Who is (was) the individual with the biggest net worth, in other words: the richest man or woman, doing time in prison/jail, preferably for a considerable amount of time?
Note: Only prisoners who have acquired their wealth legally qualify (i. e. their assets are not connected with the crime they were sentenced for, or any crime, and the government has no reason/right to take the assets away from them).
Probably not the richest but Martha Stewart became a billionaire for the second time while she was doing time for some minor league insider trading. The shares of her company soared while she was doing time.
Well, here is Forbes list of billionaire prisoners. Looks to me as if one of the Kwok brothers is the big winner.
Huh. My first thought was that Conrad Black would be up there, but according to this cite, his net worth peaked at a paltry $300 million. (I’m assuming since that is Canadian, since it’s a Canadian newspaper.)
I think the “assets not connected with the crime” is open to interpretation and makes this difficult. We might say that Martha Stewart and other people accused of securities fraud don’t qualify, but then, what about billionaire Leona Helmsley, who was accused of tax evasion?
If we disallow all forms of financial crimes by rich people, we may have to drop a rung in the amount of money we are talking about, although we still have Phil Spector, worth about $100 million. Also billionaire Jeffrey Epstein who did 18 months for soliciting an underage girl for prostitution.
Charged with bribes and graft connected to their fortunes.
By the CCP, so grain of salt. Still, there were others on the list as well, though these guys were clearly worth the most at $12.5 billion each(!! :eek:).
Like I said, interpretation is difficult here. If we take a real hard line on it, it might be interesting to ask about the richest person in prison for a non-financially motivated felony. Preferably a very serious one, as with Phil Spector.
Adjusted for inflation, where would Capone fit into the list?
The point is not to disallow any financial crime per se, but if you take for instance Martha Stewart, the direct financial consequences/sanctions of the ImClone affair were actually clear-cut as well as rather insignificant (considering Martha Stewart’s overall financial situation):
I think the proper comparison is what would their net wealth have been, if not for their crimes. Stewart made some money from the insider trading, sure, but even without that, she would still have been quite rich. Likewise for tax evaders, bribers, and the like.
John Eleuthère du Pont (deceased) must be pretty high on the list.
He was the owner of the World’s rarest stamp.
He was the only member of the Forbes 400 richest Americans ever to be convicted of murder.
OJ Simpson used to be worth quite a bit before his legal troubles. I don’t know what his current bank balance is.
He, personally, would not be that high. I’ve seen estimates that his worth would be $1.3 billion in today’s dollars, but that’s bullshit.
That might have been the worth of his organization, but, even if so, it was not all his. All his workers had greater or lesser parts of it. Sure, a lot of money flowed to him, but most of it flowed through him, to other people, for costs of running his ahem business, and so forth.
Certainly he was never short of a dollar, but he didn’t personally own his criminal empire. He was more of a CEO.
Al Capone does not fit the OP’s specified conditions :
"Note: Only prisoners who have acquired their wealth legally qualify "
Hey, don’t underestimate the money to be made in furniture sales.
And I should have remembered DuPont. There was a bit of a stir at Villanova when I was there, because our basketball arena was named after him.
The reason he’s in jail today is because he was broke. He lived in Florida, as di Lord Conrad Black of Singsing, because Florida as I understand protects the primary dwelling from being seized for bankruptcy; he robbed the dealer in Vegas to “repossess” his personal memorabilia because if he’d gone through the courts, the Goldmans would have gotten wind of it and had the items appropriated to pay their outstanding award.
He drove a Ford Bronco, he couldn’t have been that rich.
Not sure it makes a difference for this thread, but Stewart was not convicted of financial fraud but of obstruction of justice, based on lying to federal investigators about her stock sales.
My understanding is that he still has his NFL players pension that pays him about $300k per year for life. That’s about it. As everything else went to the Goldman family after losing the civil case.