A Life Wasted

Doing Bad Things Again

The Sherriff's deputy took me to the county's small Ohio jail, just a few miles from the Indiana border. I was so exhausted and lethargic that they thought I was on drugs. The fact that I slept for the next two days reinforced their opinion. After two days of sleep I woke to realize what a mess I was in. Awake and alert, the first thing I did was look at the jail I was in. It was small and it was old. It took less than an hour to figure out how I could get out. The guard walked by and asked what I was laughing about.

This is difficult to explain, but I didn't break out because I was too tired. Tired and defeated. My family was in a desperate situation and I'd done everything I could think to do legally and failed at all of it. I knew how to get money illegally but I had resisted that route because I was determined to do the right thing here. Yet here I was in jail after exhaustion had allowed me to give in to what was a very stupid move. It was ironic that after months of trying so hard to do it right, when I wake up in jail the first thing I do is plan to break out. At that point I made a conscious decision not to break out. The reason is that I knew what would come after I did. Then I'd be desperate and on the run. I would have to commit crimes just to keep going and it would be a cycle that only stopped when I was caught again. And I couldn't go home.

After drinking a cup of coffee I had begged from the guard my mind started working again so I asked to use the phone. There wasn't a phone in the cell area so the kind old guard took me out of the cell and into an office. It was a first floor office with a bar less window that opened out on to the street. All I could do was shake my head in wonder. It was clear they didn't know my history.

I had called Mary the day of my arrest, but that's a conversation so painful I've blocked it out. This one wouldn't be much better. I was going to call my grandfather. His number was easy for me to remember because I had learned it when I was five. They had the same number since the year I was born and kept it until they both died in old age. I remember their number as I write this. Guess I'll always know that number. Despite that, I rarely called them.

Five years earlier I was in a tight financial spot and had called my grandfather asking for a short term loan. Despite all the trouble I had been in and all the hard times I'd had I had never asked my grandfather for anything. That was at a time when I was working hard and building my young family, so I felt confident my grandfather would give me a small loan. I was wrong. He could have easily done it, but wouldn't. My grandfather was a good and a fair man, so it would have been difficult for me to be upset with him. But it did hurt that he wouldn't help me when I needed it. I swore I'd never ask him for anything ever again.

It was under this setting that I looked out the window at a freedom that wasn't really any freedom at all and dialed the number from memory. I had to get back to my family and do what I could, so it was either the window or the phone call. It was a close thing, but I dialed the number. I explained all this here because it was such a difficult decision for me.

My charge was for a theft that in Ohio was called second degree robbery. It was a serious charge in that I would go to prison for it, but not so serious that the bond was high. My bond was $10,000, for which the county would allow me to post a $1,000 deposit. So I asked my grandfather for a thousand and fifty dollars. The thousand to get me out and the fifty to get me back to Mary. My grandfather agreed without hesitation. He wired the money to the jail and I was released immediately. Much easier than breaking out. I hitched a ride back to the truck stop and to my surprise my old truck sat exactly where I'd left it two days earlier.

Mary wasn't happy, but she didn't seem to be upset with me either. You'd think she would have been furious, but she wasn't. We'd been in a terrible spot before and I'd made it much worse by what I'd done. There was little doubt that I'd do some time in prison, I figured two years, so she'd be completely on her own again, only with more children to care for this time. So she should have at least been worried. But that's not my wife's way. If she was worried I couldn't tell. At the time I believed she had so much confidence in me that she knew I'd figure it out, but that wasn't it at all. Mary's faith is in God.

After I got out of jail I didn't go home. Part of it was that I couldn't face my wife after what I had done and part of it was that now I really had to make some money. If I was going to stay out of jail I'd need a good lawyer, and good lawyers were expensive. And if I did end up going to jail I'd need enough money to take care of my family while I was gone. At this point all pretense was gone in my mind. I'd tried to do things the right way and failed. I felt like I'd been fooling myself the entire time I was out trying to do things the right way. Things changed with my arrest. With my arrest the clock was ticking. I had to do something illegal. Likely multiple things. And I had to do it immediately.

It's rather ironic that as soon as I made up my mind to go this way things just fell in my lap. Within a few days I'd stopped at one of those high volume gas stations to use the restroom. When I was walking to the back were the restrooms were a man walked past me with a few papers in his hand. I watched him walk up and go behind the counter with the clerk there. In the back there were two restrooms and another door. I tried that door and it was unlocked. It was a closest size room with a desk and a single chair. On the desk were three bank money bags. I grabbed both and boldly walked out of the store holding the bags down by my side. No one noticed me. When I got away from the area I opened the bags and found eight thousand dollars.

I made up a story that I hoped Mary would believe and sent her a large portion of the money. I kept most because there was a limit to how much of my lying she'd believe and I knew that if I was going to "find" more cash I'd need expense money. Mary must not have been too fooled by my deception because she used what I sent her to move the family back to Ohio, near her family and friends. The place she rented was cheap and not in that good of an area, but I knew what she was thinking. She figured I was about to go to jail and she'd be on her own with the kids. So she rented a place she figured she could afford with whatever job she could find and she would be close to her family and support network. It was a wise decision.

I'm not going to go into any details here because it is not my intention to teach others to steal. I will say that I had a few other small hauls of opportunity. After a month or so of doing this I made a big move. All I will say about what happened is that in one case a national next day carrier was moving a small gold shipment for a large coin dealer and that shipment ended up in my possession and no one ever figured out how it went missing. In another part of the country a different coin dealer was transporting his wares to a big coin show and they too went missing in transport. A short time later I was selling rare coins and gold at the biggest coin dealer show in the country in Long Beach, California.