was there from four am to noon. So
at about five am one morning, I was in their
cafeteria and I saw this woman whose name was el Abalance,
and I asked her how she ended up here. Ella
(08:47):
leaned back in her wheelchairs, settling in denim spring. She
said in a whisper. Nineteen hundred and twenty six. I
was in grade school. According to Ella, a doctor had
visited the one room school to administer shots. The raised
oval spots on her leg where the pigmentation had disappeared,
had caught his attention. He pricked the blotches with a needle.
(09:08):
Ella felt nothing. Next week, white man drives up, Ella said,
and I seen the carroll boyt pointing outside.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
Ella, he said, bounty hunter fixing to carry you away.
I look out and see the man leaning on his truck,
wearing dark glasses, arms crossed all tight. A hand painted
sign large enough to be seen from neighboring farms, and
which would later be nailed to the side of her
family's tenant house extended from the back of the white
man's pickup truck. Ella couldn't read the long words scrawled
in red letters. Later she would understand quarantine. The school
(09:42):
teacher put her hand on Ella's shoulder, pulled her up
from her desk, and led her outside. The other children
ran over to the window. The teacher walked her across
the small schoolyard toward the truck that idled at the
edge of the field. The bounty hunter uncrossed his arms
and pushed back his coat to expose a pistol. The
teacher stopped and took her hand dolf Fella's shoulder. The
man pointed to the back of the truck, and Ella
(10:03):
climbed in. As he drove away. Ella looked out through
the wooden slats. So I was sentenced to eighteen months
for mishandling nearly a million dollars. She had been there
sixty eight years because she was susceptible to a bacterial infection,
and standing in front of her hearing that story, it
(10:26):
was virtually impossible to muster up anything resembling self pity.
You never know how you're going to act when you
go into a prison. I certainly knew that I wasn't
going to be one of the tough guys. I wasn't
going to get into a fight. I wanted to get
out as soon as I possibly could. Because I had
a six year old son and a three year old daughter.
(10:47):
I wanted to follow all the rules. I wanted to
be the best inmate I could be. And so I
went in deciding that I wasn't going to put on
any air, so I was just going to be myself.
I was going to ask the questions I wanted to ask.
So I was going to be friendly. I was going
to use, you know, manners and be polite. So I
sort of scurried off into a hallway to try and
find my room. I walk in and my new roommate
(11:11):
is reading a medical journal, laying back on his cot
and he drops it on his chest and he looks
up at me, and I introduced myself as Neil.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
He told me his name was Nick, and everybody there
called him Doc.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
And he asked me if I snitched on anybody, and
I told him that I had committed this crime on
my own. There was no conspiracy, there was nobody else.
I didn't testify against anybody. And he said, well, good
because I hate snitches. Apparently his accountant turned state's evidence
over and that's why he was in prison. But it
turns out this guy was brilliant. He went to the
(11:43):
University of Tennessee medical school, and he said he had
learned more in his fifteen years in prison than he
did in medical school because Tennessee never suspended his medical license,
so he got every medical journal for free, and he
had the time to read them all, so he was
up the latest of everything. And he got in trouble
(12:04):
because he had developed this weight loss drug. The abbreviation
is DNP has got a long chemical name. It's an
illegal drug, but he discovered it when he was hired
by the CIA to translate Russian documents. And this drug
was used during World War iiO not as a drug
against enemies, but for the Russian troops. It prevented them
(12:25):
from getting frostbite. It warmed their extremities in their body,
and he saw in a footnote that the soldiers were
losing five to ten pounds a week when they took
this drug. And he started doing research on it, and
he discovered that he could give it to women and
they would lose weight without exercising, and he had clinics.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
All over the South.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
He said, the lines were around the corner of overweight
women coming in to get this DNP, which was completely illegal,
and a lot of them were poor. So it was
about forty million dollars in medicaid fraud from what understand.
But the patients loved him and the weight fell off,
and he was dispensing this illegal drug. So I think
(13:08):
Doc could have done whirls of good for mankind if
he had been placed in a pharmaceutical company and just
said we're going to give you a million dollars a
year invent stuff. But he always, I think, and that
was the problem with all of us in prison. There
was this hubris, this ego that he wanted to be
the person who led the charge, who got the accolades,
who made all the money. And I can't say that
(13:29):
I was much different from that in my own realm.
So you know, I wanted to put up photographs of
my kids in my locker, and I said, do you
have any you know, tay or Pase, I want to
stick these photographs in a locker. And Doc reached over,
grabbed his toothpaste and tossed it to me, and I said,
what's this? He said, tooth paste, And so I spread
(13:51):
toothpaste on the back of the photographs and put them
up there.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
I didn't know anything about the rules.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
I wanted my clothes to be not just ironed, but
starist if possible. I missed cologne. I mean, I was
such a fish out of water and I didn't know
any other way to act. So you can't have paper
money in federal prisons. The reason for that is you
could accumulate a lot of it, so you can only
have coins. So when I came in with twenty dollars,
(14:19):
they exchanged it for two roles of quarters, and I
put them in my locker. After I put my kids'
photographs up with the toothpaste. And later that night I
came back and Doc was there and I opened my
locker and the quarters were gone, and I said, somebody
took my quarters. And he didn't even look up from reading.
(14:40):
He said, rumor has it there are criminals here. I
just I was such a fish out of water. The
second week I was in prison, I was in the
admission and orientation room to learn the rules of the prison.
And of course I wanted to be a model inmate
to get back home as soon as I could. And
during the presentation, I noticed there was an inmate who
(15:02):
was turned away from the presenter, staring at me, who
was a crack dealer from New Orleans we called Link.
I went up to him and I said, excuse me,
I don't mean any disrespect, but why do you keep
steering at me? And he said, man, you look just
like Clark count. What the hell did you do to
get in here? I said, well, I'm in here for
bank fraud and he said you're a bank robber. I
said no, no, no, no, no, not bank robber, bank fraud.
(15:24):
I was I was kiting checks to keep my business afloat.
And he said, let me ask you something that did
a bank lose money? He said, well, yeah, actually there
were two banks involved. He said, then you're a damn
bank robber. And they all started laughing. Everybody was listening
in and he said how much did you get?
Speaker 3 (15:39):
He got really.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Excited and he said I didn't get any I was
paying printers and payroll and investors, and I was leveraging
one part of the company to expand in another. He said,
how much did the banks lose? And I said, well, together,
they lost seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars and he said,
and how much of that do you have? And I said,
I told you I don't have any. And he said, man,
(16:00):
I've been in jails all over this country. You are
the stupidest criminal I've ever met. And so by the
time the week ended, he was following me around asking
me questions, and he determined that I was not only
the stupidest criminal and the boringest person he'd ever met,
but I was the whitest man he had ever met.
And then when he found out my name was Neil White,
it was just all over with. But this guy, he
(16:22):
was uneducated, but he was brilliant. He could size you
up and dismantle you. And he was so street smart
compared to me. And he told me after about the
third day, man, you're in prison. You don't need to
be using manners. And I was like, well, that's just
how I talk, you know, Thank you excuse me. I
(16:42):
just I was myself, and I think maybe I had
sort of lost that on the outside because I was
trying to be something I wasn't.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
And you're listening to author Neil White. The book is
in the Sanctuary of Outcasts. You can get it at
Amazon or wherever you get your books. You will not
put this book down. It's one of the finest reads
I've come across. And you know, we love books and
authors of all stripes. Here on our American Stories, and
my goodness, the cast of characters you'll meet Ella, My goodness,
(17:13):
your heart will weep for this woman and her life,
and yet she's happy. And of course there's Doc and Link.
I loved what he said about Neil. You're the stupidest
criminal I ever met. You're the boringest criminal I ever met.
And you're the whitest criminal I ever met. And then
he finds, out, of course, that Neil's last name is White.
(17:35):
When we come back more of Neil White's story, he
hails right from here in Oxford, Mississippi, a writer's town
if ever there was one, home to Faulkner and Grisham,
Richard Ford and so many others. Here on our American Stories.
(18:04):
And we're back with our American stories and with author
Neil White. He's been sharing with us his various adventures.
In the first few weeks in a prison in Louisiana
dedicated to leprosy, patients or turned into a prison for well,
(18:25):
all kinds of characters.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
Back to Neil.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
So, my first day of working the four am shift
in the kitchen, I went out to meet the guys
and be escorted to the kitchen by guard and he
was balmy even at four a m. It was probably
seventy eighty degrees and I noticed four or five of
the guys.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
Had on these huge, heavy coats and these big mits.
I was like, that is idiotic. They're gonna die in
this heat.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
And so we all walked to the kitchen and after
about thirty minutes the guard left.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
I don't know if he went back to his office
or what.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
And I was washing dish and making toast, and I
noticed that there weren't many people around.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
A bunch of them had disappeared.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
So one of the people cooking asked me to go
into the big cooler and get something. I don't know
if it was fruit or whatever. And so I walked
in and I didn't see it initially. So I walked
toward the back and I noticed that there were these
three inmates asleep in the very back of the cooler.
They had gotten up on boxes of produce and fruit
and stuff and made these sort of makeshift beds, and
(19:28):
they had bundled up in their coats and mittens and
they were sleeping. They were just sleeping the morning away
in the cooler. And I couldn't believe that these guys,
they were literally sleeping on the job in like thirty
seven degree temperature. So there were about a third of
us who did all the work. But what always struck
me and I guess, you know, the same thing would
(19:49):
be said about me. These guys were so creative and
went to such lengths to do.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
Things the wrong way.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
If they had funneled that inner into doing something that
was sort of productive or legal, there's no telling what
they could have accomplished. But they just thrived on beating
the system. So I was washing dishes with a guy
named Jefferson, and he was asking me what I did,
and I asked him what he did, and he said
(20:18):
that he worked at the post office and he manned
the X ray machine at the Loyola Street post office
in New Orleans.
Speaker 3 (20:26):
And said, x ray machine. They why do they have
an X ray machine?
Speaker 2 (20:30):
He said, every package, every letter goes through the X
ray machine and make sure there's nothing dangerous and I said,
did you ever see anything interesting go through? And he said,
every damn day you see cash money coming through there.
He said, I'd pick up that letter, stick at my pocket.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
And go home.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
And I said, you really took cash from the mail
and he said absolutely. He said, some of the nicest
letters you've ever seen in your life. He said, I'd
take those things and read them and say, dear Tommy,
here's four one hundred dollars bills for your fourth birthday.
And he said, I would start saying happy birthday to me,
Happy birthday to me.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
I said, I can't believe it.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
I used to send, you know, cash to my kids
and to friends. I said, didn't you ever feel bad
about that? He said, oh, yeah, absolutely. This one day
there was another kid who was turning six years old
and there were six one hundred dollars bills. And I said,
and you felt bad, right, And he said yeah, because
I was hoping he was a teenager. And he just
went on and on and on. He had absolutely no
(21:25):
remorse about this, but he was hysterical. I was bent
over laughing and appalled at the same time. But these
are the people you encountered there. So we had payphones
and we could make collect calls. And I called, you know,
as much as I could to speak to the kids,
and there was always this recording that interrupted about every
(21:47):
three minutes. This call emanates from a federal correctional facility.
So I was talking to Linda, my wife, and she
told me that she was filing for a divorce, and
I was just absolutely devastated. What's interesting is I had
filed for bankruptcy. I had been humiliated in the newspapers.
(22:10):
There was six columns across the top of the headline
White sentenced to prison. I lost my house, I lost
my money. All these things happened, and I still didn't
hit what for me was rock bottom. But the thought
of not living with my kids, not putting them a
bed every night, not waking up with them every morning,
that was the one that finally got me. I looked
(22:32):
for an abandoned hallway, a corner in the library, an
empty television room, but inmates were everywhere. I couldn't catch
my breath, air didn't go deep enough. My hands trembled,
I felt nauseated. I needed to cry, but I couldn't
let anyone see me, not a guard or an inmate
or leprosy patient. I sat on a bench in the
corner of the inmate courtyard, slumped over. I could feel
(22:55):
my heart pound. That's where Link saw me look at
Clark Kent feeling all sad. I wanted him to go away.
My wife is leaving me, I said, hoping he would
take the hint. Damn, he said, laughing like he thought
this was way too funny. You've been lying your whole life.
You lost two million dollars and yours is in jail.
(23:15):
What the hell do you think she's gonna do? You know,
Link had a way of bringing you out of your
self pity and pointing out that, yeah, you might be sad,
but this shouldn't have been a surprise to you. By
the time I was thirty one, ambition had become the
driving force in my life. Privately, I envisioned the figure
(23:36):
I would become owner of a huge network, city magazine's
editor of a daily newspaper, holder of innumerable civic awards,
owner of a fabulous yacht, and of course, philanthropist. With
these images fixed in my mind, I was able to
overlook what I did to get there, But the prospect
of losing my children had stripped away every pretense it
(23:57):
did what bankruptcy, public humiliation, and imprisonment had not done.
I could no longer stomach my own lives and delusions.
For the first time, I felt the full weight of
my crimes. I began the process of asking myself the
hard questions. How did I get so far? Of course?
How could I have hurt so many people? How could
(24:18):
I have put my family at risk? Could I avoid
caring what people thought of me? And how could I
support my family in a way that did no harm
but allowed me to help others. I'd never set aside
the time to look at how I felt or where
I was headed. I believed I could not afford to
question my motives. I was focused on a single goal
success and had no interest in anything that stood in
(24:40):
the way. I had convinced myself that cuiding checks wasn't
a real crime. I'd also convinced myself that there were
no real victims as long as I covered the overdraft.
But deep down I knew better now. I used to
tell people that I was my own best customer. I
could convince myself of anything that justified what I wanted,
And that is a really, really dangerous way to live.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
You know, I knew I.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Needed to change, and I knew I needed to do
things differently. And I told Ella about that. I said,
you know, I want to be a new person, but
I still wake up feeling sort of the same. Ella
intertwined her fingers like she always did when she told
the story. In the early days of Carvel, she explained,
the Coca Cola distributor from Baton Rouge sent chipped and
cracked coke bottles to the colony so he could refuse
(25:28):
to accept the return bottles. He feared a public boycott
if customers discovered the glass containers had been touched by
the lips of leprosy patients. More drink bottles than you've
ever seen, she said. The crates of bottles filled closets
and storerooms. But the patients discovered new uses for the
non returnable bottles. They used them as flower vases with
beautiful arrangements. They became sugar dispensers in the cafeteria for
(25:52):
impromptu bowling games on the lawn. The bottles were used
as pins that were turned upside down and stuffed into
the dirt to line flower beds.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
Walks on the Carvel grounds.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
Co Cola bottle is still a co cola bottle. Ella said,
just found on a new purpose. And I think what
she was telling me was I didn't necessarily need to
be a new person, that those same traits I was
born with could.
Speaker 3 (26:17):
Be used for good or not so good.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
And that felt true to me because I'm suspect of
the I'm a totally different person. I'm made a you know,
one hundred and eighty degree turnaround. I think we're all
made up of what we're made up of, and we're
going to make mistakes, and we're going to stumble, and
we're going to fall, and bad things are going to happen.
But the solution to that is not a one to eighty.
It's a more subtle series of shifts. And that's the
(26:45):
gift she sort of gave me and.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
Pointed out to me.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
And you're listening to Neil White, author of In the
Sanctuary of Outcasts, a terrific read and a terrific storyteller.
In my goodness, that understanding of what had happened when
he kided those checks. He endured the humiliation in newspapers,
a bankruptcy, a lost house with the filing for divorce,
and possibly losing his children. That's when Neil hit bottom.
(27:15):
And wouldn't we all And when we come back more
with Neil White's story. Here on our American stories. And
(27:37):
we're back with our American stories. And the final portion
of Neil White's story he told us about his wife, Linda,
filing for divorce when he was in prison. Here's Neil
with the rest of his story.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
So Linda grew up in Oxford. Her family was here,
her friends were here. We had moved to the coast
and to New Orleans when all this went down. So
she decided to move back to Oxford, smaller town, for
her and for the kids. And so you know, I
realized I needed to be here too if I was
going to be.
Speaker 3 (28:12):
A good father.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
And in a long handwritten note, Linda outlined every reason
I should not move to Oxford. But in the last
paragraph her tone shifted. She would not resist my decision,
acknowledging she might be making a huge mistake. She believed
Neil and Maggie needed both of us. She closed her
letter with a request, please respect my space and privacy
(28:35):
for the sake of our children. Linda was willing to
sacrifice her desire to be far from me. I would
have some hard times after my release, especially in Oxford,
but Linda's blessing gave me great hope. Lynda had done
something remarkable. She had given me a second chance, a
second chance with my children. At that point in time,
I was in the Catholic Church and I was sort of.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
Crime.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
For a couple of days, I couldn't believe that this
was happening to me, and I noticed a new leprosy patient.
I'd never seen him before, but that was an unusual
Patients from around the world came to carve off with
special surgeries and treatments. But he was performing a ritual
I'd never seen. He put his Bible to his chin
and pressed it against his mouth like he was licking
the pages during communion. Standing at the altar, I got
(29:24):
a closer look. He was blind, and like most of
the victims of leprosy, the man's hands were anesta size,
so braill was of no use. His fingertips could not
feel the small bumps on the page. But he had
found a new way. He was reading Braille with his tongue,
and so to see what that guy overcame. When I
(29:44):
was wallowing in this pity of how am I going
to go back out and survive in Oxford, Mississippi. It
seemed like every time I fell into that I saw
something there that gave me a little bit different perspective
that pulled me out of that complete self centeredness. The
good thing about the federal prison system is they do
(30:06):
want you to not be there. They want you to
get out and live a good life. They want you
to have a good relationship with your family. So there
was this one day called Kid's Day, and the kids
were allowed to come into the prison and there was
a cake walk and there were games set up, and
the other inmates and guards were dressed up in clown
(30:27):
outfits and they were entertaining the kids. And they showed
a movie. They showed Free Willie. And one of the
inmates said, what the hell are they thinking? Is showing
about a captive killer whil trying to escape captivity showing
that to kids whose dads are in prison. I don't
think it was intentional, but it was pretty funny. So
the leprosy patients had this huge ballroom where they had
(30:49):
their dances and their Martagra parades and that sort of thing,
and that's where it was, and it was just this
remarkable day where the kids got to come in and
see where I spent my time. As silly as it sounds,
it was just one of those absolutely remarkable moments.
Speaker 3 (31:05):
And they both still remember that to this day.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
But what's really interesting is in the prison visiting room
they could visit Friday nights, all day Saturday, and all
day Sunday.
Speaker 3 (31:15):
And in this visiting room, there was no TV.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
There was no telephone, there was no Nintendo, there were
no computers. It was just them me, a playground where
we could throw a ball, some vending machines, some tables
where we could draw pictures and tell stories. I listened
to what they wanted to do. I answered the questions
they had. And I wasn't a bad father before I
went there, but I was so busy working trying to
(31:41):
build this magazine empire. I would run through the house,
pat them on the head, and say we're going to
go to Disney World spring Break. And so I really
kind of learned to rea parent in that prison visiting room.
When I got out of prison, I just parented in
a real different way. The first thing I did when
I moved back to Oxford was I moved the dining
room table out of our house and put a ping
(32:02):
pong table in the middle of it, and we just
spent hours playing ping pong and goofing around and playing,
and I coached their teams.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
I would go eat lunch with them at their school.
It was really interesting.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
I was thinking when I moved back to Oxford, all
the things that I wanted before were out of my reach.
I'd never be asked to be on the board of
a bank. I'd never be asked to be in charge
of people's money. I'd never be asked to be in
any political office or any position of importance. And it
occurred to me, Hell, I'm free. I can go eat
lunch with my kids. I can coach their teams at
(32:32):
three and so it was a very different way of
living for me. So I spent the next ten years
really trying to be a good father. But I was
trying to figure out how am I going to make
this work. I can't get a job because I have
to check that box. Have you been convicted of a felony.
I'm not going to have any resources. I didn't know
(32:54):
what to do, so I set up a little card
table in my kitchen and I called some people who
were colleagues and friends and basically said, look, I lost
my freedom, I lost my money, I lost other people's money,
but I didn't lose my mind. I'm still creative. I
can still do good work. If you have anything, a
(33:15):
press release, a brochure, you name it, I'll do it.
I'll never take money up front. If you don't like it,
you don't pay for it. And within the first three
months of being out, I got three clients, and all
of them were banks who recognized a good deal. I
had no overhead, I had no assistance, I had no employees.
So after being convicted of bank fraud, my first clients
(33:36):
were banks and I did work for them and they
were happy with it, and I started doing their annual reports.
And then I started a small magazine for graduating seniors
to help them navigate the path to getting into college
and financial aid. And that caught on and a bunch
of big national banks bought into it, and that ended
(33:57):
up having a circulation within about four years of almost
two million copies.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
And so in very short order, by myself.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
Without having an office, I had a company bigger than
the one that was on the coast, with thirty employees.
So it was a strange turn of events. But I
didn't push to be big. I didn't push for anything
to happen it. I was focused on doing good, quality
work with no expectation of the outcome. Linda told me
when I got here that her love for the kids
(34:29):
was greater than any of her animosity toward me. That
I could come to her house anytime and get them.
She would never call a babysitter, or she would call
me and see if I wanted them first. So I
ended up having the kids about half the time. Neither
one of us remarried. For about five years. We would
do Mothers and Father's Day together. We were pretty good
co parents. A lot of people in our church we
went to the same church, and that they wished their
(34:51):
marriage was as good as our divorce. But she went
so far in forgiving me. She could have made my
life really miserable, and she chose not to. I'll always
be very grateful for that.
Speaker 3 (35:02):
When I got back.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
Out, I went to try and apologize to everybody I
had hurt, and with the exception of one or two,
and there were a lot of people that had been
hurt by the wake of destruction that I had left.
You know, they said, you've done your time, we forgive you.
Let's start new. Some of us started doing business together again,
and so it was helpful to me, but I also
think it was really therapeutic to the people who got
(35:26):
hurt that some reckless.
Speaker 3 (35:28):
Guy wasn't going to get away with it again.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
The truth is, you know, I was thirty two when
I was sentenced to prison, and you know, bad things
that happened, and I'd gotten into a little trouble, but
I had never truly been held accountable. People had always
given me a benefit of the doubt. In fact, I
had been caught on a very much smaller scale kiting
checks eight years earlier in Oxford. It was st at
the tune of like seven thousand dollars and I just
(35:53):
paid it immediately, and a woman at the bank said,
we're going to have to notify the FBI of this,
and I said okay, And nothing ever came of it.
Speaker 3 (36:04):
Nobody ever called, nobody ever said anything.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
And so what it told me was that might be illegal,
but as long as you pay it, ultimately nothing's going
to happen. I'm not blaming anybody else, but I just
people gave me breaks, over and over and over again.
They would say, Oh, he's a good kid, so let's
slap on the wrist. So nothing ever really serious in
(36:26):
terms of consequences happened to me until this and this
label of X con, this label of somebody who'd been
convicted of a felony. It took away all these options
for me that did nothing but get me into trouble.
And what I was left with was, you know, the
(36:46):
ability to be kind, to use whatever skills I have
to make the world a better place, to be a
good father, to be a good friend.
Speaker 3 (36:54):
So it was.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
It was a gift in so many ways. They were
all sorts of people who helped me, whether they intended
to or not. I felt proud to live in a
room that offered a century of safety for leprosy patients.
I was honored to take communion in the same sanctuary
where society's outcasts asked God to console their suffering. I
(37:15):
felt privileged to live and work and play in a
place that few had ever seen.
Speaker 3 (37:21):
And I was.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Grateful I had been imprisoned here in a leprosarium where
I could begin to rebuild my life in a different way.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
And a terrific job on the production by Madison Derrikut
and a special thanks to Neil White, author in the
Sanctuary of Outcasts Again go to Amazon with the usual
suspects pick up this terrific book. By the way, he
thanked the judge last line of the book for holding
him accountable and putting him in prison. What character. Neil
was a better man, a better father, and a better
(37:52):
friend for everything he'd been through. And of course always
those leprosy patients would jolt him back to reality. Watching
one patient meat a Bible with his tongue. That's enough
to get anybody out of bouts with self pity. Neil White,
a story of redemption and so much more here on
our American Stories
This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American people.
To search for the Our American Stories podcast, go to
the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts up. Next,
you're going to hear from Neil White, who's the author
of In the Sanctuary of Outcasts. For much of his
early life, Neil's appearance and status is what mattered most him.
(00:34):
He'll be sharing his story of a time when all
of that was stripped from him and how he came
to realize the real important things in his life.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
For most of the twentieth century, anyone in the continentally
United States, who contracted leprosy was sent to this colony
in Louisiana, just south of Baton Rouge. It was located
on a bend in the Mississippi River that was rounded
on all three sides by water, and for most of
that time, they were taken against their will and sent there.
(01:08):
They were sometimes brought in shackles, sometimes at gunpoint. When
they got there, they were given an inmate number. They
were made to change their names, they took an alias.
They couldn't vote, they couldn't marry. Some of the most
tragic stories you've ever heard. So that treatment went on
from eighteen ninety six to nineteen sixty nine, and in
(01:30):
nineteen sixty nine they discovered a cure and they threw
open the gates to the colony and said to the
four or five hundred patients who were there, you're free
to go. A year later, only seventeen had left. Their
families had abandoned them. They had no place to go.
They didn't want to go out in public with disfigured limbs.
So they had created this community and this culture with
(01:53):
its own morase and traditions, and so they felt safe
in this colony. In sixty nine, the government decided that
they would be allowed to stay there and they could
live there for the rest of their lives. So jump
forward almost thirty years, and there are only one hundred
and thirty of those patients left, and there are all
(02:14):
these empty beds where the leprosy.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Patients used to live.
Speaker 2 (02:18):
And so a fiscally responsible bureaucrat said, I've got an idea.
Instead of wasting taxpayers dollars on building a new federal prison,
let's put nonviolent offenders and infirmed inmates. Inmates who had
a medical problem because there was a hospital there for
the leprosy patients in these empty rooms. And we'll say
the taxpayer a great deal of money. So just about
(02:38):
the time that they did that, which was nineteen ninety three,
I was a magazine publisher. I was thirty two years old,
and I was going to conquer the world. I wanted
to build the biggest magazine empire faster than anybody else had,
and I stumbled across this technique. It's a crime you
can't commit anymore, called kiting checks, where you could write
(02:58):
a check to yourself from yourself when I was running
short of money until real money came in. I'd been
doing it off and on for years and years. It
is absolutely illegal. And I got to a point after
acquiring Louisiana Life magazine where the House of Cards just
felt The FDC came in and did an audit at
the bank and I ended up pleading to one count
(03:20):
of bank fraud and was sentenced to eighteen months in
federal prison. And it just so happened that I was
sent to the experimental prison in Carville, Louisiana.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
So this was pre internet.
Speaker 2 (03:32):
I had no idea where I was going I knew
it was a mentum security prison and that I would
probably not be in danger physically. I knew I wouldn't
see my kids except in the visiting room, but I
had no inkling of what actually awaited behind those gates.
(03:52):
I packed a leather bag with books and racketball rackets
and tennis shoes and shorts, like I was going to camp,
and I was not going to be late reporting to prison.
So I got there early, and the guard was looking
at his watch, saying, you know you're thirty minutes earlier.
You're still a free man. It's like, no, no, I'm good.
I'll just wait right here, do we You know? I
(04:13):
was so ridiculous, just wanting to do everything right and
figuring that if I did, I would get special treatment there,
which of course I did not. I was standing there
waiting for a guard to come collect me, and I
saw a man walking down this hallway, and when he
got to the window closest to me, he waved to
(04:35):
me and he didn't have any fingers. And so I
went over to this guard house and I said, I
I just saw a guy.
Speaker 3 (04:44):
With no fingers.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
Assumed it might have been like a prison industry accident.
And the guy said, oh, that's a Hansons disease patient.
And I said, what's that? And he said it used
to be called leprosy. And that was the first time
that I knew something might be off. So a guard
came to get me. He strip searched me, he let
me keep two books, gave me a couple of clothes
I could keep, and he gave me a.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
Piece of paper with my room number on it.
Speaker 2 (05:08):
And so I walked out of that office into this
courtyard where the prison was located. It was surrounded by
two story concrete walls and walkways. And when I walked out,
I saw men sunbathing on a shuffle board court. I
saw twenty or thirty men who were over five hundred pounds,
a couple who were six hundred pounds playing dominoes. They
sent the most morbidly obese inmates there for the hospital.
(05:31):
I saw men in wheelchairs who had been amputated so
high they had to be in a bucket so they
wouldn't fall out. It was just this unbelievable crew of characters.
I had been thrown into this place with not only
the last Americans in prison for a disease, but also
these inmates, most of whom I thought would be non
(05:53):
violent offenders, but because the medical inmates, a lot of
them were there for heart attacks or stroke or diabetes
or something like that. And a lot of those inmates
did have a violent passed, and so I was sort
of disoriented that this was not at all the kind
of club fed that I thought I was going to
be going into. I was so appalled that I had
(06:18):
been subjected to these people that I was going to
write an expose and when I got out of prison
revealed to the world as a journalist what this horrible
government experiment was going on that nobody knew about where
inmates could get leprosy, and violent inmates were put in
with minimum security inmates. So I was completely in denial
that I needed to change, that I needed this experience,
(06:41):
and that's how I went in.
Speaker 3 (06:43):
As I was wandering trying to find where.
Speaker 2 (06:45):
I should put my stuff, I saw this woman in
a wooden, antique hand cranked wheelchair. She didn't have any legs,
and she was sort of wabbling down the hall in
this wheelchair, not being able to go straight very well.
And U knew this was an all male prison, And
I'll say she wasn't a prison guard, so I held
my breath and stepped back, And as she cranked her
(07:07):
way past me, she said, there's no place like home.
And then she turned a corner and an inmate came
up to me and said, you see that woman. She
was dropped off here when she was twelve years old,
and her family never came back to see here. And
he said, are you still feeling sorry for yourself?
Speaker 1 (07:24):
And when we come back more with Neil White's story
here on Our American Stories, Lie Hibibe here the host
of our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're
bringing inspiring stories from across this great country, stories from
our big cities and small towns. But we truly can't
do the show without you. Our stories are free to
(07:45):
listen to, but they're not free to make. If you
love what you hear, go to Ouramerican Stories dot com
and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot.
Go to Ouramerican Stories dot com and give And we're
(08:10):
back with our American Stories and with author Neil White's story.
When we last left off, Neil had just entered prison
and had encountered a woman with leprosy. That woman's name
was Elabama back to Neil.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
So later that week I was assigned to a job
in the cafeteria. I was doing the leprosy patient's menu board,
and I was there from four am to noon. So
at about five am one morning, I was in their
cafeteria and I saw this woman whose name was el Abalance,
and I asked her how she ended up here. Ella
(08:47):
leaned back in her wheelchairs, settling in denim spring. She
said in a whisper. Nineteen hundred and twenty six. I
was in grade school. According to Ella, a doctor had
visited the one room school to administer shots. The raised
oval spots on her leg where the pigmentation had disappeared,
had caught his attention. He pricked the blotches with a needle.
(09:08):
Ella felt nothing. Next week, white man drives up, Ella said,
and I seen the carroll boyt pointing outside.
Speaker 3 (09:16):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
Ella, he said, bounty hunter fixing to carry you away.
I look out and see the man leaning on his truck,
wearing dark glasses, arms crossed all tight. A hand painted
sign large enough to be seen from neighboring farms, and
which would later be nailed to the side of her
family's tenant house extended from the back of the white
man's pickup truck. Ella couldn't read the long words scrawled
in red letters. Later she would understand quarantine. The school
(09:42):
teacher put her hand on Ella's shoulder, pulled her up
from her desk, and led her outside. The other children
ran over to the window. The teacher walked her across
the small schoolyard toward the truck that idled at the
edge of the field. The bounty hunter uncrossed his arms
and pushed back his coat to expose a pistol. The
teacher stopped and took her hand dolf Fella's shoulder. The
man pointed to the back of the truck, and Ella
(10:03):
climbed in. As he drove away. Ella looked out through
the wooden slats. So I was sentenced to eighteen months
for mishandling nearly a million dollars. She had been there
sixty eight years because she was susceptible to a bacterial infection,
and standing in front of her hearing that story, it
(10:26):
was virtually impossible to muster up anything resembling self pity.
You never know how you're going to act when you
go into a prison. I certainly knew that I wasn't
going to be one of the tough guys. I wasn't
going to get into a fight. I wanted to get
out as soon as I possibly could. Because I had
a six year old son and a three year old daughter.
(10:47):
I wanted to follow all the rules. I wanted to
be the best inmate I could be. And so I
went in deciding that I wasn't going to put on
any air, so I was just going to be myself.
I was going to ask the questions I wanted to ask.
So I was going to be friendly. I was going
to use, you know, manners and be polite. So I
sort of scurried off into a hallway to try and
find my room. I walk in and my new roommate
(11:11):
is reading a medical journal, laying back on his cot
and he drops it on his chest and he looks
up at me, and I introduced myself as Neil.
Speaker 3 (11:19):
He told me his name was Nick, and everybody there
called him Doc.
Speaker 2 (11:23):
And he asked me if I snitched on anybody, and
I told him that I had committed this crime on
my own. There was no conspiracy, there was nobody else.
I didn't testify against anybody. And he said, well, good
because I hate snitches. Apparently his accountant turned state's evidence
over and that's why he was in prison. But it
turns out this guy was brilliant. He went to the
(11:43):
University of Tennessee medical school, and he said he had
learned more in his fifteen years in prison than he
did in medical school because Tennessee never suspended his medical license,
so he got every medical journal for free, and he
had the time to read them all, so he was
up the latest of everything. And he got in trouble
(12:04):
because he had developed this weight loss drug. The abbreviation
is DNP has got a long chemical name. It's an
illegal drug, but he discovered it when he was hired
by the CIA to translate Russian documents. And this drug
was used during World War iiO not as a drug
against enemies, but for the Russian troops. It prevented them
(12:25):
from getting frostbite. It warmed their extremities in their body,
and he saw in a footnote that the soldiers were
losing five to ten pounds a week when they took
this drug. And he started doing research on it, and
he discovered that he could give it to women and
they would lose weight without exercising, and he had clinics.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
All over the South.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
He said, the lines were around the corner of overweight
women coming in to get this DNP, which was completely illegal,
and a lot of them were poor. So it was
about forty million dollars in medicaid fraud from what understand.
But the patients loved him and the weight fell off,
and he was dispensing this illegal drug. So I think
(13:08):
Doc could have done whirls of good for mankind if
he had been placed in a pharmaceutical company and just
said we're going to give you a million dollars a
year invent stuff. But he always, I think, and that
was the problem with all of us in prison. There
was this hubris, this ego that he wanted to be
the person who led the charge, who got the accolades,
who made all the money. And I can't say that
(13:29):
I was much different from that in my own realm.
So you know, I wanted to put up photographs of
my kids in my locker, and I said, do you
have any you know, tay or Pase, I want to
stick these photographs in a locker. And Doc reached over,
grabbed his toothpaste and tossed it to me, and I said,
what's this? He said, tooth paste, And so I spread
(13:51):
toothpaste on the back of the photographs and put them
up there.
Speaker 3 (13:55):
I didn't know anything about the rules.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
I wanted my clothes to be not just ironed, but
starist if possible. I missed cologne. I mean, I was
such a fish out of water and I didn't know
any other way to act. So you can't have paper
money in federal prisons. The reason for that is you
could accumulate a lot of it, so you can only
have coins. So when I came in with twenty dollars,
(14:19):
they exchanged it for two roles of quarters, and I
put them in my locker. After I put my kids'
photographs up with the toothpaste. And later that night I
came back and Doc was there and I opened my
locker and the quarters were gone, and I said, somebody
took my quarters. And he didn't even look up from reading.
(14:40):
He said, rumor has it there are criminals here. I
just I was such a fish out of water. The
second week I was in prison, I was in the
admission and orientation room to learn the rules of the prison.
And of course I wanted to be a model inmate
to get back home as soon as I could. And
during the presentation, I noticed there was an inmate who
(15:02):
was turned away from the presenter, staring at me, who
was a crack dealer from New Orleans we called Link.
I went up to him and I said, excuse me,
I don't mean any disrespect, but why do you keep
steering at me? And he said, man, you look just
like Clark count. What the hell did you do to
get in here? I said, well, I'm in here for
bank fraud and he said you're a bank robber. I
said no, no, no, no, no, not bank robber, bank fraud.
(15:24):
I was I was kiting checks to keep my business afloat.
And he said, let me ask you something that did
a bank lose money? He said, well, yeah, actually there
were two banks involved. He said, then you're a damn
bank robber. And they all started laughing. Everybody was listening
in and he said how much did you get?
Speaker 3 (15:39):
He got really.
Speaker 2 (15:39):
Excited and he said I didn't get any I was
paying printers and payroll and investors, and I was leveraging
one part of the company to expand in another. He said,
how much did the banks lose? And I said, well, together,
they lost seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars and he said,
and how much of that do you have? And I said,
I told you I don't have any. And he said, man,
(16:00):
I've been in jails all over this country. You are
the stupidest criminal I've ever met. And so by the
time the week ended, he was following me around asking
me questions, and he determined that I was not only
the stupidest criminal and the boringest person he'd ever met,
but I was the whitest man he had ever met.
And then when he found out my name was Neil White,
it was just all over with. But this guy, he
(16:22):
was uneducated, but he was brilliant. He could size you
up and dismantle you. And he was so street smart
compared to me. And he told me after about the
third day, man, you're in prison. You don't need to
be using manners. And I was like, well, that's just
how I talk, you know, Thank you excuse me. I
(16:42):
just I was myself, and I think maybe I had
sort of lost that on the outside because I was
trying to be something I wasn't.
Speaker 1 (16:51):
And you're listening to author Neil White. The book is
in the Sanctuary of Outcasts. You can get it at
Amazon or wherever you get your books. You will not
put this book down. It's one of the finest reads
I've come across. And you know, we love books and
authors of all stripes. Here on our American Stories, and
my goodness, the cast of characters you'll meet Ella, My goodness,
(17:13):
your heart will weep for this woman and her life,
and yet she's happy. And of course there's Doc and Link.
I loved what he said about Neil. You're the stupidest
criminal I ever met. You're the boringest criminal I ever met.
And you're the whitest criminal I ever met. And then
he finds, out, of course, that Neil's last name is White.
(17:35):
When we come back more of Neil White's story, he
hails right from here in Oxford, Mississippi, a writer's town
if ever there was one, home to Faulkner and Grisham,
Richard Ford and so many others. Here on our American Stories.
(18:04):
And we're back with our American stories and with author
Neil White. He's been sharing with us his various adventures.
In the first few weeks in a prison in Louisiana
dedicated to leprosy, patients or turned into a prison for well,
(18:25):
all kinds of characters.
Speaker 3 (18:27):
Back to Neil.
Speaker 2 (18:31):
So, my first day of working the four am shift
in the kitchen, I went out to meet the guys
and be escorted to the kitchen by guard and he
was balmy even at four a m. It was probably
seventy eighty degrees and I noticed four or five of
the guys.
Speaker 3 (18:43):
Had on these huge, heavy coats and these big mits.
I was like, that is idiotic. They're gonna die in
this heat.
Speaker 2 (18:51):
And so we all walked to the kitchen and after
about thirty minutes the guard left.
Speaker 3 (18:56):
I don't know if he went back to his office
or what.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
And I was washing dish and making toast, and I
noticed that there weren't many people around.
Speaker 3 (19:03):
A bunch of them had disappeared.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
So one of the people cooking asked me to go
into the big cooler and get something. I don't know
if it was fruit or whatever. And so I walked
in and I didn't see it initially. So I walked
toward the back and I noticed that there were these
three inmates asleep in the very back of the cooler.
They had gotten up on boxes of produce and fruit
and stuff and made these sort of makeshift beds, and
(19:28):
they had bundled up in their coats and mittens and
they were sleeping. They were just sleeping the morning away
in the cooler. And I couldn't believe that these guys,
they were literally sleeping on the job in like thirty
seven degree temperature. So there were about a third of
us who did all the work. But what always struck
me and I guess, you know, the same thing would
(19:49):
be said about me. These guys were so creative and
went to such lengths to do.
Speaker 3 (19:56):
Things the wrong way.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
If they had funneled that inner into doing something that
was sort of productive or legal, there's no telling what
they could have accomplished. But they just thrived on beating
the system. So I was washing dishes with a guy
named Jefferson, and he was asking me what I did,
and I asked him what he did, and he said
(20:18):
that he worked at the post office and he manned
the X ray machine at the Loyola Street post office
in New Orleans.
Speaker 3 (20:26):
And said, x ray machine. They why do they have
an X ray machine?
Speaker 2 (20:30):
He said, every package, every letter goes through the X
ray machine and make sure there's nothing dangerous and I said,
did you ever see anything interesting go through? And he said,
every damn day you see cash money coming through there.
He said, I'd pick up that letter, stick at my pocket.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
And go home.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
And I said, you really took cash from the mail
and he said absolutely. He said, some of the nicest
letters you've ever seen in your life. He said, I'd
take those things and read them and say, dear Tommy,
here's four one hundred dollars bills for your fourth birthday.
And he said, I would start saying happy birthday to me,
Happy birthday to me.
Speaker 3 (21:03):
I said, I can't believe it.
Speaker 2 (21:05):
I used to send, you know, cash to my kids
and to friends. I said, didn't you ever feel bad
about that? He said, oh, yeah, absolutely. This one day
there was another kid who was turning six years old
and there were six one hundred dollars bills. And I said,
and you felt bad, right, And he said yeah, because
I was hoping he was a teenager. And he just
went on and on and on. He had absolutely no
(21:25):
remorse about this, but he was hysterical. I was bent
over laughing and appalled at the same time. But these
are the people you encountered there. So we had payphones
and we could make collect calls. And I called, you know,
as much as I could to speak to the kids,
and there was always this recording that interrupted about every
(21:47):
three minutes. This call emanates from a federal correctional facility.
So I was talking to Linda, my wife, and she
told me that she was filing for a divorce, and
I was just absolutely devastated. What's interesting is I had
filed for bankruptcy. I had been humiliated in the newspapers.
(22:10):
There was six columns across the top of the headline
White sentenced to prison. I lost my house, I lost
my money. All these things happened, and I still didn't
hit what for me was rock bottom. But the thought
of not living with my kids, not putting them a
bed every night, not waking up with them every morning,
that was the one that finally got me. I looked
(22:32):
for an abandoned hallway, a corner in the library, an
empty television room, but inmates were everywhere. I couldn't catch
my breath, air didn't go deep enough. My hands trembled,
I felt nauseated. I needed to cry, but I couldn't
let anyone see me, not a guard or an inmate
or leprosy patient. I sat on a bench in the
corner of the inmate courtyard, slumped over. I could feel
(22:55):
my heart pound. That's where Link saw me look at
Clark Kent feeling all sad. I wanted him to go away.
My wife is leaving me, I said, hoping he would
take the hint. Damn, he said, laughing like he thought
this was way too funny. You've been lying your whole life.
You lost two million dollars and yours is in jail.
(23:15):
What the hell do you think she's gonna do? You know,
Link had a way of bringing you out of your
self pity and pointing out that, yeah, you might be sad,
but this shouldn't have been a surprise to you. By
the time I was thirty one, ambition had become the
driving force in my life. Privately, I envisioned the figure
(23:36):
I would become owner of a huge network, city magazine's
editor of a daily newspaper, holder of innumerable civic awards,
owner of a fabulous yacht, and of course, philanthropist. With
these images fixed in my mind, I was able to
overlook what I did to get there, But the prospect
of losing my children had stripped away every pretense it
(23:57):
did what bankruptcy, public humiliation, and imprisonment had not done.
I could no longer stomach my own lives and delusions.
For the first time, I felt the full weight of
my crimes. I began the process of asking myself the
hard questions. How did I get so far? Of course?
How could I have hurt so many people? How could
(24:18):
I have put my family at risk? Could I avoid
caring what people thought of me? And how could I
support my family in a way that did no harm
but allowed me to help others. I'd never set aside
the time to look at how I felt or where
I was headed. I believed I could not afford to
question my motives. I was focused on a single goal
success and had no interest in anything that stood in
(24:40):
the way. I had convinced myself that cuiding checks wasn't
a real crime. I'd also convinced myself that there were
no real victims as long as I covered the overdraft.
But deep down I knew better now. I used to
tell people that I was my own best customer. I
could convince myself of anything that justified what I wanted,
And that is a really, really dangerous way to live.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
You know, I knew I.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Needed to change, and I knew I needed to do
things differently. And I told Ella about that. I said,
you know, I want to be a new person, but
I still wake up feeling sort of the same. Ella
intertwined her fingers like she always did when she told
the story. In the early days of Carvel, she explained,
the Coca Cola distributor from Baton Rouge sent chipped and
cracked coke bottles to the colony so he could refuse
(25:28):
to accept the return bottles. He feared a public boycott
if customers discovered the glass containers had been touched by
the lips of leprosy patients. More drink bottles than you've
ever seen, she said. The crates of bottles filled closets
and storerooms. But the patients discovered new uses for the
non returnable bottles. They used them as flower vases with
beautiful arrangements. They became sugar dispensers in the cafeteria for
(25:52):
impromptu bowling games on the lawn. The bottles were used
as pins that were turned upside down and stuffed into
the dirt to line flower beds.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
Walks on the Carvel grounds.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
Co Cola bottle is still a co cola bottle. Ella said,
just found on a new purpose. And I think what
she was telling me was I didn't necessarily need to
be a new person, that those same traits I was
born with could.
Speaker 3 (26:17):
Be used for good or not so good.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
And that felt true to me because I'm suspect of
the I'm a totally different person. I'm made a you know,
one hundred and eighty degree turnaround. I think we're all
made up of what we're made up of, and we're
going to make mistakes, and we're going to stumble, and
we're going to fall, and bad things are going to happen.
But the solution to that is not a one to eighty.
It's a more subtle series of shifts. And that's the
(26:45):
gift she sort of gave me and.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
Pointed out to me.
Speaker 1 (26:51):
And you're listening to Neil White, author of In the
Sanctuary of Outcasts, a terrific read and a terrific storyteller.
In my goodness, that understanding of what had happened when
he kided those checks. He endured the humiliation in newspapers,
a bankruptcy, a lost house with the filing for divorce,
and possibly losing his children. That's when Neil hit bottom.
(27:15):
And wouldn't we all And when we come back more
with Neil White's story. Here on our American stories. And
(27:37):
we're back with our American stories. And the final portion
of Neil White's story he told us about his wife, Linda,
filing for divorce when he was in prison. Here's Neil
with the rest of his story.
Speaker 2 (27:55):
So Linda grew up in Oxford. Her family was here,
her friends were here. We had moved to the coast
and to New Orleans when all this went down. So
she decided to move back to Oxford, smaller town, for
her and for the kids. And so you know, I
realized I needed to be here too if I was
going to be.
Speaker 3 (28:12):
A good father.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
And in a long handwritten note, Linda outlined every reason
I should not move to Oxford. But in the last
paragraph her tone shifted. She would not resist my decision,
acknowledging she might be making a huge mistake. She believed
Neil and Maggie needed both of us. She closed her
letter with a request, please respect my space and privacy
(28:35):
for the sake of our children. Linda was willing to
sacrifice her desire to be far from me. I would
have some hard times after my release, especially in Oxford,
but Linda's blessing gave me great hope. Lynda had done
something remarkable. She had given me a second chance, a
second chance with my children. At that point in time,
I was in the Catholic Church and I was sort of.
Speaker 3 (29:00):
Crime.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
For a couple of days, I couldn't believe that this
was happening to me, and I noticed a new leprosy patient.
I'd never seen him before, but that was an unusual
Patients from around the world came to carve off with
special surgeries and treatments. But he was performing a ritual
I'd never seen. He put his Bible to his chin
and pressed it against his mouth like he was licking
the pages during communion. Standing at the altar, I got
(29:24):
a closer look. He was blind, and like most of
the victims of leprosy, the man's hands were anesta size,
so braill was of no use. His fingertips could not
feel the small bumps on the page. But he had
found a new way. He was reading Braille with his tongue,
and so to see what that guy overcame. When I
(29:44):
was wallowing in this pity of how am I going
to go back out and survive in Oxford, Mississippi. It
seemed like every time I fell into that I saw
something there that gave me a little bit different perspective
that pulled me out of that complete self centeredness. The
good thing about the federal prison system is they do
(30:06):
want you to not be there. They want you to
get out and live a good life. They want you
to have a good relationship with your family. So there
was this one day called Kid's Day, and the kids
were allowed to come into the prison and there was
a cake walk and there were games set up, and
the other inmates and guards were dressed up in clown
(30:27):
outfits and they were entertaining the kids. And they showed
a movie. They showed Free Willie. And one of the
inmates said, what the hell are they thinking? Is showing
about a captive killer whil trying to escape captivity showing
that to kids whose dads are in prison. I don't
think it was intentional, but it was pretty funny. So
the leprosy patients had this huge ballroom where they had
(30:49):
their dances and their Martagra parades and that sort of thing,
and that's where it was, and it was just this
remarkable day where the kids got to come in and
see where I spent my time. As silly as it sounds,
it was just one of those absolutely remarkable moments.
Speaker 3 (31:05):
And they both still remember that to this day.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
But what's really interesting is in the prison visiting room
they could visit Friday nights, all day Saturday, and all
day Sunday.
Speaker 3 (31:15):
And in this visiting room, there was no TV.
Speaker 2 (31:18):
There was no telephone, there was no Nintendo, there were
no computers. It was just them me, a playground where
we could throw a ball, some vending machines, some tables
where we could draw pictures and tell stories. I listened
to what they wanted to do. I answered the questions
they had. And I wasn't a bad father before I
went there, but I was so busy working trying to
(31:41):
build this magazine empire. I would run through the house,
pat them on the head, and say we're going to
go to Disney World spring Break. And so I really
kind of learned to rea parent in that prison visiting room.
When I got out of prison, I just parented in
a real different way. The first thing I did when
I moved back to Oxford was I moved the dining
room table out of our house and put a ping
(32:02):
pong table in the middle of it, and we just
spent hours playing ping pong and goofing around and playing,
and I coached their teams.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
I would go eat lunch with them at their school.
It was really interesting.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
I was thinking when I moved back to Oxford, all
the things that I wanted before were out of my reach.
I'd never be asked to be on the board of
a bank. I'd never be asked to be in charge
of people's money. I'd never be asked to be in
any political office or any position of importance. And it
occurred to me, Hell, I'm free. I can go eat
lunch with my kids. I can coach their teams at
(32:32):
three and so it was a very different way of
living for me. So I spent the next ten years
really trying to be a good father. But I was
trying to figure out how am I going to make
this work. I can't get a job because I have
to check that box. Have you been convicted of a felony.
I'm not going to have any resources. I didn't know
(32:54):
what to do, so I set up a little card
table in my kitchen and I called some people who
were colleagues and friends and basically said, look, I lost
my freedom, I lost my money, I lost other people's money,
but I didn't lose my mind. I'm still creative. I
can still do good work. If you have anything, a
(33:15):
press release, a brochure, you name it, I'll do it.
I'll never take money up front. If you don't like it,
you don't pay for it. And within the first three
months of being out, I got three clients, and all
of them were banks who recognized a good deal. I
had no overhead, I had no assistance, I had no employees.
So after being convicted of bank fraud, my first clients
(33:36):
were banks and I did work for them and they
were happy with it, and I started doing their annual reports.
And then I started a small magazine for graduating seniors
to help them navigate the path to getting into college
and financial aid. And that caught on and a bunch
of big national banks bought into it, and that ended
(33:57):
up having a circulation within about four years of almost
two million copies.
Speaker 3 (34:01):
And so in very short order, by myself.
Speaker 2 (34:06):
Without having an office, I had a company bigger than
the one that was on the coast, with thirty employees.
So it was a strange turn of events. But I
didn't push to be big. I didn't push for anything
to happen it. I was focused on doing good, quality
work with no expectation of the outcome. Linda told me
when I got here that her love for the kids
(34:29):
was greater than any of her animosity toward me. That
I could come to her house anytime and get them.
She would never call a babysitter, or she would call
me and see if I wanted them first. So I
ended up having the kids about half the time. Neither
one of us remarried. For about five years. We would
do Mothers and Father's Day together. We were pretty good
co parents. A lot of people in our church we
went to the same church, and that they wished their
(34:51):
marriage was as good as our divorce. But she went
so far in forgiving me. She could have made my
life really miserable, and she chose not to. I'll always
be very grateful for that.
Speaker 3 (35:02):
When I got back.
Speaker 2 (35:03):
Out, I went to try and apologize to everybody I
had hurt, and with the exception of one or two,
and there were a lot of people that had been
hurt by the wake of destruction that I had left.
You know, they said, you've done your time, we forgive you.
Let's start new. Some of us started doing business together again,
and so it was helpful to me, but I also
think it was really therapeutic to the people who got
(35:26):
hurt that some reckless.
Speaker 3 (35:28):
Guy wasn't going to get away with it again.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
The truth is, you know, I was thirty two when
I was sentenced to prison, and you know, bad things
that happened, and I'd gotten into a little trouble, but
I had never truly been held accountable. People had always
given me a benefit of the doubt. In fact, I
had been caught on a very much smaller scale kiting
checks eight years earlier in Oxford. It was st at
the tune of like seven thousand dollars and I just
(35:53):
paid it immediately, and a woman at the bank said,
we're going to have to notify the FBI of this,
and I said okay, And nothing ever came of it.
Speaker 3 (36:04):
Nobody ever called, nobody ever said anything.
Speaker 2 (36:06):
And so what it told me was that might be illegal,
but as long as you pay it, ultimately nothing's going
to happen. I'm not blaming anybody else, but I just
people gave me breaks, over and over and over again.
They would say, Oh, he's a good kid, so let's
slap on the wrist. So nothing ever really serious in
(36:26):
terms of consequences happened to me until this and this
label of X con, this label of somebody who'd been
convicted of a felony. It took away all these options
for me that did nothing but get me into trouble.
And what I was left with was, you know, the
(36:46):
ability to be kind, to use whatever skills I have
to make the world a better place, to be a
good father, to be a good friend.
Speaker 3 (36:54):
So it was.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
It was a gift in so many ways. They were
all sorts of people who helped me, whether they intended
to or not. I felt proud to live in a
room that offered a century of safety for leprosy patients.
I was honored to take communion in the same sanctuary
where society's outcasts asked God to console their suffering. I
(37:15):
felt privileged to live and work and play in a
place that few had ever seen.
Speaker 3 (37:21):
And I was.
Speaker 2 (37:21):
Grateful I had been imprisoned here in a leprosarium where
I could begin to rebuild my life in a different way.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
And a terrific job on the production by Madison Derrikut
and a special thanks to Neil White, author in the
Sanctuary of Outcasts Again go to Amazon with the usual
suspects pick up this terrific book. By the way, he
thanked the judge last line of the book for holding
him accountable and putting him in prison. What character. Neil
was a better man, a better father, and a better
(37:52):
friend for everything he'd been through. And of course always
those leprosy patients would jolt him back to reality. Watching
one patient meat a Bible with his tongue. That's enough
to get anybody out of bouts with self pity. Neil White,
a story of redemption and so much more here on
our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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