Tomorrow, Brent Delzer, 36, will begin what he hopes is only a four-and-a-half year odyssey at the very bottom. At 2:00 p.m., he’s scheduled to turn himself in to federal marshals in Madison, WI, to begin serving a federal prison sentence. Last month, he pleaded guilty to an indictment alleging he was part of a marijuana trafficking conspiracy that lasted from 2000 to Nov. 8, 2004, the day his best friend and supplier, Amos Mortier, went missing.
Mortier’s disappearance sparked a massive federal drug investigation reaching across five states and into Canada. According to federal court documents – including… Continue Reading Category Archives: Comp Time
Comp Time with Federal Inmate Brent Delzer
Tomorrow, Brent Delzer, 36, will begin what he hopes is only a four-and-a-half year odyssey at the very bottom. At 2:00 p.m., he’s scheduled to turn himself in to federal marshals in Madison, WI, to begin serving a federal prison sentence. Last month, he pleaded guilty to an indictment alleging he was part of a marijuana trafficking conspiracy that lasted from 2000 to Nov. 8, 2004, the day his best friend and supplier, Amos Mortier, went missing.
Mortier’s disappearance sparked a massive federal drug investigation reaching across five states and into Canada. According to federal court documents – including… Continue Reading Comp Time with Ahmed Etemish
Ahmed Etemish, 27, has witnessed and endured horrors few can fathom, even as the soft-spoken Iraqi describes them in candid, unequivocal detail. For him, the bloodletting – first under dictator Saddam Hussein and then the insurgency that took root after the fall of Baghdad in 2003 – was merely a thread in the fabric of Baghdad’s civic life.
As he puts it, “[Iraqis] are used to blood and war.”
In 1971, Saddam, who then headed Iraq’s network of secret police, imprisoned Ahmed’s mother and grandfather in Abu Ghraib prison on suspicion they were working with the Iranian and Israeli… Continue Reading Comp Time with Repo Man Ray Crocker
Nashville, TN – Ray Crocker is a voice of reason in the otherwise chaotic and largely unregulated repossession industry. The mafia failed in the 1950s to bring repos into their rackets, but Crocker has watched over the last 25 years as tow-truck companies and auto auctions have not only low-balled professional companies like Crocker’s, but have also caricaturized repo men as lawless renegades at the ready to strong-arm consumers. On the television show Operation Repo, situations based “on real life events” are re-enacted, depicting repo agents muscle-men wrestling property from owners using headlocks and mace.
Nonsense, says Crocker, 62,… Continue Reading Comp Time with Ret. Bank Robber Gerald Heckathorn
Arguably there are no greater heart-pounding conditions under which to travel than those that come with being a fugitive from justice. Just ask Gerald Heckathorn, who, in the early-1980s, went on an 18-month cross-country bank-robbing spree in his prized white Cadillac El Dorado. “I went everywhere, man” he recalls. “I was living large.”
That is, until the FBI zeroed in on him.
Gerald was an unlikely criminal. Born to bohemian parents in the San Francisco Bay area, he rebelled as a teenager by going to war in Vietnam. Less than three weeks after arriving in Saigon, a Viet Cong… Continue Reading Comp Time with Davin Jael
As a little girl, Davin Jael couldn’t wait to grow up so she could trade the tedium of rural Maine for the excitement and wonder of everywhere else. Not unhappy, but restless, Davin left home at 18, bouncing from town to town across America. She landed eventually in sunny California, until Mother Nature sent her packing. She’s been on the move ever since.
“I like everything to be temporary and fluid,” explains Davin, now 27. “That feeling like I wake up on a moving island rather than being stationary, I can’t see myself ever getting tired of it.”
Now,… Continue Reading 
Comp Time with Marcus the Karcus