ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, March 4, 1996 TAG: 9603040001
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LESLIE TAYLOR STAFF WRITER
note: above
FOR THE FIRST time in years, Cheryl Benson Perry had a traditional family celebration this past Christmas at home - instead of in a visiting room in federal prison.
Her face is softer now.
The helmet of near-black hair that once stiffly surrounded her face, that led one news reporter to describe her as "matronly," is gone. The hair is lighter, a warm brown.
She appears smaller than five years ago, when she sat stone-faced in U.S. District Court in Roanoke, awaiting sentencing for bank embezzlement.
Prison changes a person, Cheryl Benson Perry said, laughing. It is a sad chuckle, born not of humor but of pain.
Perry's life descended in 1991 from diamond rings and lavish spending to federal prison. That year, she began serving a 50-month sentence for embezzling $2.5 million from Charter Federal Savings Bank.
It was the largest bank embezzlement in 34 years in Virginia. Her heavily publicized crime became the stuff of local folklore - not necessarily for the amount of money she took but for the targets of her theft - elderly people with whom she had fostered trusting relationships.
Perry, 51, agreed to an interview last month over her husband's objections.
"He said, 'You know people in Roanoke hate you. You're going to go through this again?''' she said. "But it's just something I feel like I need to do. There is not a day that I don't think about what I did. I've done my time, but it's always going to be there."
Perry said she can hear the whispers, detect the pointing and stares, imagined or not. More often, they are not - the man who called the newspaper, incensed that Perry was working for an agency that was supported in part by public money; the two women on the street whose gazes she could not shake the day her photograph accompanied a front-page newspaper story about white-collar crime.
"I can't judge them for the way they act or react," she said. "They're entitled to that."
Perry remembers little about Sunday, Sept. 29, 1991. She, her husband, daughter, stepson and stepdaughter drove to Lexington, Ky., that day. Perry was scheduled to report to the federal women's prison in Lexington at noon the following day.
It might have been a good time, she said. She can't recall. The memories have been lost somewhere in the fear of what was to come.
Perry remembers Monday, Sept. 30. She remembers the barbed-wire fences. She remembers walking through a metal detector. She remembers handing over her belongings and watching as the hardback cover was ripped off her prayer journal. It was considered contraband, she explained.
"I can see the hurt and I can see my 13-year-old and they are crying and I'm trying to be so brave and I do like this," she said, tapping her fore and middle fingers under her chin. "Chins up."
She remembers being escorted to a holding cell, stripped, given a uniform and bedroll and taken to her unit. She remembers being told what to do, when to do it and how to do it.
More than anything, Perry remembers her inmate number - as easily as she does her Roanoke phone number and address.
``02539084,'' she said. "I'll never forget it."
Perry was assigned to a 35-person "bus stop," a huge room with bunk beds lining two walls. She shared quarters with women serving sentences equal to hers, and with others serving life terms.
Perry said she kept to herself, finding escape in work at the prison library and playing the piano at prison chapel services on Sundays.
"I was not used to women physically fighting," she said. "You're trying to have lunch one day. You look to your left, and there is a woman taking one of those metal napkin holders and beating another woman in the face. But you don't see anything."
As much as Perry tried to block out the activity around her, she could not completely retreat from others. On her fourth day at Lexington, she said, she was "physically knocked around" by two inmates who were trying to steal money and stamps from her.
"My mind snapped, and I literally beat in a huge drink machine," Perry said. "It took four officers to contain me."
She was in protective custody for 12 days. The first two days, she did nothing but scream, she said. A psychologist recommended that she be transferred to another facility.
Seven months later, Perry was sent to a women's prison camp in Alderson, W.Va., a "college campus" compared with Lexington, she said.
She tutored, taught English as a second language, was president of a prison weight-loss group, took a firefighter training course.
"Once you're in prison and once you settle down - and it takes about a year - if you can just get beyond that 'When am I going to get out?''' Perry said. "Just do your time, get involved, stay very, very busy - and I did."
The punishment is not the confinement, Perry said; it is being separated from family.
"Your families are doing the time with you there," she said. "That's why it's best not to tell them a lot of the stuff that goes on in prison. My husband didn't know what happened to me in Lexington until years later. They don't need to be worrying."
Regular letters from her husband and daughter, and one former Charter Federal employee whom Perry declines to name, helped break the isolation, as did the telephone. Family connections were life-sustaining.
"People, when they're incarcerated, should be made to feel part of their family," Perry said. "You need to be part of the decision-making - if your daughter needs braces or if there's a problem in school.
"I've even heard inmates helping their children with homework over the telephone."
Perry worked for Charter Federal for 23 years. She rose from teller to vice president of operations at the bank's downtown Roanoke branch before her embezzlement was discovered in June 1990.
In February 1991, she pleaded guilty to making unauthorized withdrawals from the accounts of 47 customers and transferring the money into 20 single and jointly held accounts in her name and the names of relatives and friends. The scheme started in 1981.
The bank, which was bought by First American Federal Savings Bank last year, reimbursed the 47 accounts. Most of them belonged to elderly customers. Their average age was 80.
How Perry used the money puzzled people. She spent most of it on others.
She sent bouquets to fellow bank employees on almost every occasion or holiday. She spent $300,000 on a collection of rare dolls for her mother. She gave $65,000 to her church. She bought holiday decorations for Charter Federal's downtown Roanoke office. She gave away money to street people who walked into the Jefferson Street office looking for a handout.
Why?
"There was a need, and I tried to meet that need; and when the need kept growing, I let it continue," she said evenly. "It gave me a feeling of power. I was trying to be somebody I wasn't, playing a game. I felt that great a need. There was so much lacking in me."
Had Perry's crime continued, undetected, the weight of it eventually would have crushed her, she said.
"Even in my sick mind, I knew I couldn't continue it," she said.
She has never tried to contact the bank customers whose accounts she pilfered or their family members. The circumstances were just too messy, she said. But she has not forgotten those customers.
Nor have they forgotten her.
Perry took $64,000 from Charlie Paxton's savings account. At her sentencing, he said he hoped Perry would get 99 years. Contacted last month, the bitterness still seemed to be with him.
"I ain't saying nothing about that," he said.
Another customer, from whom Perry took nearly $50,000, said she always wondered about Perry's many diamond rings and necklaces and her fancy style of dress. The woman, who asked not to be named, said Perry always unsettled her, even before the embezzlement was discovered.
"But I've never had any animosity," the woman said. "No way have I had any bad feelings toward her.
"I didn't get real angry when it happened. I just got real sorry for her."
Perry was released from Alderson on Dec. 14, 1994, to a halfway house in Lebanon. She spent only three weeks there, then was placed on home confinement for the final five months of her sentence. She could leave home only to work, look for work, or for her twice-weekly mandatory visits to the halfway house.
People assigned to the halfway house were required to work and pay 25 percent of their income to the facility.
Reality hit when Perry started job-hunting. Employers shut her out. The closest she came to an offer was a call-back for a housekeeping job. It fell through.
Without a job, Perry could not pay the halfway house. Without the income, she would have violated conditions of the halfway house. Violating those conditions could have returned her to prison.
Feeling the pressure, Perry called a Washington and Lee University law professor who'd brought his students to Alderson to help inmates with legal matters. He suggested she contact Total Action Against Poverty's VA CARES, a program that helps released prisoners ease back into society.
VA CARES was looking for a full-time secretary to work for a new pilot program for unemployed or underemployed clients with children. Perry got the job.
Perry intended to work at VA CARES only until she finished serving her sentence last May. Last month, she marked her one-year anniversary as a VA CARES employee.
"I thought I would never work again," Perry said.
VA CARES participants can at first be standoffish when they meet her, Perry said. When they tell her their troubles of life after incarceration and she tells them she understands, they appear doubtful.
"Then I tell them that I did 50 months with the feds, and if I survived it, they can too," she said.
"I had one in the office who was just really devastated that he was not going to be able to do 41/2 months' house arrest. And I looked at him and said, 'If I did what I did at my age, you can do it standing on your head.'
"I've been there. I've walked the walk. I've been yelled at, screamed at, hollered at. I've been assigned a number that will be with me throughout life. I can't vote. I've been scared. I've been hurt."
LENGTH: Long : 186 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: DON PETERSEN/Staff. ``There is not a day that I don'tby CNBthink about what I did. I've done my time, but it's always going to
be there,'' Cheryl Benson Perry says. color KEYWORDS: PROFILE