When lawyers through
greed or hubris or desperation become white-collar criminals – sent to
prison and disbarred – their stories often feel like car crashes. We
gape at the wreckage of their lives and move on.
But what happens afterwards, once they’ve done their time? How do they pick up the pieces?
Jeffrey
Grant found a path to redemption. Seventeen years after he pleaded
guilty to fraudulently obtaining $247,000 through a 9/11 disaster relief
loan from the U.S. Small Business Administration, the Appellate
Division of the Supreme Court of the State of New York earlier this
month reinstated his law license.
“I’m beyond excited, but I also take the responsibility very seriously,” he told me. “I’m really grateful for a second chance.”
His
journey is extraordinary, from opioid-addicted real estate lawyer to
federal prison inmate to seminary student to head of a criminal justice
nonprofit. And now, at age 64, he has come full circle to practice law
again.
But this time around, he intends to do it very differently.
A
1981 New York Law School grad, Grant, before everything fell apart,
headed his own 20-employee firm, Jeffrey D. Grant & Associates, in
Mamaroneck, New York, serving as outside general counsel to large real
estate companies.
“I viewed life as a competition,” he said, describing himself as akin to “a paid assassin.”
“It was me against everyone else, or me and my client against everyone else.”
After
a sports injury, he was prescribed the painkiller Demerol and over the
course of a decade, he became addicted to prescription opioids.
When
he couldn’t meet payroll for his firm, he borrowed money from client
escrow accounts. With a New York state attorney grievance committee
investigation pending, he surrendered his law license on July 28, 2002.
That night, he attempted suicide by overdose, he told me.
He wound up in rehab, embracing recovery with three meetings a day. He’s been clean and sober ever since.
But
his past caught up with him in 2004, when he learned there was a
warrant for his arrest. “No one was more surprised than me,” Grant said.
Once informed of the charges, though, it “all came rushing back.”
In
the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, he had applied for federal
financial aid and falsely claimed that his firm had an office in New
York City. In reality, he merely had an arrangement to use a conference
room on occasion in the city.
Did
he somehow convince himself this qualified? I asked. “I was a lawyer
who represented sophisticated businesspeople,” he said. “I knew better.”
“There’s
no question drugs had a lot to do with it, but I can’t blame the
drugs,” he continued. “I was desperate, clutching at anything I could.”
Grant
served 14 months at a low security prison in White Deer, Pennsylvania –
but it was a “real prison with bars,” he said, not one of the so-called
Club Fed camps where white-collar offenders typically do their time.
As
a “privileged kid from the suburbs,” he said, “I had to learn hard
lessons there. But it was exactly what I needed to wipe the last smirk
off my face.”
Released
in 2007, he knew he wanted to use his experiences to help others. He’s
Jewish, but a pastor he knew suggested he consider attending a seminary.
“I
didn’t know what that meant,” Grant recalled. (His first reaction: Is
that where you train to be a monk?) But he discovered that seminaries,
at least the progressive ones, “are basically places where you learn
about social justice and faith.”
In
2012, he earned a master of divinity degree from Union Theological
Seminary in New York City. He’s been baptized, but he’s also still a
Jew. “I’m a double-belonger,” he said.
Grant and his wife Lynn Springer went on to co-found Progressive Prison Ministries.
Based in Greenwich, Connecticut, they say it’s the world’s first
ministry focused on serving the white-collar justice community.
It
includes a weekly white-collar online support group for people “who
have a desire to take responsibility for our actions and the wreckage we
caused, make amends, and move forward in new way of life centered on
hope, care, compassion, tolerance and empathy.” More than 310 people
around the country have participated, according to the group’s website.
From
2016 to 2019, Grant also served as the executive director of Family
ReEntry, a criminal justice nonprofit with offices and programs in eight
Connecticut cities.
Three
years ago, he began the process of getting his law license back. The
first step was taking the multi-state professional responsibility exam
and completing CLE. He also submitted “about 12 inches of paperwork,” he
said, including his personal story.
He
wrote 14,000 words. “I wanted to tell them everything, the whole story,
warts and all,” he said. “It didn’t make a difference to me if
strategically it was the right thing to do.” He added, “I let go of the
outcome.”
He
had a hearing via videoconference last May. “I was scared,” Grant said,
but he was surprised to find that the panel members questioning him
were “kind.”
“They
were thorough and probing, but they were not out to tank me. They were
supportive,” he said. “It helped me remember the best parts of being a
lawyer.”
On May 5, his license was officially reinstated, and he promptly launched GrantLaw PLLC.
With an office on West 43rd Street in Manhattan, he’s offering his
services as a private general counsel specializing in white-collar
crisis management.
That
might include helping a white-collar defendant interview defense
lawyers and other specialized counsel, reviewing the lawyers’ work
product and billing, and acting as a sounding board, all with the goal
of achieving a better and more-cost-efficient outcome.
“Most
white-collar defendants are very bright, who have a lot of professional
experience and are highly educated,” Grant said. “They don’t realize
they’re in trauma – and are making generally very bad decisions while in
trauma.”
They need “someone who understands trauma,” he said, “and somebody to trust.”
Given his life experiences, it’s hard for me to imagine a lawyer more uniquely qualified.
Jenna
Greene writes about legal business and culture, taking a broad look at
trends in the profession, faces behind the cases, and quirky courtroom
dramas. A longtime chronicler of the legal industry and high-profile
litigation, she lives in Northern California. Reach Greene at jenna.greene@thomsonreuters.com.
Jeff Grant is on a
mission. After a hiatus from practicing law, he is once again in private
practice and is committed to using his legal expertise and life
experience to benefit others.
Jeff provides a broad
range of legal services in a highly attentive, personalized manner.
They include private general counsel, white collar crisis management to
individuals and families, services to family-owned and closely-held
businesses, plus support to special situation and pro bono clients.
For more than 20
years, Jeff served as managing attorney of a 20+ employee law firm
headquartered in New York City and then Westchester County, New York.
The firm’s practice areas included representing family-owned and
closely-held businesses and their owners, business and real estate
transactions, trusts and estates, and litigation.
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
____________________
In the months after 9/11, I was frantic. But my fears had
less to do with the tragedy at the Word Trade Center and more to do with
the fact that, after 10 years of rampant prescription opioid abuse, my
business was failing. I was searching desperately for an out. Meanwhile,
the television and radio were blaring with ads for 9/11 FEMA loans
administered by the U.S. Small Business Administration. So, on an especially bad day, I lied. I said I had an office near ground zero. I received the SBA
loan I requested, and immediately paid down the personal credit cards I
had run up while waiting for the SBA money. Even so, the loan did
little to stop my spiral into drug addiction, mental health issues,
marital problems and magical thinking.
In 2002, I resigned my
law license and started on the road to recovery. But it all caught up
with me about 20 months later, when I was arrested for the
misrepresentations on my loan application. I served almost 14 months at a
Federal prison for wire fraud and money laundering. My objective in
writing this piece is to offer some insight on what business owners
should consider before they take out disaster loans. Certainly, the
majority of people requesting these loans are honest and upstanding
entrepreneurs who have immense need for the aid, and will use the funds
properly. I am very glad there is help for them. That said, history has
shown us again and again that when people are in dire need, they’re more
prone to make impulsive, ill-advised decisions. My hope is that sharing
my experience will help others avoid the consequences I faced. Here are
seven takeaways.
1. Desperate people do desperate things.
There
were thousands of fraud prosecutions after 9/11, Hurricane Katrina,
Superstorm Sandy, and so on. Why? Whether because of overwhelming
business issues, poor personal judgment, or just plain bad luck, people
were wounded, desperate and willing to do anything, anything, to stop the bleeding. But if the wound is too deep, a Band-aid is not sufficient.
Practice point: In any situation, behaving desperately is unlikely to save your business.
2. Beware of the belief that rules are suspended in times of emergency.
The government
is advertising that huge amounts of money are available to save our
businesses. I recently sat in on a webinar run by a very reputable
business consulting group that recommended that attendees get their SBA
disaster loan applications in immediately, regardless of the facts or
the actual needs of their business — they said we could
always modify our applications prior to taking the money. State
unemployment websites are actually giving instructions, in writing,
on how to mislead and circumvent the system in order to get approved.
Don’t take the bait! If you default two years from now, this
“good-meaning advice” won’t matter to prosecutors.
Practice point: Be truthful at all times.
3. Beware of magical thinking.
This
is a tough one because entrepreneurs are inherently optimistic. We
believe that things will always be better tomorrow than they are today.
It drives us, makes us successful, informs our risk-taking. But in times
of trauma, that voice can be an entrepreneur’s worst enemy. Does this
sound familiar? We have learned the hard way that there is no shortcut,
and yet we desperately want there to be one right now.
Practice
point: Instead of immediately reaching for a bailout or other quick
fix, develop a good solid business plan. Maybe a disaster loan will fit
into this plan; maybe it won’t.
4. This paradigm shift will affect all small to mid-size businesses.
We
are in the midst of a massive reordering that has already had a huge
effect on small and mid-sized businesses. Business owners are being
called to closely examine if our business models are still viable, or if
we must pivot to new ways of doing things. Example: the Swiss watch
industry completely missed the shift to digital watches. Have we waited
too long to have a robust online presence? Are our products or services
even needed anymore? Have we been holding on by a thread for years,
unwilling or unable to look at the hard facts?
Practice point: Get real, now. Don’t borrow money to save a business that can’t be saved.
5. Be cautious when borrowing from the government.
As
is the case with any loan, the devil is in the details. The terms and
covenants in the loan documents dictate what you can or can’t do with
the money once you get it. You can only use the funds for the purposes
you stated in your application — that is, to pay operating
expenses of the business to keep it afloat until it starts bringing in
sufficient revenue again. You (and your spouse) will probably have sign
for the loan personally, and will probably have to pledge all available
collateral, including a second (or third) mortgage on your house. If you
maxed out your personal credit cards while anticipating your disaster
relief funding, you can’t use the money to pay off your cards.
Practice
point: Read the terms and covenants of the loan closely. Whatever the
loan terms say to do, do, and whatever they say don’t do, don’t do. No
exceptions.
6. We can't save our businesses and our lifestyles at the same time.
Here’s the big trap. We have mortgages, car payments, school tuitions, and other personal expenses that have to be paid, and soon. But simply put, SBA loans are meant to save your business, not your lifestyle. Discuss all your options with advisors and friends you trust — ones
that will tell you the truth! It’s like going to the doctor. Your
diagnosis will only be as accurate as the history you provide. These
are trying times, with a triage system designed to be more expeditious
than thorough.
Practice point: There is no such thing as a free lunch. Borrowing money comes with responsibility and accountability.
7. Get acquainted with acceptance.
I
hope we are all great entrepreneurs who can figure out ways to make our
businesses survive and flourish. But let’s face it. Some of our
businesses will not make it, even with the infusion of government funds.
What should we do? We can pare down, embrace change and do things
differently as we start a new chapter. Never forget that there will
always be opportunity to start again, and to live a fuller, more
abundant life.
Radio/Podcast:
Business Talk with Jim Campbell: Jeff Grant Talks with Jim About Going
to Prison for SBA Loan Fraud and What to Know Before Taking Coronavirus
Relief Money, Biz Talk National Radio Network, Broadcast from 1490 AM
WGCH Greenwich, CT, Mon., Apr. 27, 2020. Listen on YouTube here.
Video/Podcast:
Jeff & Babz Talk SBA Loan Fraud and 7 Things to Know Before You Take
Coronavirus Relief Money, WNHH 103.5 FM New Haven, CT, Fri., April 24,
2020. Watch on YouTube here.
Jeff Grant, J.D., M.Div. is an
ordained minister with over three decades of experience in crisis
management, business, law, reentry, recovery (clean & sober 17+
years), and executive & religious leadership. Sometimes referred to
in the press as “The Minister to Hedge Funders,” he uses his experience
and background
to guide people faithfully forward in their lives, relationships,
careers and business opportunities, and to help them to stop making the
kinds of decisions that previously resulted in loss, suffering and
shame. Jeff is the Co-Founder of Progressive Prison Ministries, the world’s first ministry serving the white collar justice community. It hosts a White Collar Support Group
online on Zoom on Monday evenings, 7 pm ET, 6 pm CT, 5 pm MT, 4 pm PT.
The group marked its milestone 200th weekly online meeting on Mon.,
April 13th. Jeff can be reached at prisonist.org, jgrant@prisonist.org.
THE REDEMPTION OF JEFF GRANT – BY TIMOTHY DUMAS, GREENWICH MAGAZINE – MARCH 2018
His life was defined by GARISH
GRANDIOSITY, OPIOID ADDICTION and FINANCIAL FRAUD. HE ENDED UP IN
PRISON. And then THE JOURNEY BEGAN
THE LAST BAD DECISION SLIPPED OUT OF HIM AS EASILY AS WATER OVER A FALLS.
He’d filled out the paperwork demonstrating that his law firm,
Jeffrey D. Grant & Associates, had suffered economic hardship in the
wake of 9/11, embellishing only a little to buttress his claim.
In Grant’s own mind, he had done nothing wrong. What did it matter
that his firm was not in the shadow of the Towers, not in Manhattan at
all, but way out in Mamaroneck? The ads on the radio said Westchester
County businesses also were eligible for disaster relief loans. And when
he called the people down at the Small Business Administration office,
they confirmed his eligibility. Next came the application: He wrote down
the correct and proper Mamaroneck address required of him — then he
added, for good measure, a not-so-correct and proper Wall Street
address. “I was desperate,” Grant recalls. “I needed that money. There
was no question in my mind that my motive was to say anything I had to
say — and so I described an office situation in New York that just
wasn’t true.”
It wasn’t entirely false, either. Grant had an agreement with a firm
at 40 Wall Street to use its conference space for the convenience of
his Manhattan clients. “But I don’t think I had ever actually used the
space,” Grant says. “And losing it would have had zero economic impact
on my firm."
Why did it not occur to Grant that he
had crossed into ethical badlands? Perhaps because he’d done it already,
in a rash attempt to save his once high-flying firm from ruin: “I was
spiraling down. My firm was completely out of cash.” When the day came,
in 2000, that Grant could not make payroll, desperation got the better
of him: He borrowed from clients’ escrow accounts without their
knowledge, setting in motion a New York State attorneys’ grievance
committee investigation.
That investigation was still in
progress on September 11, 2001. Unknown to his family and friends,
unknown even to his employees (who nevertheless had their suspicions),
the firm was as good as dead, and Grant himself faced the prospect of
disbarment. So great was the weight of these secrets that he was
vomiting up blood. Not only that. He had ballooned to 285 pounds. He
drank too much. And he was addicted to opioid painkillers—first Demerol
and then OxyContin. “I took things to wake up. I took things to go to
sleep. I was a mess.”
So in the darkening whirlwind of his
life, what did a little embroidery on a loan application matter? The
loan came through—$247,000—an answered prayer, a well of tears.
GREED & GRANDIOSITY
I never knew the old Jeff Grant. But I’ve known the present Jeff
Grant—the Reverend Jeffrey Grant, the advocate for convicts and their
families, the rare voice for white collar criminals—for about ten years.
It’s October, and we’re sitting in his office at Family ReEntry, a
Bridgeport-based nonprofit that helps inmates find their feet back out
in the real world, a world where the reception is cold and the way
forward ridden with obstacles. In 2016 Grant was named CEO and executive
director of Family ReEntry—its first leader who knows the mission from
the inside out, having done his own stretch in prison.
As his saga rolls out of him, I think of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Not funny in the least, it’s the story of a man losing his way in the
middle of his life’s journey, descending into hell, and struggling back
to the bright world, where once again he beholds the stars: Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso.
At sixty-one, Grant is a powerful-looking man with a broad,
expressive face and curly gray hair swept back from his temples. He
reflects on his old self frankly, almost brutally, without excuses. Who
was that man and how did he get that way? If you’d met him socially, you
probably would have liked him. He coached his daughters’ softball team.
He sat on the school board. He owned a restaurant. “I was this
fun-loving, backslapping guy,” he says. “People may have been talking
about me behind my back, saying I was out of my mind, I don’t know. But
they would have seen this huge guy who put his arm around everyone,
hugged everyone, kissed everyone.” He pauses, then adds this curious
detail: “I had tons of people who probably considered me their friend —
but I didn’t necessarily consider any of them my friend.”
If you’d met him professionally, you might have disliked him
intensely. In 1991 he moved his family out of Manhattan, to Rye, and
opened the Mamaroneck office. “That’s when things started flying,” he
says. “I was a big fish in a small pond” specializing in real estate law
and serving as general counsel to a company that owned hundreds of
buildings. “I became increasingly arrogant and grandiose. I wasn’t a
nice guy. I viewed my job as winner take all—I was like a paid
assassin.”
Underlying his aggressive style were the addictions—chiefly the
opioid addiction. (He originally kicked Demerol in 1986 but relapsed in
1992, after rupturing his achilles tendon playing basketball.) And
underlying the drugs was an undiagnosed bipolar disorder. The disease’s
“up” phase seemed to endow him with special powers of perception. “I
would have these moments of real clarity. Some bipolar people talk about
it — it’s almost a genius. You see connections that other people can’t
see.”
His success begat more success. If the firm was running low on
cases, he would go for a walk and come back with ten new ones. “Everyone
wants to be near successful people,” he explains. “They want to rub the
arm of the person who has the golden goose.”
Meanwhile, he had fashioned a lavish lifestyle for himself and his
family. “I did everything to the extreme. I was flaunting this nouveau
riche lifestyle, flaunting it. There was no humility. I’d go down and
lease the biggest BMW you could get. I had a house in the best section
of town. We would go on shopping trips — I mean big vacations, just to
shop, and we would come back with massive amounts of clothes. I didn’t
even know that other families were looking at us like, ‘What’s going
on?’”
Somewhere along the line, his lawyerly aggression turned to
recklessness. Grant has no memory of a hard tipping point. But his risky
decisions ceased paying off, as any gambler’s will. “I kind of knew
that I was betting the house on every hand. I knew that. But I was
powerless to stop it.” For example, he took big positions in dot-com
startups, certain that just one hit would set him up for life. He had
these positions written on Post-it notes and affixed to his computer.
One day his assistant casually said, “What if none of them hit?” “And I
said, ‘No, that can’t happen.’ But of course in 2000, when the dot-com
bubble burst, it was all gone.”
Around this time, a friend who knew of Grant’s Demerol habit visited
his office — he opened his hand and let a pile of OxyContin spill onto
Grant’s broad, wood burl desk. “That was a whole new level, just crazy,”
he said of the drug that would fuel the current opioid epidemic. “I
couldn’t work at all. I couldn’t do anything. I would just go over to
his house in the middle of the afternoon and sit in his den and watch
The Golf Channel with him while my firm was disintegrating.”
Then came the raiding of the escrow accounts. And then 9/11. He
nursed the tiny hope that the disaster relief loan, which he applied for
in December 2001, could save his firm — but in embroidering the
application Grant had released the hellhounds, as it were, and it was
only a matter of time before they ran him down.
In 2002 a former business partner who’d learned of the investigation
into the escrow debacle — now in its second year — wrote a letter to
the grievance committee detailing Grant’s other sins. “He talked not
just about my character, but about my drug use, about all the horrible
things I’d done to him,” Grant remembers. “I think he was fundamentally
right, but at the time I was appalled. A copy of the letter was sent to
me by my ethics lawyer. I asked him, ‘How devastating is this to my
case?’ And he said, ‘Devastating — it’s devastating.’”
On July 28, 2002, Grant resigned his law license, conceding his
unethical borrowing. (Soon after, the state ordered his disbarment.)
Next he called a physician friend who once again wrote out a
forty-tablet prescription for Demerol. Grant picked it up at the
pharmacy — this time with a sense of doom. “My life was over,” he says.
“I knew I was going to try to kill myself.”
That night, after his family went to bed, he sat down in his easy
chair, turned on the TV, and downed the vial of pills. Then he sank away
into oblivion.
HIS AWAKENING
He came to, woozily, in the morning. During the night he had slid out of
his chair and now he was lying crumpled on the floor. He vomited. He
crawled to the kitchen to look for more pills to end the job, but no
luck: His recent string of failures now included the failure to commit
suicide.
In the blur of days that followed, Grant knew, as those who hit
bottom sometimes do, that he would never take another opioid painkiller.
He arranged admission to Silver Hill Hospital in New Canaan, but his
wife and daughters — whom Grant had kept in the dark about the depths of
his turmoil, not to mention the suicide attempt—reminded him they had a
wedding to attend that night. Could rehab wait a day? “After the
ceremony I walked into the bar, and they were pouring shots for the
wedding party,” Grant says. “There were like fifteen shots on the bar.
It’s cloudy, but I just remember it. I went up to the bar and said
something either funny or pathetic, and people laughed as I drank every
one of those shots. Those were the last drinks I ever had. August 9,
2002.”
In the fog of disease and addiction, Grant often believed that
people were plotting against him, were taking advantage of him in ways
he could not quite pinpoint. “My friends, my family, my parents, they
had all done these horrible, horrible things to me,” he says. At Silver
Hill, as the fog began to lift, he awoke one night and sat bolt upright
in his bed. How had he not seen it before? The revelation hit him like a
blunt force wound. “I realized that they hadn’t been doing horrible
things to me — I had been doing horrible things to them! And I ran down
the hall, crying …”
Here in his Bridgeport office, reliving the moment, Grant begins to weep.
“I ran down the hall to the nurse’s station, crying like a baby! I
tried to explain to the nurse, ‘They weren’t doing things wrong, I was
doing things wrong! I was the bad one!’ And she put her arm around me
and started rubbing my back. And she said, ‘I know, dear, I know.’” She
fetched a binder for him to see: It bore the heading “Bipolar Disorder.”
Grandiosity. Arrogance. Flights of ideas. Manic mood swings. On and on
and on. “I said, ‘This is me, this is me.’ And at that moment, I crossed
over into recovery.”
Let us take stock of the totality of Grant’s collapse. He was no
longer a lawyer. He no longer had a job of any kind, or even the
prospect of one. The cocksure, larger-than-life provider was gone,
replaced by a man who was a stranger to himself, down and out,
disgraced. “At that point we were pariahs,” Grant recalls. “I’d had
hundreds and hundreds of people in my circle. I was a big shot in
Mamaroneck and Rye. And nobody came to visit us—maybe like two people.
We were untouchables. We were damaged. Nobody was going to come near
us.”
THE PAST DOESN’T FORGET
After the Grants sold the house in Rye, they moved to an apartment in
Greenwich. Grant began attending recovery meetings three or four times a
day at a local church (in keeping with the recovery code, he prefers to
withhold specifics about program and venue). He would wake very early,
as was his habit, and wait outside the church on a bench or in his car
as the sun rolled up. Nobody would have guessed at his lost wealth and
position, for instead of decking himself out in the finery of that life,
he wore baggy shorts, T-shirts and a baseball cap—a uniform of
self-effacement, of anonymity.
Soon he started helping a man set up the chairs before the morning
meeting. Eventually the man asked if Grant would like to take on the
responsibility himself—to be “the chair person.” A ray of light had
found him. “It was the first time anybody had trusted me with anything,”
he says of the period after his fall. “They gave me the keys—the keys
to the church. And I would go into the church at 5 a.m., and I would set
up the chairs, and I would do it so methodically.
“In my old life, I did everything to show off. But this wasn’t
showing off. I was alone. I just felt a sense of purpose. I was actually
caring for other people. I cared about how that room looked. I cared
that they came into that room and felt taken care of. So I set up chairs
every single morning for a thousand days. A thousand days! I didn’t go
on vacation, didn’t do anything. I just set up the chairs.”
When he finished each morning, he had a couple of hours to sit in
the great silence of the church and read the Bible, or pray, or
meditate. “I got this overwhelming feeling that I can’t explain,” Grant
says. “God was all around — I just turned myself over to Him.”
And so his became the story of a man who sensed a divine hand
steering the beat-up little skiff of his life. A man who, having sweated
out every ounce of arrogance through prayer and good works, won the
affection of his tribe of mending souls, and embarked on a life of
service. But the hellhounds did not tire; all the while they’d been
gaining ground. In 2004 they caught him, and eventually ran him right
into the New York media crucible, where the gentle, kindly Jeff Grant
mutated into a particularly odious criminal: “9/11 Scammer Gets 18
Months for Loan Fraud.”
He learned of his new calamity in a humdrum way: His cell phone rang
as he was walking along West Putnam Avenue. The man on the phone
identified himself as IRS, Criminal Investigation Division. “My mind was
reeling. I said, ‘Is this a joke?’ There was no part of me, none, that
thought I had done anything wrong regarding that loan.” But the man
convinced him otherwise: How odd it was to look from a perch of clarity
upon the morass of your old life.
A couple of weeks later, he turned himself in at the Daniel Patrick
Moynihan U.S. Courthouse on Pearl Street in Manhattan. The concrete
barricades installed after 9/11 were still up, and the military presence
around the government buildings was still heightened. Grant took in the
vigilant mood, so evocative of that day of destruction. A sense of
shame overcame him. Certainly there was irony in the fact that he might
have got his loan anyway, without embellishing; but he had embellished,
there was no changing that now. He had taken personal advantage of a
national tragedy.
Federal marshals cuffed him and took him to a holding cell. Hours
later, at his arraignment, he pleaded guilty. Then he went back to
Greenwich to await his sentence, which would not come for another two
years.
The bonds of his family life, meanwhile, had frayed to breaking. So
great was the fall, so humiliating were the circumstances, that it could
hardly have been otherwise. Then there was the overlay of recovery —
the quite real phenomenon of the recovery widow, unintentionally frozen
out of her spouse’s journey. “I didn’t even know what was going on with
my family,” admits Grant, who estimates that he attended 1,200 recovery
meetings in his first year. “I became absentee. And there came a day
that I was asked to leave.”
He left the house with two duffel bags and his clock radio.
Essentially homeless, he spent the next couple of years living in
people’s guest rooms and sleeping on their sofas. “I made sure my family
was taken care of,” he says, “but I lived without a home until I went
to prison.”
Grant considers the generosity of his recovery mates as one of many
miracles along the way. Still, jobless, homeless and prison-bound, there
were plenty of reasons for fear and dread, and none for hope.
One day in church, Grant turned to see a woman entering, bathed in a
kind of halo light. “She was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen,”
he says, eyes twinkling. “I was spellbound.” She left the meeting
early. Impulsively he followed her out to the parking lot, a bearish,
squinty-faced man in an orange baseball cap.
“I thought he was a lunatic,” she says.
Her name was Lynn Springer. Svelte, fined-boned, with long, silvery
hair, she possessed a fashion model’s beauty—a beauty amplified by her
gentleness of spirit. “He had such focus in his eyes,” she continues.
“It was disconcerting.”
But at least she was aware of him now. She listened with special
attentiveness when he shared at meetings, and so learned his story in
all its wretchedness. Did it put her off? “Jeff has told you his story,”
she says to me. “Do you look at him and go, ‘Ugh, what a bad,
villainous man?’ I didn’t think that. I saw him full of life and
generosity and compassion. The enormousness of his heart, his joy of
life, were so captivating to me. And he was so kind! I had never met
anyone as kind as Jeff.” Lynn’s own marriage had ended, and such endings
are almost always difficult. “I was coming from a place in my own life
of extreme sadness. Of feeling unloved. Of disappointment. Of feeling
vulnerable. And I was very intrigued by him.”
After a year of friendship, she and Jeff began to see each other.
“When we went on our first date, I was so petrified I couldn’t hold her
hand,” he says. “I couldn’t do anything. I was so damaged, so afraid.”
He laughs. “I had no idea what she could possibly see in me. What a bad
bet I was!”
THE PRISON WALLS
In January 2006 Grant was sentenced to eighteen months at Allenwood Low
Federal Correctional Institution in Pennsylvania. (A U.S. Supreme Court
case about sentencing guidelines accounted for the two-year wait; in the
interim, he had repaid the loan.) “I’m sorry and I’m ashamed,” Grant
told the judge. “I offer no excuse for what I did.”
Only now did the papers get wind of his crime. Though his old self
might have wished the news reports had teased out the nuances of the
story, his new self accepted the wave of infamy with surprising calm.
And anyway, the more immediate worry was prison itself.
Allenwood is surrounded by farmland and forest; the only remarkable
feature in the landscape is a reptile zoo across the street. Grant
reported to Allenwood on Easter Sunday, 2006. Nobody is supposed to
report to federal prison on Easter Sunday, but there had been a clerical
error, one of weird significance. If Easter is about rising, then
surely Jeff Grant had come to prison on the right day.
Prison has its own byzantine laws and ways, and a new inmate must
pick them up on the fly. Why did the barber ignore Grant when he went
for his haircut? Because everything must be paid for black-market style.
You couldn’t have money in prison. So the currency at Allenwood was
smoked mackerel — the fish — available for purchase, in foil bags, at
certain times and in certain ways at the commissary. If you wanted your
uniform ironed, if you wanted a haircut, you paid with “macks.” “God
forbid you should actually eat them,” Grant says with a laugh. Because
this entire system of exchange was illegal, there were designated
“runners” to shuttle the macks to and fro.
Grant enjoys recounting some of these details now. But the essence
of prison is harder to get at; there’s no succinct way to describe truly
what it does to a person. “Once you go to prison, you lose touch with
reality in some way,” Grant says. “Empathy kind of escapes. I was, like,
in a deprivation tank.”
The easiest way to get by was to keep his head down, talk little,
and fall into a prison groove, one day duplicating the last. Even the
supposedly glad interruption of a visitor could instill unease. For one
thing, a visit entailed hours-long preparation. When a prisoner was
finally on the verge of seeing his loved one, he entered a sort of
retaining room—and Grant is suddenly back in the present tense: “I have
to strip down and stand there naked while they check between my fingers,
check in my mouth, check my private parts, they turn you around, you
bend over, they check you.” (There was also a litany of requirements and
prohibitions for visitors. One infraction could scrap a visit for the
day, such as when Lynn wore capris. A guard had judged them to be short
pants, thus forbidden, and barked, “You—out of the line!”)
Lynn spent her first visit with her head in Jeff’s lap, crying. “I
don’t think I had fully accepted the reality of it,” she says. “The
concertina wire, the guards, the way I was treated, even as a visitor —
the way Jeff was treated. The way he behaved there. The way his eyes
were. Everything about it was humiliating. The guard would say something
and Jeff would immediately go, ‘Uh!’ and do what he was told. He was so
nervous. Just talking about it and remembering it is making me feel
sick.”
A distance opened between them. She would tell him about some
problem she was having back in Greenwich and seek his help, as had been
her custom. “And he would say to me, ‘Lynn, I’m in prison now. What do
you want me to do?’ That was his answer. And I kind of felt like I
didn’t have a partner anymore. That was devastating for me. I felt so
alone.”
But Grant did find his prison groove. He did it by walking — walking
around the track, lap upon lap, ten miles a day. He hit upon the idea
of walking clear across America. “In the library I pulled out a road
atlas and plotted the course from New York to L.A., all the little towns
in between, in ten-mile increments. Every day I’d vicariously be in the
town that I had walked to.” Soon gang members, drug dealers and white
collar offenders wanted in on the journey. “They would join me on
segments and I would say, ‘Today I’m walking from Akron, Ohio, making my
way down to Nashville, Tennessee.’ It was fascinating! We would talk
about where we were walking and what was in that town, and we’d look it
up. It was our form of escape.” In the end, Grant walked 3,500 miles,
shed sixty-five pounds, and learned the life stories of his fellow
inmates, human stories in all their contradictions and complexities.
JEFF’S REENTRY
Grant went free after serving nearly fourteen months at Allenwood. But
when he emerged, his old joi de vivre was gone. The attitude Lynn had
noticed in Jeff that first visiting day, the nervousness, the
disconnectedness — he carried it back to Greenwich.
“I couldn’t look anyone in the face — I could only look at my shoes. For six months.”
“He didn’t even look at me,” says Lynn. “The shame, I guess.” Grant
sighs. “It wasn’t as if I didn’t want to connect. I couldn’t.” Lynn’s
daughter, Skylar, was seven when Jeff came into their lives. Though
Skylar had a loving relationship with her own father, Jeff had proved a
delightful bonus. “She said, ‘Mommy, Jeff is so warm and snuggly, when
you sit next to him to watch TV you don’t even need a blanket,’” Lynn
recalls. The post-prison Grant was decidedly cooler. “When Skylar saw
him — she was thrilled to see him — she hugged him and he hugged her,
but he wasn’t smiling or anything. She turned to me and she didn’t know
what to do. I had to hug her and comfort her. And she said, ‘I liked him
better fat.’”
Gradually, the old Jeff returned. He planted himself back in his
life of service, at Liberation House in Stamford and then at Family
ReEntry in Bridgeport. Family ReEntry has strong Greenwich roots:
Elizabeth and Prescott Bush, sister-in-law and brother of George H. W.
Bush, helped found it in 1984, and the Bushes’ friend Joan Warburg held a
benefit concert each year at her backcountry estate. One year Lynn
invited Jeff to the benefit, and one of Family ReEntry’s directors asked
Grant if he would volunteer:
His perspective as an ex-con would be invaluable.
Feeling the old energy warm in him, Grant consulted his friend Chris
Tate, the associate minister at Second Congregational Church in
Greenwich. “I said, ‘Chris, I need to figure out what to do with my life
now.’ He said to me, ‘I think you should go to seminary.’ I looked at
him like he was crazy. ‘I’m a convicted felon. And I’m a Jew.’ He said,
‘Look, you probably have no idea what a seminary really is.’ In my mind
it was where monks walk around. He said, ‘Really, it’s a place where you
learn about social justice.’ ”
And that idea struck at Grant’s very core. He applied.
Around this time, in 2009, his mother was dying. Lynn helped nurse
her as she faded away. “At this point we were pretty serious,” Grant
says, “but I didn’t even feel I deserved to be married. Then this
beautiful, beautiful woman, a big African-American nurse who was taking
care of my mother, pulled me aside and said, ‘Honey, you better not let
that one get away.’ On the plane ride home I asked Lynn to marry me.”
“Jeff and I each came from lives of privilege that had felt like
unhappy, golden cages,” Lynn says. “Together, we left all that behind
and embarked on a rocky, rough path that led us to love, hope, joy and a
life beyond our wildest dreams.” Early in their relationship, she had
stumbled upon a haiku by the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Mizuta
Masahide — nine words, summing up her life’s hardships and stubborn
beauty: “Barn’s burnt down, now I can see the moon.”
AND SO IT BEGINS
The rest of the story is epilogue. No, that’s not right. The rest of the
story is Grant’s flowering into his new life. “When I show people my
bio, every single thing, every accomplishment, is after prison,” he
says. “They can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.”
In 2012 he graduated from Union Theological Seminary in New York,
where he focused on Christian social ethics. The same year, he and Lynn
founded the Greenwich-based Progressive Prison Project, the first
ministry in the United States to help white-collar and other nonviolent
offenders deal with prison issues — earning Grant the sobriquet
“minister to hedge funders,” though that only covers a piece of his
mission. And they founded its sister ministry, the Innocent Spouse &
Children Project, which helps the families of the accused and convicted
navigate their harsh new realities. “The people at home are left
dealing with the shame, the stigma,” Lynn says. “And there was a lot of
it.”
Lynn tells me of people who up and walked away, bristling with
disapproval, when she told them Jeff’s story. Even after Jeff became a
minster, there were people who refused to shake his hand. Paradoxically,
perhaps, white-collar crime tends to be less forgivable than other
crimes. Even Dante says so. His seventh circle of hell is reserved for
the violent; his eighth is for the frauds.
In towns like ours, the families of the convicted live quietly
excruciating lives. “They know everybody’s whispering about them,” Lynn
says. “And in these affluent towns the children are ostracized. ‘Oh,
you’re not having a playdate with so-and-so, his daddy blah-blah-blah.’”
“There’s not a lot of services there,” Jeff adds. “There’s not a lot
of understanding. You’re pretty much in a vacuum, and the sense of
isolation is huge.”
The stigma he speaks of does not exist in Bridgeport. Grant often
preached at the city’s First Baptist Church (and ran its prison
ministry) in addition to his work at Family ReEntry, and the starkly
different attitudes he witnessed vexed and fascinated him. “They have
this embodied understanding of criminal justice and prison,” he
observes. “It’s part of their culture, unfortunately. But they rally
around one another, and they’re helpful to one another, and they’re not
shunning and they are not stigmatizing.”
One of his great goals is to bring communities like Greenwich and
Bridgeport together, to get them to share their common humanity. “That’s
not an easy thing to do,” he admits. “There’s prejudice on both sides.
Everyone is frightened of things they don’t know about.”
Certainly that was once true of Grant himself. In the end, he says,
we don’t really know which of our journey’s twists and turns are good
for us, and which are bad. “But I do know that the things I was most
afraid of in life turned out to be the best things for me.”
MISSION: Social Justice
Jeff Grant’s work spans a wild
range—blighted neighborhoods to back-country estates—with prison and
anguished families as a common thread
FAMILY REENTRY
By 2007, when Grant
got out of prison, he had already discovered the presence of God in his
life. But how could he engage his spiritual self in a world that treated
ex-cons as outcasts? One small way was to volunteer at Family ReEntry, a
Bridgeport-based agency that helps ex-cons return productively to their
cities and towns. It offers, among other things, intervention;
mentorship; skills training; and mental health, substance abuse and
domestic abuse counseling. In 2009 Family ReEntry asked Grant to join
its board.
On his first day as a
board member, he was waiting outside the First Baptist Church of
Bridgeport (the former home of Family ReEntry), staring at a desolate
lot on Washington Avenue. “Weeds had grown up to like eight feet tall,
and there were car parts and garbage all over,” Grant says. “And inside
the weeds was what looked like a crop circle. It was a heroin den—an
outdoor heroin den. The neighborhood was so dangerous that the seniors
couldn’t even walk to Walgreens without a security guard.”
Grant had a vision of
turning that lot into a park. And with the support of the board, the
lot owner, Grant’s wife, Lynn Springer, then-Bridgeport Mayor Bill Finch
and some Greenwich hedge funders, that’s exactly what he did. Family
ReEntry organized a crew of ex-cons who made the unlikely transformation
of heroin den into a lovely, lighted park. “It was the largest
privately owned, public-use park and garden in the state,” Grant says.
This proved to be a
kind of metaphor. If people can be seen as gardens in distress, then
Family ReEntry helps reclaim about 3,500 of them every year. Among other
achievements last year, about 90 percent of those in Family ReEntry’s
residential programs successfully transitioned back into their
communities, and about 93 percent of those in mentoring programs
enlisted in high school equivalency programs. Family ReEntry is also the
state’s largest provider of domestic abuse services.
In 2016 Grant was
named Family ReEntry’s executive director—as far as he knows, the first
person in the U.S. formerly incarcerated for a white-collar crime to
head a major criminal justice nonprofit. He had his work cut out for
him. That July, Connecticut’s fiscal trouble forced the Department of
Corrections to end all nonresidential behavioral health programs for
returning inmates, including $2 million in Family ReEntry programs. The
state had worked hard to reduce its prison population from 20,000 to
14,000. But now, Grant says, “there are no longer mandated critical
support services to help ensure that these individuals won’t be forced
to go back to the very behavior that landed them in prison in the first
place.” Grant says Family ReEntry is on the rebound, but he hopes that
private fundraising in affluent communities can further offset the loss.
familyreentry.org
PROGRESSIVE PRISON MINISTRIES/INNOCENT SPOUSE & CHILDREN PROJECT
In 2012 Grant and his
wife, Lynn, founded Progressive Prison Ministries and Innocent Spouse
& Children Project. The former helps those accused or convicted of
white-collar (and other nonviolent) crimes navigate incarceration
issues—from going in to coming out. The latter helps their families
cope. Often wives and children are left destitute when the breadwinner
goes to prison and his assets are frozen or seized. And there’s no
natural sympathy for them, Grant says. “Even some of the churches turn
their backs on you.”
The ministries help
guide families to available financial resources—such as help with
heating bills and groceries—or just comfort them when they cry. For the
imprisoned, Grant organizes video conferences offering advice from those
who have been there; he also helps the men (they are almost always men)
forge new career paths. For example, he helped one hedge funder go back
to school to become a drug counselor. The ministries continue to
thrive. prisonist.org.
Jeff Grant is a leader, expert and speaker in (1) criminal
justice/prisoner reentry, (2) recovery from opioid and substance abuse,
(3) leading a successful life with bipolar disorder/other mental
illnesses, and (4) spirituality/interfaith religion. After addiction to
prescription opioids and serving almost 14 months in a Federal prison
for a white-collar crime he committed when he was a lawyer, Jeff started
his own reentry – earning a Master of Divinity from Union Theological
Seminary in New York City. As the Executive Director of Family ReEntry,
a criminal justice organization with offices and programs in eight
Connecticut cities, he is the first person in the United States
incarcerated for a white-collar crime to be appointed CEO of a major
criminal justice nonprofit. He is also the Co-Founder of Progressive Prison Ministries
– the first ministry in the country created to provide confidential
support and counseling to individuals, families and organizations with
white-collar and other nonviolent incarceration issues. Jeff can be
reached at (203) 405-6249, jgrant@prisonist.org, prisonist.org.
