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“What are you doing here?” was the question everyone asked me in prison – the guards, the inmates, the civilians. They didn't think I belonged behind the barbwire and couldn’t imagine me doing anything criminal… I just seemed so fundamentally out of place there...
In a way they were right: under our contemporary standards of morality, for most of my life I was viewed by all as an upstanding citizen. Yet, my imprisonment was well deserved: After devoting 25 years of my immigrant life to staying afloat as career Controller and CFO in the unforgiving environment of private entrepreneurship; channeling my various frustrations through this blog for as long as four years; and writing a CFO guide for Springer - I began stealing from my employer, embezzled millions, and got caught…
What happened? How could a fairly decent person with strong moral beliefs and exceptional work ethics get transformed into something that repeatedly committed one act of thievery after another? Disappointment and resentment overwhelmed all coping mechanisms and deteriorated into cunning deception. The depletion of personal means coincided with the overflow of the corporate profits... The distorted mind found the way...
My story is very particular and acutely personal, but in many ways it's also quite typical… Because this memoir was conceived out of my need to repent, I strived to be honest and as objectively revelatory as I could, unflinchingly analyzing the genesis of my moral degradation and its psychological underpinnings. The book also details the specifics of this white collar crime and reflects on the different stages of its aftermath, depicting my quest for some inner clarity under the most oppressive conditions, in the grittiest of places...
The result is part chronicle, part cautionary tale, part heartfelt confession, part inquisitive commentary... And I sincerely hope that the readers will find my conversational style compelling enough to forgive the verbosity...