Getting Trashed
Anti-CCA activist Alex Friedmann goes Dumpster-diving to soil Gus Puryear
by Caleb Hannan
No man should look this relaxed in a courtroom. No man who's been here before—and had a decade of his life determined by a judge—should be this composed. But Alex Friedmann rocks on his heels, hands in pockets, looking like a man without a care.
Two broad-shouldered suits enter, a woman between them. The men nod, while the woman shoots Friedmann a frightened look. She has a right to be scared.
He has something that she wants back: A bag of trash. Something she once thought of as nothing is now in dispute within this Davidson County courtroom.
One of the suits gets up to make an opening statement. He wants the bag of trash to be returned. He's calling his client a victim, claiming she's collateral damage due to her association with one man.
"Your honor," he says, "the common thread in this whole thing seems to be our landlord."
No one's disputing that.
Today's scene is about more than the contents of one Hefty bag. It's just the latest twist in a saga that began earlier this year, a passion play involving a grand American tradition, in which one determined man makes life miserable for a wealthier enemy.
In this casting, Friedmann plays the role of instigator. His target: Gus Puryear IV, the top lawyer for the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), and George W. Bush's pick for federal judge in Nashville.
The backstory begins in 1987. That's when self-described "dumb as rocks kid" Friedmann found himself sticking up a Nashville coin dealer. A gun was pulled. Shots were fired. When the dust cleared, he was facing a 20-year sentence for armed robbery and attempted murder. He spent much of his time in a CCA-owned prison in Clifton. There Friedmann gave an interview to a national magazine that led to an unfavorable article on the company. Friedmann subsequently sued CCA twice, claiming the company retaliated for his words, and won a small judgment in one case.
Once a free man, Friedmann turned his antipathy for privately run prisons into a career. While researching a story for monthly newsletter Prison Legal News, where he serves as associate editor, Puryear arrived on his radar.
The lawyer is well-connected among Tennessee's Republican elite. Bush nominated him for a judicial post last year. Friedmann wasn't about to allow his former captor clear sailing through the Senate confirmation process.
So began his scorched-earth campaign. Friedmann drilled Puryear on his paucity of courtroom experience (just two cases tried as lead counsel) and conflicts of interest (serving as a judge in the same zip code as his former employer's corporate HQ).
Then came revelations of Puryear's membership in the infamously antiquated Belle Meade Country Club, where those of darker pigmentation aren't especially welcome. That was followed by an accusation from a CCA whistleblower, who claimed that Puryear tried to cover up data on prison riots, rapes and murders to protect the company from bad publicity.
Bruised and battered, Puryear's confirmation stalled. So one Saturday last month, Friedmann went looking for the knockout punch.
Puryear owned a Nashville building occupied by a clinic. Friedmann hoped the clinic's work was controversial (read: abortion).
But when he arrived, he discovered instead the Middle Tennessee Treatment Center (MTTC), a methadone clinic. It was closed. As he walked back to his car, he noticed a stack of papers lying face-up in the Dumpster. It proved to be a mother lode of MTTC patient documents that included names, addresses and Social Security numbers.
By law, MTTC is required to destroy such records with industrial strength shredders. For people looking to wean themselves of powerful opiates, privacy is of the utmost concern. But here they were, awaiting scavengers.
With a trunk full of trash, Friedmann tried to trigger an investigation. He contacted state and federal authorities and provided The Tennessean with copies of the discarded records. He also conducted a background search on MTTC, revealing that the head of the clinic was at one time put on probation by the state medical board for overprescribing. But at no point did he think about returning the papers.
"I've been an advocate for 10 years," says Friedmann. "I know that the quickest way to right a wrong is to make it public, not allow the people who screwed up to deal with it themselves."
What followed was a fairly predictable round of ass-covering. MTTC slapped Friedmann with a temporary restraining order. Personal info for dozens of its patients was now in the public. Clinic officials could envision mounds of litigation accumulating at their door.
Meanwhile, Friedmann says that the state refused to return his calls. All he wanted was to hand over the bag of trash. All they wanted to do was pass him on to their PR department.
After admitting that the case was "highly unusual," Judge Carol McCoy ordered the trash handed over to the state. What comes next is unknown. Both they and MTTC will conduct their own investigations (and refuse to comment).
Outside the courtroom, Friedmann's eyes have already returned to his ultimate crusade. The garbage case did nothing to stain Puryear. And though the man who nominated him will unceremoniously retreat to Texas come January, Puryear's allies in D.C. will remain.
"I don't care about methadone clinics," says Friedmann. "The only reason this came up is because this is part of the larger campaign against Gus Puryear."
Friedmann stands up to go. And with that, the campaign continues.
Comments (13)
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Whether or not Friedman intended to expose the incompentence of this clinic, he has done a great public service. Patient records are and should be sacrosanct. Clinical records should be kept permanently. Even billing records are protected by regulations governing retention and disposal. This clinic's patient confidentiality protections are nonexistent and they should not be allowed to continue to operate.
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Interesting in this story that Alex admits that he was the one looking through the dumpster at the Puryear property, but in the Tennessean story.... "Friedmann said the records were taken from the Dumpster on June 28 but wouldn't say who brought them to him." http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080709/NEWS07/807090397 Was he misleading the Tennessean or is he misleading the Scene?
Regarding the statements in the Tennessean and Scene articles as to how the documents were obtained, there's no contradiction. He didn't tell the Tennessean, so the reporter assumed it was from someone else, while he did tell the Scene after he admitted in court that he obtained the records himself. Sometimes reporters don't report things as they are, but only how they think they are.
The important contradiction (other than the blatant "I ain't saying who gave me the documents" one that is being wrongfully dismissed as poor reporting) is that the former inmate portrays himself in the newspaper as an advocate championing privacy, but the cover gets blown off of that by the present article. He's diving through the dumpster to find something, anything, to smear his enemy. He doesn't care about privacy one bit, he just wants dirt. In fact, does anybody find it ironic that this guy is digging through a dumpster to find dirt on somebody and then turning around and championing privacy rights after he finds some documents? Here's the part that should bug everyone---the newspaper goes ahead and prints the info privacy angle of the story lauding the former inmate as an advocate. Worse, at the end of the story the reporter mentions that the former inmate's enemy is part owner of the building. Wow. What's that got to do with anything? It is pretty obvious that the reporter had to know what the former inmate was really doing--unless he was actually looking for a stray puppy or something and just happened to run across the documents. If the newspaper is as objective and forthright as it keeps claiming to be, it either should have rejected the privacy angle of the story outright because that wasn't the former inmate's true agenda OR the paper should have fully vetted the "Puryear owns the building" angle in the article and talked about the actual agenda at work. My reading of the article the day it came out left me thinking, 'what does the building owner have to do with this story?' Indeed, it appears the paper is out to get Mr. Puryear and his employer as much as the former inmate is. The conclusion of the paper's article is akin to saying, for example, "a woman was found dead in the lavatory of a Delta flight this morning on final approach to Atlanta's airport. Embattled judicial nominee Gus Puryear owns 20 shares of stock in Delta by the way." I have no idea if he really owns stock in Delta, but it is just as objective and relevant to the actual story as what was presented in the original dumpster diving story. The fact that the former inmate tells one story to one publication but then shifts the story a while later to another publication calls to mind a former southern governor's quote about needing "a better class of inmate." In this case, the former inmate was allowed to masquerade as a consumer advocate when all he was really doing was dumpster diving because he had his feelings hurt when he was incarcerated. The paper either saw that coming from a mile away or is hideously misguided. The real villain in this case appears to be the newspaper. However, I find it pretty sad that nobody has stood up (until now I guess) and said what I hope others are thinking: If I was Gus Puryear, I would be really, really, really alarmed that a person convicted of a gun crime was so desperate as to go digging through dumpsters in an effort to discredit him. Oh, and then for good measure, he tells 2 wildly different stories about his trashy adventure. That's a little random. If he's willing to do that, what else is he doing that hasn't come to light? Look, I get that this guy doesn't like CCA. He's not alone in that category. However, it's getting a little scary that he's going to such lengths to smear somebody given his background. The fact that the papers give him a platform to do it flies in the face of the hollow claims of objectivity.
Ummm ... because I read both articles, and know one of the reporters, perhaps? That's the problem -- people read more into something than is there. Looks like Dawg has a big chip on his shoulder, too. Is Dawg actually Puryear? Might be!
Robert (Alex): which reporter do(es) you(Alex) know? And how did that reporter come to tell you (Alex) what you (Alex) told the other reporter? And how did that reporter find out what Alex (you) told the other reporter? Because you (Alex) told him (her) during an interview, perhaps? Either (1) you are tight enough with the Tennessean reporter that she discussed Alex with you or (2) you are Alex or (3) you know Alex and you are relying on Alex's entirely implausible explanation. And as for Harry's comments: it is ludicrous that an article in Nashville's ONLY DAILY PAPER implied a link between a landlord and an alleged recordkeeping violation by a tenant in the landlord's building! Pointing that out does not prove that Harry has a chip on his shoulder. He's just calling the Tennessean to account.
Sorry, it's not my job to answer your questions. You're guessing blinding in the dark and I set you right according to what I know. How I know it is my business, not yours -- and you'd just deny it (as you have) anyway. Even after my comment, you're still guessing blinding 'cause you simply don't know; you're just making assumptions based on ... well, I'm not sure since you haven't told anyone what YOUR source of knowledge is, assuming it exists. So Dawg isn't Puryear but Robert is Alex? Go back and read both articles again. BTW, I 100% agree w/ you and Dawg that the Tennessean article had no valid business mentioning Puryear at all. No argument there. It was completely unrelated to the story -- but remember, reporters write what they write (and yes, I know one of the reporters personally). Sometimes, often even, they don't get it right. That doesn't mean some armchair observer like you gets it right, either. Peace.
Ok--I guess you aren't Alex. Your second paragraph is too fair to Puryear to be written by Alex.
Thanx. And no problem. I don't take one side or another, really -- I just know that what gets reported as "news" depends on who's reporting it and their take on it. Most news stories are "mostly" right but not completely accurate, since the only people who really know what's going on are not the reporters writing the story. That goes for the Tennessean, Scene, and probably every other media source.
Puryear's nomination may be effectively trashed, so one can speak one's mind now without fear of being a reflexive Pro-Puryear dogmatist. We can take it as a given that whether the allegations against the clinic are true or not, they have nothing whatsoever to do with Puryear. I think that is the acid test of universal rationality here. Who passes and who fails? And why didn't Matt Pulle write this article? ;) Friedmann has performed his very own reductio ad absurdum here, by casting Puryear in some sort of active custodial role as landlord of the clinic. It neatly typifies his methodology with the Richardson case, among others. Every fight, flight and fart in a CCA prison was, after all, Puryear's fault and/or direct responsibility. If Friedmann did indeed find these papers in a dumpster, then I suppose there is a measure of public benefit that can be salvaged from his bizarre actions. But given the lengths he would go trash Puryear and CCA, up to and including substantial cash incentives, I would not be surprised if it turns out that these documents were obtained illegally from an employee or patient at the clinic. To the undecided, I would advise patience.
CCA is fanatical about keeping its transgressions out of the public's and even contracting authorities eye. A perfect example is the lid on the story about the warden's long-time secretary in Wainwright Kentucky who brought a gun to work after many years in the job. She blew her brains out in the warden's office, despite supposed "security" that would keep a weapon outside the fences and razor wire. The corporation's failures to immediately report escapes is another persistent failing. So what they've done here is to try to blame the clinic's failure to protect patient privacy by bringing up Friedman's record, to which he freely admits. When Tom Jones, the whistleblower who exposed Puryear's role in cover-ups came out to TIME magazine, CCA trashed him also. Now this is clearly an invasion of privacy and I hope Mr. Jones sues the corporation. Alex was surely on a fishing expedition when he retrieved these illegally disposed of records. So what? If you came across a corpse in a public bathroom, should you simply relieve yourself and depart? If you watched a hit-and-run fatality, would you fail to take a visible plate number? Alex witnessed a crime, no matter what his motivation was for being there, but CCA, which appears to have posted here in an effort to discredit Friedman, want to divert attention from the real problem, which is Puryear's lack of professional ethics and possible criminal behavior.
