My-America: A Memoir On Justice And Race In The U.S. Federal Legal System

My America:

A Memoir on Justice and Race

in the U.S. Federal Legal System

By

Alexander Otis Matthews

On August 27th, 2010 the author Alexander Otis Matthews was arrested by the FBI and charged with wire fraud in connection to a luxury home project that he had undertaken in an exclusive neighborhood of Fairfax, VA in the fall of 2007. Mr. Matthews was later convicted and sentenced to a term of 120 months in federal prison.

In this memoir, he narrates for the reader the full story of his journey, beginning with his personal and family history, through his academic and spiritual undertakings, and the inner-workings of his federal investigation and prosecution. He tells a story that reveals what few American citizens are aware of regarding the inner workings of the U.S. federal legal system and how many of our most basic assumptions about how our current system works, are inaccurate.

A trained clinical therapist, husband, and father of five, the author discusses his love for America and its people and for the system that so many of its citizens have fought for and continue to fight and die for every day around the world, yet most of those people unaware that many of the ideals they believe in and are willing to die for are not being extended to our own citizens. He doesn’t find the source of the problem in our laws, which he found to be spirited and awe-inspiring in their wisdom, especially the U.S. Constitution, but rather finds the problem in those tasked with applying the law to have grown corrupted over time by their own unchallenged power.

The founders of the American Republic knew the dangers inherent in unchecked power and designed a system of law to keep it in check, which we have slowly eroded in critical areas that are in desperate need of change and reform. The author seeks to make public his very personal ordeal so that others will learn, and to bring attention to the areas that need to be addressed. The author addresses his subject with a relaxed writing style, candor, and detail that makes this book entertaining and a must read for those interested in the inner workings of our nation’s federal legal system.

To Kawthar,

The Love of My Life…

My Sun Rises and Sets With You

To Alexander Matthews Sr. and Dr. Martina P. Matthews,

Who Gave Me Life And Taught Me To Love My Fellow Man

To Joseph Purnell Pinkney,

My Uncle, Intellectual Muse, Teacher, And Friend Who Stood By Me

Through All Seasons…

To Ezana, Segen, Sara, Jihane, and Yassine,

My Life Itself

THIS IS A TRUE STORY…ONLY SOME OF THE NAMES HAVE BEEN CHANGED FOR PRIVACY REASONS….

Copyright 2016 by American Investments Real Estate Corporation. All rights reserved.

Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by American Investments Real Estate Corporation

245 9th Street N.E., Washington, DC 20002

www.my-america.org

ISBN Number 978-0-692-82115-2 (e-book)

ISBN Number 978-1-520-32976-5 (paperback)

Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes; humility is the frank acceptance of all experiences; where there is sorrow there is holy ground…

Oscar Wilde

What is to give light must endure burning…

Victor Frankl

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference…

Robert Frost

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

FINAL CHAPTER

POST-SCRIPT

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

August 27th, 2010 was a typical fall morning in suburbia in my well-kept cul de sac. I live on a serene and tree lined neighborhood in Northern Virginia known as Tysons Corner, roughly 20 minutes outside our nation’s capital. At approximately 5:30 am that morning, my wife and I were awakened by a deafening series of knocks and booms on my front door, accompanied by the shouts and screams of 15 FBI agents commanding me to come out of my home. The knocks were unceasing and seemed to be growing louder as the obvious intent of such a raid at that time of the morning is to catch a person off guard and to disorient him or her with the noise and screaming. I went to the window of an adjoining bedroom and quickly took in the scene outside my home. My wife seemed momentarily to be on the verge of tears, and I instinctively and gruffly told her to pull herself together, and that this was no time to break down, we were going to deal with this, whatever it was. My next thought ran to my sleeping daughters, five and six years old, their safety, and my determination not to let them witness what was about to unfold.

The knocking and shouting seemed to get louder and more insistent, wreaking havoc on the suburban calm.

I told my wife to stay upstairs, and I descended the stairs to the front door.

I opened the front door to the menacing shouts and glares of the FBI agents, their loaded guns drawn squarely on my chest. I placed my hands in the air, and inquired as to what I was being arrested for. At that moment, I felt no fear, for such a moment is strangely somehow beyond fear, a time when you are put face to face with something that we dread all our lives and in which we know that our lives are likely to be irreparably altered. Somehow, I was very calm and determined, and the adrenaline had my mind crystal clear. One of the agents yelled the address of a home a partner of mine and I had purchased in 2007, a 25,000-square foot mansion in a private subdivision in Clifton, Virginia, for 4.5 million dollars. As my brain attempted to take in what the agent was saying, a retired neighbor of mine, a white gentleman in his mid-sixties, just happened to turn the corner onto my street while jogging. His eyes widened, his movements locked up, and he suddenly seemed on the verge of cardiac arrest, unable to process what he had come upon. My immediate neighbor, and Asian lady who had recently purchased the home closest to me, was also peering at me intently through her bedroom window, seemingly trying to also understand what I had done to warrant such early morning attention from the federal government.

One of the male FBI agents cautiously approached me, while the other agents maintained their stance. He patted my pockets, leg, shirt, and finally did a thorough pat down, including emptying my pockets. One of the female agents entered my home to speak to my wife, and I was told that I would have to submit to a DNA test, to which I replied that I would be happy to once we get to where I am being taken to. The agent countered that it would have to be done now, on the spot, whereupon she produced a DNA swab in my mouth. I calmly protested, but was told this is new FBI policy, and the agent then stuck a DNA swab in my mouth in a manner similar to how Saddam Hussein’s DNA was initially taken after his arrest by US forces. My two stunned neighbors watched all this happening, and suddenly my wife appeared at the door, shaken, but still composed.

For some reason, I smiled at her, and gave her a knowing wink, surprising both of us. She would vividly remember that smile and wink in the days, weeks, months, and years to come. We would need and draw upon such memories in the ordeal to come, which was only just beginning.

Somehow, in the midst of all the cacophony of booms, screams, and shouts, my two daughters had mercifully slept through it all, providing my heart at least that solace. Nonetheless, my life and my family’s lives were about to be forever altered, for I was under the throes of being prosecuted by the United States Government. As I was placed in an unmarked car, which drove off and made a U-turn at the end of the cul de sac, I never bothered to look at my home or even to look back. I needed to keep my eyes squarely on what lie before me.

CHAPTER TWO

I was born in the Columbia Hospital for Women in the Georgetown area of Washington, DC. I am the product of my dad, a southerner from Farmville, Virginia, and my mom, a native Washingtonian. My mom is one of nine children born to Elton and Beatrice Pinkney, my dad one of nine children born to his parents Otis Matthews and Cornelia Matthews. My dad was the first member of his family to attend college, boldly leaving the family farm to attend college at the University of Maryland, Eastern Shore. My mom graduated from the District of Columbia Teacher’s College before getting a master’s degree from Georgetown University and a PH. D from Ohio State University.

Both of my parents became teachers, and met while teaching at Evans Jr. High School in a rough neighborhood in Southeast Washington DC. My dad is a handsome, fair skinned black man with grey eyes and fine features, always driving a pick-up truck of some sorts, and not much into fashion or external extravagances. My mom is a brown skinned woman with dark brown eyes, very pretty, and always very stylish and fashionable as long as I can remember. My parents were opposites in many ways, maybe due to their backgrounds, but they fell deeply in love while teaching, married, and produced me, their only child. Their marriage would not last long despite the strong love they shared, and they divorced while I was still very young, jointly raising me in a very civil manner despite their differences. Neither of them ever put me between their issues, and I believe I ended up benefitting from growing up in two households, essentially two different worlds. My mom would never remarry, but my dad did twice, marrying his third wife, Peggy, after his second wife Alice succumbed to breast cancer. Though my dad remained in the Washington DC Metro area after divorcing my mom, he never had cut off ties to his family farm in Farmville Virginia, and would return most weekends and all summer to maintain the farm. How he was able to operate a farm all those years while still maintaining a job and family in Washington is something I never could fathom, but he did, and is a testament to his character and drive. It was also a great benefit to me because he never failed to take me along, wanting me to learn and experience the type of life most Americans don't have an opportunity to in later generations. I thus grew up very close to my dad, on a functioning farm, often just he and I and our hunting dogs for long stretches as a time. His mom still lived on the farm and his oldest sister, my Aunt Nellie, also lived on the farm on a section she and her husband had purchased many years ag from her parents. My Aunt Nellie was the town head nurse, and her husband Burnell owned and operated the local mom and pop grocery store on Main street. My father's other sister Dorothy lived in town with her husband John Baker, one of the first black dentists in Farmville. My dad's family was somewhat well to do by Farmville standards, hardworking and self-respecting people, very conservative, not known to suffer fools gladly.

Farmville is roughly 3.5 hours from Washington DC, and as a child I can't tell you the number of times I rode the highway back and forth with my dad to work on our farm. Located in Prince Edward County, Virginia, Farmville is a former Dutch settlement on the James River. Any substantive book on the history of civil rights in America begins in Farmville, because it is often called the birthplace of what became the civil rights movement. From my days as a toddler until my late teens, I spent most of my childhood on that farm with my dad when I was not attending school in Washington DC. We spent our time there tending to the crops we grew and sold, which included tobacco, corn, wheat, barley, soybeans, all types of hay, and all manners of vegetables from the garden. We also raised cattle, hog, and chickens, along with a small number of guinea fowl and geese. My dad always said that he made the sacrifice he did to maintain his dad's farm because he knew the sacrifices his dad had made, and because farming and farm life was simply in his blood. He, of all his brothers, did the bulk of work to preserve the farm that his dad had left them before his dad succumbed to arteriosclerosis, a hardening of the arteries sometimes caused by diets high in fat and grease.

Farmville has been known or its racial policies, famously refusing to integrate its schools after the US Supreme Court issued its landmark decision desegregating public schools, Brown v. Board of Education. The Farmville School board was one of nine plaintiffs that sued in that landmark case, but rather than comply with the federal government Farmville notoriously closed all its schools for nearly five years, refusing to mix its black and white students. Whites with means attended private academies during this period, while black students fared as best as they could with isolated home schools or simply went without schooling.

The reverend Vernon Johns, often credited as the founder of the modern civil rights movement in America, and with being reverend Martin Luther King's forerunner, was not only from Farmville, but a friend and neighbor of my paternal grandfather Otis Matthews. Vernon John's farm lies behind my family's farm, separated by a creek and a patch of swampy lowlands. HBO made a documentary about the life of Vernon Johns which chronicled his life and struggles, and how he managed to educate himself through attending Oberlin College and a rigorous path of self-managed studies in languages, the classics, and religion. Farmville blacks have always been known for their self-respect and dignity, even during the worse times of race relations, but Vernon Johns took self-respect and frank introspection to a new level unheard of in those days.

At a time when the Klan and other local whites were committing terrorist acts and threats against the black community simply for being black, and through such acts had managed to instill that psychological element of fear so prevalent in America during the early 20th century, Vernon John was not only fearless but highly educated and vocal about the social inequality so fiendishly plaguing the nation. He obtained a divinity degree and became an ordained minister, but his sermons were not your typical ones aiming to bemoan and commiserate white bigotry and hatred, designed to sooth the black community's pain and suffering. With a booming voice and a masterful vocabulary, Reverend Johns instructed the black community to demand the equality that the Bible clearly told them was all men's inheritance.

Johns instead also berated the black community for its passivity and fear in the face of white terror. He didn't just blame whites for their part in America's racial madness, he also berated black men, as the putative protectors of their wives and children, for their cowardice in the face such treatment by whites. He spoke strongly to his own community for its failings in the calculus of America's racial ills, and demanded blacks to overcome their paralysis of fear and act to demand their lawful and God given rights, and to stop blaming white America for all its problems.

He would often ask his audience how whites could claim Jesus as their savior on Sundays, that Jesus who preached love and tolerance for all men, after they had just lynched and terrorized black people on Saturday night. His vocabulary and bearing was such that many whites, while concerned by him at the time, couldn't quite make sense of many of his sermons, and many whites and blacks found him to be enigmatic. A man far, far ahead of his time, his teachings and preaching would have a lasting effect on many people in this country, including his own sixteen-year-old niece Barbara Johns who would later conceptualize and stage one of the first successful school sit-ins in America, done in protest of the conditions of the all black Moton High School on Main street in Farmville, which sat blocks away from my Uncle Burnell Coles' grocery store.

My family's farm was located in almost all white section of Farmville known as Pamplin, and from an early age my dad's family taught me to not be in fear or awe of any man, that we are all equal in God's eyes, and that I must always work hard and educate myself so that I will be properly equipped to compete with any man, no matter his race or origin. I was never in awe of whites as a kid, nor was I ever taught to be hostile to them for their transgressions against blacks. I was taught to, and always have, taken each person as the individual they are, and have never understood how a person can hate someone base on the color of his or her skin color or religion. I was taught to respect myself and to regard all people with that same respect, and I was taught to never see myself as a victim of whites or of anything else in this life, and that the victim psychology is out of step with the real nature of man and his having been given a free will and a mind all his own to use as best he can. I was taught that life in and of itself is an adversarial process for all humans and that adversity comes in many forms, not just racial prejudice. I also was taught that despite America's racial ills, opportunity is available to those who sincerely desire it and are willing to work to achieve it.

Working beside my dad on that red clay farm as a kid, which was very hard work most days, and then looking forward to the time we spent after work hunting and fishing on our pond, I grew up with a tremendous gratitude and love for America and for what it provided me and my family. My dad is one of the finest persons I have ever known, and has always been my hero and my guide, in ways I am not sure he even knows. When a father takes the time to raise his son next to him on a farm, a kid inherits a wealth of values and strength that remain with him for a lifetime. My dad is the kindest and most generous, and yet most serious, man I have ever known. Kind to a fault, he is a throwback to the old days, a genuine and principled American southern man. He could not have been there more for me as a father, and my fondest childhood memories in Virginia remain with him. This is the country of my birth and the land that I love. We are at root rural Virginians to the core, and we love that farm and land beyond words. Yet and still, speaking candidly, as a black American there is often in the background of our minds the awareness of the sordid racial history we experienced at America's hands, and really there is no way to collectively or personally wipe the reality of what occurred out of our minds and act as if it never happened. No people that experienced such mass trauma, brutality, and terror have been asked to do so, and America is insensitive and unrealistic to ask and expect black Americans to do so. No one should question our patriotism for being honest about our feelings, for honest criticism is a part of any true love relationship, and people tend to feel the most pain for what they most love. Somehow, discussion and dialogue in our nation often on many topics is dominated by soundbites and very shallow levels of analysis, so rushed and emotionalized that the understanding we are capable of achieving is lost in the process. The topic of race is one area where this shallow dialogue is often typified, and one in which both sides of the debate stand to be criticized.

For example, most whites tend to stick to the view that America's racial atrocities against blacks are only a thing of the past, and something for which they and today's contemporary black Americans have scant connection to. They say that they did not commit such acts, and that black Americans of today are not subject to such treatment, thus it is purely a thing of the past and should be buried. On the other hand, the recent celebration of the 50-year anniversary of Martin Luther King's March on Washington featured many speakers and participants, some seemingly stuck in a racial time warp, breaking out in We Shall Overcome, which many whites find curious considering our black president, black national security advisor, black head of the BOP and the ATF, and black US Attorney General, among other prominent blacks in government. The undeniable truth is that, given our history of race relations, blacks and whites ought to both give themselves a tremendous amount of credit for collectively working to prove to each other, and to the world, that Americans have the inner resolve and goodness to achieve what stands today before us. What stands before us are the results of our truly incredible efforts to live out the true meaning of America's highest values as exemplified in our Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Lest we forget, ours is a nation that once held white supremacy as its guiding force in all matters legal, social, religious, sexual, and intellectual. What we have shown the world by our progress is almost unreal when you see our gains at wiping out racism for what they are. As racism is still very much alive and kicking, we must simultaneously work to oppose it, while not giving it constant attention. We live in an imperfect world, and one in which it is illusory to think that racism and other forms of bias will somehow ever be permanently eliminated.

Hearing some of the speakers at the 50th Anniversary of the March on Washington made it appear as if many black Americans are loathe to give up their indignation concerning race, even in the face of positive objective evidence to the contrary. If I learned nothing else during my years as a psychotherapist it’s that we humans tend to oddly get attached to our pain and misery, and place happiness or success as a far and distant horizon when it’s right at our fingertips and under our control, not others.Its almost as if some blacks want to have some type of racism detector device, like a metal detector, whereby whites would be scanned for all traces of racism. That may be a humorous analogy, but the fact is that you cannot eliminate and be sensitive to all symptoms and manifestations of racism, it is as absurd as it is impossible. People feel the way they feel, and when it rears its ugly head we need to forcefully confront it, and we still need stiff laws and civil rights organizations, just like the Jewish people have B'nai Birth and AIPAC. I hope and pray for its disappearance one day, but for now, we as a nation who lived collectively under racial apartheid for 400 years cannot expect it to disappear from our individual