....Martha's frosty demeanor struck Hartridge as arrogant. "She seemed to say: 'I don't have anything to worry about. I fooled the jury. I don't have anything to prove'." Even courtroom visits by Martha's pals Rosie and Bill Cosby seemed highhanded. "Like that was supposed to sway our decision," sniffed Hartridge. And what of prison?
- It's just 25 miles from Martha Stewart's country manse in Bedford, N.Y., to the minimum-security women's federal prison camp at Danbury, Conn. But for a woman used to unparalleled luxury, her likely future home will seem a world apart.
....most experts point to Danbury - which housed Leona Helmsley and the Rev. Sun Myung Moon - as her likely destination because it's close to her family.
According to Danbury alumni, the women's camp has no fences or barred cells; instead of breakouts, guards have worried about nearby residents trespassing to enjoy the lake. "Campers"—most in for immigration or drug charges—sleep in small, bunk-bedded dorm rooms (some house eight women apiece) and spend their days in the kitchen or maintaining the grounds. For recreation, there are two TV lounges, a law library, a track, and a gymnasium used for Pilates, yoga, dancersize or aerobics (but not tai chi, which the Feds have deemed a martial art). There's no e-mail or cell phones (and long waits for pay phones), and guards discourage friendships by rotating bunkmates frequently.
....Stewart will be dealing with no-nonsense guards who'll search her before and after visitations and shackle her if she leaves the facility for a doctor's visit. "To classify any of the federal prison camps as 'Club Fed' or to imply there's any sense of civility or decency about them is not right," says Herb Hoelter of the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, who represented Helmsley, Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky at their sentencings.
- Stewart's trial wasn't about corporate misbehavior. It was about misleading the government, which was investigating her for a crime - insider trading - that she was never charged with. If Stewart weren't such a big name, who'd care about this stuff? For heaven's sake. When a cop pulls you over for going 70 in a 55-mile-per-hour zone and you say you didn't know how fast you were going although you damn well did, you're lying to an investigating officer. If you take $520 of charitable deductions on your income tax but can document only $500 of them, it can become tax fraud. If the government decides to put your life under a microscope, do you think it won't find something? I suspect there's not an adult in the country who would walk away totally unscathed if every aspect of his or her life were investigated the way Stewart's ImClone trading was.
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