Michael Gray had advice for newbie black hats in the SEO field. My two favorites from his post are:

If you do client work set a fake SEO company website. If you get a client banned and need to give up your SEO company when you file for reinclusion, it’s good to have an established SEO company website in your back pocket to act as a sacrifice.

I just think the idea of having an "SEO Company" site that you must " sacrifice to the hungry Google spam monitors is classic. The next one, though, channels Tom Hanks / Jimmy Dugan:

The last and most important is don’t be a whiner. If you are breaking the rules be prepared to pay the consequences. It will suck losing a site that was bringing in a couple of G’s a month, but if you play heavily in the dark arts you will get burned from time to time.

Even white hats get banned - the art of re-inclusion is something every professional needs to know inside and out. One of the benefits of being in the industry for a long time, as I've learned, is that you eventually build up the e-mails and phone numbers of people who can expedite that process. We'll have to save the art of schmoozing for another day.