“Never trust a writer who hasn’t been indicted or imprisoned.”
— Donald Clark MacPherson
If you have sympathy for the NY Times journalists who’ve been served by the DOJ let me tell you that there are worse things. Such as a search warrant, an indictment by a grand jury operated by a criminal (like former Suffolk County DA Thomas Spota and associates) and a poisoned court system with endless deep pockets and total media control to put you in prison. The Southampton Press was glowingly complicit in this criminal enterprise that targeted me. I had the pleasure of just such a revenge prosecution at the hands of Hamptons D.A. Thomas Spota, who was ultimately prosecuted and imprisoned himself. They extorted a plea deal from me so I could stop them from torturing my family. The Suffolk County D.A.s office is still a Hamptons criminal enterprise.
But it’s really a money game. While the current administration is hammering people they’re not happy with poor schmucks are not protected by BIG money (like the NY Times). In my situation, I’d been writing about the corruption in Southampton, Westhampton Beach and in Riverhead and Hauppauge where the District Attorney has offices. Like the real estate and political ploys that still go on, primarily in Westhampton Beach and Southampton, if you don’t have the money, no matter whether you’re innocent or not, they’ll fuck you and you’ll do time.
All of the notoriety that the midwest newspaper got — the Marion County Record — over the search of its offices and the owner’s home and searches done on Bolton, Bannon, Michael Cohen, Flynn, Manafort, Stone — pale by comparison to the fucking I got from D.A. Thomas Spota and his prosecutor Thalia Stavrides, a former sadist with power who should still be prosecuted.
Whatever. So here’s what it’s really like doing almost five years for exposing corruption in a Suffolk County jail (where inmates won an $18 million dollar civil rights lawsuit — Butler v. Suffolk County Jails) and in an upstate New York prison with killers, drug dealers, mobsters, assassins, pedophiles, rapists, bikers, cartel members and gangs. If you’re doing real time with no back-up and no money it’s dangerous — especially when ill at seventy years of age as I was. Enjoy my book, Prisoner of the Hamptons for a real taste of what it was like. Genuine True Crime genre. Later this year my novel about how they did what they did will be published. Maybe you’ll learn something about American justice and the prison system. Or, perhaps you’ll enjoy what you’re missing.
It’s not “Orange is the New Black.” It’s far worse.
The SoHo Journal 25th Anniversary magazine has recently resumed publishing and Prisoner of the Hamptons is now available on Kindle. Neither this blog nor the magazine are non-profit. Donations are accepted: Post Office Box 1032, New York, NY 10013.


