MAIN STREET — Just a little more than a year ago, Main Street furniture stripper Michael Miller drove with his buddies north of Santa Barbara, ate Mexican food and drank a beer. And then he went to federal prison.

Recently released from minimum security camp at Lompoc Federal Penitentiary, Miller, the 42-year-old owner of furniture stripping shop Stripper Herk, is still stunned over how he wound up serving 10 1/2 months incarcerated for telling the truth.

Miller was sentenced in October of 2004 to a year and a day at Lompoc for illegally dumping methylene chloride into the sewer — a charge that was later reduced to a misdemeanor. He also was charged with a felony for keeping sealed 55-gallon barrels of the toxic substance at his business for longer than the 90 allowable days.

Miller made a plea deal with federal prosecutors, knowing he wouldn’t be able to beat the system and recognizing what he had done was mistake. And because the judge used federal minimum sentencing guidelines in deciding Miller’s fate, he wound up losing a year of life as he knew it and was forced to ignore his financially troubled business.

Acting on a report from Santa Monica city officials, the FBI raided his shop in 2003. Miller at the time admitted he had let about 20 barrels accumulate over several months because it is expensive to have them carried off and he was struggling to make ends meet. At the time of the raid, Miller was scheduled to have the barrels picked up the next week. Had he told the investigators the 20 barrels had accumulated in the previous 90 days, the backlog may have been considered legal, Miller suggested.

But authorities arrested Miller after city contract worker Vincente Valenzuela in March of 2003 fell into cardiac arrest and suffered severe burns while working in the sewer below Stripper Herk.

Miller has maintained that a slight rinsewater leak from his shop couldn’t have caused Valenzuela’s injuries. The prosecutors ended up dropping the charges related to that incident, and Miller was never sentenced for Valenzuela’s injuries.

However, what happened to Valenzuela did end up in civil court, where a $1.25 million judgment has been awarded and the case is buried in disputes among Miller’s lawyers, his insurance company and Valenzuela’s attorneys.

Miller surrendered to authorities on Feb. 1, 2005, and was released in November. He spent a month in a halfway house in Inglewood before finally returning to his Playa Vista apartment. Now, he’s working tirelessly to rebuild his business and trying to stay out of bankruptcy. The Santa Monica Daily Press caught up with Miller at his Main Street shop to talk about his prison experience and what the future holds.

What was Lompoc like?

“It’s north of Santa Barbara, near Santa Maria. It’s minimum security. It’s a camp, so pretty much anything you imagine as a prison, throw it out. This place is literally green grass, eucalyptus trees and a split-rail fence surrounding it. We had sport fields, weight piles, we watched movies on the weekends, we had TV rooms; it’s a summer camp. It’s the federal version of community service. You work during the day, you have jobs, stay busy, then work’s over, do what you want. You have over 340 guys watched by one or two unarmed guards. The whole thing operates on the honor system. Across the street is the (federal penitentiary), so if you mess around at camp, you go across the street.”

What were your thoughts when you got there?

“I was processed in the bowels of the big house. It was the creepiest thing. They put you in the cell. I had never been in a cell, never been in handcuffs. They closed the door, and you can hear the key click. You say, ‘This just got real.’”

Were you expecting a ‘summer camp?’

“I was expecting something more organized. When I first got there, I was still way freaked out. I will never forget, I got there on Feb. 1 and five days later, the Superbowl. There I am, still freaked out and sitting in the back of the visiting room, and there were three TVs. These guys were just having a ball, cooking food, watching the game. Two hundred-fifty of my new best friends watching the Superbowl. It’s crazy.”

Describe the experience.

“It was relaxing, peaceful. I guess I would have enjoyed myself if I didn’t have to worry about things. It’s all white-collar guys. Some guys started higher up, and they worked their way down the system and qualified for the camp. We got jobs. We were running dairies, plowing fields, working in family housing across the street, painting, tiling. I worked over Vanderberg Air Force Base with civilian contractors.

“I got pretty lucky. The paint crew I enjoyed. It’s funny because I’ve been stripping for 23 years, not painting. At Vanderberg, we did everything from landscaping to splitting firewood, whatever they needed done. We spent a couple of weeks clearing running trails. That was fun. Here we are loading up a golf cart with chainsaws, driving through a forest unsupervised. I got paid 16 cents on the paint crew and 12 cents when I was working at Vanderberg. They got 300 some odd guys working for them, who are making all kinds of money.

“Once I got a job, it moved pretty quick. Then it seemed like you had a normal routine. Get up, go to work, come back and either work out or go play sports or anything you want.

“The inmates organized softball, football, basketball, horseshoe tournaments, bocce ball. That’s what they say when you get there, take advantage of your time. You sit in the park, watching the sunset on a beautiful afternoon, and you say, ‘This is prison?’”

What kind of guys were your fellow inmates?

“A lot of drug charges, something that made it federal. Taxes, wire fraud, embezzlement. That kind of stuff, things that weren’t bad enough to put you behind bars.”

Did you get to know the guys pretty well?

“Some you do. Some just first names. As many guys as there are, you don’t really get too close to anybody or form real friendships ... a couple guys, yeah, but you just keep to yourself. I didn’t have a problem approaching people. The whole time I was there I didn’t meet one guard, counselor, inmate, anybody that has heard of somebody going to prison for any amount of time for a permit violation. I set a whole new standard. They kept asking, ‘What else?’ I said, ‘I wish there was more.’”

How do you feel about the system now that you’ve been through it?

“What time they give you, you do that time. You could have a guy who has a laundry list of DUIs, traffic violations, he kills a family of four and they charge him in the state and give him 10 years for manslaughter; six years he’s out. I met I don’t know how many 19-, 20-year-old kids on first-time drug charges who have these 10-year sentences and they are going to be there for 10 years. And at the camps, they don’t offer anything. There are no classes, there is no schooling.

“You are on your own. When I first got there, if it weren’t for the inmates telling me how to do things, I would be wondering, ‘What is going on?’ because the people who are running it ... they couldn’t have real jobs, they were pretty bad. They were inefficient. Half the time they didn’t know what they were doing, they would just threaten to throw you in the hole. Anytime you question them. Like medical. You don’t get sick there because if you ask the doctor for something and he says ‘no’ and you start arguing with him, he’ll just have you taken across the street and thrown in the hole. They are like the schoolyard bullies because they know they can pick on us and we can’t do anything back.”

What’s your opinion of mandatory federal sentencing guidelines?

“The probation officer had me pre-screened for home detention, but (the judge) wouldn’t modify it. The judge is not obligated to look at those modification levels, so he didn’t. It should have gone down to probation. Worse, home detention. Technically it was a felony because of the drums, which I always laughed at because I told the truth that I was over the time limit. And the misdemeanor was for the unintentional negligence drain leak. That’s it. The injury and all of that, they dropped it all. It wasn’t part of sentencing.

“The judge stuck to the book. All we can figure out was that he was a brand new guy from the state court. If he had modified the sentence, he would had to have explained to Washington why he did it. He just stuck to it and as lousy as that was, he did let me be eligible for time off with good behavior, he did give me more time to surrender.”

What’s was your worst experience while at Lompoc?

“Easter Sunday, playing in a flag football game, I blew out my Achilles’ tendon. Since it was an emergency, they did repair that. They never did any follow up or any therapy. I was on crutches for three months, and I couldn’t work and that was lousy because I couldn’t do anything. I did a lot of reading, a lot of writing.”

How was the food?

“Pretty good. It was always well balanced. We had a salad bar, and that was the big thing. Guys who’d been all over at institutions wanted to be at Lompoc because of the salad bar.”

What was your first day of freedom like?

“Dec. 16? I had been coming here everyday in the halfway house so I just came to work. The first night I went home, that was kind of nice. My apartment has been packed up for the last 10 1/2 months, so there was a lot of cleaning and sorting things out.”

What have you learned during this experience?

“Where do you start? Just the whole system itself, from a federal level, I look at it as a giant game show. The lawyers are the contestants. The judge, he’s the guy that runs the thing, and the guy that is accused is the prize. You just go back and forth. The defense attorneys are like the deal makers because if the feds come in, you are going to be incarcerated. It’s just a matter of how long and under what circumstances so they make the best deal for you, but you are going to go to jail. It’s simple as that. What happens is a lot of the prosecutors, they will accuse you of the world and then they’ll make you an offer. It’s supposed to be that they have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, but they go with ‘well, we’re pretty sure.’ If you go to trial, there’s a 97 percent chance you’ll lose, so you take the deal.”

How did you wind up at the federal level?

“I violated a city permit because of the discharge, but it also violated the Federal Clean Water Act; otherwise it’s a local thing. They would report it to the EPA of California, but they don’t have enough people there so they contacted the FBI’s environmental crimes division. As soon as they called the feds, they thought, ‘Oh, we’ve got an intentional dumper.’ So they authorized the raid. It should have been handled either locally or the state, but since they called the feds and they did a raid, they made a federal case out of it.

“I could have lied, but I told the truth and I was cooperating. Even when the feds came in, I still told the truth. I was laughing at the stupidity of it — the FBI was in my shop with bullet-proof vests and guns and searching the place and taking pictures and threatening to throw the guys into jail.”

What was happening at the shop while you were incarcerated?

“The shop pretty much runs itself. It’s a pretty simple operation. My guys, they know how to do the strip thing. My one guy, Ernesto, did a great job, doing the best he could. I taught him how to do the pricing. They just stumbled their way through it. I hired a bookkeeper to take care of the books. The one rule in prison is that you can’t conduct business in prison. So I’m a business owner, but I wasn’t allowed to do business.”

How would they know?

“They monitor phone calls, they do check the mail. Visitors can’t bring anything in. You can’t have anything mailed to you other than books. At the state, people can send you care packages. They won’t let you get stamps. They wouldn’t let anything in, which is funny because here we are in someone’s house painting their living room and I can’t get stamps in the mail.”

How is your business now?

“I got behind on everything. Things lapsed. This year, I’m still trying to figure out, but I think this past year was worse than 2002. I expected this last year to be a real boomer because of the all of the construction and remodeling going on. Usually we are really busy. Maybe me being away factored into this, but I’m the only guy that does this. We should have been busy.

“Technically, I’m bankrupt and I don’t have the money to pay the attorney to file the bankruptcy. We are that bad off here. My apartment, I was able to keep that barely. I was able to sell both of my trucks.”

Will Stripper Herk survive?

“I’d say 80/20 against. I’m going to give it until March when my lease expires anyway. Unless I can get this place turned around and going, I can’t do it anymore. I’m already too far in the hole. I’m the only guy that does this, but I can’t move because you can’t get a permit anywhere else.”

Are you bitter?

“No, I’m more disappointed in how the system works. The prosecutors are free to do and say whatever they want and are not accountable. The federal judge is God. Whatever they want to say or do, that is the way it is.

“I’m done. I’m wiped out. They destroyed my life, they ruined by business, they did everything they could to break my spirit, and almost did, but that is where they failed. I’m determined to make the shop go, rebuild my life and move on. I’m not happy about it, but I am not dwelling on it.”