1 case · White Collar
Convicted: Martha Helen Stewart (née Kostyra)
At 12:30 in the morning on March 4, 2005, Martha Stewart walked out of the Federal Prison Camp in Alderson, West Virginia. She was 63 years old. America's most famous homemaker, a woman who had watched her personal fortune touch $1.2 billion, had just served five months in federal prison for crimes that traced back to a single phone call and a stock sale that saved her exactly $45,673 in avoided losses. The story of how the most recognizable domestic brand in American history came undone involves ImClone Systems stock, a Merrill Lynch broker named Peter Bacanovic, a frightened assistant named Douglas Faneuil who became the government's star witness, and a prosecutor named James Comey who would one day lead the FBI. It involves a woman who grew up in working-class Nutley, New Jersey, modeled for Chanel at 15, navigated Wall Street in the 1960s, and built a media empire from scratch, only to lie to federal investigators over a transaction that, compared to her net worth, was pocket change. The crime was almost comically small. The cover-up was not. And the consequences reshaped one of the most iconic careers in American business history.
