Reza Zarrab, the Turkish national who is now cooperating with Federal prosecutors in an international money laundering case that gets close to the current Turkish president has been implicated in bribing a guard with tens of thousands in dollars for a cell phone, vitamins, alcohol, over-the-counter pain medication and DayQuil.
Mr. Zarrab is being held in the Metropolitan Correction Center, a maximum security lockup that currently houses El Chapo, the notorious drug dealer who is awaiting trial.
If anyone has been following the case surrounding Mr. Zarrab they should remember that he was initially directly charged with such a fistful of crimes that Mr. Zarrab retained an absolute all-star array of New York lawyers to defend him. The great thing about reading a story online is following the links the editors provide to take you to relevant stories that provide background to what you're already reading.
The current Zarrab story takes you through a link to a piece on this array of lawyers, one of whom is a former Federal prosecutor who I worked with when I was a witness for the prosecution in a health care fraud case in my long-ago prior life at Empire BlueCross and BlueShield.
Another of the lawyers is the former Mayor Rudolf Giuliani. It is an all-star team that may or not still be assembled as Mr. Zarreb has now pleaded to guilty to some charges and is cooperating with prosecutors. The bribes that may be linked to him all occurred prior to his guilty pleas.
Getting contraband in jail is nothing new. If anyone watched HBO's series The Night Of a whole underground world of providing is revealed, as well as the efforts to detect it. What might be new are the amounts of money that Mr. Zarreb has supposedly flung around.
Being held as an inmate cannot be fun, and I'm sure Mr. Zarreb is no different from any other one who wants to try to ease their confinement. Apparently he can allegedly arrange some head-turning amounts to tempt.
Think of a sequestered jury. They are not being confined for any crime they did, but are held in some state of incommunicado until the trial is over and a verdict is reached.
Again, a long time ago, at Empire we had an Outgoing Mail supervisor who wound up on the Mitchell-Stans case in Federal Court. This was when the former Attorney General John Mitchel and Maurice Stans, a former Commerce Secretary were accused of an array of crimes related to President Nixon's fundraising during his second presidential campaign. It was the first time former cabinet officials were on trial since the Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding administration. The trial went for 48 days. It was 1974.
Our Outgoing Mail supervisor, Leonard Eppler was gone away from home and work for so long his family was highlighted on the evening news for a story on how they were getting along without husband and father for so long.
The jury for the second Bill Cosby sexual abuse trial has just been selected. Their sequestering begins on Sunday, with the trail starting on Monday. They are to be held in a "nice hotel" as the judge as promised and are expected to refrain from exposure to all types of media.
That has got to be a real drag with so many people now addicted to cell phones, and media updates from all types of sources.
One wonders if there will be a mistrial declared because someone was able to bride a court officer and take in an episode of the rebooted Roseanne show. After all, rating must be maintained.
Time will tell.
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