Jones, who is sixty-two, was starting a five-year sentence for conspiracy in what amounted to corporate fraud. His former company, Commercial Financial Services, or CFS, had occupied fifty-one floors of the Cityplex Towers on the outskirts of Tulsa, which vied with the Bank of Oklahoma headquarters as the tallest building in the city. Its business involved buying bad credit-card loans from commercial banks, like Chase, Citibank, and MBNA, then chasing down cardholders and getting them to pay the money they owed. The idea was to collect more money than CFS paid the banks for the debt. CFS also bundled the loans into securities and sold these as bonds to raise the cash to buy more accounts. The crime Jones pleaded guilty to involved devising a scheme to make it appear as if the company was doing a better job collecting on the bad loans than it actually was, which would encourage investors to keep buying the bonds. When the truth came out, bond sales evaporated, the company went bankrupt, its four-thousand-odd employees lost their jobs and bondholders were left with more than $1 billion in near-worthless paper.

At his sentencing, Jones stood before the judge in Federal District Court in Tulsa, looking solemn and contrite, and said that he was sorry for what he had done. He apologized to the investors, apologized to his former employees, to the members of his family and to any others whom he had harmed, "either emotionally or financially." And, for sure, there is no argument that Jones was sorry for getting caught. In private moments, however, he betrays a bitterness over his treatment by the government, the veiled conviction that his transgression wasn't serious enough to deserve prison. "I did what I did, and there's a certain punishment that goes along with that; whether I realized it at the moment or not is kind of immaterial," he said a few months before going to jail, speaking in the tight, hurried-up twang characteristic of rural Oklahoma. "I certainly knew it was nefarious, a little wormy, unethical, make no mistake about that. But criminal? Whether I thought that or not, I can't remember; but I was certainly willing to take the risk. Fraud? Honestly, the first time I ever looked at that squarely in the face, in that light, was when the government brought it up. Here, it seemed like I was being a good soldier, saving the company. But when I was talking to the government about that, they said, 'No, you did it because of greed.' They said, 'No, you continued the deception, the fraud, to be able to continue selling the securitizations.' "

What happened to Jones and CFS received little play outside Tulsa and the financial trade press, but this kind of story has certainly become a familiar narrative on the American business scene. Bright prospect starts off in career, works hard to build successful enterprise, then one day, as if contracting a moral virus, turns from solid corporate citizen into closet criminal. And the startling thing about it is that until that news photo showing him being led away by federal marshals, the telltale overcoat draped over his handcuffs, not even the people who counted themselves as his most intimate acquaintances would have suspected a thing. Some of these defendants, of course, are coldblooded criminals underneath-psychopaths with MBAs. "As a white-collar criminal-defense lawyer, you occasionally meet people who just spend their lives going from one fraud to another and essentially rip people off whenever they can and don't care how many people they hurt," says Benjamin Braf-man, a defense lawyer in Manhattan whose client list has ranged from doctors, lawyers, and corporate executives to Michael Jackson and associates of the Gambino crime family of Brooklyn. Other kinds of business-class fraudsters, he says, become so successful and powerful that they can't imagine that the laws applying to others are also meant for them. "I've met people in different professions who are simply stunned by the suggestions that they are subject to prosecution, that they could end up in jail and the government would have the temerity to take them on."

In most of the cases he has handled, though, neither of the characterizations apply: "It's my experience that the preponderance of individuals caught up in criminal investigations in the white-collar arena are not what people would call evil. They do not get up that morning and decide, Today I'm going to commit a crime. Most of these are normal people who end up just getting caught in something that spins out of control."

As a rule, he has noticed, the more unassailable a person's background, the harder it is for him to take the fall. The boiler-room shark, the Mafia interloper in the business world-they seem capable of accepting punishment as just a disagreeable cost of doing business. But, Brafman says, "when a person with an impeccable history, with no prior experience in the criminal-justice system, suddenly finds himself under investigation or under indictment, his world completely collapses around him. It's much worse than being told you have a terminal illness, because when you're told you have a terminal illness, everyone who loves you rallies around you, and all of your friends and family offer support and compassion and help because they recognize they might soon lose you. But if you're suddenly indicted, you're a pariah. You bring embarrassment and shame into your home and into your extended family. You lose your business; you lose your money; you have the possibility of going to prison. The life support you counted on for your entire existence begins to disappear. It's a terrible, terrible thing. I've seen middle-aged people in my office grow old in front of my eyes. And I don't think anyone ever recovers from the experience."

I met Jay Jones in late January 2003, several months before he had to report to prison, and that winter and into the spring we spent a lot of time talking and driving around rural Oklahoma in his 1975 powder blue Cadillac Deville. He liked the Deville for the wideexpanseitgavehimbehindthewheel,andwedroveinitto visit some of the mile-markers in his life-down to Shawnee, where he and his wife, Jennifer, began their marriage; to Musko-gee, where he had started up the company with his business partner, Bill Bartmann. The driving helped distract him from thinking about what lay ahead. Trying to be helpful, a friend had given him a handbook called Down Time:A Guide to Federal Incarceration,writ-ten by an ex-inmate who counsels white-collar defendants. It told about a $175 monthly spending limit at the commissary, the three hundred monthly phone minutes and the rules on visitation. But it said little to ease the anxieties that ranked uppermost in Jones's mind. He had seen the prison movies. Would the guards down there be nasty to him? What about the other inmates? Would he be safe?

One morning we headed up to Blackwell, in the wheat-growing area near the Kansas line, where Jones spent his boyhood and where he hadn't visited in several decades. A thick wet snow was falling, so you couldn't tell where prairie left off and sky began. Blackwell loomed in the distance by virtue of its grain elevators shooting up at the south end of town. Driving onto Main Street, Jones was taken by how many of the old brick-front stores had gone out of business or had been replaced by curio shops offering up relics of the town's past. No more Sears, no more JC Penney. "A single Wal-Mart can pretty much clean out half of one of these little towns," he said. Jones came from humble origins and started out in the workaday world while still in his teens. His father spent most of his adult life as a route man for Wilson foods, taking meat orders from small-town butchers. He died of a heart attack at age fifty-seven while fixing up the camper truck he planned to take on fishing trips during retirement. To earn extra money, the whole family would go out on weekends picking pecans at local orchards. Jones's younger brother, Joe, about half his size, climbed up to shake down the nuts so the others could scrabble for them on the ground. Unlike his straight-arrow brother, Jay admits to taking a few financial shortcuts as a boy-stealing change out of the newspaper racks on Main Street, charging a carton of cigarettes at the corner store supposedly for his mother, then selling them to his friends. "Jay was more the adventurous one, more willing to go the route, take the risk," said Joe, now a preacher who teaches physical education at a college in Lawton,