I Love You Phillip Morris [Hardcover]

Steve Mcvicker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 25, 2003

To escape from a Texas jail or prison once is unusual. To do it four times is incredible. To do it four times in five years and always on a Friday the 13th is the stuff of legend. Welcome to the world of Steven Russell. Con artist. Thief. Swindler. Embezzler. Hopeless romantic.

A husband and father, Russell was a church organist, prosperous businessman, and onetime Boca Raton cop before turning to his life of crime. Arrested for a string of felonies, with a specialty in fraud, his real expertise turned out to be his uncanny ability to escape from jail. Between 1993 and 1998, he orchestrated a string of prison breaks that were as audacious as they were ingenious. Using whatever unlikely materials were at hand—a Magic Marker, a pay phone, a walkie-talkie, a pair of stolen bright red women's stretch pants—along with an innate talent for analytical thinking and boundless quantities of sheer nerve, Russell again and again arranged his own "early releases" from jail. Unfortunately, for Russell, staying out of jail is another matter entirely.

Over the years, it became increasingly clear that Russell's talent for escape is matched only by his knack for getting arrested. One thing always seems to trump Steven Russell's careful planning, cool head, and instinct for self-preservation—love. Russell cannot resist the urge to try and spring the great love of his life—a fellow inmate named Phillip Morris.

In I Love You Phillip Morris, journalist Steve McVicker goes right to the heart of this improbable-but-true story of crime, punishment, and passion. Thanks to unprecedented and exclusive access to Russell, his family, and his friends, he retraces Russell's journey from small-town businessman to flamboyant white-collar criminal and jailhouse Houdini. It's the darkly comic tale of a man with a spectacular ability to manipulate almost everyone he meets, yet who is himself helpless in the face of love.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Steven Russell, the subject of this true crime story, is a rare individual, a genius who has run afoul of the law, a prodigious intellect endowed with boundless energy, audacity and guile. Russell pulled off his first jailbreak while waving a stolen walkie-talkie at a guard as he sauntered out the front gate, and his last escape-a feat of staggering self-discipline-by faking a terminal case of AIDS over several months and forging his own death certificate. Russell also walked out of prison and into a six-figure job as a CFO of a major company-twice. (The title of the book refers to Russell's only proven weakness-his steadfast love for one-time fellow convict Phillip Morris.) Journalist McVicker has written an unexceptional book about this exceptional man, but Russell's charisma-shining through lackluster prose-is what makes this offbeat biography a success. Like any great con man, Russell has a charm that is both disarming and overpowering, but his criminal antics are more effective and make for more interesting reading because they are coupled with unlikely virtues: sincerity, diligence, fidelity, affability. What McVicker does well is capture the accident of Russell's descent into criminality, a series of events that turned a once law-abiding husband, father and former police officer into one of the most innovative criminal minds in recent memory.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Steve McVicker is an award-winning journalist who has worked for the Houston Chronicle, National Public Radio, The New York Times, the Houston Press, and People. He lives in Texas. I Love You Phillip Morris is his first book.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Miramax (June 25, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0786869038
• ISBN-13: 978-0786869039
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #163,636 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #64 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > Professionals & Academics > Lawyers & Judges

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wilder Than Fiction, July 3, 2003

By 

Lisa Gray (Houston, TX United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: I Love You Phillip Morris (Hardcover)

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."

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Look at an Escape Artist, March 30, 2010

By 

H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: I Love You Phillip Morris (Hardcover)

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.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars bravo!, August 13, 2003

By 

Julie Mason (Washington, D.C. United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: I Love You Phillip Morris (Hardcover)

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.