Federal Prison

A Bala Cynwyd man told a federal judge yesterday that he stole almost $400,000 from Independence Blue Cross to prop up a financially struggling athletic club that he owned with his son-in-law. "It didn't do as well as I thought . . . and I guess I lost my mental control and tried to make up for it, and I did that by cheating," Mark Levin said, adding that he never took the money for himself but plowed it back into the gym. U.S. District Judge Gene E.K. Pratter sentenced Levin, 65, to a year and a day in prison and ordered him to make restitution of $399,883 to IBC. (Advisory sentencing guidelines called for 24 to 30 months behind bars.

Convicted drug kingpin Kaboni Savage is not happy with his accommodations at the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia, where he is awaiting trial on racketeering-murder charges that could carry a death sentence. Even Guantanamo Bay, the notorious federal lockup for suspected terrorists, would be better than the FDC at Seventh and Arch Streets, Savage said in a handwritten memo filed with U.S. District Judge R. Barclay Surrick last week. In the memo, Savage, 36, complained about the conditions under which he is being held and the difficulty he has had meeting with his court-appointed attorneys.

Richard H. Rossmiller, the man considered the biggest individual borrower in the nation's savings-and-loan scandal and to whom Montgomery County's Hill Financial Savings Association lent more than $100 million before collapsing, was sentenced yesterday to more than four years in prison and ordered to make restitution of $10 million. "You have a lot of talent, you have ambition," U.S. District Judge Joseph L. McGlynn Jr. told Rossmiller. "I don't think there's any question that you can be a successful, productive citizen when you again get that opportunity.

The city and the state need to adopt and implement a strong earned time/ good program to begin to combat the escalating prison crisis. If the city does not want to be limited by the provisions in a state bill, it may have only weeks in which to act. Earned time/good time works by providing additional control to corrections staff and incentives to inmates to learn societal rules and new skills. Also it helps combat overcrowding in a responsible, systemized way. Earned time/good time is not an automatic release, nor is it a guarantee.

An inmate has killed a guard at a federal prison in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Prison officials say that Monday night at the Canaan penitentiary in Waymart, about 20 miles northeast of Scranton, Correctional Officer Eric Williams was working in a housing unit when an inmate attacked him with a homemade weapon. Williams was rushed to a hospital and pronounced dead at 11:30 p.m. The Bureau of Prisons says Williams is the first federal corrections officer killed on the job in nearly five years.

The clock struck midnight yesterday for a New Jersey business executive who used $12 million he embezzled from his employer over eight years to amass one of the world's finest collections of antique European timepieces. Francis X. Vitale Jr., 53, who was a senior vice president of the Engelhard Corp. in Iselin in Middlesex County, pleaded guilty in federal court in Camden to diverting the money and buying precious old clocks. Prosecutors said Vitale owned more than 140 rare clocks, some dating to the 17th century, some worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The U.S. Bureau of Prisons is looking for more than a few good men - and women - to staff its new federal jail at 7th and Arch streets. The 11-story, $90 million Philadelphia Metropolitan Detention Center, scheduled to be completed in December, will need at least 301 workers, said Florentino Morlote, executive assistant at the center. To fill some of those positions, the bureau is holding a job fair Tuesday from noon to 6 p.m. at the Clarion Suites, 1010 Race St. "We're hoping to fill about 55 percent of the positions, 165 jobs, with people who live in and near the community where the detention center is," said Morlote.

A former corrections officer was sentenced today to one year and one day in prison for accepting $3,600 in bribes to smuggle contraband into a federal prison in South Jersey. U.S. District Judge Renée Marie Bumb imposed the sentence on Job Brown, 39, of Bridgeton, in a hearing at federal court in Camden. Brown previously pleaded guilty to one count of receipt of bribes by a public official. The U.S. Attorney's Office said Brown, an officer at the Fairton federal prison, accepted the bribes to smuggle cigarettes and vitamin supplements to an inmate at the facility in Fairfield Township, Cumberland County.

A Chester County man who stoked terrorism fears when he crashed his Jeep through a locked fence and onto runways at Philadelphia International Airport in March was sentenced Wednesday to 16 months in federal prison. Kenneth R. Mazik, 25, of Chadds Ford, blamed the March 1 incident on what he said were delusions caused by an addiction to the behavioral drug Adderall. "I was operating in a different space and time," he told U.S. District Judge Mitchell S. Goldberg. The judge acknowledged that Mazik was possibly in a drug-induced psychosis at the time.

Convicted mobster Salvatore "Chuckie" Merlino - the father of former Philadelphia mob boss Joseph "Skinny Joey" Merlino - died Monday in a federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas. The elder Merlino was 73 and had spent the last quarter century behind bars. The federal Bureau of Prisons listed his potential release date as August 2016. Local attorney Joseph Santaguida confirmed Merlino's death on Tuesday, but offered little other information. He said simply that Merlino had been "sick for a while.

NORRISTOWN - A housekeeper has been sentenced to six years in federal prison in the theft of a Benjamin Franklin bust stolen in Montgomery County and reportedly worth $3 million. Andrea Lawton, 47, of Mobile, Ala., was living in Philadelphia when the bust was taken Aug. 24 from a home where she had worked as a housecleaner. She fled to Alabama with the bust and was arrested Sept. 21 in Elkton, Md., where she planned to sell it. Lawton pleaded guilty in December to a federal charge of interstate transportation of stolen property.

LUBBOCK, Texas - Billie Sol Estes, 88, a flamboyant Texas huckster who became one of the most notorious men in America in 1962 when he was accused of looting a federal crop subsidy program, was found dead by a caretaker early Tuesday at his home in DeCordova Bend, southwest of Dallas. Mr. Estes was best known for the scandal that broke during President John F. Kennedy's administration involving phony financial statements and nonexistent fertilizer tanks. Several lower-level agriculture officials resigned, and he wound up spending several years in prison.

BOSTON - Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhohkar Tsarnaev was moved from a hospital to a federal prison medical center while FBI agents searched for evidence Friday in a landfill near the college he was attending. Tsarnaev, 19, was taken from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where he was recovering from a throat wound and other injuries suffered during an attempt to elude police last week, and was transferred to the Federal Medical Center Devens, about 40 miles from Boston, the U.S. Marshals Service said.

A Philadelphia man's effort to give some payback to his girlfriend's former boyfriend earned him 15 months in federal prison and an apology letter writing campaign on Monday. Kenneth W. Smith, Jr., 26, pleaded guilty in January to making a call to authorities saying the ex was carrying explosives on a flight from Philadelphia to Texas on Sept. 6. As a result of the call, the plane returned to Philadelphia, where it was stormed by police and federal agents. The ex-boyfriend was taken off the plane and forced to kneel with his hands behind his head while he was searched.

KABONI SAVAGE, the convicted drug dealer facing the death penalty if also convicted of committing or ordering 12 murders, on Monday was portrayed by his attorneys and girlfriend as a good-natured man - even while threatening the girlfriend. It was the first day of the defense team's presentation of its case to the jury after federal prosecutors rested last week, capping 2 1/2 months of testimony. "We got a bond for life. I'd kill you before I let you go," Savage, 38, who is serving 30 years in federal prison for drug conspiracy, reportedly told Crystal Copeland during a phone call recorded by authorities.

Edward "One-Eye Eddie" Montgomery, who has vexed Philadelphia law enforcement in numerous gun cases, was sentenced Monday to 21 months in federal prison for violating his supervised release by allegedly shooting two people only three weeks after getting out of prison. Montgomery, 35, who got his street nickname because he is missing an eye, was sentenced to 60 months in federal prison in 2009 for dealing crack cocaine in Lewiston, Pa. Soon after his release last year, Montgomery allegedly fired shots at a group of men in Brewerytown, wounding two. Court records show that the prosecution withdrew the case in December after witnesses failed to appear in court.

Like many class-action settlements, the $3.5 billion payout announced in 1999 by the makers of the diet drug Fen-Phen unleashed a stampede of claims, including thousands that were bogus. Many came courtesy of Abdur Razzak Tai, a Florida cardiologist who expected more than $1,000 from a plaintiffs' lawyer each time he certified a Fen-Phen patient with heart damage - a marker that often led to a six-figure payout. Tai signed more than 12,000 physician reports over several years.

A FORMER MEMBER of the board of directors of a federal credit union that had been founded to serve low-income Hispanics pleaded guilty Friday to embezzlement and money-laundering, which caused the bank's collapse. Miqueas Santana, 43, who served on the board of the Borinquen Federal Credit Union, at Allegheny Avenue and Front Street, faces a maximum sentence of 40 years in prison, five years of supervised release and more than $1.2 million in fines when he is sentenced in federal court on June 21. Between July 2009 and June 2011, Santana stole more than $500,000 from the bank, aided by a former manager, and used the money to buy real estate around the city, the U.S. Attorney's Office said.

The South Philadelphia rapper Beanie Sigel was sentenced Wednesday in Delaware County Court to six to 23 months on drug charges stemming from an August arrest. Sigel is already in federal custody, serving two years for failure to pay about $348,000 in taxes. On Aug. 29, Sigel and a friend were arrested by state police after a traffic stop on I-95 in Tinicum Township. The driver, Gerald Andrews of Philadelphia, was pulled over for following another car too closely and swerving out of his lane.

An inmate has killed a guard at a federal prison in Northeastern Pennsylvania. Prison officials say that Monday night at the Canaan penitentiary in Waymart, about 20 miles northeast of Scranton, Correctional Officer Eric Williams was working in a housing unit when an inmate attacked him with a homemade weapon. Williams was rushed to a hospital and pronounced dead at 11:30 p.m. The Bureau of Prisons says Williams is the first federal corrections officer killed on the job in nearly five years.