Q: So, Greg, it has been 8 years since the Justice Department embarrassed themselves in your case. And yet, you were embarrassed as well. How do you feel about the whole situation?
A: People ask me if I am angry and to a certain extent, I was. But then, and even now, I was more stupefied than angry that these so-called professionals in the FBI and DOJ would go to a grand jury without doing any case research in the prior 24 months. That still blows me away.
They could have called our clients about our platform being world-class. They could have called HSBC to find out they paid us $5.7MM in December 2012. They could have called us or the lenders to find out they had been paid back. But they did not.
But it gets worse—At a court hearing following my arrest, the Assistant US Attorney (AUSA) who brought the case, told the court that “the only reason I paid people off was because the SEC was after me”. It was a ludicrous comment. At the time I was arrested, she thought there was no software, HSBC did not happen, and she did not know we paid investors down. She learned quickly of her incompetence. And then in court, to cover up her lack of understanding about HER case, she is suddenly telling the judge why I paid people off—pressure from the SEC. Crazy.
First, I repaid investors because that is what our capital structure required. I invested $5MM over seven years and never paid myself a salary, dividends, principal, interest, expenses of any kind. But the AUSA had no idea we repaid investors until we told them and showed them after the arrest. They had no idea. The SEC played no role in our repayment.
As an aside, the SEC has its own administrative civil court system where they hire and pay for their own judges, generally retired lawyers with expertise in Securities law. To demonstrate, a few years ago they fined Elon Musk $25MM for sending a tweet saying he would take Tesla private and had the financing lined up. It was a lie. Pay on your way out. Kim Kardashian was recently fined $1.3MM for a tweet about a cryptocurrency company that paid her $250K for the mention. She paid for her lack of knowledge in giving investment advice.
To the contrary, I was fined zero, a rare outcome when dealing with the SEC. They saw the injustice and the fact that the SEC staff had no idea about my case too and did no research. In their preliminary presentation to THEIR judge, they said my company “purportedly” made software. The judge wondered why they did not research Navagate and discover that it had world class software and clients. “Purportedly” sounds guilty. His comment was “Do your research and tell the truth.”

Q: You mentioned previously that the Assistant US Attorney/ Prosecutor make other strange and uninformed comments?
A: Yes, She also said at the Federal Court hearing that she did not know whether our software could be upgraded. Again, ludicrous and laughable.
First, at the time of my arrest, the DOJ had no idea I HAD SOFTWARE, let alone that it was world class.
Second, our “n tiered architecture” meant it was easily upgraded and had been upgraded 13 times in its 8 year history. But they never asked.
Third, do you think HSBC or New York Life or Mutual of Omaha would roll our platform out to 45,000 people collectively and pay us millions of dollars IF IT COULD NOT BE UPGRADED.
It was just an example of the DOJ misleading the court with a rudimentary distraction —FUD—Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Malicious and Unethical. Make a damaging comment in court to try to fool the judge.
What also becomes very clear is that the FBI, DOJ and even my defense team know virtually nothing about business and finance. And clearly the DOJ did not even try to learn. Mostly, they were covering up for their lack of research and preparation with lies or FUD.

Q: What did your legal team think?
A: They were former prosecutors, like most white-collar defense lawyers. They thought I should have received probation but that the judge was protecting the AUSA from the embarrassment of bringing an unresearched case. Again, the DOJ was blinded by the fact that I taught at Columbia Business School for 16 years while being a CEO for 12 companies. The DOJ is a jobs program that specializes in publicity. “Columbia Professor Charged” was too good a line to be lost by justice and research.

Q: What did you learn from all this?
A: First, I learned who my friends are and who my friends were not. Fortunately, my friends were there to support me. And when I described what I am describing here, my friends were as stupefied as I was.
Second, I reflected and decided that this did not define me. I made mistakes, and I moved on. Yet my abilities, hard work and intelligence have served me well. They will continue to allow me to build value in other situations.
Third, I saw the criminal justice system with all it structural faults and the human errors that make it an embarrassment to the US. Greed, ambition, corners cut, sloppiness, pettiness, and vindictiveness.

Q: Can you describe camp?
A: There are five levels of incarceration in the Federal System—Camp, Low, Medium, Penitentiary, and Super Max, with obvious increases in security and lower levels of freedom. The Camp level is really a joke. It was like summer camp cabins–dorms with no locks. I had 24 hours a day to read, sleep, workout, eat, “send and receive” emails, watch TV. I did not have to do laundry, prepare food, clean up or pay for anything. We had large screen TV’s, ping pong, bocce, a running track, gorgeous soccer fields, lighted first-class basketball and beach volleyball courts. And there were competitive leagues where the champions got bags of chips and candy instead of trophies. My teams won a few championships. Quality of play was high as only 40 out of 700 residents joined the leagues. There was a regular group of a dozen or so of us who would have a “non-cocktail hour” playing bocce after dinner.
I chose Pensacola as my spot. Half of the residents went off in buses to the Naval Air Station or the Air Force Base to do various work assignments during the day. Free labor for the government. While at the Naval Base, the campers would go grab their hidden cell phones and spend a good part of the day connecting with friends in the free world. Again, a joke.
I chose to stay in an uncrowded camp and spent most of my time in the gym or library. I read over 130 books in my one year stay – Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Pride and Prejudice, White Noise, Crossing to Safety, Angle of Repose, Long Walk to Freedom, The Pickwick Papers, Bleak House, Team of Rivals, John Adams, Hamilton, biographies of Jefferson, Washington, Teddy Roosevelt and 100 more.
People could walk out the front gate (but they would track you down). There was one fight in my time there, a quick, non-serious fight but each of the participants were rewarded with an extended stay at a “Low”. That was a strong incentive to not fight. I never felt in danger. There was one escape—a Colombian drug dealer who had ten years to go and found his way to his friends in a boat nearby.

Q: But what was it really like?
A: I mentioned to a few friends that there was ten times more laughter than they imagined. That surprised them. There were a lot of bright, engaging, entertaining people there, and they were allowed to roam the campus freely and have lively conversations in the dorms, dining hall and recreation center. Everybody made a lot of friends, and they are friends for life. A Band of (lightly) Incarcerated Brothers.

Q: You sound innocent, but you plead guilty eventually. Why?
A: This is something lawyers know and those caught in the justice snare learn quickly. The system DOES NOT want you going to trial. It is expensive for defendants—hundreds of thousands of dollars to multimillions of dollars. The government needs 12 guilty votes from the jury and the defendants need 12 not guilty votes to be innocent. Anything else is a mistrial and the government must then decide whether to bring a second trial, which they usually do not pursue. Given my story, my lawyers told me I would “win” 9-3 or 10-2. But since I admitted to signing a false form, the judge could have taken a 9-3 mistrial and then nullified it and moved ahead to sentence me for the false form admission—or not.
And, by the way, 98.5% of people plead out. Cost and potential nullification are factors, but mostly there is a huge sentencing penalty if you go to trial and lose. People who were “promised” a lighter sentence go to court and find that in a guilty jury outcome, that potential plead out sentenced is now tripled. Ouch.
I did not want to spend 4 years at a camp after spending an extra $300,000 and taking another year treading water in pre-trial. I wanted to move on quickly, serve my year, avoid the risk of a longer sentence, read my books, get on with life.
One last comment. The judge is a former prosecutor. Your lawyer is likely a former prosecutor and the prosecutor is a current prosecutor. Defense attorneys really do not want to shake things up. They get along to get along. And the judge knows the actual prosecutor goes back to the office after sentencing with a win or a loss. Mine did not get the career win she was hoping for but every lawyer who knows my case thought I should have gotten probation. That outcome would have embarrassed the prosecutor. Oh well.

Q: Can you make some brief comments about the whole criminal justice system?
A: The second COVID hit the prison world, virtually everyone at the camp was sent home for home confinement. They could be with their families, babysit, work from home, etc. This is a strong indicator that the camp level is unnecessary.
The USA has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners—and to what purpose. We are over prosecuting and over incarcerating. Marriages break up, kids are thrust into poverty, mothers work and kids are left alone. Incarceration destroys people and families. Scandinavia has a system that returns people to society so they can be productive members of society. The standard they use is “would you want these released prisoners to be your neighbor?” That requires counseling and job training and that begins on Day One of incarceration in a Nordic country. The US system destroys people—no job training at any level. Teaching the incarcerated carpentry, HVAC, plumbing etc. could reduce recidivism and allow people to recover, but that is NOT what our system does.
It IS a jobs program, but not for the incarcerated—for police, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, clerks, marshals, corrections officers, for profit prisons, lobbyists, Bureau of Prisons administrators, probation officers, halfway house operators. Trip a small wire and you are back in. The players benefit. It is a grotesque, inhuman system.

Q: Any final comments?
A: Yes, I mentioned the 130 books of history and literary fiction that I read in my camp months. In addition to a long list of books I wanted to read, I carved out a group of writers and books that could aid in self-reflection. Some were second passes of titles I read long ago, but as you would expect, the writers’ thoughts can strike you differently later in life. Siddhartha, The Razor’s Edge, Essays of Montaigne, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, Walden, Dylan, Victor Frankl, Martin Luther King Jr., Andre Gide, among others. I read four from the long list the late Vietnamese Buddhist priest, Thich Nhat Hanh left behind—his books on Mindfulness, Anger, Love, and Happiness. This was the only positive part of the justice system’s injustice. I had time to focus.
One of my second passes was Wallace Stegner’s classic fictionalized memoir, “Crossing to Safety”. One essayist called it “a meditation on the idealism and spirit of youth, when the world is full of promise, and on the blows and compromises life inevitably inflicts”. Yes, like he said.

Q: What are you up to these days?
A: I am currently consulting for four companies on various projects, two of the assignments from principals of companies I led years ago. I have a draft screenplay that covers many of my experiences over the past ten years. The working title is “It’s Not About Me”. And in closing, I will quote from Bob Dylan’s classic My Back Pages, “I was so much older then. I ‘m younger than that now.”