Concierge of Incarceration

It is no secret that I love to read newspapers. Even a casual reader of these postings will have read that before. I still miss the Herald Tribune: news, sports, comics, and especially Our Miss Peach and B.C.

I was reading Dick Schaap and Jimmy Breslin in high school. When the Tribune finally folded after the great newspaper strike of 1963 in New York City, I moved on to The New York Times.

The Times of that era was a different paper. Eight column across, tightly packed. Never a comic in sight, except in the Sunday paper when in Section 4 they reprinted some of the editorial cartoons of the week from other publications.

The Sunday paper was a doorstopper. You needed a crane to life it and carry it home. The corner candy store set up temporary boards on Saturday night to collate the sections as the late arriving newspaper sections needed to be blended with the previously printed ones. People left Siegal's candy store with their trophy tucked under their arms.

I've been reading The New York Times ever since. Not for its editorial stances, but rather for the sports when it was a real sports section—not some outsourced department to The Athletic that can't report on local teams and standings—but for the conciseness of the reporting. If I can be considered a writer of sorts, it is because I've read a lot.

Mt wife raised, by a 1950s father who expressed his disdain for The Times by calling it a Pinko Commie rag is always constantly teasing me that I'm reading that Pinko Commie rag. I prevail.

My friend's Jewish father was so anti-New York Times that when his son was sent home by the grammar school teacher to bring in an example of current events from The New York Times he went ballistic! He was a Herald Tribune man, and also thought The Times was a left-leaning rag. Be all that as it may, I still rely on the paper for well written stories. I'm immune to its opinions. 

I can't exactly remember when I came to realize that there was a lot to learn from reading obituaries. I distinctly remember when I arrived at work on November 23, 1998 having read Robert McG.Thomas Jr.'s obituary on Charles McCartney, the Goat Man, that I had to share the obituary with the co-worker who sat next to me.

I said, "You got to read this." Even in 1998 not many people came to work having read the paper on the way in, and Vincent was no exception. He couldn't quite understand why I was asking him to read an obituary, of all things. Did I know the person? No.

McG Thomas of course became immortal for writing off-beat obituaries on people who hadn't won a Nobel prize, didn't hold public office, didn't command troops during war, didn't hit home runs, score touchdowns, sink baskets, or put pucks in a net, didn't write books, produce plays, act in plays or movies, create art or sculptures of all types.

The obituary's headline went: Charles McCartney, Known for Travels with Goats, Dies at 97.

The lede is as famous as Melville's "Call me Ishmael": You take a fellow who looks like a goat, travels around with goats, eats with goats, lies down with goats and smells like a goat and it won't be long before people will be calling him the Goat Man."

If you passed up that headline and that lede, you were never going to read a tribute obituary. And pretty much, I've never stopped reading them.

When several days pass and I haven't been inspired to post something I start to wonder if there will ever be another something to comment on. Has the well gone dry? Not as long as someone passes away who to me had a profession unlike anyone else's: Concierge to the incarcerated. That's right. It's a thing, and Herbert Hoelter, 73 Is Dead; Prison Consultant to the Wealthy is an obit headline that if you pass it up, you're still never going to read a tribute obituary. 

Thursday's obit by Michael S. Rosenwald in the NYT doesn't have the normal lede of the deceased's name, then a comma. It doesn't have the sing-song melody of the Goat Man, but it does start with might have been the public's first awareness of a person who wrote detailed autobiographical profiles for those who could pay for it to present to a judge at a sentencing—pretty much for white-collar crime—in the hopes that the profile piece will give the judge pause, reflection on the person's overall character and potential for do-good efforts, that they will consider a favorable prison venue, and possibly a lighter sentence. If it didn't work, then Herbert Hoelter wouldn't have an income. It did work. And he made a living at it.

Mr. Rosenwald introduces us to Mr. Hoelter's vocation, a sentencing reform advocate, who appeared in an interview with Anderson Cooper on CNN discussing Martha Stewart's sentence for lying to the FBI.

Martha faced insider trading charges, but they were drooped. She was convicted of lying to federal law enforcement, a felony conviction for which she served five months in a low security federal prison.

Mr. Hoelter had many clients like Martha. He prepared highly detailed accounts of the subject's life in order to present a benevolent picture to the judge. He represented Mike Milken Ivan Boesky, Leona Helmsley, Bernie Madoff, household names of major financial frauds. Numerous lesser knowns were clients as well.

When I worked at Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield I attended a sentencing of a subject we were instrumental in gaining evidence on of health care insurance fraud, Dr. Lauersen, a well-known fertility doctor in Manhattan. He got seven years in federal prison.

I have no way of knowing if he was a client of Mr. Hoelter's, but I distinctly remember the judge sending one of the AUSA attorneys on an errand during the proceedings to bring back the answer to what was the difference between a low security and a minimum security facility. I don't remember what the answer came back as, but I was dumbfounded why the judge didn't know the difference himself. Whatever it was, Dr. Lauersen served the full seven years somewhere.

It wasn't all that long ago that a read a piece in the NYT about Otisville prison in New York, as being where the Jewish convicted felons were sent to do time because the prison has a Kosher kitchen and a Hasidic chaplain. 

I know the New York State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver was sent there in order to allow for consumption of Kosher prepared meals. We had a CFO at Empire, Jerry Weissman, who was convicted of obstructing justice and perjury, who I suspect did his time in similar fashion because of being an Orthodox Jew.

Mr. Hoelter explained to Anderson Cooper, "our philosophy isn't that punishment should not occur, it's that it should occur in different ways."

Well written obituaries always try to close with a "kicker," an anecdote or final quote from the subject. Mr. Rosenwald doesn't have one for Mr. Hoelter, but he does relate a story that when his daughter of 7 answered the phone in 1992 on Christmas Day and accepted the charges from Leona Helmsley, who was calling from prison and gave her her well wishes to have a "Merry Christmas," Leona, not feeling festive, or caring that it wasn't her holiday, told the little girl, "I don't care what day it is, let me talk to your father."

Prison can make you grumpy.

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