The Price of Freedom

After serving a portion of his 55 month sentence (do the math if you'd like, I started getting sick as I was counting), Vince Fumo somehow managed to skip the halfway house and go straight home...to his Green Street mansion.

What the Federal Bureau of Prisons calls a "home confinement system" sounds more like the plot from the satirical Arrested Development.

While he was supposed to be completing his sentence at the Klintock Group halfway house in North Philadelphia making $10 an hour working for his lawyer, it seems that his lawyer was instead working for him, getting him released on house arrest with no comment from the bureau other than the statement that decisions are made on a "case-by-case basis."

Something tells me this case depended on the fact that Fumo had a $5.5M mansion to return to and the means to maintain his house...and other relationships.

What's that? A man convicted of 137 acts of corruption, a man who faced a minimum of ten years in prison despite being sentenced to 55 months, still owns a $5.5M mansion?

It would seem so. The house was on the market in 2009 for $5.5M.

I'd spend two years at Camp Cupcake if I could return to this house. Oh wait, I have a pesky little thing calls a conscience that says the government should own that house.

I guess the sale was a potential safety net he just realized he didn't need. The price of freedom must have tanked with the housing crash if Fumo is residing there.