A Social Climber’s Guide to Her Majesty’s Prisons

I WAS sitting with a couple of swells in one of those London clubs that are full during working hours but empty when the few toilers who are members leave their offices, when the news of Michael Milken’s conviction came over the Telex wire. (The Turf Club adamantly refuses to purchase a fax machine, and only acquired a Telex during the extravagant Eighties.) I must admit that even in the state gentlemen of leisure usually are in at that postprandial hour, we were stunned. “Ten years is a hell of a time to spend indoors for being three steps ahead of everybody else,” was the way one of my companions put it.

“Ah, but he’s bound togotoa country club,” said James Spencer Churchill, Marquis of Blandford and son of the Duke of Marlborough, “unlike us poor dopes.” He looked at me and smiled knowingly, and I smiled back. Fraud, you see, means an open prison in England, and both Jamie and I had done time for drugs, which means hard time in that uptight little island. (What happened was that about six years ago I was dumb enough to go through customs at Heathrow Airport with a few grams of happy dust on my person. When an eagle-eyed officer spotted an envelope about to fall out of my rear trouser pocket and warned me about it, I made an even dumber move. “If only you knew what is in it,” I joked, a Taki remark that landed me in the slammer for the next four months.)

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I WAS sitting with a couple of swells in one of those London clubs that are full during working hours but empty when the few toilers who are members leave their offices, when the news of Michael Milken’s conviction came over the Telex wire. (The Turf Club adamantly refuses to purchase a fax machine, and only acquired a Telex during the extravagant Eighties.) I must admit that even in the state gentlemen of leisure usually are in at that postprandial hour, we were stunned. “Ten years is a hell of a time to spend indoors for being three steps ahead of everybody else,” was the way one of my companions put it.

“Ah, but he’s bound togotoa country club,” said James Spencer Churchill, Marquis of Blandford and son of the Duke of Marlborough, “unlike us poor dopes.” He looked at me and smiled knowingly, and I smiled back. Fraud, you see, means an open prison in England, and both Jamie and I had done time for drugs, which means hard time in that uptight little island. (What happened was that about six years ago I was dumb enough to go through customs at Heathrow Airport with a few grams of happy dust on my person. When an eagle-eyed officer spotted an envelope about to fall out of my rear trouser pocket and warned me about it, I made an even dumber move. “If only you knew what is in it,” I joked, a Taki remark that landed me in the slammer for the next four months.)