White-Collar Prisoner Recalls Downfall

By Deborah Lutterbeck

LEWISBURG, Pa. (Reuters) - Alfred Porro remembers the pleasure of walking the corridors of Capitol Hill when he was special counsel to Rep. Henry Helstoski. He recalls dining with his former business partner, Football Hall of Famer Lawrence Taylor, as waiters hovered and women flocked to them.

Porro, a New Jersey corporate attorney, enjoyed all the trappings of power: the Mercedes, the 12-room house with tennis court and pool, the charge cards, the expense accounts -- until he was caught diverting money from a trust fund.

Porro, 67, is now inmate No. 20532-050, a convicted white-collar criminal serving out a nearly 6-year sentence at the Lewisburg Federal Prison Camp in Pennsylvania.

After Enron's bankruptcy a year ago on Monday and the ensuing explosion of boardroom scandals, Porro and others like him are a new generation of well-paid wrongdoers, replacing old villains of the '80s junk bond and savings-and-loans debacles.

Congress has responded by passing laws to crack down more severely on white-collar felons, and when President Bush signed the legislation he vowed: "No more easy money for corporate criminals, just hard time."

But while scores of high-ranking executives have been subject to "perp walks" -- being led off in handcuffs before drop-jawed colleagues or family-members -- less than a handful are currently facing the hard time the president promised.

Former Enron financial executive Michael Kopper pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and money laundering at the failed energy giant. WorldCom's former controller, David Myers, pleaded to charges of filing false documents with securities regulators, and former ImClone Chief Executive Officer Sam Waksal pleaded guilty to insider trading charges.

While Porro may not have operated on the same scale as those high-ranking executives, they may face a life much like his in jail. All of the men are awaiting sentencing.

'A NOBODY'

If imprisoned, they will join Porro among the less than 1 percent of the U.S. prison population incarcerated for white-collar crimes.

"You are a nobody here," Porro told Reuters Television in a prison interview. "You don't win by being a great orator. You don't win by having a lot of money. You don't win by having a lot of influence."

Porro has the rap sheet of a businessman gone bad. In 1999 he was convicted on 19 charges including mail fraud, wire fraud and embezzlement.

The primary charges stemmed from diverting $276,000 in trust funds to help prop up failing businesses. He's now a little more than half-way through his sentence.

The minimum security Lewisburg Federal Prison Camp is nestled in the rolling hills of central Pennsylvania, its buildings resembling an underfunded community college.

The 324 inmates are a mix of white-collar criminals and drug offenders. As Porro describes his current lifestyle, it sounds more like military boarding school than purgatory.

The inmates play sports. There's a weight-lifting room, and prisoners watch a communal television at night. The guards don't carry weapons and there's little risk of rape or other violence. The inmates are fed in a dining area. (Porro prefers the pancakes to the chipped beef and says the pineapple chicken is as good as anything in a restaurant.)

Such relatively lenient conditions have led to popular charges that the government runs a "Club Fed" for well-heeled bad guys who committed crimes on the right side of the tracks.

And Porro himself admits that, for those who manage to hold on to their money, prison can just be a place to mark time.

"A guy who has ripped off millions of dollars isn't worried about going to jail," Porro told Reuters Television. "They have millions of dollars put aside. They are on vacation."

PENNIES AN HOUR

But for Porro and other white-collar cons who lost everything, it's not your father's country club.

Inmates are paid between eight and 21 cents an hour. Porro is now earning about $21 a month for serving as the prison law librarian; his last job was rolling utensils into napkins.

They have access to the phone but are limited to a little over an hour a week worth of calls. While inmates wear no shackles, boundary signs are posted throughout the camp.

One step beyond a restricted sign means an immediate transfer to someplace along the lines of the main Lewisburg prison a few hundred yards away, a maximum security cellblock sitting like a warning in the near distance.

Porro lives in cubicle No. 37, about three strides wide and five strides long, that he shares with another inmate. There's a bunk bed, a table, a chair and a locker. The closet is a hook. "We learn to have a very humble kind of existence, and ironically, it does the job," Porro said.

For white-collar criminals, prison means adapting to a new set of rules, and it starts the first night of incarceration. "The first night in prison was horrible," he said. "You wake up in the morning and you look at the ceiling and say, 'This isn't true. I am going to close my eyes and go back to sleep."'

Dave Moffat, who runs the camp, maintains the hardest adjustment for inmates is the loss of their families. "The biggest thing is the adjustment of being away from their families and friends. They're incarcerated 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They do get to see their families, but when their families leave, they are gone. They are back to reality."

'TEFLON LAWYER'

As for how white collar crime begins, Porro thinks it's a process, and it comes with success. "These executives become famous in their own world. They become famous because they are the guy on top who is producing this miracle. They are the guy who is getting their picture on the front of Fortune magazine," he said.

That was his experience on a smaller scale. He enjoyed renown as a lawyer and served as special counsel to now-dead New Jersey Democratic congressmen Helstoski. Porro's rising influence began to draw the attention of authorities.

After beating two indictments, Porro starting seeing himself differently. "Newspapers started calling me the Teflon lawyer. You know what that did to me? Nobody is going to dent this armor. Then you become careless. Then you start believing that you are infallible and you successfully separate that moral conscience that is tied to God. It's a process that creeps up on you very subtly," Porro said.

Porro's downfall came when he was in business with Taylor, a former New York Giants linebacker. The two men opened restaurants, a go-go bar and a golf driving range; in Porro's words, they "lived on the edge together."

Living on the edge caught up with them, as did the law. Taylor kept himself out of jail by testifying against his former partner. Porro's wife was also convicted and is serving almost a five-year sentence in Danbury, Connecticut.

Porro was always a religious man, but now he spends even more time reading scripture. "A person who doesn't find a conversion, who doesn't make their own rehabilitation, who doesn't reach for restoration is in bad trouble," he said.

For Porro, part of that conversion has been in the classroom. Periodically Porro, along with other inmates, is released to lecture students on business ethics. In early November, Porro stood before undergraduate students at Bucknell University where he introduced himself as a number.

His advice: "Your worst enemy is going to be success."