(Bloomberg) -- President Donald Trump included in his last-minute wave of clemency grants a commutation of former New York businessman Sholam Weiss’s 835-year sentence, believed to be the longest ever imposed on a white-collar criminal.
Weiss, 66, was sentenced in 2000 in federal court in Orlando, Florida, following his conviction on charges stemming from his role in a series of complex financial frauds that resulted in the collapse of the National Heritage Life Insurance Co. In commuting Weiss’s prison term, which was previously reduced from the original 845 years, Trump noted that Weiss suffers from “chronic health conditions.”
The length of Weiss’s sentence -- Bernard Madoff received 150 years in prison by comparison -- has long been controversial. Supporters argued that Weiss was unfairly penalized because he contested the charges at trial rather than accepting a plea deal with prosecutors. The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers included him in a set of clemency petitions that it submitted to the White House in October, alongside a number of prisoners sentenced for nonviolent drug crimes.
Weiss also hurt his case by fleeing the United States while free on bail and partying with prostitutes at a luxury hotel before the authorities tracked him down in Austria.
“He regrets doing that,” Hershy Marton, Weiss’s nephew, said in an interview in December.
Marton, the 26-year-old chief executive of a Brooklyn home-care agency, helped lead the charge to free his uncle, bombarding Trump with tweets about the case and cold-emailing New York state legislators, many of whom ultimately backed clemency. Weiss also hired lobbyist Brett Tolman to make his case to Trump and won the support of former U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese, former U.S. Solicitor General Seth Waxman and Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, among others.
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