'Bunch of fat guys sitting around'

CLUB FED | Ex-cons' tips on doing time

When John B. Webster was convicted in 2001 for lying to the FBI, he lost his law license and his freedom -- but gained a new career.

Webster is part of a small, specialized industry that advises white-collar criminals heading to the pen.

Among his recent clients was a Minneapolis embezzler who was sentenced to a federal prison camp in Oxford, Wis., the same place former Gov. George Ryan is scheduled to report to today.

Ryan, like most criminals, wanted to be incarcerated as close to his Kankakee home as possible, but Webster tries to get his clients to reconsider that wish.

"When's the last time you sat at a table and talked to your wife for six hours with no TV, no eating, no drinking?" Webster said.

Inmates bristle as family members ask "What's new?"

"The answer is always the same: Nothing's new," Webster said.

Webster, 48, who served 13 months for reporting a bogus death threat, has provided "incarceration assistance" to more than 40 people though his company, National Prison & Sentencing Consultants, based in Rhode Island.

Influenced by prison movies and TV shows, clients are usually worried about being raped -- a slim chance in minimum security facilities such as Oxford, he said.

"I tell them, 'If they ever made a movie about [low-security] camps, it would show a bunch of middle-age fat guys sitting around reading,'" Webster said.

Gerald Luongo, 69, author of Surviving Federal Prison Camp (Mallon Publishing), says minimum security prison is "not being home with mother, but it's not the end of the world, either." The former New Jersey mayor and state legislator wrote the guidebook after serving 11 months on a tax-related charge.

Holidays are tough, but the key is to keep busy, Luongo said. And don't complain, he advised, because "everybody in prison is 'innocent,' and no one wants to hear about it."

Webster tells clients to get a thorough checkup before reporting to prison to see if any time-bomb health problems are ready to explode.

"You do not want a medical emergency" in prison, Webster said. The approach in prison dentistry "is extraction," so dental work should be done ahead of time, too.

Malcolm Young, director of the John Howard Association, a prison watchdog group, says middle- and upper-class convicts have a higher fear level. For lower economic classes, there is less of a mystery about prison because they're more likely to know someone who has served time, he said.