No Entiendo: From Conviction to Convention

"I got out of the pool and I had fifty guns pointed at me." That is a good sentence. He said it on camera. It is not what happened. On the night of 22 June 2023, Michael Wittenberg - a Long Island event producer three days into the eighth destination trade show of his career - signed for a pallet in a resort parking lot in Punta Cana at twenty-five minutes to three in the morning. He had not packed it. He had never seen inside it. Fifteen narcotics agents were waiting. What followed was eighteen months in Najayo 20, a prison of eight hundred men where six in ten had been convicted of nothing. Five or six men to a cell. Water for a few minutes twice a day. Drinking water delivered once a week. He lost a house, a business, a marriage, a quarter of a million dollars and a hundred and four pounds. His mother was diagnosed with cancer the day after his arrest and flew to see him seven times, once for six weeks, between chemotherapy treatments. His father, whom he had barely spoken to in twenty-five years, came back into his life and died while he was inside. And the documents - an invoice, an air waybill, a customs declaration, a laboratory certificate - sat in a file the whole time, in a language he could not read, agreeing with each other to the cent. NO ENTIENDO is not a story about an innocent man. It is a harder and more useful book than that: a full accounting, built on the paper, by a man who went back and checked which parts of his own story he had gotten wrong. "Did I know for a fact it was in the pallet? No. I thought it was a possibility. Was I stupid or ignorant? Yeah. I was not guilty. There is a difference." - CBS News New York, January 2025 Told with the court file, the emails, the phone calls and the photographs he was not supposed to take.