I Love You Phillip Morris: A True Story of Life, Love, and Prison Breaks Hardcover – Jun 2003

The amazing true story of con man and escape artist Steven Russell is the stuff movies are made of. A sample escapade: To escape from a Texas prison, he dropped a green Magic Marker into a sink full of water, then dunked his prison-uniform pants. Combined with a stolen hospital shirt, the green-dyed pants looked like surgical scrubs. Guards assumed Russell was a visiting doctor, and let Russell walk out of prison.
The books is full of such highjinks, including Russell's love story with Phillip Morris, a scrawny miscreant he met at the Harris County Jail.
But most fascinating of all is the character study of a highly successful liar. Says Russell: "I'm persuasive because I understand and listen to people. I study everything about a person. No detail is too small. People love to talk, and I love to listen. Listening to a person is the key to being able to outwit them."

Had he come into the world 61 seconds earlier, he would have been born on Friday 13, a magic number for Steven Jay Russell, prison escape artist par excellence. That is the date he always chose to break out of prison if possible and the birthdate of his lover Phillip Morris in 1959 two years after the birth of Russell on September 14, 1957 in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. Morris, the son of a Baptist preacher, was born in Blythe, Arkansas. Journalist Steve McVicker recounts the wild ride of this latter-day Bonnie and Clyde duo through several states and about as many prisons. Russell, the escape artist, has the skill of Houdini and the charm of the fictional Tom Ridley.

Mr. McVicker got the bulk of his information from interviews with Russell whom the author says he never caught in a lie. To his credit, McVicker does not try to analyze the reasons for what Russell did-- after all he is not a psychologist but a jouralist-- but lets Russell tell the events as he remembers them. Neither does Russell spend any time contemplating his own motives. "I live in my own little world. I build walls around me to keep from getting hurt. I don't understand why I'm like this. I've never tried to analyze it. It takes a lot of bumps in the road before I am able to trust another person." According to Russell, he has an I.Q. of 163. "Studyng people is a large part of what I do. . . When I talk to someone, I watch their eyes to see if they're looking at me in the eye or if they're drifting off somewhere else. I have to know that I can trust them before I know I can get them to trust me."

Russell first exhibited unusual behavior shortly after his parents told him when he was nine that he was adopted but that he was special. He soon proceeded to torch a cousin's parents' garage. And as an adult, he remembers when he made a conscious decision to lead a life of crime. He had previously been married, had become a father and had run the family business, been a police officer-- before being arrested by a vice squad officer for solicitation for sex-- and even been a church organist.

It is almost as if Russell breaks out of prison multiple times for the sheer joy of outsmarting law officials. At various times during his wild ride, he impersonates a prison physician, an attorney and a police officer. He even fakes an AIDS diagnosis and his death in order to escape. During Russell's long life of crime, however, he never becomes violent or hurts another person. He is also capable of great affection towards those people he cares about: his wife, his child, a lover he takes care of during that lover's long illness with AIDS and, of course, Phillip Morris.

There are few dull moments in Russell's life of crime which McVicker narrates in spare, to-the-point prose. Now we have the movie version with Jim Carrey as Russell and Ewan McGregor playing Phillip Morris. If the film is half as good as this book, it will be well worth seeing.

McVicker effortlessly blends excellent journalism with great writing and a suspenseful tale in this compelling, readable true-life adventure. The story is poignant without being mawkish, and hilarious without condescension.
Once I started, I couldn't put it down.

There's no doubting that this book is compelling, both in idea and execution. The prisoner who keeps returning for the man he loves? The life history of both? Good stories of prison breaks? Hard to keep a heist lover down. A solid, fun read, perfect for passing the time with a good story.
That said, McVicker's a writer for a (good) weekly alternative paper, and this book reads like an overlong story from those pages, filled up with anecdotes that go just this shy of deep. I'm just not as impressed with the depth of characterizations or the writing as I am with writings in a similar narrative vein.

A fun, fascinating book about an incredibly intelligent con man.
The strange thing is how you find yourself rooting for Russell, even though he's a criminal -- after all, the reason he keeps getting caught is he can't help being in love. How can you fault someone for that?
McVicker has put together a page-turner. A definite must read!