He Turned Himself In to the FBI Before He Had a Lawyer. The Judge Gave Him 5 Years Instead of 12.

I had just finished a long run along Temescal Canyon in Pacific Palisades. I was at my friend Brad Fulmer's house when my phone rang.

A man I'd never met was on the line. "Hey man," he said, "I read Lessons From Prison." This was 2011. I was a terrible marketer back then, so how he found the book, I still don't know.

Then he told me why he was calling. He'd just left the FBI office. He didn't have a lawyer. He'd already turned himself in. Could we meet?

I said yes. An hour later we sat down, and he walked me through why he did it.

I helped him find a lawyer, Mark Werksman. Even Mark said it: this doesn't happen a lot. People called the man crazy. Nuts, some said, for walking in before anyone forced him to.

About two years later he stood in front of a judge for sentencing. The judge told him: "I'm giving you five years instead of 12, like your co-defendants, because of your early action."

Seven years. That's the distance between the man who walked in on his own and the co-defendants who didn't.

What the judge was actually weighing

I want to be careful here, because it would be easy to read this and think turning yourself in guarantees a lighter sentence. It doesn't work that way, and no lawyer, including Mark, can promise you a judge will respond the way this one did.

Federal judges are required to weigh a defendant's history and conduct, including what he did after he became aware of the investigation, under the general sentencing factors at 18 U.S.C. § 3553(a). Walking in before an indictment forces your hand is one way that conduct shows up in front of a judge. It's not a formula. It's not automatic. It's one fact among many that a judge can weigh however he decides to weigh it, and every judge is different.

What I can tell you is what I watched happen. A man who could have waited, could have hired a lawyer first, could have let the government come find him, made a different choice. Two years later, that choice was the reason the judge gave for the number he read out loud.

The part I wouldn't tell you to copy

He met with me and told me his whole story before he had a lawyer sitting next to him. I wouldn't recommend that to anyone reading this right now. If you're under investigation, or you think you might be, talk to a lawyer before you talk to anyone else, including federal agents. What worked out for this man doesn't make it the safe move for you. His outcome and his decision to go in without counsel already in place are two separate things, and only one of them is something I'd tell you to do.

More than 400 people, all making this call differently

That story is part of why I sat down with my friend Ron Chapman, a healthcare lawyer, for a live YouTube conversation about the healthcare fraud sweep that produced six and a half billion dollars in indictments against more than 400 defendants.

Some of those defendants are going to walk in the way the man in this story did, because they want the best outcome they can get. Others are going to trial. Some will cooperate. Some won't. Some are going to double down and make it worse. Every one of those decisions is playing out right now, across hundreds of separate cases.

If you're going through a government investigation, or you want to understand how the government works, how to respond, how the government thinks, watch the conversation here:

[Watch the Short here]