Abramoff released to halfway house

June 10, 2010|Associated Press

HAGERSTOWN, Md. — Disgraced Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff has been released from prison to a halfway house in the mid-Atlantic region, the Federal Bureau of Prisons said yesterday.

Abramoff, 51, was released Tuesday from the minimum-security federal prison camp in western Maryland where he had been confined since November 2006 for fraud, corruption, and conspiracy convictions, spokesman Edmond Ross said.

Abramoff was moved to a residential reentry center, or halfway house, in a region encompassing much of Maryland, Delaware, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia, Ross said.

He said he did not know the location of the halfway house. Calls to the agency’s Community Correctional Management section, which oversees halfway houses, were not returned.

Abramoff’s scheduled release date is Dec. 4, Ross said.

He said Abramoff could spend the last two to three weeks of his sentence in home confinement.

The Bureau of Prisons has no home address for Abramoff.

Abramoff was sentenced in 2006 to nearly six years for a fraudulent Florida casino deal.

He got a four-year sentence in 2008 for conspiring to defraud the United States, corrupting public officials, and defrauding his clients in a separate case.

Unless a judge orders such sentences to run concurrently, the shorter sentence is normally subsumed by the longer one.