Betrayed By a Trusted Author: How One Writer Turned a Shocking Scam Into a Master Plan for Revenge
I spent some time in jail a while back, as a psychotherapist working with repeat offenders in the county lockup. I heard their stories, how to con, how to scam, how to get their needs and desires met through theft and manipulation. I was equally awed and horrified, and I’d ask them – with their intelligence and creativity, why didn’t they get a legal job? The usual response? “It’s too hard.”
My favorite example was Roy, a mountain of a man with a shaved head and luxuriant mustache. He had been incarcerated since his teens. Now he was forty and determined to win his freedom. So, he completed his sentence, the guys in our support group gave him a standing ovation – and two months later, he was back. His offense? He had held up a bank with a hammer, in full view of the CCTVs. The crime was so preposterous, it had to be a deliberate effort to get caught. It was. In his brief episode out of custody, he learned that people who live in houses must pay for curbside trash pickup. He was outraged. “But I paid for this crap once already!” Life on the other side of the iron bars was too hard. When I left my job, I never expected to find another population as cunning, imaginative, and desperate to dodge the challenges of real life. Then I became an author.
