Dan Kennedy (17:10)

That was Michael Von Allman. And we met Michael through a workshop we did with exonerated prisoners, prisoners at a conference that was put on by the Innocence Project. Here's Larry Rosen, the Moth's community program manager and also one of Michael's story instructors from the workshop, talking about the process of working with Michael.

Larry Rosen (17:30)

So we've been doing these workshops with exonerees at the Innocence network conference since 2012. So this was our fifth this year. Michael has come to every single one. He came to the first one in 2012. He worked with Terrence. Mickey was one of our instructors at that point. And Terrence told me that at that point, Michael really wanted to be there, but he was shy. And so he didn't share a story. Instead, he just shared his love of basketball, and he broke down the rivalry between the Wildcats and the Cardinals in great detail. And then he came next year, and he worked with our executive producer, Sarah Austin, Janess, and they became great buddies, and same thing. And he just began. There was a story that he wanted to tell. And then subsequently, he worked with a bunch of us, including Kate Tellers, Bonnie Levison, Dawn Fraser, just trying to get at what the story was. And so Bonnie worked with him in 2015, and she said he was getting so close, but she said what she most felt from him was that he wanted to get this story out, and he still wasn't completely focused on it. And so I got to work with him this year, and I'm taking him through all the basic prompting things that we do in any workshop, just basically giving him things to think about and I'm just starting to sort of encourage him toward a story. And he stops me and he says, I want to tell this story about Ted. I said, okay. And he told it, and it was beautiful. And so these guys all told their stories the next day at this luncheon for everybody. The conference was over 500 people, and Michael, after five years, stood up on that stage and shared this with 500 people who just went crazy. And the tears and the love in the room was just amazing.

Dan Kennedy (19:36)

Michael Von Allman was convicted in 1983 and sentenced to 35 years in prison. He served 11 years before he was paroled in 1994 and later contacted the Innocence Project for their assistance. In 2010, all charges were dropped and his name was cleared. From everyone here at the Moth, we'd like to thank Michael for sharing his story. Our next story is from Ted Conover, and Ted has told many stories for us over the years, almost all of which involve his work as an undercover journalist. He just wrote a new book called A Writer's Guide to Going Deep. And in celebration of that, here's a story he told live at a Moth mainstage here in New York way back in 2005. Here's Ted Conover.

Ted Conover (20:30)

Prisoners tell lies. Every corrections officer knows this. In fact, there's even a joke about it. How do you know when a prisoner is lying? When he opens his mouth. I spent almost a year working as a state corrections officer, or CO up at Sing Sing. I wasn't there for the same reason as my fellow officers who were there for a paycheck. I was there to learn about the life and be able to write a book about it. But the inmates didn't know that, and so they lied to me the same as anybody else. For most of my time, I worked in a place called B Block. It's a massive human warehouse with almost 600 men in it. One of those men was an artist, a Latino guy named sand, about 25 years old, slightly built. He had a giant set of felt tip markers. And for a price of four packs of cigarettes, another inmate could pay him to do a customized greeting card for any occasion. Easter, Mom, I miss you. Whatever. But it would say the name of mom, and it would have anything else personal you wanted in it. These works of art. And they were. Took him two or three days to complete. And I'd watch him admiringly. And he was a friendly guy. And I got talking to him, and one day I said, sonny, what are you doing in here? I had him pegged for some drug offense. You know, some massive sentence for a relatively small crime. And he made a gun out of his hand and he said, murder, murder, co, triple life. And I thought, whoa, you murder? And about a month later, the department put an inmate lookup page on their website so you could enter a person's name and it helps if you have their number, too, which I did. And when I did that for Sonny, it came back larceny. So Sonny was a burglar or a thief. He wasn't a murderer, but he was in a place where you want everybody to think you're as tough and as you could possibly be. And being a murderer is a good thing in Sing Sing. And I understood why Sonny had told me that I had another inmate on the other side of that floor who was one of the very few white guys on the floor. There were 112 inmates I supervised. Four of them were white. He was one. He was a middle aged guy, glasses, not much hair left, and constantly afraid of the other prisoners. You could just see him. He was always looking over his shoulder. He was afraid. And maybe that's one reason he was friendly to me and I liked him. Okay. And one day I said, hey, Van Ness, so what brings you here anyway? And he looked sort of ashamed. He said, attempted murder. Co attempted murder. I tried to kill my business partner. I said, oh, I'm sorry to hear that. And I went home right away, and I looked up Van Ness and he was in for second degree sodomy, which means sexual intercourse with somebody under 13 years of age. And you can see why somebody like that would be afraid in prison. And you can see why somebody like that would tell a lie. The most common lie, I suppose, was the one you hear almost every day, which is just, I didn't do it, CEO. That's not me. I'm doing somebody else's time. This is a bum rap. I was framed. You hear this every single day. And at first I was kind of interested, and I thought, wow, a travesty has occurred, and I'd want to know more, but it doesn't take long. And you just filter that out. You just add it to the rest of the noise you deal with every day. And officers have a way, have a response. They don't say this to the inmates. You don't want to stir things up. But the response we tell each other is, yeah, well, okay, he didn't do that. But, you know, he did something else. And it's cynical, but, you know, most crimes go unsolved. And when a person is sent to Sing Sing. When they are convicted of a crime, almost always it's. It's been more than one crime that got them there. So it may be the officers are right, though, that that idea always bothered me. There was one inmate I talked to, even though I didn't like him. His name was Warith Al Habib. He was an older man. I'd say late 50s, tall, handsome, wore a kufi and other Muslim garb. And he loved to yell at the cos. He loved to get a good rant going. And mine came one day when I asked him for his ID card. He had no reason to dislike me, but Bing. ID card? You mean transit pass, don't you? Co? You mean transit pass? Because this is South Africa. This is the apartheid system here. This is the white man oppressing the black man. This is a bantustan. You heard co. You know what that word means? I bet you you don't, do you? Bantustan, co. Look it up. And that's an unpleasant thing to hear. But I was interested because the only other Explanation was the CO's explanation of why there was this terrible, terrible racial imbalance in prison. And the CO's explanation doesn't even bear repeating. So I was interested in what Habib had to say. The problem is, I couldn't tell him so, because any CO who admits to accepting an idea like that, that the system might be a little rigged, loses all credibility, not only among COs, but among the prisoners. They don't want to hear that from you. You are there to stand up for the law and stand up for the system. So I didn't say that to Habib, but I did ask him other things. He got so much respect from all these prisoners. And I learned one reason is he'd been in so long, he had a bad limp. He had a limp because he had a bullet in his butt against his hip. He had the bullet there, according to him, because the state wouldn't pay to take it out. The bullet had come from a state trooper during the ATTICA Uprising in 1974, I think, and Habib was respected for that. If he wanted a shower, and it wasn't his day for a shower, the younger guys would say, hey, con over. Give my shower to Habib. Habib can have my shower. And I'd say, okay. And one day I said to Habib, habib, what are you here for? He said, oh, man, I'm locked up. I'm locked up for rape, man. I said, what? And I thought, first of all, I thought he was telling me the truth. But I couldn't understand all the respect he was getting if that was his crime, because that's only slightly higher on the scale than Van Ness crime. So I was intrigued by Habib. I was worried about him, but I was intrigued. I thought he had a lot to tell. And he left Sing Sing before I did. His arthritis got so bad he couldn't climb the steps. There's a lot of steps there. So he got sent to the geriatric unit of another prison. Yes, there are many geriatric units for prisoners these days. And when I quit a few months later, I thought, you know, of all the people, all the interesting people I met in prison, who I wrote to, Habibs at the top of my list. So I went back to that inmate lookup page. Habib is now at Greenhaven Correctional Facility. I wrote him a letter, he wrote me back. And two weeks later, I'm sitting in the visit room of Greenhaven. He's the only inmate I ever went to visit. And he is so happy I'm there because I'm the first person who's visited him in more than five years. And I was happy, too. I was happy because I thought for once we're. One of the walls is down. I'm not wearing a uniform. He knows I'm interested in him as a person. He's going to be candid with me. And the first thing I wanted to know was about this rape thing. And it's the same rap I heard time after time at Sing Sing. I didn't do it, Conover. I was a setup. I was, you know, I'd been let out, I'd been paroled. I'd been free like two months. And they're looking for a con. They're looking for a con to lay this crime on. And, man, I was in my late 50s when I got charged with that. I didn't do it. I got a good lawyer, though, Conover, I got a good lawyer. She's been trying to get me out for years. She's going to get me out. I think it's going to happen real soon. I said, okay, Habib, you got a good lawyer. I'm glad for that. Tell me what else. Tell me what else you went to prison for. And he had a long story. It started early on. He ran numbers in Newark. He was called Newark Red. He told me he became a gangster. I was a stick up man, Conover. And his second, his second bid, his second prison term was for robbery and assault. And then he went in once for extortion he converted to Islam during his third term. He said, it wasn't till then I came down off my high horse, Conover. I learned, you know, I learned there's more important things in the world than me. And Islam had been good for him. You could see it had filled his life with purpose and discipline and. And I liked hearing about all that. And he was glad to tell. And he was glad I was there, too, because of all the vending machines around us. And in prison, you get kind of tired of the food and then the vending machines. There's pies and sandwiches, and I bought a lot of those for us. And we spent a pleasant afternoon that way. I couldn't figure out how to work Habib into my book. He was such an interesting guy, but, you know, I didn't think he was telling me the whole story. And I went on writing. I stopped thinking about him until about four months later. It was a hot night in August. I was lying on my bed, almost midnight. I was falling asleep. I had New York 1 news on, and the announcer said something about another inmate exonerated on DNA evidence. Barry Scheck today got another inmate free on the basis of DNA evidence. And I sat up and I looked, and damn if it wasn't Habib coming out of Greenhaven Prison with his lawyer, Ms. Peel, and Barry Scheck. And I said, oh, my God. And I woke up my wife, and I said, margo, you're not going to believe this, but this is the guy. This is the guy who said he was innocent. And. And he was innocent. And it shook me up. I'm still shook up. And I couldn't sleep well that night. First thing next morning, I called a guy I'd worked with who's now an NYPD officer, and I said, alcantara, you remember that guy Habib used to yell at us? He said, oh, yeah, I remember. I said, you remember? He said he was innocent. And he said, well, I suppose everybody said that. And I said, he was innocent. I just saw him on tv. Barry Sheck got him off, and he said, huh, that's interesting, Conover. But, you know, if he didn't do that crime, I bet he did something else. And I thought, oh, man. And the problem. The problem that stuck with me was both that in this occasion, maybe he did do something else, but he was doing time that wasn't his to do. He did six years. He did six years that were not his crime. The second thing that got me was I was part of his punishment. I was the guy who locked him in every day. And that bothered me. I moved to New York about 15 years ago from Colorado, and I thought, you know, to make it in a city like this, you're going to have to be a little more tough. You're going to have to be a little more suspicious. You have to watch out for yourself. You're going to have to question what people people say, be a little less trusting, don't take things at face value and especially well. Habib taught me this lesson, especially in a place like prison, you had to be skeptical because you hear untruths all day long. But the lesson Habib taught me was this, that if you don't question that reflex, if you don't imagine now and then there's cotton in your ears and stop to listen to somebody who is not listened to, you might just lose your ability to hear the truth when it comes at you. So thanks. Thank you very much.

Dan Kennedy (33:11)

Ted Conover is a journalist and professor at nyu and his journeys have seen him as a train hopper, a border crosser and meat inspector. His new book, A Writer's Guide to Going Deep is out now. That's all for this week. Thanks to all of you for listening. And from all of us here at the Moth in New York, we hope you have a story worthy week.

Rosetta Stone Advertiser (33:36)

Dan Kennedy is the author of the books Loser Goes First, Rock on An American Spirit. He's also a regular host and performer.

Dan Kennedy (33:44)

With the Moth Podcast, production by Timothy Lou Lee. Moth events are recorded by Argo Studios in New York City, supervised by Paul Rue West. The Moth podcast is presented by prx, the Public Radio Exchange, helping make public radio more public@prx.org.