On Friendship
“I used to think friendship was the easiest thing to explain. Now, I think it’s the hardest, and I’ve been wrong in my judgment so many times in the past that I’d be foolish to not at least consider that everything I’ve written here could be wrong. So, when it comes to friendship, here is the only hill I’m willing to die on. Your friends are the people who stand by you in tough times, period, point blank, end of discussion. There is no other definition. Always dance with the one who brung ya, dear reader. Always reward loyalty. We may not be dollar billionaires, but we are time billionaires, and our fortune depletes every second of every day. Don’t squander what you have left by wasting it on the wrong people.”
I spend an unhealthy amount of time thinking about friendship, although the more books I read, the less wrong I feel about the magnitude of this mindspace. Nicomachean Ethics covers some topics that are mighty weighty. Metaphysics, morality, free will and determinism, virtues and vices, justice, other minutiae like that. Each of those gets one chapter. There is only one topic that gets two chapters. Know what it is?
Friendship.
Over the past four years I cannot emphasize enough times how friendship drastically affected my life for the better. I would have taken a completely different path, and turned into a completely different man, if I had to go through all of this alone.
When I got arrested, friends were my rock in the storm. It is very easy to lose yourself in the hailstorm of government and media opprobrium. Friends were my tether to reality, reminding me over and over who I really was and what I meant to them, reminding me not to sweat the charges too much, shit happens, it’s only money, mistakes get made, the only way to it is through it, and that the floor is no place for a champion. To each of them, it didn’t take much effort to reach out and show that they cared, but the sum of their sentiments saved my ass. It felt like I landed on a cloud of support. I really don’t know who I would be today if none of them had been there, probably an angry, outcasted and bitter misanthrope—it could have gone either way, for real—and it is solely because of friends that Blind Spots was not only written but written with love and gratitude.
That’s qualitative. Quantitatively, friends shaved years off my prison sentence. I had far more letters of leniency than I deserved, but the number of letters you get doesn’t mean anything if they’re banal. At my Federal sentencing, the judge had clearly spent a lot of time reading the letters beforehand and rattled off his notes: so-and-so was an investor of Greg’s, so-and-so has known him since they were six, so-and-so played football with Greg in high school and said he had breakaway speed but stone hands. I think the judge spent more time going over the letters than anything else.
Near the end of sentencing, there is a part called allocution, where the defendant gets to say a few words on his own behalf before receiving the length of his term of imprisonment. I had asked my lawyer the week before, like, should I write something up beforehand or just let it rip? His advice was to write something up, so I had showed up that day with some prepared remarks and I began to read off them. The judge cut me off and said “put those down, I want to hear from you.” I tossed that shit directly on the floor.
Right hand to God, I was thrilled, because I felt like I had wrung all the awfulness out of myself over the past year and was comfortable letting my soul shine in the midst of a verbal cavity search. The judge brought the thunder. He came at me hard and heavy and asked jarring questions, and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t mentally black out for parts of it, because I don’t remember everything I said - all I know is that it came straight from the goddamn heart. The one part that I will always remember is when he stated the following: “Mr. Blotnick, I am impressed by the fact that so many of your investors wrote in on your behalf asking for leniency, even after you wronged them. What do you have to say about this?” His tone had changed, which I guess implied that my situation was unusual compared to what he usually sees. I responded with the truth: that there are no words for how grateful I am to these people for their loyalty, how blessed I feel to have friends that stood by me throughout all this, that I have forty, maybe fifty good years left on this Earth, and however much time I’ve got, all those years are devoted to these people and never once letting them forget how much I love and appreciate them. I blacked out again after that.
The guideline range for my sentencing was 70 to 87 months. That’s what the prosecutors were pushing for. The judge gave me 51.
I swear the letters were the determining factor. His discussion of the letters, the questions he asked about the letters, those were the parts where I saw him leave judge-mode and enter human-mode. Because the case itself couldn’t have been more straightforward: man defrauds government out of X dollars, here’s the sentencing guideline range based on the dollar amount. But the human element is, like, what drove the man to do this, how did it affect the people around him, and in the eyes of those same people it affected, did they view these actions as out of character? I didn’t have control of what my friends would write and all I could do was pray. But those letters that saved my ass, it was all thanks to the friends who wrote them, and if it weren’t for friends, I would still have years ahead of me rotting in prison. I didn’t have words for it at allocution and I still don’t today.
I’ll die on that same hill as in 2021 when I wrote Blind Spots - that your friends are the people who stand by you in tough times, period, point blank, end of discussion. There is no other definition. I got forty, maybe fifty years left, and I’m grateful and full of love every single day for the friends I’ve got.
Always reward loyalty,
GB
