Stealing America: What My Experience with Criminal Gangs Taught Me about Obama, Hillary, and the Democratic Party

398 Pages·2015·2.32 MB·English

by  Dinesh D’Souza

DEDICATION
FOR DEBBIE FANCHER,
Immigrant, patriot, and the woman I love
CONTENTS
Dedication
A Note to the Reader
Chapter 1 Crime and Punishment:
How They Taught Me a Lesson
Chapter 2 The World as It Is:
Inside the Confinement Center
Chapter 3 How to Steal a Country:
A Heist to End All Heists
Chapter 4 Creating New Wealth:
America, the Anti-Theft Society
Chapter 5 History for Profit:
The Reparations Scam
Chapter 6 The Things That Keep Progressives Awake at Night:
The Greed and Inequality Scam
Chapter 7 You Didn’t Build That:
The Society-Did-It Scam
Chapter 8 Silver Spoons and Genetic Lotteries:
The Lucky Luciano Scam
Chapter 9 The Godfather:
Saul Alinsky’s Art of the Shakedown
Chapter 10 Barack and Hillary:
The Education of Two Con Artists
Chapter 11 The Envy Triangle:
Shaking Down the Wealth Creators
Chapter 12 Cracking the Con:
Restoring the Productive Society
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Photographs
About the Author
Also by Dinesh D’Souza
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
A NOTE TO THE READER
The language spoken in a confinement center is extremely coarse. Hardly a
sentence is uttered that does not contain obscenities. There is no way to convey
the sense of place and even the meaning of what convicts are saying without
using some of this language. Out of respect for the reader, I’ve scaled it way
back and used asterisks to bowdlerize the most offensive words.
Chapter 1
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT:
How They Taught Me a Lesson
If a man wishes to be sure of the road he’s traveling on, then he must
close his eyes and travel in the dark.1
—John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul
T
he mood in the courtroom was tense and electric as I entered, accompanied
by my superstar lawyer Benjamin Brafman and another attorney, Alex Spiro. We
were in the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse in lower
Manhattan, the offices of Judge Richard Berman. Brafman, with his elegant
locks of hair brushed back, looked completely at home in this environment. I, on
the other hand, was not.
I tried to look nonchalant, or at least expressionless. Inside, however, my heart
was pounding with terror. In a very short time I’d know if I was headed to
federal prison. My crime? I had exceeded the campaign finance laws by
convincing two of my friends to contribute $10,000 apiece to a candidate for the
U.S. Senate from New York; then I reimbursed them for their contribution. For
this—I subsequently discovered—I could be prosecuted as a felon and sent away
for up to two years. I had already pleaded guilty to the charge. Now I was going
to find out whether the judge would give me a prison sentence.
My greatest fear was not prison itself. At Brafman’s suggestion, I had hired a
criminologist with extensive experience in the various federal prison camps. “If
you get prison,” this fellow told me, “it’s going to be a white-collar camp, most
likely Taft or Lompoc in California. You’re going to be surrounded by
accountants, lawyers, dentists, bureaucrats. All the others in there have proven
themselves through good behavior. These are nonviolent criminals, just like
you.”
That part—the “just like you”—jolted me. I almost didn’t hear the rest.
“You’ll have to work part-time, but you’ll have lots of free time. There is little
contact with the outside world. No cell phones and no laptops. But you can send
emails from a general computer that is monitored, and you can make three
hundred minutes of phone calls per month, also monitored. That’s not much, but
you’ll get used to it. Taft, the camp I’d recommend for you, has pretty good
facilities, a gym, a running track, a tennis court. You’re a writer, so do a lot of
reading and writing. I’ll help to prepare you for what to expect. If you stay busy,
and use common sense, you’ll be fine.”
Fine? I took that as an exaggeration. Even if there was little danger of being
stabbed or raped, how can someone who is locked up for two years, without a
phone and a laptop, and such limited contact with the outside world, be fine? My
deepest fears were over my nineteen-year-old daughter. She, I knew, would be
devastated. I had recently gone through a difficult divorce and unfortunately my
daughter’s relationship with her mother had been, at least temporarily, severed.
Even though my daughter was now in college, in terms of immediate family, I
was all she had.
I was accompanied by a few close friends, and two sympathetic journalists,
the seasoned veteran Jerome Corsi from WorldNetDaily, and a young reporter
for Breitbart News, Adelle Nazarian. Nazarian said she was an immigrant from
Iran and understood where I was coming from politically. Most of the crowd was
hostile. The liberal press was there in force, from the staid New York Times to
the rabid Daily News. The reporters are so young, I thought to myself, and how
delighted they look at the prospect of me being sent away. These people hated
me because I was a person of color who was also a conservative. They had
regarded me as a race-traitor, an enemy of the people. Jonathan Capehart, a
blogger for the Washington Post, opined that “Dinesh D’Souza is a disgusting
man. . . . D’Souza should be in jail where he would no longer be able to assault
the rest of us with his special brand of racist bile.”2 For guys like Capehart, I was
about to get my comeuppance and they were about to get their schadenfreude.
In the back of the room, I even had a critic from the evangelical right: I
noticed the sly reporter from World magazine there to continue that publication’s
long-standing vendetta against me. She avoided my gaze. Brafman told me the
men walking around with badges were from the government’s prosecution unit. I
noticed their smug expressions, anticipating victory, as if my incarceration were
a foregone conclusion. There were also a few ordinary folk who had read about
my case and came out of curiosity.
My attention focused on the prosecutor, Carrie H. Cohen, a woman with an
enduringly haggard and harassed expression, as if life has done her wrong. From
two previous court hearings, I knew she was brash and abrasive. Carrie never
shook my hand and she avoided eye contact with me; I got the impression she
considered me, like all defendants, to be vermin. She also had an irritating habit
of referring to herself as the Government. “The Government does not agree.”
“Your honor, the Government will prove . . .” “The Government takes
objection.” Meanwhile, I’m thinking, Who elected this woman? She reminded
me of Inspector Javert from Les Misérables. Of course I kept these thoughts to
myself. I asked Brafman’s associate Alex Spiro, “How important a case is this
for her?” He said, “For Carrie? Oh, this is a career case. This could make or
break her career.” Carrie, I realized, badly wanted me in prison so that her career
could advance.
I knew that Carrie was a stooge, an enforcer for people higher up than her.
The most important people—her boss, an Asian-Indian federal prosecutor named
Preet Bharara, and his boss, the attorney general Eric Holder—were not in the
courtroom. Also absent was the biggest boss of them all, the president of the
United States, Barack Obama. That trio, I knew, would all take a considerable
interest in the outcome of my sentencing.
My thoughts were interrupted by a loud voice in the courtroom. “United
States versus Dinesh D’Souza.” What a phrase! I winced. “Please stand for
Judge Berman.” The buzz quickly subsided. In sauntered Judge Berman, fully
robed and looking solemn as usual, his head bobbing from side to side like an
old family horse. Behind the judge came three of his clerks. Slowly,
ceremoniously, the judge took his seat. The clerks planted themselves in chairs
against the wall.
Then began what I am going to call my official castigation.3 Normally
sentencing is a perfunctory business, but not this day. The judge gave me a
verbal flaying from the bench that lasted for the better part of an hour. During
this time the clerks watched with evident bemusement; they seemed to enjoy
watching their man carry out a ritual flogging.
The judge insisted I had “willfully and knowingly” violated the law. He
added, “Mr. D’Souza’s crime is serious.” One of the purposes of punishment, he
suggested, is to discourage others from committing similar violations. “The
public certainly needs to be deterred . . . from making phony contributions and
violating the election laws.” I took this to mean I was going to be punished not
just for what I did but also to send a message of discouragement to the general
public.
The judge then rejected any suggestion—either by me or my lawyers—that I
was being selectively prosecuted because of my public criticism of the Obama
administration. That claim had been widely circulated in the media, especially
the conservative media. For Berman, however, making an interesting deviation
into Texas terminology, it was “all hat, no cattle.” Referring to my public
statement that “we don’t want to live in a society where Lady Justice removes
her blindfold and winks at her friends and targets her enemies,” the judge opined
that “I’m totally confident that Lady Justice is doing her job and that she’s not
taking off her blindfold to target Dinesh D’Souza.” There were mild titters from
the audience. Leftist reporters, bloggers, and photographers were in a very good
mood this morning.
Things did not improve from there; they actually got worse. At Brafman’s
suggestion, I had submitted to the judge some two dozen or so letters from
family members and others, including some prominent liberals, testifying to my
good character. Alluding to them, the judge sounded dismissive. “The court
receives packages of letters of support not unlike those submitted in this case in
virtually every criminal case, including one I received just the other day where a
defendant had pled guilty to a conspiracy to commit a Hobbs act robbery of
drugs involving fake police uniforms, badges, police car sirens, and the
possession of two guns to be used in connection with the robbery conspiracy.”
The judge added that “someone wrote in his behalf to me, ‘I have known the
defendant’—who, by the way had five prior convictions—‘for almost twenty