He is a former combat photographer, who was imprisoned in Vietnam for illegally entering the country while supposedly looking for treasure buried by Captain Kidd.

[3] Knight claimed to be in possession of a map passed down from his grandfather detailing the position of Captain Kidd's buried treasure.

[5] According to a western official following the case in Hanoi, the whereabouts of Knight and Graham were unknown until late July, when it was learned they were being held in a provincial prison at Kien Giang.

[5] The Vietnamese indicated they expected the British and American governments to come up with the money, but both refused on grounds it would set a bad precedent.

"[5] Late in 1983 the pair were transferred from the provincial prison at Kien Giang to a converted French military building in Ho Chi Minh City.

"[5] The Washington Post described it as "dubious, since historians have never agreed whether Captain Kidd and his pirate ship, Adventure Galley, ever sailed the waters off the Indochinese coast.

"[10] Graham returned to America 40 pounds (18 kg) lighter than when he had left home,[3] and doctors diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress disorder.

He revisited his second and third prisons in Ho Chi Minh City, one of which was at Bach Dang #3, a street along the Saigon River; the front portion of which had been converted into a restaurant.

[2] In 2004, a memoir was published about his Vietnam treasure hunt/prison adventure, titled The Bamboo Chest: An Adventure in Healing the Trauma of War, in which he wrote about confronting (during seven months' solitary of an eleven-month confinement) a case of post-traumatic stress disorder, incurred from observing the Tet Offensive of 1968 as a child in Saigon, South Vietnam.

This resulted in a tell-all whistleblower memoir on the media industry, titled So You Want to be a Reality TV Star: Everything I Learned About Sex, Drugs, Fraud, and Rock and Roll as Team Leader of Treasure Quest: Snake Island, where he claims most of the show was scripted and/or staged, with many of the treasure finds being cheaply made replicas.

Graham persevered through a three-year lawsuit against the Discovery Corporation, in order to keep his First Amendment rights, and his memoir available on bookshelves.