#bobney

[rafasbiscuits]

there was something happening with them on season 1 that needs further investigation.

[ledenews]

Today’s Bob Ney – Part 2 – ‘I Needed to Survive”

(Publisher’s Note: This article is the second of a two-part series written by new contributing writer Dimitri Vassilaros. Vassilaros hosts “Dimitri - Live & Dangerously Local!” on River Talk – Ohio Valley 100.1/100.9FM and AM1290/1430 each week Monday through Wednesday from 7-9 a.m.)Mom was in a Wheeling hospital. Perforated colon. Might not make it.That was the news delivered by Bob Ney’s sister the same evening he left a Cleveland alcohol rehab center after just three days.His mother, though, somehow survived. After visiting her in the hospital, Ney headed back home that night from West Virginia when he saw a familiar interstate exit in Ohio that was the shortest route to his favorite bar in Cambridge.It was well before midnight. He was alone in the bar’s parking lot. Ney said that he was planning to go in to drink because “Mom lived.” He knew he would have done the same had she died.“I’m three days sober, whoop-de-do,” Ney said to himself. He calls that the start of his “bright-light moment.”“I’m like, oh my God, I’m insane. What the hell’s wrong with me? There is something horribly, horribly wrong with me. I’m about to go in there. I know what I’m about to do,” Ney said.Ney joined President George W. Bush for the signing of the Help Americans Vote Act.But he didn’t take that first step toward the bar. Instead, Ney started calling other recovery centers and found an affordable one that would accept him as an outpatient.Ney started going to recovery meetings about that time.In the first 90 days of his journey to find sobriety, Ney said that he attended at least 360 recovery meetings. When he wasn’t at a meeting, he was stuffing 693 boxes with his worldly possessions to take them out of the home that the mortgage company soon would repossess.Even though he had stopped drinking and had begun to address the underlying causes and conditions that triggered his desire for alcohol, life started to become more challenging.Ney had lost most of his material possessions. And now, being homeless, he couch-surfed in the homes of family and friends for about two months before heading to Morgantown. But there was one issue that was more embarrassing to Ney than all the other trials he’d endured. And it was announced at that very public pre-trial hearing; Ney was insolvent.Humiliations continued to pile on during his incarceration, long after the initial body-cavity search. The head counselor of the prison’s drug-and-alcohol recovery program was stern with a biting sense of humor.She told her celebrity inmate “You ran the House, but you couldn’t run your own house.”One of the inmates blamed his imprisonment on Ney.“Hey! You that congressman? You put me in here.” he said to Ney. Sponsoring even one anti-drug bill that can be a tool for law enforcement to arrest and convict users and sellers does not make former congressmen popular in federal prisons. At least, not at the Morgantown facility.“I was dejected, broke and nervous,” Ney said. But he didn’t drink or drugs, even though almost any prisoner there could get just about any illegal substance if he wanted it badly enough, he said.This recovery coin was given to Ney a few days after he stopped drinking back in 2006.Ney also was committed to attending the prison drug and alcohol recovery program, which included grueling group therapy, and raw rigorous honesty in front of a captive audience of 59 other addicts. Ney said he had had so many resentments that they could be computerized. He had much to say at those meetings. And his cellmates freely offered scathing tough-love feedback after he spoke.Ney decided that the first step to solving his prison problem was the same one that he was using for his drinking problem; “I needed to survive, one day at a time,” he said.Ney also embraced the prison philosophy of “be friends with everybody, but don’t be friends with anybody.”Ney completed his sentence, but he hasn’t stopped working on his daily reprieve from alcoholism. He now believes that there’s no such thing as a “functional alcoholic,” even though Ney thought he was one before the scandal.“It’s beyond stopping,” Ney said. “You need behavioral change. Alcoholics are not bad people, just sick ones. Recovery is medicine.”Ney stopped drinking on September 13, 2006. He knows he could start tomorrow. The 24-hour recovery coin that he accepted a few days after he stopped remains tucked safely in his wallet.It reads “… this road is a long one, but together, all of us as one, will win back our self-respect and begin walking our new road to this beautiful thing called life.”That coin gradually embossed itself on one side of Ney’s bi-fold wallet. It’s stark relief for anyone who feels that serenity is priceless.Ney offers to help other alcoholics, including being a sponsor - a type of guide or mentor to help steer a newcomer away from his current mindset and towards a sober one.Ney co-sponsored the Help Americans Vote Act, and he received a "Thank You" phone call from President Jimmy Carter after its passage.The lessons that Ney learned in the prison recovery program still are useful. He tells those who he sponsors not to play him if they don’t want recovery. Be honest. Develop a sense of gratitude for what they have.When Ney is having a bad day, he thinks about the juice and the raisins at that hospital in Afghanistan that his congressional delegation had visited.The unit included 10 severely malnourished Afghan children who drank from juice bottles and ate raisins to help them stay alive. As a gesture of profound gratitude for the aid that America had given that tortured pile of rocks in South Central Asia, the mothers of those near-starving kids offered Ney and their other foreign guests some of their children’s juice bottles and raisins.After Ney translated what the moms were saying, everyone in his group wept.When there is a temptation to drink, Ney said to think of the worst thing you’ve ever seen in order to be grateful, juice bottles and raisins, for instance. “Stay in the moment,” he said. An attitude of gratitude, in program-speak.Mere fender-benders also can be life collisions.Ney said that in order for him to stay alive, to survive, and to thrive, he still makes many meetings. If there’s one key to his survival, it is this: “Meeting makers make it.”Now, leading by example is how he’s going to show them, and how he’s going to teach them.“I think it is the right thing to do,” Ney said.https://ledenews.com/todays-bob-ney-part-1-things-collide-in-life/

[ledenews]

Today’s Bob Ney – Part 1 – ‘Things Collide in Life’

(Publisher’s Note: This article is the first of a two-part series written by new contributing writer Dimitri Vassilaros. Vassilaros hosts “Dimitri - Live & Dangerously Local!” on River Talk – Ohio Valley 100.1/100.9FM and AM1290/1430 Monday through Wednesday from 7-9 a.m.)As the Feds were closing in, U.S. Congressman Bob Ney was going to execute his exit strategy the next day.The plan was to wear a Republican blue suit with a red tie, take a weekday drive from his home in Ohio to Washington D.C., bring two envelopes, each with the same angry screed trashing President George W. Bush, and political advisor Karl Rove, and saying the Iraq War was a setup.“Everything! I was going to show them. I was going to teach them,” Ney said.After arriving at the Department of Justice, Ney was going to put one of the envelopes in his suit pocket and the other on the ground, right before he pulled out his Smith & Wesson Bodyguard J-frame revolver to kill himself.“I thought it was the right thing to do,” Ney said.Although Ney was a member of the Congressional Class of 1995, he was the chair of the House Administration and that's why he's on the bottom left of this framed photo in the former lawmaker's home.The former Bellaire altar boy had come a long way from his days at St. John’s Catholic Church, where he would sneak his first sips of wine somewhere behind the altar. His analysis of the situation was that he had fewer than nine seconds of privacy while the priest was busy changing his garments.“Here’s the big principle of the thing: I didn’t just take a sip of wine. I counted how long it would take. Within those 8 1/2 seconds, I opened it, took a swig, put the thing back, so I wouldn’t be caught. That was more important than taking the drink,” Ney said.He was 11 years old.As Ney was going to school at Ohio University, and then at The Ohio State University (“Where everybody drank.”), he also had volunteered to help the Republican Party on college campuses. Ney didn’t realize he had started on a career path within the GOP. But after graduation, with just a few hundred dollars in his bank account, and no job prospects teaching history in the Upper Ohio Valley, Ney thought “screw it.”He considered a career path detour of roughly 6,700 miles. To Iran.Ney was teaching and tutoring there for less than a year when the Iranian Revolution drove him back home. Ohio’s Republican governor gave him a government job, and from there, it led Ney to public service in Columbus, and then, to Washington, D.C.As fate would have it, his exposure to the languages and religions of the Middle East during the late ‘70s was helpful years later after he pleaded guilty in 2006 to the falsification of federal documents.Ney climbed the ladder in the U.S. House during his 11 years in the nation's capital.During his 30-month prison sentence at the Federal Correctional Institution in Morgantown, W.Va., Ney taught Black Muslim inmates how to properly say their prayers in Arabic.“Things collide in life,” Ney said. “Big-ass collisions.”One of the biggest was the Jack Abramoff influence-peddling corruption investigation. By 2006, the collateral damage included convictions of almost two dozen lobbyists, congressional aides, and politicians: including one from Bellaire. Ney was facing the end of his political career, and maybe his life. But there was no end to his drinking.“You rationalize it in your mind. I would make rules about not drinking. I would lay off; not drink for two nights in a row. It doesn’t work unless you stop (permanently). You always go back to where you stop, and then you catch up,” Ney said.During the Abramoff investigation, Ney drank in the evenings at home for about two years, bottles and cans of bourbon and beer. Vodka, too. And yet, it seemed to him that he was functioning very efficiently during the day.Ney's campaign account had been drained bone-dry to pay his legal team about a half million dollars. And in the opinion of his pollster, after the public learned of the scandal, “Mickey Mouse will beat you in the primary election.”And if Ney had planned on pleading ‘not guilty,’ fighting the feds would have cost $3.2 million in legal fees. And if he had lost, the additional cost was an untold number of years in prison.There were free trips, front-row tickets, and plenty of booze for Ney while working with shamed lobbyist Jack Abramoff.His kids had told Dad that “We can lose you for 18 months: we can’t lose you for 10 years.” So, Ney offered to plead guilty and take the 18-month prison sentence. The judge, a Bill Clinton nominee, tacked on 12 more months.Ney told his attorney, “My kids would be better off if I’m dead.”His children would get the rest of Ney’s congressional salary. And while in office, he was insured for more than a million dollars. “Plus, I was drinking so much, I couldn’t make sense of anything,” Ney said.“(The drinking) progressively escalated my entire adult life, but then, it just became … the solution. You drink until you black out, then, you don’t have the issue anymore. You’re sleeping. Then, you wake up, and it starts all again the next day.“The pressure was intense, and the alcohol was rampant. I was at the end of my rope, and I decided to kill myself.”His attorneys and a close friend suggested that driving to an in-patient rehab facility in Cleveland was the better route to take. Ney was ready to surrender his drinking and his freedom.But, at the first meeting, his thoughts included, “What am I doing here? I don’t belong here.” Ney compared himself quite favorably to the other attendees. After all, none had been in Congress, and probably none had gone on junkets to exotic lands such as Afghanistan.After learning that his insurance coverage would not pay for more than three days of rehab, Ney drove back home after the third day.But then his sister called that night.(Part 2 will be published tomorrow morning.)