He Went To Prison And He Enjoyed It

As only Vinny Parco can

Celebrity private investigator Vinny Parco believes he was wrongly convicted. But then, he says, everyone else in the joint feels they were wrongly convicted too.

Parco, who once starred in the reality TV show Parco PI, got nailed after he rented a hotel room and video taped a target with a female operative and two hookers. Parco was trying to pressure the guy to drop charges against a client. The client told Parco he was being set up.

Parco was convicted of promoting prostitution. So off to prison he went.

Even for a tough guy like Parco prison was a scary proposition.

“I didn’t know what the fuck was going on,” he says of his introduction to the state penitentiary in upstate New York. “I was in a fog.”

And initially he wasn’t well received by the other inmates.

Parco is hard of hearing. And he says some prisoners were nasty to him when he didn’t always answer them because he couldn’t hear them.

But after he got over the initial shock, Vinny decided to be - well - Vinny.

Parco is a very gregarious guy. Always upbeat. Always with a quick quip. Always the center of attention when he walks into a room. Always looking for a ready audience to entertain.

In prison, he found an audience too - a captive one.

So he turned on the charm, entertaining fellow prisoners. And incredibly, he began to enjoy it.

The news articles about his case helped him too.

“They knew who I was,” Parco says. “And to them, I was a celebrity.”

And if there’s one thing Vinny Parco likes, it’s playing the role of a celebrity. He eventually let it slip that he does stand-up comedy. So one day, at the urging of his fellow inmates, he went into one of his routines in a rec room. He ended up playing to one of his best audiences ever.

“I had everyone laughing,” Parco says. “Even some of them who I’m sure didn’t get the punch lines laughed.” Perhaps it’s true that laughter is contagious.

And then, there was his cooking.

Vinny studied gourmet cooking in France. So he offered to take his talents into the prison kitchen. An advantage of working in the kitchen was his ability to give guys on his unit extra food, earning him more good will.

“My sister would also send me premium coffee and boxes of cookies which I always shared with the guys.” That also helped him to get along.

That’s not to say he was with a group of pacifists. Fights broke out from time to time.

“You know what most of the fights were over? Access to the phones and the TV.”

Parco says the attention span of many inmates is limited. So they were changing channels all the time. And getting into arguments over what to watch.

The guards were sometimes to be feared as well. The last thing an inmate wants is to be put in solitary confinement. Parco says guys who were sent into “the box” would be handcuffed by guards who would often “tune them up.” Fortunately he was able to avoid such trouble.

But the most enjoyable part of being in prison was that it gave him the time to write. He authored three books while behind bars and got the idea for a couple more.

“The truth is, if I wasn’t in there, I wouldn’t have had the time to write my books.”

Some of the concepts for his books came from his experiences in prison. Because he was convicted of promoting prostitution, Parco was on a sex offenders unit. So researching sexual deviancy was a piece of cake. He decided to interview convicts in his unit. He estimates he interviewed 40 to 50 guys. “I learned a lot about child trafficking,” he says.

Nearly everyone he met believed they’d be cleared on appeal. Wishful thinking, he says.

“A guy is caught with 10,000 child porn images on his computer and he thinks he has a case for appeal,” he says with a chuckle.

That being said, he interviewed some prisoners who may have gotten a raw deal. Those who broke the law but apparently not with intent.

“A lot of them had sex with a girl they thought was of age and then learned later she was 16.” He says they would typically meet on social media sites where everyone is supposed to be at least 18.

Parco leaves prison with some takeaways. He got his first lesson his first day in the joint. A con who goes by the name of “Shoeshine” took him under his wing and told him to avoid, among other things, gambling and gangs.

And he learned to have a positive attitude. Being friendly can go a long way.

Now that he’s out Parco is still writing. He hosts a weekly podcast. He’s doing stand-up. And while the state stripped his PI license, he’s still allowed to do asset investigations so he’s pulling in some money from that.

And oh, yes. Just like the guys he met on the inside who he rewarded with chuckles when they said they had grounds to appeal, Parco - plans on appealing his conviction.

Parco’s prison-penned books are Investigations After Dark, Mafia Double Cross and From the Detective Kitchen. He’s currently putting the finishing touches on Rogue PI which he describes as semi-autobiographical.