January 15, 2001

Dear Ms. Chan,

I've been following the McCorkle case, and looked forward to Dateline's
follow-up show about it.

I knew from having seen some of the original infomercials that William
McCorkle was a slippery character, but the depth of Chantal's complicity in
the scam was not so clear to me:  either she knew everything and was just as
actively amoral as William, or she was, like so many young wives, really on
the fringe of her husband's profession.  I hoped Dateline would provide
clarification.  And I assumed that Dateline's purpose in introducing an
interview with Chantal, was to shed new light on her role in the scam
operation.

It was quite disappointing, therefore, to see myself watching what was
really an editorial opinion.  Actually, the Dateline show reminded me
somewhat of William's infomercials, where he put together visuals and
aurals as needed to build a believable picture of what he wanted the viewer
to think and believe, without much regard to truth.

It's an unfortunate reality in the U.S. that stretching and twisting the
truth, in commercials, is an acceptable practice.  William McCorkle's ads
aren't any more immoral than standard TV commercials, in picturing a falsity
as truth, or offering more than the buyer gets.  Smoke a Marlboro, for
example, and you're automatically a he-man, an independent thinker, a
courageous loner, etc.  Buy a car and you get a beautiful landscape to go
with it.  Just about any major commercial is misleading, and we expect it.
They entertain us and we want to buy what they're offering underneath the
surface product:  sex, money, prestige, power; the myth sells the product.
William's lies are in line with ad industry practice.  So if he hadn't
actually scammed people of their money, the ads wouldn't have been
questioned.  But your show put most of its emphasis on how he lied in his
ads, how he hired actors, etc., and Chantal's complicity in the making of
such ads.  Yet no one these days expects to see the truth when they watch a
commercial.  They expect to see hype, to be entertained.

Dateline's presentation of Chantal last night was that, oh my gosh, she was
in on this kind of advertising.  But I wasn't convinced, watching the show,
that she was doing anything other than what hundreds of ad agency actors
do -- she was following William's direction, literally.  She's from England,
and I say that only because in that country they're not used to our kind of
hustle -- I'm not sure it's even allowed on their television -- and so when
William must have said to her, "Well, this is the usual selling technique
that's done in the States, and I know how to do it well," I can see his wife
going along with it, especially when she sees all the money rushing in
afterwards.  It's logical too that a slick pitchman such as William could
have conned his own wife.  Her participation may have been callous, or even
cynical, but my impression is that she was tickled by the absurdity of it,
believing that her husband was right when he said he knew what he was doing.

The crime itself wasn't covered very well, other than to state that William
didn't invest as he promised, and that he didn't give back many of the
refunds as promised.  Her knowledge of the extent of that might or might not
have been deep.  I know that with AT&T, for example, parts of the company
literally doesn't know what other parts are doing.  It's the problem of the
day with "fractured" companies, especially ones that rely on
telecommunications with clients, such as cruise lines, phone companies,
computer outfits.  Chantal might well have been simply an office manager who
was drawn into acting in William's infomercials because she would follow a
script and was good looking -- and was low-cost.  An office manager doesn't
necessarily read the things that she files away.  Her job is to make sure
they're filed in the right places.  Get coffee.  That kind of thing.  But
the Dateline follow-up did not clarify this issue.

The Dateline show did not illuminate the depth of Chantal's knowledge or
participation in the actual criminal behavior.  Even money laundering is not
a strange activity, when you aren't aware that there's a shuck-and-slide
going on:  you're just sending what you think is legitimate money to a bank
outside the United States.  Was she aware?  I don't know any more now than
before Dateline aired.

The interview takes with Chantal themselves made me a little uneasy.  There
was little sense of flow -- it was quite choppy.  So I would say to myself
just after she made a comment, "She just said yes, but it looked like she
was going to add something, but then we hear another question, and another
yes or no, but then she's cut off again.  What was in her mind?  What was
she going to say that was edited out?  How would she have elucidated her
answers?"  I'm afraid that the entire interview sequence, as Dateline
presented it, served only to inform me of what her natural hair color is
when she's incarcerated, and that she was sorry.  I was hoping for more.

But the main disappointment with Dateline was that it was simply a
commercial against the McCorkles instead of a commercial for them.  Lots of
cutting and pasting, lots of use of other peoples' in-takes and out-takes,
trying to establish a mood-flow:  exactly what William McCorkle was doing in
his own sleazy infomercials, Dateline was doing too!

Finally, I was puzzled by two things the prosecuting attorney had said on
Dateline.  Even with the show's choppy presentation, they didn't jive with
the Chantal that Dateline was showing the viewer.

The first was his comment that Chantal had said she was the brains behind
William.  Yet the show presented us with a callous, daffy air-head Chantal
who couldn't even pronounce or remember the names of the friends and actors
they used for the infomercials.  It simply didn't jive and only made me more
confused.  And if she had actually said it, on tape, why didn't Dateline air
the audio or the visual tape?  Was the prosecuting attorney basing his
statement on hearsay, maybe on a statement made by one of the hired actors?
And even assuming she had said something like Mr. Byron asserted, what did
that really mean?  There was no follow-up of verbal or visual explanation of
such a damning statement in the show.  I began to suspect him, not her.

The second statement of Mr. Byron's televised on Dateline that bothered me
was his opinion that twenty-four years without chance of parole was what
Chantal deserved.

I know someone who, in his twenties, committed a crime that under the
current mandatory sentencing laws could have given him a sentence like
Chantal's.  But he got out of prison after serving four years.  He told me
he changed in prison, that he knew he was going to get out, and so he did
some hard thinking, and changed his approach to life.  When he got out, he
could only get a job driving cabs.  He drove a cab for six years straight.
During that time, he got a GED and put himself through junior college and
then college.  He's now a marvelously sweet, law-abiding, talented man who
is contributing to the wealth of our society.

That man had a chance because he had hope.  But Chantal's sentence is cruel
because it takes away not only the fertile years of her life, but hope
itself.  When Chantal gets out, she'll be a 54-year-old ex-convict,
institutionalized, bitter, not able to bear children, unemployable.  There's
no hope for her.  She'll be deported to England, where, her parents long in
the grave, she'll subsist on welfare until death finally takes her.

How can a nice-mannered man like Mr. Byron casually say that she got what
she deserved?  No one deserves to have their hope of an amended life taken
away.  It's better to kill a person than to condemn them to a life without
hope.  Mr. Byron's statement has nothing to do with justice.  It was on a
level of callous cruelty that matches William McCorkle's indifference to the
poor people he was stealing from.  It frightens me that a U.S. attorney has
such anger beneath his skin.  It made me wonder whether they used the
laundry laws as revenge rather than for a just resolution to a crime.  This
suspicion is believable because William McCorkle made little effort to meet
the settlement which was negotiated with the government; which is akin to
thumbing your nose at a heavyweight boxer:  he's going to come at you with
big fists a'flyin'.  The result is a terrible beating and even that doesn't
take away the anger.

It's also scary because Mr. Byron's judgment reflects the laissez-faire
views we have in the U.S. about imprisonment.  We're afraid to face the
complexity of dealing with criminals.  We just seem to want to put them away
and forget that they are going to cause us future problems if we don't try
something other than mere warehousing.  Dateline did not state the ironic
cost to our society of this kind of sentencing:  warehousing Chantal
McCorkle for twenty-four years will cost U.S. taxpayers, including the ones
who were ripped off, at least a half million dollars.  But no one is a hero
in this story:  neither the prosecution, the defense lawyers, the convicts.
. . nor, evidently, the journalists.  Forgive me, Ms. Chan, for I don't mean
to insult you, but I was disappointed in Dateline's presentation.

As a post-script, I'm reminded of Christ's doing what society in his day
would not do:  he welcomed Paul, the greedy tax collector, ruiner of many
families, into his inner circle of friends.  He gave Paul hope for a
different way of living.  The turnaround was amazing.  Between you and me,
Ms. Chan, I pray that Chantal McCorkle is also visited by an angel, because
it looks like our society is going to continue throwing stones at people
like her.

Sincerely,


David Rogers
4600 J.C. Nichols Pkwy, #610
Kansas City, MO 64112
816-756-0686
http://dave-rogers.home.att.net