Crime and Publishing

Mark Singer's inquiry into the denial of a prisoner's rights began as a relatively straightforward magazine story. But as he dug deeper, his project became a morass of deceptions and ethical dilemmas worthy of Dostoyevsky.

by Yvonne Abraham

Part 5

A free man since 1993, Kimberlin is back in business. Only this time he trucks in a different trade, supplying everything from automobile parts to chicken parts for clients in Ukraine, associates of friends he made in prison.

The first inkling he had that the book was not the panegyric he'd been expecting was when a fact-checker from the New Yorker called to run a rather large inconsistency by him, an inconsistency that implicated him in the 1978 murder of a woman called Julia Scyphers, the grandmother of a pre-teen with whom Kimberlin had an unusually close relationship. He was not happy about the news.

Kimberlin doesn't talk to reporters much anymore. "The only reason I'm talking to you," he says, "is because the independent papers all did good work for us." He is calling from the DC area, where he lives between Ukraine expeditions. At first, he speaks softly and evenly. "The book is full of lies and erroneous information and factual inaccuracies," he says matter-of-factly. "It's amazing what a bad job Singer did. He did a great job for the New Yorker originally, but then he changed his mind. Is he going to change his mind again next week? Reporters aren't supposed to be flapping in the wind.

"At what point is it incumbent on a reporter or author to tell the subject, `I'm not on the same wavelength as you anymore'?" he asks. "He should have informed me and given me the opportunity not to co-operate, or said, `I'll return the advance.' "

He criticizes Singer for not confronting him with the holes in his story. "He never asked me about all these things he says are inconsistencies," Kimberlin says. "If a reporter has something that doesn't add up, he has an obligation -- this is what I've heard -- to say, `What's your explanation?' If he'd come to me with those conflicts, I would have laughed. I would have told him. I would have explained it in a heartbeat."

Despite the contract he signed, he says Singer betrayed him: "It's not the book he told me he was writing. He was hired to write a book about somebody getting railroaded, and government corruption, and he writes a diatribe about me."

He says Singer also betrayed the nation's prison population: "Mark Singer's book could have been a great inspiration for people in jail, about how you can rise up against bad influences, beat Big Brother, corruption. But he puts a slant on it like I'm some kind of manipulator rather than how I rose above it."

Fifteen minutes into our conversation, Kimberlin displays some of the qualities he successfully hid from Singer in those first six weeks in 1992. His voice grows louder. His claims inch into oddness.

He says Mark Singer wishes he were Brett Kimberlin: "The problem is one of envy. This is what my lawyers say. I don't want to psychoanalyze the guy, but he's obviously envious that I'm able to be the way I am, and he isn't. I think broadly and expansively and optimistically. I don't grovel and whine and go see psychiatrists and all this crazy stuff Mark seems to enjoy doing, and I think he envies that. My strength. Well, that's what my lawyers say."

Part 6

Yvonne Abraham can be reached at yabraham[a]phx.com.