The American Trap, page 3
Then the floor goes to the prosecuting attorney representing the US government, Novick, who interrogated me at FBI headquarters. And this time, he is a roaring success.
Novick is firmly opposed to my release. He spews out his arguments with fury. And, unashamedly, asserts the exact opposite of what he had told me in the FBI offices.
‘Mr Pierucci is a very high-ranking executive of Alstom. The corruption case in which he is implicated is extremely serious. His company paid bribes to an Indonesian government official to obtain favours. We have built up a solid prosecution case. As well as a great deal of documentation, we have evidence of his involvement in a conspiracy to violate the US Anti-Corruption law of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.’
So this is the price I have to pay for refusing his deal in the first interview. Then Novick starts telling the court that I am a flight risk.
‘Frédéric Pierucci has no ties to the United States. When he worked here, he was issued a green card [a permanent residence permit]. Yet he suspiciously returned it to the authorities in 2012. We interviewed the employee to whom he had entrusted this document. The latter told us that he found Frédéric Pierucci’s behaviour rather strange.’
I must be hallucinating. In 2012, during one of my many trips to the United States, I simply decided to return the green card, as I no longer required it. A few weeks earlier, I had been transferred to Singapore. How can this be deemed suspicious? However, Novick was not finished yet.
‘If you release him, he’ll most certainly flee. And as you know very well, Your Honour, France does not extradite its citizens. Furthermore, he was charged and an arrest warrant was issued, but he still did not surrender to the authorities.’
I find this attorney’s line of argument quite staggering. How could I have surrendered myself to the authorities when I had no idea that an arrest warrant had been issued against me, since the DOJ had kept this information sealed until today, considering me a flight risk? If I had known, I would probably have sought legal advice before travelling to the United States on business. It’s quite simply absurd. Nevertheless, Judge Garfinkel seems to be troubled and I hear her say: ‘I must say that the government has presented a very strong case. The defence needs to constitute a stronger probation case if I am to release her client. Ms Latif, I would like to give you some time to prepare a new motion. When do you think you will be ready?’
‘Late afternoon, Your Honour.’
‘That’s not possible, I unfortunately have to leave in an hour for a medical appointment. I suggest we meet again in two days.’
The hearing is adjourned. The judge then turns towards me and says: ‘How are you pleading, Mr Pierucci? Guilty or not guilty?’
‘Not guilty.’
I was only asked one question. And I was only allowed to utter one or two words. I just have time to figure out that I’m going to stay another forty-eight hours in jail before returning, still handcuffed behind my back, to a court cell where they give me two minutes with my lawyer. I urge her to inform Keith Carr of the truly alarming twist that my case is taking.
Two hours later, the guards pull me out of my cell and chain me up like a beast.
Yes, I have become a beast. There is no other way to portray me: my wrists and ankles are shackled by handcuffs, my upper body is restrained by a heavy chain, the handcuffs and chain attached to a huge padlock that rests on my stomach. The only time I ever saw human beings shackled in this way was on television, during reports on prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. As I can no longer walk normally with these chains locking my ankles, the guards force me to jump with my feet together to reach an armoured vehicle waiting for us in the courthouse basement. The black vehicle, with its armoured windows covered with thick wire mesh, resembles a special forces intervention truck.
There are two other detainees sitting next to me. An Asian and a big black guy. I try to start a conversation: ‘Do you know where we are going?’ I cannot understand a single word they say. They are using jail vernacular, a kind of backward slang with coded expressions.
Beaten by exhaustion, I don’t press them further. I haven’t slept for almost two days now. I am literally numb, stunned by the sequence of events. In this armoured truck, this rolling-stock jail, trussed up like wild game, the fatigue knocks me out and I fall asleep. Five hours later, I wake up at Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, in Rhode Island.
Chapter 4
Wyatt
How can I describe the Wyatt Detention Facility? Seen from afar, or from overhead, this prison resembles an ordinary five-storey administrative building, no different from the surrounding buildings. But as you approach, you discover that it is a genuine blockhouse, a concrete sarcophagus, with tiny slits in the facade in place of windows, each measuring six inches wide and thirty inches high. Loopholes that send shivers down your spine, and make you wonder how daylight can pass through. You feel that once you’re in there, anything could happen. Wyatt is cut off from the rest of the world. Surrounded by a double fence, a barbed-wire field, and surveillance cameras every ten yards. All vehicles entering it are armoured. Wyatt is no ordinary prison. It’s a maximum-security detention facility.
Americans use a scale of one to four to rate the level of security of their jails. Level 1 establishments, known as ‘camps’, are usually reserved for white-collar criminals convicted of financial crimes. These camps are equipped with gyms and often tennis courts, few guards and minimum surveillance measures. Security 2 centres are for short sentences and non-violent prisoners. Then there are the so-called mid-level detention centres, classified as level 3, and finally maximum-security establishments.
Wyatt belongs to the latter category. This prison is home to the most dangerous criminals in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maine and Vermont. They are detained there awaiting trial. Wyatt is therefore not part of the Bureau of Prisons, which groups together the federal penitentiaries where prisoners who have already been tried are incarcerated. Wyatt is managed by a private company under the authority of the Bureau of Prisons. The detention facility houses an average of six hundred inmates, who, as is customary practice in the United States, are dispersed into pods (‘quarters’) according to various criteria such as gang membership, age, dangerousness, ethnic origin, etc. In 2013, according to the annual report of the Wyatt administration, this figure included 39 per cent Hispanics, 36 per cent African Americans and 25 per cent Caucasian Whites. The same report also points out that, in 2013, several cases of sexual abuse among detainees were reported but not addressed. Also, during this same period, two detainees were murdered in such horrific circumstances that the families of the victims decided to file a suit.
So it is in this ultra-secure facility that the Department of Justice has decided to place me. Yet I am neither a re-offender nor a dangerous inmate. Such a choice defies any custodial logic, but nobody deigns to provide me with the slightest explanation.
On 15 April 2013, when our convoy passes through the gates, we are blocked by a first security airlock, before a grid rises and we proceed to a second airlock. Here, they pull me out of the van along with the other two passengers whose lingua franca I still can’t decipher. Having to jump, as our ankles are shackled, we pass through three armoured doors in succession to finally reach the R&D (Receive and Discharge) room, the building that manages the in-and-out movement of prisoners.
This room features a counter, behind which sits the steward who is responsible for receiving arrivals, a security screening gate to detect metals, similar to those seen at airports, two booths for body searches, and a special chair used to restrain the most violent prisoners. The guards remove our handcuffs. And once again we have to strip naked. This is my fourth body search since my arrest and as I haven’t washed since I left Singapore – two days ago – I must reek. But strangely enough, I don’t care. It has taken only forty-eight hours for me to start losing my most elementary bearings. It’s all a haze. I float, as if I were moving into another dimension . . .
I barely react when the prison staff hand us our kit. At Wyatt, new arrivals wear a khaki uniform as in all American federal penitentiaries, except when you are in ‘the hole’, where the colour is orange. We are also allowed four boxers, four pairs of socks, four T-shirts, two pairs of trousers, a pair of sneakers, and a pair of flip flops. Apart from the shoes, everything is old and shabby from having been worn before. The guards also hand me a badge featuring my mugshot, which they took in front of a grid indicating my height, just like in the film The Usual Suspects. It bears the number 21613.
Next, we must complete the admission questionnaire, which includes a list of contacts to be mentioned with their phone numbers. I suddenly realize that I don’t know any of the phone numbers of my nearest and dearest by heart, not even Clara’s in Singapore, which has just changed. I have no means of contacting my lawyer either. I start to panic. Liz Latif hadn’t thought to leave me her contact details. The only American ‘official’ I can call, because he had the foresight to leave me his business card, is Seth Blum, the investigator who received me at FBI headquarters. I must reach him, at all costs, to let him know where I am.
‘No way,’ mutters the guard, a Hispanic with an emaciated face. I insist. I try to explain the situation to my jailer, which annoys him even more. He locks me in a cell with the two other passengers from the van, then returns at the end of an hour. Only God knows why, but he changed his mind. I can make a call, but only one.
I pray that Seth will pick up, which he does. My luck ends there. He’s on the train taking him from New York to Washington, and before he has time to give me Liz’s number, the line goes dead. I just had time to explain my problem to him. Naturally, I ask the guard to call back.
‘This is not a hotel, asshole! You were told one call, not two! Get the hell outta here!’
I try explaining, I almost beg . . . Nothing works.
‘One phone call! And if you carry on acting smart, I’ll put you in the hole!’ screams the guard. But this vicious-looking screw is not letting me argue, so I have to accept it.
Before leaving the ‘intake room’ to join the pod allocated to him, each inmate is assigned a toothbrush and a small tube of toothpaste, soap, a small bottle of shampoo, two towels, a two-inch-thick plastic mattress, a pair of sheets and a brown blanket. I’m in D pod, one of the most dilapidated in the prison. In Wyatt, the pods are organized around a common room, surrounded by cells. D pod has about twenty cells. Each cell can house four inmates. For the moment, I share cell number 19 with my two travelling companions. We’d better get along because the prison’s internal regulations stipulate that during the first seventy-two hours of detention, we are not allowed to leave our cell, except to go to breakfast, lunch and dinner at 7:50 a.m., 12:20 p.m. and 5:20 p.m. respectively. Apart from walking through the common room, which doubles up as a refectory, all three of us have to remain locked up for almost twenty-two hours a day in a space of thirteen square yards during this first stage of the incarceration process.
The cell is equipped with a small iron table, a sink, a toilet, two stools fixed to the floor and two bunk beds. The cells were designed to accommodate two inmates, but due to overcrowding, they now host four. There are no partitions separating the toilets. The only way to get some privacy to relieve yourself is to wait for the guards to activate the automated cell door opening at mealtimes. This enables your cell mates to wait outside in the hallway for a few minutes and give you a break.
The Asian guy settles on the bunk above mine, and the tall black guy slumps down opposite me. Fortunately, my cell mates are pretty good company. They grasped that I can’t understand anything they are saying, so they talk to me more slowly, paying attention to their words. We pass the time by sharing our respective stories. Cho has an odd tale to tell. He is a Vietnamese political refugee who, after a hellish time in transit camps in Malaysia, managed to emigrate to San Francisco in 1991. With his meagre savings, he opened a first restaurant, then a second, and ended up making a fortune in the catering industry.
‘I managed to save two million dollars,’ he tells me. ‘And then I screwed up. I was a casino freak. I lost everything, so to bail myself out I started making fake credit cards.’
Cho was arrested on one occasion and given a two-year custodial sentence, which he served in California. Once released, he relapsed, and gambled away the astronomical sum of $12 million! He was arrested again for committing large-scale fraud, and now faces a ten-year sentence.
Mason, on the other hand, has a more ‘classic’ background. He grew up in the black district of Hartford, the capital of Connecticut. Unknown father, drug-addict mother. Mason was only fourteen years old when he joined a gang and started trafficking cocaine out of Texas. He spent six years behind bars, and upon release, he became a member of the ‘666’, a Muslim sect reserved for Blacks and openly racist towards Whites, which boasts of enforcing its own law even within prisons. He was subsequently sentenced to another eight years’ imprisonment. However, between two incarcerations, he succeeded in producing four children from four different women in two years. He proudly explains that these are four ‘very fine’ ladies.
‘One is even a prison guard! The second one works in a museum security department; the third is a waitress at McDonald’s; and the fourth is a stripper in a Hartford club.’ He then hilariously adds, ‘And you know what? None of them have tried to claim alimony from me.’
On that first day in Wyatt, my cell mates also familiarized me with prison codes. As I leant over the sink to brush my teeth and spit into the sink, Mason started yelling and insulting me.
‘You cannot spit. You cannot do that. You gotta do that in the john. You cannot spit where we all wash!’
It soon became apparent that the prisoners are very strict on hygiene issues.
‘It’s the same when you piss. You have to sit down and piss like a girl,’ says Mason. ‘You got it? You mustn’t spill it everywhere. You must never piss standing up. And if you want to pass wind, it is the same. You do it on the john and flush it so it sucks up the smell, you understand?’
Message received loud and clear. Indeed, all these rules make sense. I learn them in stages. My inmates know from experience that if one of us gets ill in the cell, the risk of infection is very high. Medical aid at Wyatt is almost non-existent. This is something I discover very soon for myself.
Just before I flew to New York, during my last tennis match, the first one for a long time, I suffered a serious rupture of the external and internal ligaments in my right ankle. I got on the plane barely able to walk (you can imagine how it felt when I had to jump with my ankles shackled). Upon my arrival in Wyatt, despite my repeated requests, I received no medical care, apart from an aspirin.
Even though Cho and Mason are naturally quite sociable, these first few hours of detention seem endless. No music, no TV, no notebook, no pen, no book. The only document I was able to keep was a summary of the indictment that Liz handed me in court. Reading it, I revert to the early 2000s, when the goddamn Indonesian contract was negotiated; the reason I am locked up in this pen today.
Chapter 5
Recollections
Ironically, at that time in my life, I was thinking of leaving the company. I was thirty-one years old, and after four years in Beijing (1995–99) as Sales Director China for the Power division, I was keen to make a career change. Indeed, since I joined Alstom, I had made significant career strides, but as a graduate of an average engineering school (ENSMA in Poitiers), I was afraid of hitting a glass ceiling fast. I knew that in order to progress in a multinational I would have to obtain further qualifications, so decided to leave and do an MBA at INSEAD, one of the world’s leading graduate business schools, which offered me a place.
In 1999 Clara and I discussed this at length. After agreeing to put her career plans on hold to follow me to Beijing, then giving birth to our first set of twins, Pierre and Léa in January 1998, and completing her PhD in neurobiology, she was keen to return to work. Hence our desire to settle in France.
Today, with hindsight, I bitterly regret that I did not stick to this choice. Who knows what the future would have held for us, or even if we would have been happier, but what I do know is that I would never have ended up here, in penal servitude.
Alstom, at that time, knew how to hold on to me. They saw me as young rising talent. After China, I was offered a senior role in the United States as Vice President Global Sales and Marketing of the Boiler division. To persuade me once and for all, my managers offered me time off (every other Friday plus several weeks a year) to attend the MBA courses at Columbia University in New York, one of the most prestigious American universities, a member of the famous ‘Ivy League’, and they agreed to fully fund my tuition for an amount of $100,000. Who could refuse such an offer?
In September 1999, I left for Windsor, Connecticut, where Clara and the children joined me two months later. Soon after my arrival, however, my mission proved to be much more challenging than expected.
At the beginning of the year 2000, Alstom was financially distressed. It was on the verge of bankruptcy. One year prior to this, management had made an alliance with ABB, a Swiss–Swedish competitor, but very soon this industrial partnership was to prove catastrophic. Whereas Alstom thought it had made the deal of the century by seizing control of ABB’s gas turbine technology, sold and distributed all over the world, it had just signed the worst deal in its history. These gas turbines were poorly designed and suffered from numerous technical faults. As a result, Alstom had to pay over €2 billion in compensation to its clients, which in turn increased its debt by an unprecedented 2,000 per cent. It posted a record deficit of €5.3 billion, which gave lenders a fright.
