He only played a villain on TV

Richard Hatch doesn't look the way he did on TV. Not, at least, as he did on "Survivor," that first, iconic blast of reality TV, the show that changed the way celebrity works, the show that changed his life.

Once overweight, he now looks slender in his prison-issue khaki shirt and pants. His brownish hair has turned a soft, spiky grey; his beard is gone, replaced by a soul patch. But mainly, it's his demeanor. The Hatch on the screen was confident and cocky; he strutted around in the nude and calmly plotted victory. This man is jittery and talks in hyperspeed, jumping from subject to subject. He's painfully aware that the length of time he has to speak -- like most everything in his life these days -- is entirely outside of his command.

Here at FCI Morgantown, the federal prison where Hatch, 45, has lived since late July, there's no respite from the rules. One hour, precisely, to talk face-to-face with a reporter (though he begged prison officials for more). Phone calls limited to 300 minutes a month. Yes, the Blue Ridge Mountain setting is picturesque; with its low brick buildings and curved pathways, the place looks more like a community college campus than a penitentiary. But Hatch cannot leave. And on a very basic level, he cannot comprehend that he is here.

"I'm used to being able to understand how you get from point A to point B," he is saying, as we sit in a tiny glass-walled room off the cavernous visitor center. "This has been tough."

I am here because Hatch wrote to me last spring, shortly after he was sentenced to 51 months in prison for failing to pay taxes on, among other things, his $1 million winnings from the famed 2000 season of "Survivor." I had recently published a story in the Globe, suggesting that Hatch's trajectory was a cruel byproduct of reality TV: the way the public could accept artful editing as truth; the way, according to one legal expert, the government prosecutes tax cases that are bound to generate attention.

A few weeks later, a letter in longhand arrived from the Plymouth County Correctional Facility, where Hatch was being held. After years of lawyer-imposed silence, he wrote, he finally wanted to talk.

Months of letters and e-mails would follow, as Hatch was moved from Plymouth to his permanent assignment in Morgantown. If it's possible to be breathless in a letter, Hatch is; his frustration is tangible, though he mocks himself, too, punctuating his letters with "Arghhhhhhh!"s and occasional smiley faces. ("I either need a tranquilizer or my own radio talk show!" he wrote after one longhand rant, and it's not hard to imagine him with either.) He complains about tyranny, abuse of power, the inherent unfairness of the legal system.

It's not unusual, of course, to find a prisoner who claims innocence , or a celebrity, fallen from grace, who seeks absolution. But tell people the bare outlines of Hatch's story -- that he didn't pay taxes on his "Survivor" winnings -- and you provoke a certain level of disbelief. His million-dollar prize wasn't exactly a national secret. Taxes, we all know, are as inflexible as death. And for six years, Hatch has been cemented in the national consciousness as a master manipulator, a sharp and cunning snake. It says quite a bit about your public persona when you inspire less sympathy than the IRS.

Hatch counters, in essence, with two arguments. The first is that he had legitimate questions about whether those taxes were owed, but always intended to find the answers and pay. The second is that his case never would have gone to court were it not for his "Survivor" fame. He believes he was targeted largely because of the character on TV, the naked, fat, gay mastermind. And he says he never imagined that the world created on that distant island would bleed so mercilessly into the real one. In fact, he declares in the prison conference room, "I am more naive than people realize."

Whether this will matter, in the eyes of the law, is in the hands of a federal court in Boston, which accepted Hatch's appellate brief earlier this month. Whether he'll be able to recast his public image is another matter entirely. So far, there has been no outpouring of sympathy for Hatch. When he was sentenced, the overwhelming reaction was mocking glee, a sense that the manipulator got what he had coming.

That's no surprise. To believe Hatch's version, in the wake of "Survivor," requires a leap of faith -- an acceptance that a man who proved himself smart, in the most public forum possible, could approach the legal system with spectacular credulity. It requires a public recalibration of the entity we know as Richard Hatch.

Which is what Hatch says he now intends to do. "I'm doing my best," he wrote in one letter, "to expose you to the real me."

Ask Hatch who that real person is and he'll rattle off a list of character traits. "I'm a good guy. I'm a really good guy," he says in the prison visiting room, then laughs at how piteous he sounds. "I've lived a really good life, an ethical life . . . . I enjoy conversation and intimate relationship, I don't drink. I don't smoke. I'm not into 'stuff.' Post 'Survivor' -- whack! -- who is this insane caricature?"

But it's not quite as simple as that; it's not as if the Hatch on "Survivor" was invented from whole cloth, or that Hatch had no part in its creation. Indeed, you get the sense that the TV persona wasn't a completely different person so much as a costume -- that you can pinpoint the real Hatch somewhere inside, the way you can trace the outlines of his current, thinner self inside the figure on the screen.

Hatch takes full credit, after all, for what he managed to accomplish on Pulau Tiga, an island off Malaysia. "I loved how I planned how to win," he tells me. "And I loved how I carried it out. And I am really proud of everything I did on that show."

Watch Hatch's handiwork again, six years after the fact, and it's still breathtakingly audacious. As other castaways are worrying about each other's feelings, or planning to vote people off in alphabetical order, Hatch is coolly working. He contemplates when to hold off on catching fish so that the other players won't stop appreciating him. He forges the alliance that turns the show from a peek at summer camp into a psychological masterpiece.

TV critics compared him to Machiavelli. His cousin Karen Hatch, who had known him through his boyhood, saw something different.

The Rich Hatch she knew had survived a troubled childhood, a broken home, the death of a younger brother when he was 15. He had struggled with his weight, been molested as a boy , and teased by other kids. He had come out as a gay man and spent years shuttling between jobs, trying to figure out his place. Here, half a world away, in front of TV cameras, he was taking charge at last, and managing to win.

"He was like Mr. Confident, so obnoxious, to be out there taking off his clothes on television," Karen Hatch says. "When, really, that was his way of conquering the fear that made him vulnerable -- his way of not being the little boy whose weaknesses or vulnerabilties got his pants pulled down. He flipped that world and said, 'Now, I will pull them down first, because I am so confident and so controlling and so strong now that you'll never access that little boy again.' "

When the "Survivor" finale aired in August 2000, before 51 million viewers, Hatch was not just a millionaire but a bona fide star. Annie Leibovitz shot his photo for Vanity Fair. Time named him one of the most important people of 2000. And it was clear that he enjoyed the trappings of fame; his relatives and friends, stunned by the sudden limelight, say they were amazed at Hatch's graciousness with fans.

Yet even before "Survivor" aired, Hatch began to confront the flip side of celebrity. First, he was charged with abusing his son, a troubled 10-year-old boy he had adopted from state custody. A judge eventually dropped the charges for lack of probable cause. Later, Hatch was convicted of assaulting an ex-boyfriend; the ruling was overturned on appeal.

Through it all, he was hounded by the press, recalls Chris Behan, the Newport lawyer who represented Hatch in both cases. And Hatch's reaction, Behan says, reminded him less of the "Survivor" mastermind than of the man he had known before the show began: a guy who was "disorganized and by-the-seat-of-his-pants," prone to stubborn declarations about how things should be. At one point, Behan says, Hatch decided to sue the Rhode Island Department of Children and Family Services for its handling of the child- abuse case. Behan advised him that, technically, the agency wasn't at fault. Hatch said he didn't care; what they had done was wrong.

This, Behan says, was signature Hatch.

"I used to call them, sometimes, 'Richisms, ' " Behan says. "He thinks something out, and if his logic tells him that it should be this way, he decides this is how it should be. He follows what he believes is right."

This is another theme of Hatch's protestations: Despite public perception, he says, he's an ethical man. Even his famous "Survivor" duplicity, he says, took place within a moral framework: "I was prepared to make choices within the rules of the game, like to deceive. Outwit, outlast, outplay. . . . I don't regret it."

But if "Survivor" conformed to Hatch's sense of logic -- if this was a system he could master and control -- the tax code was another matter. At first, he says, he wasn't concerned when the IRS started to inquire. He says his accountant, a family friend who worked out of her Rhode Island home, seemed equally confused about his obligations, since he had earned money overseas and incorporated himself for tax and legal purposes. Hatch says he expected that he'd get the right answers and all would be resolved.

And he says he had reasons for questioning what he owed on his "Survivor" winnings, dating back to the filming on Pulau Tiga. Hatch says that part way through the game, he discovered that another castaway was getting food from the staff. He says he presented proof and that producers stopped the game and sent the camera crews off the beach. He says Mark Burnett, the executive producer, talked about ways to revive the show and promised "additional benefits, prizes, money, whatever, that you're going to be receiving that you're not even aware of yet. Taxes were talked about."

A couple of Hatch's castmates have publicly disputed the story. CBS has denied it. Burnett has never commented.

"I'm sorry but Mark will not respond to these allegations and begs you to consider the source, please," his spokesman said in an e-mail earlier this month.

But the brouhaha on the beach would become the crux of Hatch's legal case -- and of his appeal, since testimony about the island conversation was not allowed at Hatch's trial in Providence last winter. That conversation with Burnett, Hatch says, planted doubt in his mind about whether his taxes had been paid. And he says his efforts to find out more, by contacting Burnett and CBS president Leslie Moonves, were futile.

In 2002, Hatch says, he received two computerized letters from the IRS, each demanding that he file his 2000 return and including a list of income. Neither mentioned the $1 million "Survivor" prize. True, the fine print said the list "may not be all-inclusive." But Hatch says he told his accountant that "may not" could also mean "may." He filed a return without addressing the million dollars, figuring, he says, that the government would correct him if he was wrong.

"If they say I owe more, tell me and we'll pay it. Period," he says. And even as the IRS investigation grew more contentious, he says, he held out hope that the matter could be resolved with a payment plan. His manager offered to film Hatch in pro-IRS public service announcements. When the government offered a plea deal -- two years of prison for admitting to tax evasion -- Hatch refused, claiming innocence. He was eventually indicted on 10 counts of tax evasion and fraud.

Steve Hickey, an IRS spokesman, wouldn't discuss the specifics of Hatch's case. But he says the agency chooses to pursue criminal cases based on the evidence -- whether prosecutors think they can prove, as they must, that a taxpayer willfully planned to evade. "We don't prosecute individuals," Hickey says, "for what we call honest mistakes."

The US Attorney's Office in Rhode Island, which prosecuted Hatch, had no comment on his case, either. But from the government's standpoint, it must have seemed like a heavenly gift, says Peter Henning, a former prosecutor and professor at Michigan's Wayne State University Law School. The documents were easy for jurors to understand: a 1099 form, reporting Hatch's "Survivor" income; a contract Hatch had signed, saying he was responsible for paying taxes on his prize money.

And if the government won, the case of Richard Hatch could be promoted as a metaphor. Indeed, on the day Hatch was sentenced, a Justice Department official announced that "our nation's federal tax system is not a reality show to be outwitted."

As it turned out, Hatch was convicted of tax evasion but acquitted on seven counts of fraud, related to a charity he tried to set up after he won "Survivor." His lawyer believes that, had the jury been able to hear testimony about his motivations, he would have been acquitted completely.

But shortly after the trial ended, one juror told the Associated Press that the jury had been swayed by other omissions on Hatch's tax forms: his failure to pay taxes on some real estate holdings and his salary from a Boston radio station. Hatch and his lawyer explain them as paperwork errors and innocent mistakes. Hatch's appeal says his 2001 returns were wrong "because his tax preparer was incompetent and Hatch's bookkeeping was horrible."

Cases like this, Henning says, come down to credibility. "The government's case is nice and simple: This is a lie," Henning says. And Hatch is "left, essentially, hoping that the jury will just like him." Thus, the trial hinged on those opposing versions of Hatch: the bumbling, disorganized one his lawyers described, or the conniving one the government presented -- the one Hatch had created for the purpose of winning a prize on TV.

Some questionnaires, filled out by potential jurors before the trial began, speak to the pervasiveness of that latter view of Hatch; several called him a "child abuser" (though those charges had been dropped) , lambasted him for being gay, or said they'd already decided to dislike him. "He was walking around nude for no reason on the set," one wrote. "I find it distasteful."

When the trial was done, Judge Ernest Torres, too, seemed to believe in Hatch the conniver -- and doled out a serious punishment. When the government presented Hatch as a flight risk, Torres denied him bail before sentencing and sent him to the prison in Plymouth, where visits took place across a glass barrier. When Hatch's lawyer was quoted in the press saying the food was "abysmally bad," Hatch's sister Kristin says, food started arriving in his cell with a pile of spit on top, or a footprint impressed into it.

Months later, Torres would say Hatch had lied repeatedly on the witness stand and chose the high end of federal sentencing guidelines -- more jail time, Hatch's lawyer notes in the appeal, than the combined sentences of convicted tax offenders Leona Helmsley, Pete Rose, Darryl Strawberry, Spiro Agnew, Chicago crime boss Frank Nitti, and tax protester Gordon Wendell Kahl. If Hatch's appeals are unsuccessful, his projected release date is October 2009.

Things have improved for Hatch physically, friends and relatives say, since he was moved from Plymouth to Morgantown, a minimum-security prison where inmates roam freely and visits are face-to-face. He writes long letters, reads books, and has said he plans to tutor other inmates studying for their GEDs. And he thinks about the course of events that led him here. "It's all I do," he tells me, in the visiting room . "How could you not? This is my life. I spend my life thinking about why I am where I am."

For all intents and purposes, he has been exiled from the public world of "Survivor," which six years later remains a substantial TV hit. Many alumni of the show I tried to contact for this story either refused to be interviewed or never returned calls -- though Kristin Hatch says her brother has been corresponding with several of them, and at least two have signed up to be on his visitor's list.

But while his sister says she wishes he'd never gone on "Survivor," Hatch doesn't have the same regrets. For one, the show connected him to Emiliano Cabral, whom he married in a ceremony in Canada last year. They met after the filming of "Survivor: All - Stars," when Hatch was sequestered in an Argentine hotel.

Besides, if publicity got Hatch here, it could also be the instrument of his resurrection. Hatch says he has been fielding media requests and is working on a book, based on his voluminous journal entries. It's unlikely that he'll have trouble getting published; that's what celebrity will do, another irony of post-"Survivor" life.

Recently, Hatch e-mailed to tell me he'd been lying in his prison bunk reading "Moral Minds," a book by Harvard professor Marc D. Hauser, when he came across a passage about his television triumph. It described his approach to "Survivor," his belief that he acted ethically within the rules of the game. Hatch's victory, Hauser wrote, "encapsulates the balancing act between temptation and control that is characteristic of our species."

"HE GETS IT!" Hatch wrote, with no small amount of relief. "It is really a good feeling to be understood!"

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com.