- Harvey Weinstein cooling his heels in special Rikers cell after overturned rape conviction New York Post
- Star witness in Harvey Weinstein trial says she’d consider testifying after overturned conviction: ‘This isn’t just about me’ CNN
- Can Weinstein’s Overturned New York Conviction Help Him Appeal California Case? The New York Times
- “Sexual violence is such a thief”: Ashley Judd speaks out against overturn of Weinstein conviction Salon
- Here’s why Harvey Weinstein’s New York rape conviction was tossed and what happens next The Associated Press
Tag Archives: Rikers
Trump executive Weisselberg prepares for jail on Rikers Island
NEW YORK, Jan 10 (Reuters) – A longtime executive for Donald Trump is expected to be sent to New York’s notorious Rikers Island jail after being sentenced on Tuesday for helping engineer a 15-year tax fraud scheme at the former president’s real estate company.
Allen Weisselberg, the Trump Organization’s former chief financial officer, pleaded guilty in August, admitting that from 2005 to 2017 he and other executives received bonuses and perks that saved the company and themselves money.
Weisselberg is expected to be sentenced to five months behind bars, after paying nearly $2 million in taxes, penalties and interest and testifying at the criminal trial of the Trump Organization, which was convicted on all counts it faced.
The sentence will be imposed by Justice Juan Merchan, who oversaw the trial in a New York state court in Manhattan. Weisselberg would likely serve 100 days with time off for good behavior.
Those days will probably not be easy for Weisselberg, 75, at a jail known for violence, drugs and corruption. Nineteen inmates there died last year.
“You’re going into a byzantine black hole,” said Craig Rothfeld, a prison consultant helping Weisselberg prepare for lockup.
50-YEAR RELATIONSHIP
Many convicts in New York City facing one year or less behind bars head to Rikers Island, which lies between the New York City boroughs of Queens and the Bronx and houses more than 5,900 inmates.
Rothfeld spent more than five weeks at Rikers in 2015 and 2016 as part of an 18-month sentence for defrauding investors and tax authorities when he was chief executive of the now-defunct WJB Capital Group Inc.
He now runs Inside Outside Ltd, which advises people facing incarceration. Another client is Harvey Weinstein, the former Hollywood movie producer convicted twice of rape.
After being sentenced, Weisselberg will likely be driven to Rikers and trade his street clothes for a uniform and sneakers with velcro straps.
Rothfeld said he hopes Weisselberg will be segregated from the general population, and not placed in a dorm with inmates who may not know him but will know his boss, who is seeking the presidency in 2024.
“Certainly Mr. Weisselberg’s 50-year relationship with the former president is on all our minds,” Rothfeld said.
A spokesman for the city’s Department of Correction said the agency’s mission is “to create a safe and supportive environment for everyone who enters our custody.”
Rikers is scheduled to close in 2027.
STAR WITNESS
Weisselberg was the star government witness against his employer.
He told jurors that Trump signed bonus and tuition checks, and other documents at the heart of prosecutors’ case, but was not in on the tax fraud scheme.
Though no longer CFO, Weisselberg remains on paid leave from the Trump Organization. He testified in November that he hoped to get a $500,000 bonus this month.
Weisselberg testified that the company is paying his lawyers. It is paying Rothfeld as well, a person familiar with the matter said. Rothfeld declined to comment.
Trump was not charged and has denied wrongdoing. The Manhattan District Attorney’s office is still investigating his business practices.
Merchan will also sentence the Trump Organization on Friday. Penalties are limited to $1.6 million.
Weisselberg remains a defendant in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ $250 million civil lawsuit alleging that Trump and his company inflated asset values and Trump’s net worth.
Rothfeld said he advised Weisselberg not to go outside at Rikers because of the risk of violence in courtyards, and not to interject himself into conversations between other inmates.
“The goal is to keep to yourself,” Rothfeld said.
Reporting by Karen Freifeld; Editing by Richard Chang
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Ricardo Cruciani, Who Sexually Assaulted Patients, Found Dead at Rikers
A doctor found guilty last month of sexually assaulting patients was found dead at the Rikers Island jail complex Monday even though his lawyer had called for him to be put on suicide watch just minutes after he was convicted.
The doctor, Ricardo Cruciani, a 68-year-old neurologist, was found early Monday morning sitting in a shower area of the jail with a sheet around his neck, according to documents obtained by The New York Times. Shortly afterward, medical staff arrived to attend to him. He died about an hour after he was discovered, the documents show.
Mr. Cruciani is the 12th person to have died this year either while being held in the city’s jails or shortly after being released. His death came about two weeks after a jury found him guilty on 12 counts of predatory sexual assault, sexual abuse, rape and other crimes, stemming from his treatment of six patients that he saw around 2012.
In a statement, the commissioner of the New York City Department of Correction, Louis A. Molina, said he was “deeply saddened to learn of the passing of this person in custody.”
“We will conduct a preliminary internal review to determine the circumstances surrounding his death,” he said in the statement, which did not identify Mr. Cruciani. “Our thoughts and prayers go out to his loved ones.”
The Crisis at Rikers Island
Amid the pandemic and a staffing emergency, New York City’s main jail complex has been embroiled in a continuing crisis.
The Department of Correction did not immediately respond to questions on the circumstances surrounding the death or whether Mr. Cruciani had been placed on suicide watch, as his lawyer and the judge presiding over his trial had requested.
“Ricardo’s attorneys and family are shocked and saddened beyond belief to have learned of his violent death while in city custody this morning,” Mr. Cruciani’s lawyer, Frederick Sosinsky, said in a statement.
Mr. Sosinsky said that after his request in the courtroom, the judge had directed the Department of Correction to place Mr. Cruciani in protective custody and under suicide watch, during which he would have been supervised around the clock, even while using the bathroom.
“Neither of these conditions were, to our knowledge, ever complied with,” Mr. Sosinky said. He called for an investigation into the circumstances of Mr. Cruciani’s death, including why the Department of Correction failed to follow the court’s orders.
Mr. Cruciani was being held in a general population dormitory of the Eric M. Taylor Center that was understaffed, according to an official familiar with events who was granted anonymity to speak on the matter without authorization.
A second official said that Mr. Cruciani had entered the shower area at 4:23 a.m. and was found unresponsive at 5:35 a.m. by the officer overseeing the housing area. Officers are expected to tour the area every 30 minutes, but it is unclear whether that happened, the official said.
Mr. Cruciani’s death raises questions about why he was not under heightened supervision and draws new attention to problems at the Eric M. Taylor Center, which has become increasingly chaotic since it became a facility for processing new detainees last September, according to jail staff and advocates for prisoners.
Mr. Cruciani was scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 14, and could have been facing life in prison. He also faced federal charges in Manhattan and state charges for similar behavior in New Jersey.
During his trial in New York State Supreme Court, prosecutors said that Mr. Cruciani, who once had a reputation as a congenial and brilliant physician with a particular gift for treating chronic pain, had engaged in a pattern of untoward behavior with several women he treated.
At first, Mr. Cruciani would embrace his patients too tightly, or run his fingers through their hair, the prosecutors said. Eventually, his behavior would escalate and he would grope the women without permission, and force them to have intercourse or perform other sex acts. In lawsuits, some women accused him of having overprescribed pain medication that left them dependent on him.
Hillary Tullin, a former patient of Mr. Cruciani who said that he had assaulted her multiple times, said in an interview Monday that while she felt sorry for his children, she also felt “for all the victims who will never get a chance to confront him.”
“It finally dawned on him there was no way out,” she said. “The jurors believed what we said. It was real. He was going to jail for life.”
One of his other former patients, Terrie Phoenix, said: “I take comfort knowing he now faces another judge.”
Mr. Cruciani was first arrested in Pennsylvania in 2017, but after pleading guilty in a deal with Philadelphia prosecutors that required him to surrender his medical license, he was able to avoid jail time. The following year, he was criminally charged in Manhattan. His trial was delayed because of the pandemic, but began in late June of this year. After his conviction in July, he was sent to Rikers Island to await sentencing.
The jail complex, which is set to close by 2027, has been troubled for decades, but the coronavirus pandemic has worsened problems, as hundreds of correction officers have failed to show up for work. The lack of staffing has contributed to a cascade of issues, including the basic processing of new arrivals.
In the late summer of 2021, incarcerated people were held for weeks in intake cells, including in shower areas. After visiting the jail complex, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio said that one of his top priorities was speeding up the intake process. But that process appears to have slowed again — and a third of those who have died at city jails this year were being held at the Eric M. Taylor Center.
William K. Rashbaum, Roni Caryn Rabin and Troy Closson contributed reporting.
Hochul Orders Release of 191 Detainees as Rikers Crisis Deepens
Responding to an escalating crisis inside New York City’s notorious Rikers Island jail complex, Gov. Kathy Hochul on Friday signed a measure that will lead to the release of about 200 detainees, many of them being held for parole violations.
The law, known as the Less is More Act, is intended to ease crowding in the jail at a time when severe staffing shortages at the city’s Department of Correction have led to unsafe and unsanitary conditions for detainees and guards. Ten people have died at Rikers since December, several by suicide.
Even though the law does not go into effect until next March, Ms. Hochul said she was directing the board of parole to immediately release 191 people who qualify from Rikers Island. They were expected to be released on Friday.
Ms. Hochul said the legislation’s focus on ending the re-imprisonment of individuals for technical parole violations was a crucial step to end one of the largest drivers of mass incarceration in New York.
“Parole in this state often becomes a ticket back into jail because of technical violations,” Ms. Hochul said. “Someone was caught with a drink or using a substance or missing an appointment.”
Ms. Hochul also said an additional 200 people serving sentences would be moved from Rikers Island to state prisons over the next five days to ease the burden on the city jail.
But the legislation will still leave Rikers far more crowded than it was last spring, when a wave of releases amid the pandemic dropped the population below 4,000. As of Friday, more than 6,000 people were being held at the jail.
At the same time, coronavirus rates inside the jail appear to be climbing. Correctional health officials first reported an uptick in the prevalence of the virus in mid-August, followed by a spike in cases later that month. After active cases and rates in the jail dropped to near zero in June and July, the seven-day average positive test rate among detainees — 4.36 percent as of this week — is now higher than the city’s 3.92 rate at large.
During a City Council hearing this week to address the conditions at Rikers, officials described a two-pronged catastrophe in the making. About 2,700 staff members — roughly a third of the entire work force — are absent or unable to work on any given day for myriad reasons, leading to a lack of supervision that has caused violence among detainees, and crowding in unsanitary conditions is paving the way for a new surge in coronavirus infections. As of this week, the city said there were 65 active virus cases at the jail.
Only 36 percent of detainees at the jail are fully vaccinated, according to city data.
“The current conditions are resulting in a rapid increase in Covid-19 infection rate in the jails, (and) previously effective control mechanisms such as isolation and quarantine will not be possible because of the department’s dysfunction and overcrowding,” Dr. Robert Cohen, a member of the Board of Correction, an independent body that monitors the jail system, said at the hearing.
Officials have said the staffing shortage has left posts unmanned and cells unsupervised. Guards who do come to work are forced to stay on past the point of exhaustion, working double or even triple shifts. Detainees and correction officers have described conditions inside the jails as filthy, with bodily fluids on the floors and walls of cells, and people held for days in intake units fashioned out of showers.
“The situation in the jails is worse than I imagined,” Vincent Schiraldi, the commissioner of the Correction Department, said at the hearing. “There are sometimes posts with no staff on them, and makes it extremely difficult for us to provide basic services and maintain the level of safety that our officers, civilian workers and people in custody deserve.”
Facing intense criticism following a series of violent incidents and reports of chaotic conditions inside Rikers, Mayor Bill de Blasio this week announced an emergency plan that would allow the Correction Department to suspend workers without pay who were found to be absent without permission.
After signing the bill on Friday, Ms. Hochul said the release of 191 people from Rikers Island was meant to “alleviate the pressure cooker, which could explode at any time. But we’ll be looking at other people who qualify around the state. This was just an immediate Rikers driven situation, but absolutely people meet that threshold in other parts of the state.”
Luis Ferré-Sadurní contributed reporting.