OAKDALE, La. - Former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards arrived here in
2004, transferred from a Texas prison. Now, this tiny lumber town has
another big-name resident.
Bernard Ebbers, the disgraced former telecommunications chief, drove
through the heart of Oakdale last week in a white Mercedes sedan, his
wife in the passenger seat. He turned down the prison road, drove over
the railroad tracks and past the town softball diamonds, past a small
crowd of news photographers, through the prison's gates.
He could spend the next 25 years behind them, for his role in a $11
billion accounting fraud that ruined Worldcom, the company he built up
from a tiny Mississippi firm.
"The camp has no fences, everyone's nonviolent. Everyone's on their way
out (of prison), so nobody would think of escaping."
Ebbers is probably in the slightly higher security facility on the
prison grounds, where prisoners are locked up at night and where he'll
be assigned a job working in the garden or kitchen, Brown said.
"It's not like you're in Alcatraz," said Brown, who now writes opinion
pieces for newspapers and is developing a talk-radio show.
Oakdale's prison facility was created in 1986, to hold illegal aliens,
and showed up on front pages the next year, when about 1,000 Cubans
rioted inside, burning their detention center. They took 28 workers
hostage and nearly destroyed the $17 million facility to protest U.S.
negotiations with Fidel Castro's Cuba, that could have returned them to
their home country.
Oakdale popped back into the newspapers and on TV news, last week, when
Ebbers showed up. The former high school basketball coach was given a
25-year sentence last year, after he was convicted of fraud and
conspiracy in the fraud that drove Mississippi-based WorldCom into
bankruptcy in 2002.
His lawyer is working on appeals, possibly to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Investigators uncovered $11 billion in fraud at WorldCom Inc., much of
it because accountants were classifying regular expenses as long-term
capital expenditures. The company re-emerged under the name MCI, to be
bought up by Verizon.
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