September 24, 2024 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, for much of his early life, success and status were the driving factors of Neil White's life. This mindset led him to being imprisoned for a white-collar crime in Carville, Louisiana. But this wasn't any normal prison...
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Episode Transcript
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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.
(00:35):
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 surrounded
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 this
figured lembs. So they had created this community and this
(01:52):
culture with its own morase and traditions, and so they
felt safe in this colony. 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
(02:14):
all these empty beds where.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
The leprosy 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 non violent 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
save the taxpayer a great deal of money.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
So just about the.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
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
a check to yourself, I'm yourself when I was running
(03:01):
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 of
bank fraud and was sentenced to eighteen months in federal prison.
(03:24):
And it just so happened that I was sent to
the experimental prison in Carville, Louisiana. So this was pre internet.
I had no idea where I was going. I knew
it was a mentosecurity 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.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
Behind those gates.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
You're still a free man. It's like, no, no, no, I'm good.
I'll just wait right here, do we.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
You know?
Speaker 2 (04:13):
I 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
(04:35):
waved to 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 with no fingers. I
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
(04:57):
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 piece of
paper with my room number on it. 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. When I walked out, I saw men
(05:20):
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. 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
(05:42):
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 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
(06:05):
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 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
(06:28):
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, and that's how I went in.
As I was wandering trying to find where I should
put my stuff, I saw this woman in a wooden,
(06:50):
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 I
knew this was an all male prison, and I assume
she wasn't a prison guard. So I held my breath
and stepped back, and as she cranked her way past me,
she said, there's no place like home. And then she
(07:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
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. Leehabibe 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 listen to,
(07:46):
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 back
(08:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
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 Ella Balance,
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 boy pointing outside. Oh, Ella,
he said, boundy hunter fixing to carry you away. I'll
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
(09:30):
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
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
(09:50):
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 and off Fella's shoulder.
The man pointed to the back of the truck, and
Ella climbed in. As he drove away, Ella looked out
through the wooden slats. So I was sentenced to eighteen
(10:13):
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 was virtually impossible to muster up anything resembling self pity.
(10:34):
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 soign and a three year old daughter.
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
(10:55):
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
is reading a medical journal, laying back on his cot
and he drops it on his chest and he looks
(11:16):
up at me, and I'd introduced myself as Neil. He
told me his name was Nick, and everybody there called
him Doc. 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
(11:37):
over and that's why he was in prison.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
But it turns out this guy was brilliant.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
He went to 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 on the latest of everything. And
he got in trouble because he had developed this weight
(12:06):
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 from getting frostbite. It warmed their extremities
(12:28):
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 understand, But
the patients loved him and the weight fell off and
he was dispensing this illegal drug. So I think Doc
(13:08):
could have done whorls 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
and vent 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
(13:30):
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, tape or pase I want to
stick these photographs in my locker. And Doc reached over,
grabbed his toothpaste and tossed it to me, and I said,
what's this?
Speaker 3 (13:48):
He said, tooth.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
Paste, And so I spread toothpaste on the back of
the photographs.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
And put them up there. 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 rolls of quarters, and.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
I put them in my locker.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
After I put my kids' photographs up with the toothpaste.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
And later that night I came back and Doc was
there and I opened.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
My locker and the quarters were gone, and I said,
somebody took my quarters. And he didn't even look up
from reading. He said, rumor has it there are criminals here.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
I just I was such a fish out of water.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
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 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,
(15:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
I was.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
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? He got really
excited and he said, I didn't get any I was
paying printers and payroll and investors, and I was leveraging
(15:46):
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?
Speaker 3 (15:57):
And I said, I told you I don't have any.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
And he said said, man, I've been in jails all
over this country, and 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
(16:20):
all over with. But this guy, he 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,
(16:40):
Thank you excuse me. I 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, and 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,
(17:13):
My goodness, 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. When we come back more
(17:36):
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. And we're back with our American
(18:10):
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 were turned
into a prison for well 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. I mean
he was balmy even at four am. It was probably
seventy eighty degrees and I noticed four or five of
the guys had on these huge, heavy coats and these
big mits, and I was like, that is idiotic. They're
gonna die in this heat. And so we all walked
(18:52):
to the kitchen and after about thirty minutes the guard left.
I don't know if he went back to his office
or what. And I was washing dish is in making toast,
and I noticed that there weren't many people around. A
bunch of them had disappeared. 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.
(19:14):
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 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
(19:36):
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 be said about me. These guys were
so creative and went to such lengths to do things
(19:56):
the wrong way. If they had funneled that in energy
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,
(20:18):
and he said that he worked at the post office
and he manned the X ray machine at the Loyola
Street post office in New Orleans. And said, x ray machine.
They why do they have an X ray machine? 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,
(20:39):
every damn day you see cash, money coming through there.
He said, I'd pick up that letter, stick in my pocket.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
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 (21:04):
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, you 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 was six one hundred dollars bills.
Speaker 3 (21:17):
And I said, and you.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
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 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
(21:38):
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 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 biling for the worse, and I was
(22:02):
just absolutely devastated. What's interesting is I had filed for bankruptcy.
I had been humiliated in the newspapers. 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
(22:25):
my kids, not putting in a bed every night, not
waking up with them every morning, that was the one
that finally got me. I looked 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,
(22:47):
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 my heart pound. That's where
Link saw me look at Clark Kent, feeling all sad.
Speaker 3 (23:01):
I wanted him to go away.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
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.
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,
(23:24):
but this shouldn't have been a surprise to you. By
the time I was thirty one, Ambish had become the
driving force in my life. Privately, I envisioned the figure
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
(23:48):
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
did what bankruptcy, public humiliation, and imprisonment had not done.
I could no longer stomach my own lies and delusions.
For the first time, I felt the full weight of
my crimes. I began the process of asking myself the
(24:12):
hard questions. How did I get so far? Of course?
How could I have hurt so many people? How could
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
(24:33):
question my motives. I was focused on a single goal
success and had no interest in anything that stood in
the way. I'd convinced myself that kuiding 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
(24:55):
convince myself of anything that justified what I wanted, and
that is a really really dangerous way to live. You know,
I knew I needed to change, and I knew I
needed to do things differently.
Speaker 3 (25:09):
And I told Ella about that.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:20):
In the early days of Carvel, she.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
Explained, the Coca Cola distributor from Baton Rouge sent chipped
and cracked coke bottles to the colony so he could
refuse 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
(25:44):
the non returnable bottles. They used them as flower vases
with beautiful arrangements. They became sugar dispensers in the cafeteria
for 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 and walks.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
On the carvel grounds.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
Co Cola bottle is still a co Cola bottle. Ellis 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 be used for good or not so good.
And that felt true to me because I'm suspect of
(26:25):
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 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, but the filing for divorce
and possibly losing his children. That's when Neil hit bottom,
(27:15):
and would 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. Linda 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
patience from around the world came to carve off for
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 an estacize,
so braille 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 Willye, And one of the
inmates said, what the hell are they thinking is showing
about a captive killer whale 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 martogron 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. And
they both still remember that to this day. But what's
really interesting is in the prison visiting room they could
(31:12):
visit Friday nights, all day Saturday, and all day Sunday.
And in this visiting room, there was no TV. 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.
(31:35):
And I wasn't a bad father before I went there,
but I was so busy working trying to 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.
Speaker 3 (31:47):
And so I really.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
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, as I moved the dining
room table out of our house and put a ping
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. I would go eat lunch
(32:10):
with them at their school. It's really interesting. I was
thinking when I moved back to Oxford, all the things
that I wanted before were out of my reach.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
I would never be asked.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
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 three and so it
was a very different way of living for me. So
(32:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
I didn't know what to do, so I.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:11):
I'm still creative. I can still do good work.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
If you have anything, a 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
(33:35):
of bank fraud, my first clients 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 up having a
(33:57):
circulation within about four years of.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
Almost two million copies.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
And so in very short order, by myself, 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
(34:22):
expectation of the outcome. Linda told me when I got
here that her love for the kids 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
(34:44):
Day together. We were pretty good co parents. A lot
of people in our church we went to the same church,
so that they wished their 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.
When I got back out, I went to try and
(35:05):
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 disruption
that I had left.
Speaker 3 (35:14):
You know, they said, you've done your time, we forgive you.
Let's start new.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
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 hurt that
some reckless guy wasn't going to get away with it again.
The truth is, you know, I was thirty two when
I was sentenced to prison, and you know, bad things
had happened. I'd gotten into a little trouble, but I
(35:38):
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 to at the
tune of like seven thousand dollars and I just paid
it immediately, and a woman at the bank said, we're
going to have to notify the FBI of this, and
(36:01):
I said okay, And nothing ever came of it. Nobody
ever called, nobody ever said anything. 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.
(36:23):
So nothing ever really serious in 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
(36:45):
left with was, you know, the 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 (36:56):
It was a gift in so many ways. There 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
felt privileged to live and work and play in a
(37:18):
place that few had ever seen. And I was 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.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
What character.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
Neil was a better man, a better father, and a
better friend for everything he'd been through. And of course
always those leprosy patients would jolt him back to reality
watching one page. Shouldn't read 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.
(00:35):
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 surrounded
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 this
figured lembs. So they had created this community and this
(01:52):
culture with its own morase and traditions, and so they
felt safe in this colony. 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
(02:14):
all these empty beds where.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
The leprosy 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 non violent 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
save the taxpayer a great deal of money.
Speaker 3 (02:38):
So just about the.
Speaker 2 (02:39):
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
a check to yourself, I'm yourself when I was running
(03:01):
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 of
bank fraud and was sentenced to eighteen months in federal prison.
(03:24):
And it just so happened that I was sent to
the experimental prison in Carville, Louisiana. So this was pre internet.
I had no idea where I was going. I knew
it was a mentosecurity 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.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
Behind those gates.
Speaker 2 (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.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
You're still a free man. It's like, no, no, no, I'm good.
I'll just wait right here, do we.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
You know?
Speaker 2 (04:13):
I 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
(04:35):
waved to 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 with no fingers. I
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
(04:57):
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 piece of
paper with my room number on it. 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. When I walked out, I saw men
(05:20):
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. 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
(05:42):
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 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
(06:05):
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 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
(06:28):
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, and that's how I went in.
As I was wandering trying to find where I should
put my stuff, I saw this woman in a wooden,
(06:50):
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 I
knew this was an all male prison, and I assume
she wasn't a prison guard. So I held my breath
and stepped back, and as she cranked her way past me,
she said, there's no place like home. And then she
(07:11):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
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. Leehabibe 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 listen to,
(07:46):
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 back
(08:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:25):
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 Ella Balance,
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 boy pointing outside. Oh, Ella,
he said, boundy hunter fixing to carry you away. I'll
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
(09:30):
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
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
(09:50):
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 and off Fella's shoulder.
The man pointed to the back of the truck, and
Ella climbed in. As he drove away, Ella looked out
through the wooden slats. So I was sentenced to eighteen
(10:13):
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 was virtually impossible to muster up anything resembling self pity.
(10:34):
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 soign and a three year old daughter.
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
(10:55):
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
is reading a medical journal, laying back on his cot
and he drops it on his chest and he looks
(11:16):
up at me, and I'd introduced myself as Neil. He
told me his name was Nick, and everybody there called
him Doc. 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
(11:37):
over and that's why he was in prison.
Speaker 3 (11:39):
But it turns out this guy was brilliant.
Speaker 2 (11:43):
He went to 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 on the latest of everything. And
he got in trouble because he had developed this weight
(12:06):
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 from getting frostbite. It warmed their extremities
(12:28):
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 understand, But
the patients loved him and the weight fell off and
he was dispensing this illegal drug. So I think Doc
(13:08):
could have done whorls 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
and vent 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
(13:30):
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, tape or pase I want to
stick these photographs in my locker. And Doc reached over,
grabbed his toothpaste and tossed it to me, and I said,
what's this?
Speaker 3 (13:48):
He said, tooth.
Speaker 2 (13:49):
Paste, And so I spread toothpaste on the back of
the photographs.
Speaker 3 (13:54):
And put them up there. 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 rolls of quarters, and.
Speaker 3 (14:23):
I put them in my locker.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
After I put my kids' photographs up with the toothpaste.
Speaker 3 (14:28):
And later that night I came back and Doc was
there and I opened.
Speaker 2 (14:31):
My locker and the quarters were gone, and I said,
somebody took my quarters. And he didn't even look up
from reading. He said, rumor has it there are criminals here.
Speaker 3 (14:45):
I just I was such a fish out of water.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
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 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,
(15:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:24):
I was.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
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? He got really
excited and he said, I didn't get any I was
paying printers and payroll and investors, and I was leveraging
(15:46):
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?
Speaker 3 (15:57):
And I said, I told you I don't have any.
Speaker 2 (15:59):
And he said said, man, I've been in jails all
over this country, and 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
(16:20):
all over with. But this guy, he 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,
(16:40):
Thank you excuse me. I 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, and 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,
(17:13):
My goodness, 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. When we come back more
(17:36):
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. And we're back with our American
(18:10):
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 were turned
into a prison for well 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. I mean
he was balmy even at four am. It was probably
seventy eighty degrees and I noticed four or five of
the guys had on these huge, heavy coats and these
big mits, and I was like, that is idiotic. They're
gonna die in this heat. And so we all walked
(18:52):
to the kitchen and after about thirty minutes the guard left.
I don't know if he went back to his office
or what. And I was washing dish is in making toast,
and I noticed that there weren't many people around. A
bunch of them had disappeared. 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.
(19:14):
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 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
(19:36):
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 be said about me. These guys were
so creative and went to such lengths to do things
(19:56):
the wrong way. If they had funneled that in energy
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,
(20:18):
and he said that he worked at the post office
and he manned the X ray machine at the Loyola
Street post office in New Orleans. And said, x ray machine.
They why do they have an X ray machine? 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,
(20:39):
every damn day you see cash, money coming through there.
He said, I'd pick up that letter, stick in my pocket.
Speaker 3 (20:44):
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 (21:04):
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, you 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 was six one hundred dollars bills.
Speaker 3 (21:17):
And I said, and you.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
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 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
(21:38):
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 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 biling for the worse, and I was
(22:02):
just absolutely devastated. What's interesting is I had filed for bankruptcy.
I had been humiliated in the newspapers. 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
(22:25):
my kids, not putting in a bed every night, not
waking up with them every morning, that was the one
that finally got me. I looked 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,
(22:47):
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 my heart pound. That's where
Link saw me look at Clark Kent, feeling all sad.
Speaker 3 (23:01):
I wanted him to go away.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
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.
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,
(23:24):
but this shouldn't have been a surprise to you. By
the time I was thirty one, Ambish had become the
driving force in my life. Privately, I envisioned the figure
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
(23:48):
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
did what bankruptcy, public humiliation, and imprisonment had not done.
I could no longer stomach my own lies and delusions.
For the first time, I felt the full weight of
my crimes. I began the process of asking myself the
(24:12):
hard questions. How did I get so far? Of course?
How could I have hurt so many people? How could
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
(24:33):
question my motives. I was focused on a single goal
success and had no interest in anything that stood in
the way. I'd convinced myself that kuiding 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
(24:55):
convince myself of anything that justified what I wanted, and
that is a really really dangerous way to live. You know,
I knew I needed to change, and I knew I
needed to do things differently.
Speaker 3 (25:09):
And I told Ella about that.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:20):
In the early days of Carvel, she.
Speaker 2 (25:21):
Explained, the Coca Cola distributor from Baton Rouge sent chipped
and cracked coke bottles to the colony so he could
refuse 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
(25:44):
the non returnable bottles. They used them as flower vases
with beautiful arrangements. They became sugar dispensers in the cafeteria
for 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 and walks.
Speaker 3 (26:00):
On the carvel grounds.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
Co Cola bottle is still a co Cola bottle. Ellis 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 be used for good or not so good.
And that felt true to me because I'm suspect of
(26:25):
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 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, but the filing for divorce
and possibly losing his children. That's when Neil hit bottom,
(27:15):
and would 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. Linda 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
patience from around the world came to carve off for
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 an estacize,
so braille 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 Willye, And one of the
inmates said, what the hell are they thinking is showing
about a captive killer whale 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 martogron 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. And
they both still remember that to this day. But what's
really interesting is in the prison visiting room they could
(31:12):
visit Friday nights, all day Saturday, and all day Sunday.
And in this visiting room, there was no TV. 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.
(31:35):
And I wasn't a bad father before I went there,
but I was so busy working trying to 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.
Speaker 3 (31:47):
And so I really.
Speaker 2 (31:48):
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, as I moved the dining
room table out of our house and put a ping
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. I would go eat lunch
(32:10):
with them at their school. It's really interesting. I was
thinking when I moved back to Oxford, all the things
that I wanted before were out of my reach.
Speaker 3 (32:17):
I would never be asked.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
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 three and so it
was a very different way of living for me. So
(32:38):
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.
Speaker 3 (32:53):
I didn't know what to do, so I.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
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.
Speaker 3 (33:11):
I'm still creative. I can still do good work.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
If you have anything, a 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
(33:35):
of bank fraud, my first clients 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 up having a
(33:57):
circulation within about four years of.
Speaker 3 (34:00):
Almost two million copies.
Speaker 2 (34:02):
And so in very short order, by myself, 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
(34:22):
expectation of the outcome. Linda told me when I got
here that her love for the kids 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
(34:44):
Day together. We were pretty good co parents. A lot
of people in our church we went to the same church,
so that they wished their 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.
When I got back out, I went to try and
(35:05):
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 disruption
that I had left.
Speaker 3 (35:14):
You know, they said, you've done your time, we forgive you.
Let's start new.
Speaker 2 (35:18):
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 hurt that
some reckless guy wasn't going to get away with it again.
The truth is, you know, I was thirty two when
I was sentenced to prison, and you know, bad things
had happened. I'd gotten into a little trouble, but I
(35:38):
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 to at the
tune of like seven thousand dollars and I just paid
it immediately, and a woman at the bank said, we're
going to have to notify the FBI of this, and
(36:01):
I said okay, And nothing ever came of it. Nobody
ever called, nobody ever said anything. 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.
(36:23):
So nothing ever really serious in 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
(36:45):
left with was, you know, the 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 (36:56):
It was a gift in so many ways. There 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
felt privileged to live and work and play in a
(37:18):
place that few had ever seen. And I was 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.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
What character.
Speaker 1 (37:49):
Neil was a better man, a better father, and a
better friend for everything he'd been through. And of course
always those leprosy patients would jolt him back to reality
watching one page. Shouldn't read 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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