Criminal - No Place Like Home

Episode Date: September 25, 2015

In the early 90s, a wealthy magazine publisher was convicted of fraud and sentenced to 18 months in a minimum security prison in Louisiana. But white collar criminals weren't the only people living there, and the other people inside had basically been forgotten about by the outside world, some of them for decades. Learn more about Neil White’s time at Carville in his memoir, In the Sanctuary of Outcasts. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family.

Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Your own weight loss journey is personal. Everyone's diet is different. Everyone's bodies are different. And according to Noom, there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Thank you. for a healthier lifestyle. Stay focused on what's important to you with Noom's psychology and biology-based approach. Sign up for your free trial today at Noom.com. I mean, we weren't driving $100,000 sports cars and snorting cocaine, which was the drug of the day, but we had a boat, we had three cars, we had a 4,000 square foot house. I mean, we were leading what I would consider an upper middle class life.

In the early 90s, Neil White owned Coast Magazine Corporate, a magazine publishing company in Gulfport, Mississippi. And we had lots of perks from the magazine that don't really go into any account. It's, you know, oh, we'd love for you to wear our suits because people pay attention to what you wear. And oh, we'd love for you to drive our cars and we'd love for you to come eat at our restaurant. It's on us. And so there are all these benefits. You know, business people would say, we're flying to Jackson or Memphis or whatever. If you need a ride, let us know. You're welcome on a plane anytime. And so we led a lifestyle that we didn't

even have to spend money for because we owned these media companies and nobody really was paying attention. No one was paying attention. And so for a few years, no one noticed that Neil White was kiting checks. He had two corporate bank accounts, and he'd transfer large sums of money back and forth constantly so that both accounts always appeared flush with cash. Because the way it used to work is you could write a check from yourself to yourself from one bank, deposit it in another bank, and that money would be there. But the next day, the check would bounce because there was a 24-hour float. So you would write a check to yourself, from yourself, from a secondary account,

and deposit it in the original bank to cover it. So you're just buying time. Yeah, I was cheating time is what I was doing. It's sometimes called circular kiting, and you can't do it that easily anymore. Banks have changed the way they operate. Checks are now cleared with electronic imaging that takes much less time to process. But back in the early 90s, Neil was able to pull it off, and he wasn't even that stressed about it. I remember that I was doing this during a period before Christmas, and our family was planning this five-day vacation. And you can't leave town if you're doing this unless you have somebody who's going to make these transfers for you. And I was $200,000 in the hole on December 21st.

And on December 23rd, we were leaving town for five days. And I was in a panic. But the money came in, and a guy came through with a loan that we had been talking to. I made the $200,000 deposit on the 23rd and left town. How did you get caught? The FDIC came in and did an audit and pointed it out to both banks. And they called me to the bank and said, we will not accept any deposits that aren't cash or money orders.

We're closing your accounts. I sure hope you have money to cover this. I called my dad and said, Dad, you know, I just need to let you know because you'll hear through the grapevine I've been caught short and was kiting checks. And he said, well, the first thing we need to do is cover it. How much do you need? He was ready to write the check. And I said, Dad, you can't cover this. He said, no. I mean, my dad's a judge and a lawyer. He's middle class. And I mean, I think he was thinking $30,000, $40,000, we'll mortgage the house, we'll take care of it. I said, $750,000. And he said, oh, well, we need to get you a lawyer. And the lawyer couldn't get you out of it.

Oh, God, no. I mean, the only way you can get out of it is if you cover the loss. And then you still are committed. It's still a crime. You just, the federal government sentences you based on how much, in bank fraud anyway, how much a financial institution lost. So had I been able to cover it, I probably would have gotten home confinement or probation or a fine or something like that. But because I couldn't cover the amount and ultimately they lost that money, the sentencing guidelines said I should be sentenced to between 18 months and 24 months.

And the judge took the lower recommendation and gave me an 18-month sentence. On May 3, 1993, Neal White self-surrendered at a minimum security prison in Carville, Louisiana. His wife, Linda, dropped him there 45 minutes early. Well, first of all, I took my children to school that morning, to first grade and to preschool, and hugged them and reminded them that, as the psychologist suggested, that Daddy was going to camp and that I would see them in a week when they could come visit. And Linda and I got in our blue Ford Explorer and drove the hour and 10-minute drive to Carville, and it was deafening silence. Was she mad at you?

She was mad at me, but more than that, she was hurt. She lost everything, too. She had believed my story that I was going to take care of everything. In the overall scheme of life, what these things I'm about to say are not clubs, and we got banished from there. And all of her places that she shopped and had charge accounts, they closed them. And her friends who were still in this, you know, elite social area with very few exceptions were, you know, shunning at some level. I mean, she was humiliated and mortified at all sorts of levels. And, you know, the father of her children, who were six and three, were about to be away for a year. They would miss every significant event in their life. And if she wanted to keep us all in touch, she was faced with driving that distance every weekend,

spending her weekends in a prison visiting room. Here's the thing. It wasn't just a prison visiting room she'd be bringing her kids to. White-collar criminals weren't the only ones who'd been locked up in the enormous old facility in Carville, Louisiana. And the other people living there, they were all but forgotten by the outside world. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. I showed up with my leather bag with books and racquetball rackets

and tennis shoes and shorts like I was going to camp. And as I waited for the guard to come collect me, I saw a man limping down the hallway. And when he got to the window closest to me, he waved and had no fingers, and that was the first time I knew anything was awry. Neil went inside and checked in and immediately asked the prison guard about the man with no fingers. He said, that's a patient.

And I said, what kind of patient? And he said, a Hansen's disease patient. And I said, what is Hansen's disease? And he said, it used to be called leprosy. What was your thought? That's when I began to panic. I knew that I could survive a one-year prison sentence but I thought if I if I contracted a disease that disfigured me that I would never be able to touch my children again I thought my life will be over. Neil White was to serve his sentence at a minimum security prison located inside the last

remaining leprosy colony in the continental United States. An LA Times article from 1993 said prisoners are being brought in to, quote, use the spaces left empty when older patients die. Everyone we asked credited the idea of putting the prison inside the leprosy colony back to one man, Dr. John Duffy. He was the director of Carville at the time, but he was also the former director of the Bureau of Prisons. He knew that Carville's patient population was dwindling, and he saw a business opportunity. There were all these empty rooms, and he was fiscally responsible and said, you know, instead of spending money building a new prison, let's put invalid inmates, people who need health care here because there was a hospital for the leprosy patients, and non-violent offenders who

can maintain the grounds. You know, it sounded like a decent financial decision, but what he didn't realize is you would have the last 130 Americans who were imprisoned for a disease, 500 federal inmates, including Jimmy Hoffa's lawyer and the man who gave Arnold Schwarzenegger his first steroids, 100 prison guards, all thrown together in this colony, a convergence of cultures like there's never been before or after. When Neil White says that the leprosy patients were imprisoned, he's not kidding. The facility opened in 1894 as the Louisiana Leper Home.

By 1921, leprosy was thought to be so contagious that the federal government began moving patients to Carville from all over the country. If people refused to go, the police or bounty hunters would put them in shackles and bring them against their will. See this here? This is a shackle. Shackles? What were they used for? Bring the patient here. If you don't come voluntary, then they put the shackle and bring you here.

This is Mr. Pete. He was the first person I met when I flew to Louisiana to see Carville for myself. And he told me to call him Mr. Pete. He's a short man with glasses that seem just a little too big for his face. He was dressed in a flannel shirt with suspenders and a khaki jacket. It wasn't until he reached out to shake my hand that I realized he was missing fingers, part of his ear. He's the guy who waved at Neil White. He showed me the shackles that are now part of a small museum at Carville,

and he also showed me a collection of former patients' shoes, specially made because the loss of toes is one of the biggest challenges leprosy patients deal with. Mr. Pete told me he was born in the Virgin Islands, and when he was six, he was diagnosed with leprosy and quarantined in a hospital there. He had no idea what was happening. They never tell me anything. They just tell my mother, but not me.

Why did you think you were in the hospital? Well, because I had a little mark on the side of my face from when they took tests when it was Hansen's disease. And at that time, people were very scared of the disease. They just bring me to the hospital. My mother come visit me. She couldn't touch me. I couldn't touch her.

She stay outside the fence. I stay inside the fence. Was that confusing to you when you were a little boy that you couldn't touch your mother? Well, yes, it was confusing. She's on the outside, and I'm on the inside. And I still didn't know what's going on. I couldn't touch her. And she couldn't touch me either.

He stayed in that hospital until he was 21 years old when his family packed him aboard an Army plane to Carville. Mr. Pete never saw any members of his family again. When a patient like Mr. Pete got to Carville, he or she could not leave. But they weren't legally prisoners either. It was this strange limbo where you hadn't done anything wrong, but the outside world saw you as a danger. For a long time, patients couldn't

even vote or get married. Some of the family didn't want them on. The friends didn't want to have anything to do with them. So they just came back and stayed until they die. And when you got here, you did realize that this disease people were scared of. Would you talk about it with other people here about how you were kind of kept away? No. They didn't. They wasn't interested like now. They did.

You came here, that's it. Even the patient, we never speak about it. We never, so why are we here? That's it. You wouldn't talk about it with your friends about being kind of outcast or away from society. You were just here. Yeah, I was just here.

Because they were the same thing, you know. They were from society, outcasts like me, so they didn't interest in all that. Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series

worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Thank you. Learn more at klaviyo.com slash bfcm. In 1941, doctors began testing a drug that could slowly reverse some of the symptoms of leprosy.

They made progress. By the early 50s, doctors recognized that with treatment, the disease was not contagious, and they lifted the strict quarantine. Some patients were discharged, and others were encouraged to own cars and come and go as they pleased. But most of them didn't want to go anywhere. They'd been locked away for so long that the prospect of leaving terrified them. As one patient wrote, we belong with the secret people. Pete, for example, if you look at his hands,

his hands are greatly deformed. And his face and ears show the ravages of the disease. And he just doesn't want to face what he would have to face in the outside world. This is Dr. Jim Cranbule, former director of the National Hansen's Disease Programs, which is the official name for Carville. Basically, patients have to lie about their deformities,

you know, an industrial plant accident or something like that. And he just was not willing to face that. I guess the parallel is you've heard all the stories about a prisoner being released from prison after 20 years, and the first thing he does is he goes and robs a bank so he can go back in again, because they just can't deal with the outside world. It's hard to imagine what the patients must have thought when, after so long, the outside world was thrown at them in the form of 500 convicted bankers, doctors, and lawyers.

The inmates were not supposed to interact with the patients at any time, but Neil Light worked in the cafeteria, so there was no way around it. And I helped them with their trays and pushed their wheelchairs and wrote their menu board. You have to remember, in addition to this weird convergence, the leprosy patients were older and nobody, they hadn't seen new residents there in ages. And most of them looked at us as children or grandchildren. They would talk to us and the guards would say, you're not supposed to talk to him. And they would say, you can't tell me what to do because they weren't under the Bureau of Prisons. So it really was something that got dropped as the experiment went on, and we talked all the time and were friendly and exchanged hellos.

And when guards weren't around, we talked all the time. Neil became especially close with one patient in particular, an elderly woman named Ella Bounds. Well, the first time I saw her, I was in the hallway, and I was trying to find my room. It was the first day, first hour I was there. And I saw her wobbling in that wheelchair, cranking those handles, coming toward me. And I knew she wasn't an inmate. It was an all-male prison. I assumed she wasn't a prison

guard. So assuming she had leprosy, she had no legs. Her dress was hanging over the edge of her wheelchair. I stood to the side, and I held my breath. And as she passed me, she cut her eyes over and said, smiled and said, there's no place like home. And she went around the corner, and an inmate came up behind me and said, that girl's father dropped her off here when she was 12, and he never came back, and she was about 80 at the time. And then he asked me if I was still feeling sorry for myself.

It didn't take Neil long to understand that it was basically impossible for him to catch leprosy. And with that fear gone, he was just trying to keep himself occupied and finish out his time. He remembers one night in the spring when the leprosy patients were getting ready for a dance. Four of us inmates were setting up the bandstands and the tables and the chairs, and as the band was about to start, there were no guards around, so Ella asked me if I wanted to stick around for the first song. And so I did, and so did the other inmates. And I pushed Ella around the edge of the dance floor to the music in her wheelchair. Two of the other inmates, big, strong bodybuilders who were the steroid gurus, guinea pigs, went into the middle

of the patients and broke in on one of their dates during this dance. And it really made the leprosy patient mad. This woman he was with, we don't know, but we think she may have been a prostitute. Anyway, she was rather attractive. And at the end of the song, the leprosy patient pointed what was left of his index finger and said, you know, you're not invited. No inmates at our dance. And it was very quiet, and the four of us slowly walked out of the ballroom. And as we were walking back toward the inmate side of the colony, my roommate said, did we just get kicked out of a leper dance? If you ask him now, Neil says he feels pretty lucky that he served his time at Carville. I was there for 18 months, actually only spent a year, for mishandling, you know,

close to a million dollars. And I was standing in front of people who had been quarantined for 68 years because they were susceptible to a bacterial infection, and it was almost impossible to muster up self-pity in the face of that. They were such remarkable people, and it put my problems, albeit self-made, in such perspective. He was let out on April 25, 1994. The prison experiment ended about four months later, and all of the remaining inmates were reassigned. Why was it so short-lived? The Bureau of Prisons wanted to turn the facility

into this huge prison with a couple of thousand inmates, and when they became a tenant of the leprosy patients, which is really public health services, they assumed that those 130 patients would be dying off in a year or two. What they didn't realize is that leprosy doesn't kill you. And so there became this battle for the Bureau of Prisons trying to evict the leprosy patients. It was just horrible. So the inmates and the leprosy patients got along fine just horrible. So the inmates and the leprosy patients got along

fine. You would think that's where the problem was. It was these two government bureaucracies. And what happened was public health services and the leprosy patients and the Carville Historic Society clandestinely got the facility on the National Registry of Historic Places. And so the Bureau of Prisons could not make the modifications they needed to make the building secure, and they abandoned the prison and went home. But Ella and Mr. Pete and other patients continued their lives at Carville,

many of them entering their seventh or eighth decade there. In 1998, about four years after Neil left, the remaining patients were offered an annual stipend of $33,000 to leave Carvo and move to a nursing home. Mr. Pete declined. He chose to stay. When I met him two years ago, he was one of six patients left. They had the whole place to themselves. Mr. Pete rode around the giant empty hallways on his bicycle.

He'd been there for 63 years. I asked him whether he'd ever consider leaving, even for a night. Sometimes I wish I was on the outside and I could get out, but when I look, I say, well, people are going to ask me a lot of questions. What happened to your fingers? Why you got this spot? Why this? I said, well, I don't want to go through all that. I stay here. It was easier to stay here.

It was easier, because we all the same patient, you know what I mean? When you go out there, people, some people, most people wouldn't, even now. Will you stay here for the rest of your life? Oh, yeah. I'm told to be getting out now. I'm almost 85 years old. So this is it. I got my spot over there in the pecan tree.

The spot he showed me under the pecan tree was part of the cemetery at Carville. The cemetery is a big one. There are a lot of graves there. Put me in a nice shady pecan tree. You plan to be buried at Carville here? You have your choice. I know my family are not going to take me home. It costs so much money to ship the body.

Have you ever left Louisiana since you got here? No. Never left Louisiana. I went to Mississippi, but I come back the same night. But I've never been up to New York and all them places, if that's what you mean. Would you like to? Yeah, I see so much people, I may get lost. I know in New York, people ain't got time to look at you. They're just busy,

busy doing nothing, but they're busy. It's unclear whether Mr. Pete will get his wish to be buried at Carville. Last month, the remaining patients were finally forced to move to a nursing home in Baton Rouge, so Carville now sits empty. Neil White still talks to Mr. Pete on the phone sometimes. They spoke last week. Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohr and me. Audio engineering help from Rob Byers.

Julianne Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can find them at thisiscriminal.com. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. Criminal is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of the 13 best podcasts around. If you're interested in supporting us and shows like ours, email sponsor at prx.org. You can find out more about Neil White's time at Carvel in his book, In the Sanctuary of Outcasts. This month, the show Reveal is doing a four-part investigative series called Left for Dead, which examines the national phenomenon of missing and unidentified persons, the John and Jane Does of America.

They've also created a new tool which allows anyone to view cases and try to match the missing to the unidentified by comparing characteristics and case information side by side. You can find out more at RevealNews.org. Radiotopia from PRX is supported by the Knight Foundation and MailChimp, celebrating creativity, chaos, and teamwork. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia from PRX. campaigns for you, tells you which leads are worth knowing, and makes writing blogs, creating videos, and posting on social a breeze. So now, it's easier than ever to be a marketer.

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