Napa Valley Register's City Editor Gives His Thoughts About Ned Roscoe's Troubles

Kevin Courtney gives his thoughts on Ned's upcoming prison sentence (reprinted in full):

A friend goes to prison

In all the years I’ve been in journalism, I’ve never personally known a person who went to prison. This has given me the freedom to think the worst of such miscreants.

Of course they committed the crime. Of course they deserved to be locked up. Hurrah for the criminal justice system.

Only now there’s a twist. A friend of mine, Ned Roscoe, is going to the federal slammer.

When I first met Ned at a church social function nearly a dozen years ago, he was already notorious. His family owned the Cigarettes Cheaper! chain. Yes, Ned, an avowed non-smoker, was a high-volume tobacco merchant.

Worse yet, a libertarian tobacco merchant. For years, Cheaper! stores had assaulted customers with libertarian screeds printed on their shopping bags.

Ned Roscoe in the flesh did not come with an exclamation point. He was soft-spoken, impish, given to conversational flights of fancy that I found fascinating.

When Ned ran for governor of California in 2003 (this sounds improbable, but improbable is what you get with Ned), I spent a day as a reporter covering him on the campaign trail. We drove from one Cheaper! to another with Ned talking the whole time about public policy, classic literature and sundry musings.

Ned did not become governor — Arnold Schwarzenegger did — but our relationship evolved. We’d talk at least monthly after Sunday service.

About 10 years ago, the Cheaper! stores, of which Napa had two, disappeared overnight. Later, from news reports, I learned that the discount chain — 805 stores in 26 states —had financially imploded. Poof. They were all gone.

About the same time, Cheaper! was losing an expensive legal battle against the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co. The ciggie behemoth crushed the discount vender.

I caught only bits and pieces in our Sunday sidewalk chats. Bad things were happening to Ned, but he remained outwardly unflappable, the devout father and family man.

Then came the federal indictment, followed last year by a guilty verdict of jaw-dropping proportion: 13 counts of bank fraud, 14 counts of false statements to a bank, one count of conspiracy to commit bank fraud.

What the hell, Ned?

Ned knew what everyone in Napa was asking: Did you do it?

Just what was the “it”? Ned was found guilty of signing his name to inflated inventory evaluations that were submitted to a bank that had loaned millions to Cheaper! The effect was to prevent the bank from calling in loans as Cheaper!’s economic problems worsened.

While Ned was losing his home and facing years away from his wife and their three children, he continued to share shards of his life with me and many others. Not with bitterness, but philosophically and with humor.

In early February, Ned was sentenced in federal district court in San Jose to 60 months in prison. Improbably, the next day — the day after Armageddon — he and I went hiking in Tilden Park above Berkeley with a ranger whose forte was pointing out coyote scat.

The highlight of our outing? That was the moment Ned told the ranger he’d just been sentenced to prison. This news stopped the ranger in his tracks.

Ned does not feel guilty. A complex business-bank relationship went bad, but this should have been a civil matter, not criminal, he says. Further, no money was embezzled.

Because of his brash libertarianism and lifelong questioning of authority, Ned thinks forces conspired to finally put him in his place. “Someday you’ll get yours, Ned,” he quotes a childhood friend as saying.

When coming to terms with Ned and his legal smackdown, people split in their assessment of him. “There’s ‘nice Ned,’ but there’s also ‘nefarious Ned,’” he says. The FBI went with “nefarious Ned.”

I believe in nice Ned, the dedicated church volunteer and scoutmaster. The Ned who does Napa River cleanups on Earth Day. The Ned whose commitment to his family is inspirational.

To get ready for prison in May, Ned has read Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago.” While locked up, he plans to study engineering so when he gets out “I can speak with our Chinese overlords.”

This is a classic Ned line. Is he joking? Serious? A little of both?

If he’s a model prisoner, Ned’s 60-month sentence will shrink to 51 months. He’ll be out in August 2016.

I hope to be here to greet him.