Best PR Man Behind Bars

THE BEST PR MAN BEHIND BARS LIFER MASTERS THE MEDIA, PITCHING HIS INNOCENCE

January 9, 1996

By Mark Jurkowitz

On a typical day, Benjamin LaGuer probably talks to more journalists than the White House press office does. By his own estimate, he'll work the phones for about four hours, chatting with his friends in the media. More time is spent batting off letters and notes to his pen pals at Time and The New Yorker. There are packets of material to send out. And in a leftover moment, he may work on an article, manuscript or story idea. Benjamin LaGuer does all this from a cell in the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at Norfolk, where he is serving a life term for rape. With his loaded Rolodex, superior schmoozing skills, undeniable charisma and inhuman doggedness, LaGuer, 32, is the convict the media cannot forget. He simply will not let the members of the so-called Benjy Brigade. He has pitched his story everywhere: Penthouse to Random House. His thick pile of clips includes scores of stories about his case in publications from The Boston Globe to El Mundo, from Worcester magazine to Esquire. His plight has been examined on Channel 2's "La Plaza" and on Channel 7. He is on a first-name basis with network news producers. And half a dozen or so journalists, including WBUR's Chris Lydon and Esquire's John Taylor, recently took the unusual step of asking a judge to reduce LaGuer's sentence.

When he was first imprisoned, LaGuer vigorously protested his innocence to a veteran con. "Look around, all these people are innocent," came the weary reply. "It struck me then," says LaGuer, "that I had to be extra good."

This is not a story about whether LaGuer is guilty or innocent. Only a few people really know. It's about how he became extra good in getting the media to take up the cause.

Liza McGuirk, a producer at "60 Minutes," chuckles at the mention of LaGuer's name. "Because we're '60 Minutes,' we have innocent men behind bars lined up to talk to us," she says. But he managed to cut through the clutter.

"He turned on the charm every time he called," says McGuirk. "Because of his persistence, he got a look. He throws around names like a press agent."

John Strahinich has written several LaGuer pieces for Boston magazine, including a wrenching 1989 "Obsession" story detailing the relationship the two have developed. He figures he's probably taken about 1,000 calls from La Guer.

"If this guy gets out of jail, George Regan better watch out," says Strahinich, referring to Boston's public relations guru. "He'll put him out of business in a year." Compared by one friend to Ronald Reagan's spinmeister supreme Michael Deaver, LaGuer retorted: "I'm just trying to bring some dignity to the profession."

He's always plying his trade, currently trying to peddle his tale to The New York Times, PBS' "Frontline" and playwright David Mamet.

"I might find his [Mamet's] home number in the Hamptons somewhere," LaGuer says, half-seriously. Don't bet against it.

Since his conviction for the brutal 1983 beating and rape of a Leominster woman in her late 50s, LaGuer has embarked on a tortuous odyssey through the courts. Suffice it to say the case against him was not exactly ironclad and that he was not represented by the Dream Team. Then there were allegations that the verdict was fueled by anti-Hispanic racism. LaGuer, who has thus far failed in repeated efforts to gain a new trial, is still looking for a reduced sentence and becomes eligible for par ole in 1998. A number of reporters have concluded that at the very least, his trial was a pretty odoriferous piece of business. In 1994, the Globe editorialized in favor of a new one.

Last year, Lydon, Taylor, Strahinich, the Boston Phoenix's Tim Sandler, the Boston Herald's Sean Flynn, Richard Nangle of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and Allen Fletcher of Worcester magazine joined some clergy, educators and activists in asking Judge Herbert Travers to reduce La Guer's sentence. Their letters reflected both the passionate (Lydon's assertion that "Ben LaGuer in the Massachusetts prison system always reminds me of Dostoevski in Siberia") and the pragmatic (Taylor's insistence that "I became convinced that he neither committed the crime for which he was convicted nor received a fair trial.")

This display of press politicking generated a November 1995 story from Fitchburg Sentinel & Enterprise reporter Andy Baron raising the issue of media ethics. It's pretty much a tempest in a teapot since these petitioners don't cover LaGuer anymore or they write for publications that encourage advocacy. Still, it's no mean feat to persuade the allegedly hardened practitioners of the purportedly cynical art of journalism to become so involved.

Nangle, who has been prohibited from covering Judge Travers as a result of the letter, says simply: "Sometimes in your life you've got to put aside these considerations and say, 'What's the right thing to do?' "

Nangle is the original member of the Benjy Brigade. More than a decade ago, while working at the Sentinel & Enterprise, he became the first reporter to hear LaGuer's pitch. He eventually produced a four-part series on the case.

"He told me, 'Mr. LaGuer, this better be good. I got no time for no bull," LaGuer recounts.

LaGuer quickly absorbed the primary rule of media relations. Make it snappy. "I learned that reporters ain't got a lot of time," he says. "I learned that you have to take out the 'its' and the 'thes'. . . . It's a straight narrative filled with components."

LaGuer, often approached by inmates eager for his secret for attracting headlines, says, "I ask them to tell me their story."

" 'Oh, the racism!' " he says, mimicking their opening gambit. "Now wait a minute," he tells them. "For every claim I make, I need a phone number and an address."

Reporters say LaGuer doesn't traffic in wild-eyed speculation or sweeping cosmic theory. It's closer to just the facts, ma'am.

"Benjy had paper," says the Globe's Howard Manly, who estimates having about 300 conversations him. "He'd send you news stories, court decisions, manuscripts. He flooded you with information to the point that Benjy LaGuer was what you looked forward to in the morning. He was like your boss."

Some of this simpatico with the press stems from LaGuer's massive consumption of the product. He claims to read the Bay State Banner, Globe, Herald, Phoenix, Boston magazine and New Yorker on a regular basis. (He tried in vain to pique the interest of New Yorker editor Tina Brown, who in his opinion fails to measure up to her storied predecessor, William Shawn.) He also peruses Architectural Digest "just for the mental masturbation."

"I can close my eyes," he says, "and actually think I am in the house."

And some of his relationships may reflect the psychological skills of a nimble mind buffed to a shiny survivor's finish in prison.

"I've learned so much insider stuff," LaGuer boasts. "I relate to people on different levels. I relate to John Strahinich in a different way than I relate to John Taylor." With some reporters, LaGuer adopts the streetwise "Benjy from the Bronx" mode. "With John Taylor, I have to bring out my best [expletive] Oxford English."

But ultimately, it is old-fashioned elbow grease -- and an indomitable, unblushing persistence -- that are LaGuer's primary assets. The clips he dispenses include not only major stories but letters to the editor, column snippets, editorial cartoons and even items from Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly tracking the careers of some of his trial's principals. He is an avid letter writer, jocularly informing author Lawrence Wright that it cost "a hefty five packs of cigarettes" to purchase one of his books from the prison librarian. "In prison," LaGuer told Wright, "there is a lot of validity to supply- side economics."

But LaGuer does his most impressive work over the phone. When Nangle moved out of state to work in New Haven and Bridgeport, LaGuer tracked him down. When Francis J. Connolly, who had written about the case for the Boston Phoenix, went to work for the consulting firm of Marttila & Kiley, La Guer found him. He has -- and readily provides -- the direct phone numbers of the ABC and NBC news producers Martin Phillips and Ty West, who don't seem at all surprised to field inquiries about LaGuer. In fact, by the time I reached several sources for this story, he had gotten there first to brief them.

"He calls me sometimes three or four times a week, sometimes to say hello, sometimes to make a pitch, and sometimes to say 'Have a good week' or 'Merry Christmas,' " says Andy Baron. "This guy will not give up."

Tim Sandler hears from convicts crying foul "all the time, and there is an air of desperation about it," he says. "LaGuer's not a whiner. He's eternally optimistic, which is what sets him apart from everyone else in the can. . . . He will not be denied."

"I was not seduced by a smooth, savvy con," says John Taylor, noting that Esquire editor Edward Kosner tends to be jaded about these innocents-behind- bars claims. "It was the record of the case that was compelling."

But he is quick to add that LaGuer "seemed like a rare guy. He was motivated, optimistic, focused."

Perhaps it was inevitable that LaGuer would try his hand at journalism -- and equally inevitable that the matter would end up in court. In 1992, while at the Gardner correctional facility, he was removed from his $1.50 per- day post as editorial director and associate publisher of the Gardner Press Newsletter. He filed suit charging First Amendment violations. LaGuer claims he was punished for running an editorial on the risk of AIDS transmission via prison dental tools. The judge focused on a story about Gardner's Hispanic Cultural Week celebration that inflamed passions among some Dominican inmates. In the end, the court found that LaGuer had been improperly removed "for permitted expressive activity" but that his point was moot largely because he had been transferred to Norfolk.

Still, LaGuer was proud of the job he did with the newsletter. "I made it look aesthetically like a newspaper and I gave myself a title," he explains. But "you know the white guy had to be the publisher," he says, laughing.

In the past year LaGuer has written several articles for Worcester magazine, one during the O.J. trial and another on the brutal murder of a relatively harmless inmate by his cellmate. He shrewdly prophesied that the O. J. outcome "won't actually reflect the truth of what happened to these victims. . . . But ultimately, the verdict will resemble a more theatrical view." The murder story, intended as an indictment of penal priorities, concluded that "in the modern prison, there is no distinction . . . between those who are, and those who are not roaming on the cliffs of madness." Nice turn of phrase.

"I've watched him become familiar with the English language and I've watched him become accomplished with the written word," says Worcester magazine chairman Allen Fletcher. "He has a spiritual depth, but he doesn't drag you into the pit."

LaGuer has also produced a 100,000-word manuscript, now being edited and massaged by local fiction writer Dale Thomas, a contact he made through her uncle, Channel 4 newsman Charles Austin. "I sort of vomited on the page and talked about everything," LaGuer admits. With a touch of exasperation, Thomas says the work has "possibilities" and "could be salable . . . if we can ever decide what the heck he wants to do with it. It keeps evolving."

Perhaps unaware that much of the public now holds journalists in lower esteem than ex-cons, LaGuer wants to join their ranks. "I saw reporters, what they do, and the pieces started building," he says. Given the limitations on his lifestyle since 1983, it's quite possible he idealizes those assiduously cultivated reporters not only as a lifeline to the outside world but as allies and role models.

"I guess if my friends had turned out to be painters, I'd be like Jackson Pollock throwing paint on canvas. . . . I just want to be worthy someday of all their generosity," he says of his supporters in the media.

Allen Fletcher vows that "when LaGuer gets out, I'm going to have one big party for him at the classiest place I can rent. It'll be black tie. And I'll bet there'll be 500 people who come."

They could fill the place with charter members of the Benjy Brigade