Ex-Con’s Mission: Keeping Teens Out of Prison
As a champion hang glider and skydiver, Rich Pfeiffer sailed to record-breaking heights and performed dizzying stunts before plummeting like Icarus into a sea of drug abuse.
His fall caused Pfeiffer, a former U.S. Navy SEAL, to serve two years in prison for armed robbery.
Today, the same competitive drive that led Pfeiffer to earn seven U.S. championships and set several world records in skydiving and hang-gliding competitions has helped him overcome his drug addiction and turn his life around.
Beating tremendous odds and surprising even the judge who sentenced him, Pfeiffer went to college after his release from prison, graduated from law school and passed the state bar. He’s now a Tustin attorney who devotes his spare time to helping those like himself who have landed on the wrong side of the law.
Pfeiffer volunteers for several organizations that provide mentors to prison inmates and recent parolees, as well as a program to deter young offenders at risk of ending up in jail. He does so because he doesn’t want his years of incarceration to go to waste.
“The time I spent in prison was too painful to throw away,” he said.
One recent Wednesday evening, Pfeiffer had landed behind bars again. This time, he went with four other ex-convicts to a holding cell at Justice Center in Newport Beach as volunteers in an Orange County Bar Foundation program called Shortstop. Their mission: to tell a dozen teenagers, all first-time offenders, what it’s like in prison. They spared no details in their effort to scare the youths out of committing future crimes.
“We’re here because the pain we went through and the pain we put our families through was so great, we don’t want anyone else to go through it,” Pfeiffer told the teens.
A Daredevil With a Bookish Look
With his slight build and wire-rimmed glasses, the 45-year-old Pfeiffer looked every inch the bookish attorney, not the daredevil stuntman who leaped from airplanes and cliffs or the ex-con who survived brutal stints in county jail and state prison.
“He doesn’t have a hardened look about him, and that adds to the impact,” said Leslie Wolf, program director of Volunteers in Parole in Orange County who recommends speakers for Shortstop.
Pfeiffer studied a list that showed which crime each youth had committed. Most offenses were shoplifting, possession of marijuana and burglary--the kind of behavior that led to his own incarceration:
“I became a drug addict, and that led to stealing,” he said. “My biggest fear is that you guys are getting off so easy, you might not learn your lesson.”
Pfeiffer described how, in prison, inmates had to fight to hang on to every possession. He told how they had to join in prison brawls whether they wanted to or not, and how the guards, instead of protecting inmates, set up those brawls.
“If you’re in a tiny cell with a bigger person, you’re going to do what he says,” Pfeiffer said. “And every time you’re outside your cell, every time you go into the exercise yard or you go to the cafeteria, you have to watch your back. I know one inmate who got stabbed in the ear with a pencil and he died. It’s when you’re with the other inmates that you’ve got to watch out.”
Another ex-con unleashed a graphic description of men preying on one another. By the time the volunteers finished speaking, most of the teens were wide-eyed with fear. One boy who had made the mistake of smirking at the beginning of the program sat in silence.
Pfeiffer was upbeat about the evening’s success: He figured they scared 10 of the 12 teens.
Like the youths in Shortstop, Pfeiffer never saw prison coming, not from high in the sky where he dangled from parachutes and hang gliders.
Pfeiffer had always been a risk taker.
At age 18, he had joined the elite U.S. Navy SEAL (Sea, Air, Land) team, but even skydiving, scuba diving and “playing with explosives” didn’t offer enough excitement. He served in the Navy from 1971 to 1976, then left to join a 10-man skydiving team.
In the late ‘70s and ‘80s he earned five U.S. national championships in skydiving and two in hang gliding and set several world records for various feats in both sports. He wrote a book on hang gliding that was published in five languages.
In 1979, he linked up with 50 skydivers in the air--a record at the time. His stunts were featured on the TV show “That’s Incredible.”
In 1980, he flew his hang glider over the Rose Bowl--during the Rose Bowl game. When he landed on a golf course next to the stadium, he was arrested for the first time in his life, but all charges were dropped.
In the end, it wasn’t gravity but cocaine that sent him crashing to earth: He got hooked while partying on the hang-gliding circuit, where coke was plentiful. Some athletes would transport the drug in the hollow aluminum rods of their gliders.
“I’d never done drugs, but I started winning world championships, and everyone would want to party with me,” he said. “I learned [addiction] could happen to anybody.”
Soon he couldn’t stop using.
In January 1989, short of cash to feed his drug habit, he went into a Santa Ana convenience store and grabbed money out of a cash register. He was arrested and charged with armed robbery because he had a razor blade knife in his pocket. He hadn’t touched the weapon during the robbery, but it was enough to get him a six-year prison term.
He served two years and four months at Chino and Jamestown state prisons.
While in prison, he kicked his drug addiction with the support of the prison ministry offered by the Friends Outside program of the Orange County Council of St. Vincent de Paul.
“They helped me and my family get back together again,” Pfeiffer said.
After his release in 1991, he had two vital things many ex-cons lack: a home and a job. He reunited with his ex-wife, who had divorced him after his arrest, and went to work at a manufacturing company she owned. His family then made some financial sacrifices, and he was able to go to college.
Pfeiffer’s natural drive and determination turned to academic achievement. He enrolled in Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, graduating with a 4.0 grade point average in 1993.
Judge Helps Him Enter Law School
When he first applied to law schools, none would take him because of his criminal background. He was eventually accepted by Western State University College of Law in Fullerton after the school received a letter on his behalf from U.S. District Judge David O. Carter, formerly the presiding criminal judge of Orange County.
Carter had given Pfeiffer the original maximum 15- to 21-year prison sentence for his armed robbery conviction, but his decision was reversed on appeal and the sentence shortened to six years because the judge failed to consider whether Pfeiffer qualified for a drug rehabilitation program in the state prison.
“I’d maxed him out,” Carter said. “He told me he was going to make it, but I hear that from thousands of defendants.”
Pfeiffer, however, became a “model probationer,” Carter said.
“He completed junior college in one year, and that was unheard of. He seemed very sincere. That caused me to take a second look.”
Pfeiffer received several law school scholarships and in 1995 graduated from Western State in the top 20% of his class. Still, the legal community was reluctant to allow him to practice law because of the gravity of his offense.
“When I was going for my bar license, they asked, ‘Don’t you find something wrong with a criminal being a representative of the court?’ And I said, ‘Who better?’ ” Pfeiffer said.
The state bar requires those who practice law to have good moral character. If they have been convicted of a felony, they have to show the ethics committee that they’ve been rehabilitated. Judge Carter again came to his aid, appearing before state bar examiners in Los Angeles to vouch for Pfeiffer’s character.
“He’d done more than any prisoner I’d seen in terms of rehabilitating himself,” Carter said. “I’ve taken chances with my career before, and this time I told the examiners the same thing I wrote in my letter of recommendation [to the law school]: That America was a place for second chances for those who sincerely want to change.”
‘Law Is a Sport I Can Compete In’
Pfeiffer was accepted to the state bar, and in 1995 he began to practice law.
For two years, he has performed trial and appellate work in criminal and child dependency cases; often, he defends clients who have lost their children or committed crimes because of drugs or alcohol abuse. He’s a panel attorney for Appellate Defenders Inc. in San Diego, the same office he used to win his appeal.
The walls of his Tustin office are decorated with his diplomas, professional awards and medals for his hang-gliding and skydiving championships.
“I thrive on competition, and law is a sport I can compete in until I’m 80,” he said.
Pfeiffer occasionally represents needy clients for free or on an ability-to-pay basis, especially if he thinks they’ve been treated unfairly by the system.
Through a statewide nonprofit program called Volunteers in Parole Inc., which matches attorneys with new parolees from the California Department of Corrections, he has helped several ex-cons try to build new lives.
“They have all lost families, lost everything they’ve ever had in life,” he said. “They come out of prison with $200, no job and no house.”
Pfeiffer visits the parolees, offering friendship and advice on getting an education and a job.
“A lot of times I don’t want to trust people. But Rich has been really honest and upfront. I’ve found a good friend,” said Greg Sullivan, a Tustin resident who was matched with Pfeiffer through Volunteers in Parole.
Sullivan was paroled eight months ago after being in and out of prison for 6 1/2 years on drug-related charges. Now he’s clean and has a job driving heavy equipment.
“Rich is always offering to have me come to his house. I get to fit in with people. A lot of parolees don’t have that,” Sullivan said.
He even found himself schmoozing with lawyers and judges at Pfeiffer’s Christmas party.
“They just think I’m another lawyer,” Sullivan joked.
Volunteers in Parole director Wolf considers Pfeiffer an ideal mentor because he’s seen the legal system from both sides.
“He’s been through the system. He’s experienced what parolees are experiencing now. He can help them learn how to cope. He beat a lot of the odds,” Wolf said. “He’s doing this not to get anything out of it, but to help someone else out who’s in a difficult position.”
Pfeiffer has volunteered with Friends Outside almost since the day he stepped out of prison, serving on the board the past six years. In addition to the ministry, the program offers job placement, mentoring, legal help, parenting and anger management classes and peer support to inmates and their families.
“Rich is a wealth of information for us. He’s a professional I can call who has a criminal background and legal knowledge,” said Sandi Burns, director of Friends Outside in Santa Ana. “He sees the need and has the compassion, because he’s been there.”
Pfeiffer writes to three to five inmates a week through Friends Outside.
“I send them letters to let them recognize they’re a person and they’ll have a future,” he said. “These programs aren’t for everybody. They’re for the few people who want to change.”
He also visits inmates in county jails.
Most ex-convicts want to forget their past and stay far away from prison cells, but Pfeiffer believes it helps him stay on the right side of the law.
“It’s good to see where you’ll go if you use drugs again,” he said. “It reminds me where I was. I can’t forget that, because I don’t ever want to go back.”
Attorneys interested in participating in Volunteers in Parole can call the Santa Ana office at (714) 567-2839. Friends Outside needs funding for programs that assist inmates and their families. Call (714) 288-5600. For information about Shortstop, call the Orange County Bar Foundation in Irvine at (714) 480-1925.