Friday the 13th was indeed an unlucky day for former Louisiana Rep. William Jefferson, who was sentenced to thirteen years in a federal prison after being convicted in August on eleven federal charges of bribery, fraud, money laundering, and racketeering.
Jefferson’s sentence is believed to be the longest ever handed down to a former member of Congress.
In 2005, federal agents raided Jefferson’s home in Washington, D.C. and found $90,000 in cash wrapped in aluminum foil in his freezer. The cash had been given to Jefferson by an FBI informant as a bribe for then-Nigerian Vice President Atiku Abubakar. That bribery attempt made Jefferson the first-ever member of Congress to be tried under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
Investigators linked Jefferson to numerous other scandals, but in spite of these embarrassing revelations he was reelected to Congress in 2006.
In sentencing Jefferson, federal judge T.S. Eliott III called his conduct a “cancer on the body politic.”
He could – and should – have been put away for two decades longer, with federal prosecutors seeking a 27 to 33-year prison term.
“The defendant betrayed the public’s trust time after time by using his congressional office as a criminal enterprise to further a pattern of racketeering acts of corruption and self-enrichment,” the prosecutors wrote in requesting a harsher sentence.
Frankly, that sounds like every politician, if you ask us …
By Rebel November 14, 2009 at 10:35 pm
federal judge T.S. Eliott III?
Here’s the other T.S. Eliot: “An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.”