After I was indicted in late 2020 and my political career fell apart almost instantly, I spent most of my time at home.
I’d been Cincinnati’s youngest councilman for nearly a decade—a favorite for its next mayor—when public corruption charges were brought against me, stemming from a movie-like FBI sting. The allegation was that I accepted campaign donations from undercover agents posing as investors on a downtown redevelopment project in exchange for favorable official action. There was zero accusation of personal embezzlement. I immediately proclaimed my innocence.
While fighting the case against me initiated a difficult, disorienting, and scary stretch of life, there was a silver lining: I got to spend a lot more time with my family and our dog, Oakley.
Oakley is a 30-pound rescue with white fur and brown splotches. My wife, Sarah, and I impulsively adopted her nine years ago and named her after the Cincinnati neighborhood where we met on a blind date. We’ve always believed that Oakley is part Australian Shepherd, part Brittany Spaniel, though we’ve never done genetic testing. She’s shy, except around our immediate family, and has a tendency to groom herself like a cat. In the years we’ve had Oakley, she’s barked only about ten times total. When she cocks her head and flashes her puppy eyes, it melts my heart.
At home, Oakley was never more than a few feet away. Oftentimes, including when I was reviewing discovery materials in preparation for my looming trial, she’d nuzzle next to me on the couch, blissfully ignorant of my grim circumstance: a potentially years-long prison sentence.
My family and friends rallied around me, embraced my innocence, and showered me with support throughout the entire period of my prosecution. But the totality of the situation overwhelmed me. It was the perfect time to have the species famous for unconditional love by my side. Oakley and I went for walks together. She cajoled me into giving her frequent belly rubs. And I talked to her throughout the course of my days, even if those conversations were one-sided. I soon created a new rule for myself: Unless both my hands were full, I’d never pass Oakley by without petting her.
In 2022, I turned down a plea deal that could’ve resulted in no prison time. Soon thereafter, I sat for a three-week trial, where I was acquitted on four counts of public corruption and convicted on two counts. At the end of 2023, I was sentenced to 16 months of incarceration at a federal prison camp in rural Kentucky.
When I reported to prison at the beginning of 2024, the most painful part was saying goodbye to Sarah and our two sons, then ages one and four. But it was no small thing to say goodbye to Oakley either, who had been a source of constant comfort, love, and warmth.
Sarah and I told our sons that I was heading to “Daddy Camp” for a while. There was no way to communicate to Oakley what was happening, so the morning I departed for prison, I did the only thing I could do. I laid down on the ground next to her in her favorite corner, which our family calls “Oakley’s Landing,” scratched behind her ears with both hands, kissed her on the top of the head, and told her goodbye and that I loved her.
Once I settled into my new life as an inmate, Sarah and our sons drove two-and-a-half hours each way to visit me every other Saturday. She and I exchanged daily messages through the prison’s email system. I used my allotted 15 minutes of phone time per day to call home, though we were frequently interrupted by an automated voice saying, “This call is from a federal prison,” as if we needed a reminder. Being separated from my family, especially when I believed with all my heart that I was innocent, was the cruelest and most painful experience of my life—but at least there were opportunities to express my love for Sarah and our sons.
There’s no equivalent way to do so with a pet. Dogs are capable of giving and receiving great love, but it’s a love that must be shared in person, most often tactilely, and cannot be captured or conveyed by mailing a letter, sending an email, or making a phone call. When Sarah would put me on speaker phone during our nightly call, she said that Oakley seemed to recognize my voice, just not in a way that registered emotionally.
The prison camp had a dog training program. After applying, about eight inmates at a time would be paired with a puppy to train and care for. At night, the puppy slept in a kennel in that inmate’s cubicle. (The prison camp had eight-foot by ten-foot cubicles, usually two men per cubicle, rather than barred cells.) After six to nine months, the trained dogs were adopted by an outside family.
It was common for inmates who weren’t part of the program to stop by the training area to play with the dogs. I started doing so almost as soon as I arrived. As a dog lover, I relished this, but whenever I played with one of them, it made me long for my dog.
Fellow prisoners taped pictures of loved ones to the exterior of the locker in their cubicle. While I had a few family pictures in my possession, Sarah said she preferred that images of our sons not be publicly displayed. A close friend on the outside, who had a dog with which Oakley enjoyed playing, mailed me a picture of Oakley.
For the entirety of my time in prison, the only two things affixed to the outside of my locker were the words of the St. Francis Prayer (“For it is in giving that one receives, it is in self-forgetting that one finds,”) and the picture of Oakley. Every morning when I woke up, every evening when I went to bed, and numerous times throughout the day, her sweet, furry face looked back at me—a welcome reminder that a warmer world awaited me back home, but also how far away that world was.
I wasn’t the only inmate missing my pet. For some of the men, getting accepted into the dog program filled that void, but spots were limited. I witnessed plenty of inmates connecting with other creatures.
A guy one cubicle over from mine was just 19 years old but looked even younger. He “adopted” a mouse that was missing one eye, which he kept safe from stray cats on the compound by sheltering it in the prison chapel.
Other men cared for those very stray cats, of which there were four. I watched the strongest, most badass-looking dude on the compound, early 40s and in on drug charges, fork a pouch of tuna—a valuable item in our scarcity-minded environment—onto the ground for one of the cats to enjoy.
Meanwhile, other men took the stale, flavorless bread that was served in the chow hall, broke it into pieces, and fed the flock of pigeons that hung around the prison yard.
It’s easy to dismiss these activities as a way to pass the time, to fight the tedium. But I believe there was something deeper: Men at their lowest, separated from their families, were trying to recapture a version of themselves in the role of protector, provider, and nurturer.
My celly, a man in his late 40s, was halfway through his 20 years for dealing drugs. “After I got to prison,” he told me, “it really hit me that my sentence was a death sentence for my relationship with my cat.”
During our sons’ spring break, Sarah and the boys planned to see my in-laws in St. Louis and stop on the way to visit me. During their two-hour stop, Oakley would be waiting in the car, the windows cracked. My beloved dog, fifty feet away. I asked another inmate whose judgment I trusted whether I should ask the prison guards if they’d let my wife bring Oakley up to the entrance, just for a few seconds, so I could pet her.
“First, there’s zero chance they’d ever let you do that,” he told me. “And second, it’s very likely they’ll make fun of you just for asking and quite possibly make your life more difficult because you did.”
I heeded the advice. When the day arrived, it was morale-lifting, as always, to see Sarah and our boys, but deflating to know that Oakley was right outside. When our family visit was over, I moved extra slowly to clean up the children’s play area within the larger visitation room, hoping to catch a glimpse of Oakley as Sarah let her out for a bathroom break before continuing on their drive. When Oakley was in my line of sight, there was no way of telling her, “Here I am, sweet girl!” She looked just as she did in the picture on my locker. As she exited the car, her nose went into overdrive, sniffing the scents of a new location. I watched through the prison’s front window as she hopped back in the car, which then pulled away and faded out of sight.
Nearly two months later—four-and-a-half months into my 16-month sentence—a three-judge panel ordered my immediate release from prison pending the final outcome of my appeal, one of the rarest turn of events that can occur in the legal system.
Sarah drove to pick me up. Five hours after the judicial order was posted, I walked into my kitchen, surprising our sons, who giddily jumped into my arms. A few seconds later, Oakley came bounding into the kitchen, head bobbing, ears twitching, tail wagging. As Sarah, our sons, and I embraced in the happiest of family hugs, Oakley joined in, too, standing on her hind legs as she placed her front paws against me.
That night, after I tucked both boys into bed, before I climbed into bed next to Sarah, I lay down next to Oakley in the spot where I’d said a goodbye she hadn’t understood. I weathered three-and-a-half years of a harrowing prosecution and four-and-a-half months of incarceration. What was Oakley’s sense of time? How had she registered my absence? I nuzzled my forehead against the top of her head. I like to think she was feeling the same thing I was—grateful, for a moment, to be in the blissful present.
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