CORINNE BROWN will have to work at federal prison industries and follow rules or be punished for violating the rules. Read Coleman FCI Medium Security inmate handbook here.
The Justice Department and FBI have indicted, tried, convicted and sent to prison a corrupt 24-year Northeast Florida Congresswoman for abusing an 501(c)(3) "charity."
She used it for her personal benefit, violating the IRS inurement rules, as the Orlando Sentinel reports, " stealing "$800,000 meant for poor students to pay for Bahama vacations and a Beyoncé concert and to pad her own bank accounts."
BROWN betrayed all of her constituents, and all Americans, and all African-Americans. She made a deal with Florida legislature's Republicans in getting her unconstitutional district established, mining African-American votes in a ridiculously gerrymandered district that stretched 300 miles, from Jacksonville to Orlando, making other districts Republican sinecures. That districting plan was struck down by the Florida Supreme Court, the wonderful result of Wayne Hogan's heroic work getting the Fair Districts Amendment added to Florida's Constitution.
For 24 years, BROWN was shamelessly promoting corrupt projects and stealing from a charity. Now she's in a federal prison.
Like a hog caught under a gate, wherever he his hiding, our corrupt St. Johns's County Sheriff DAVID SHOAR is sweating bullets about what the FBI and U.S. Attorney will do about his crimes.
SHOAR, who changed his name from "HOAR" in 1994, must be insanely, anxiously awaiting federal and state investigations about his dodgy St. Johns County Sheriff's Office Four Star Association, Inc., which is run by disgraced former St. Augustine City Manager WILLIAM BARRY HARRISS, and is no charity and HARRISS is no "independent contractor" -- they violate IRS inurement and personal benefit rules, possible federal crimes, as amply documented by Michael Gold and Historic City News in investigative reporting ignored by ineptly run local news media that routinely accepts SHOAR/HOAR's flummery, including the St. Augustine Record, local tv stations and Folio Weekly
https://historiccity.com/2017/staugustine/news/florida/sheriffs-four-star-association-fails-charitable-organization-test-69098
https://historiccity.com/2017/staugustine/news/florida/sheriff-milking-the-budget-let-me-count-the-ways-69093
https://historiccity.com/2017/staugustine/news/florida/sheriffs-attempt-at-secrecy-begins-to-unravel-68156
http://cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com/2017/07/sheriff-shoar-wm-harriss-committing-tax.html
http://cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com/2017/07/sheriff-shoar-wm-harriss-committing-tax.html
From Orlando Sentinel:
Former U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown reports to prison, faces 'rough road'
A month later, Brown, whose district reached into Orlando before it was redrawn last year, cast her vote as a superdelegate for Hillary Clinton’s nomination for president.
But the days of hobnobbing with the powerful are over for the 71-year-old Jacksonville Democrat, whose fall from grace was complete Monday when she emerged from a limousine-style minibus at the federal prison in Sumter County to begin serving a five-year sentence for fraud and other crimes.
Brown, who served 24 years in Congress before her defeat in 2016, was sentenced last month for using about $800,000 meant for poor students to pay for Bahama vacations and a Beyoncé concert and to pad her own bank accounts.
At the Coleman federal correctional complex — the nation’s largest with more than 6,600 prisoners — she will spend her days at the same complex that houses notorious criminals such as convicted gangster James “Whitey” Bulger, 88, who spent 16 years as one of the country’s most wanted fugitives, and Texas tycoon Robert Allen Stanford, 67, convicted of running a $7 billion Ponzi scheme.
Bishop Kelvin Cobaris, lead pastor and founder of The Impact Church in Orlando and Brown’s spiritual adviser, said she was accompanied by family to the prison about 50 miles northwest of downtown Orlando.
“I saw emotion. I didn’t see nervousness or fear,” Cobaris told TV reporters. “She was just ready to go and face what she needed to face.”
The low-security prison camp is separate from the rest of the correctional complex that has three security levels — high, medium and low.
There are no walls or fences at camps, and most inmates are serving five to 10 years for nonviolent crimes, said Larry Levine, director of Wall Street Prison Consultants, which helps incoming prisoners adjust to their new confinement.
Because doors are often not locked, the inmates are subjected to multiple headcounts day and night.
Levine, who did not work with Brown, said he is certain inmates will be wary of their new politically connected prisoner.
“I was locked up with politicians — they have entitlement issues; they think they’re entitled to things, and people resent that,” he said. “They’re going to think she’s rich — she can claim she doesn’t have any money.”
Brown will wake at 6 a.m. on weekdays to wait in line for the bathroom and then for breakfast. Afterward, she will tidy her room and the small locker “that is her existence,” where she keeps all her possessions, said Levine of Los Angeles.
Brown likely will do clerical or janitorial work during her days at the prison camp, where she will be held with 391 other female inmates, he said.
“When they get high-profile inmates like her, they like to treat them like [expletive],” said Levine, who did time at 11 prisons over 10 years for racketeering and narcotics traffic, among other charges. “Seriously, she’s got a rough road ahead of her.”
Brown will work until 10 a.m. before a two-hour lunch break, after which she will resume work until about 4 p.m. Prison staff will assign her to one of the jobs in cooking, maintenance, cleaning or clerical work.
Those first 30 days for Brown will be spent living in the multipurpose room, or “fishbowl,” said Holli Coulman, a consultant at Wall Street Prison Consultants who served 21 months for wire fraud.
“She won’t yet be moved to what we call the ‘condos,’ where she will be assigned to a two- or four-woman room,” Coulman said. “She will have a job and be expected to work.”
The former congresswoman’s chief of staff, Ronnie Simmons, began a four-year sentence for his conviction on similar charges in the same case this month in Maryland.
In 1992, Brown and two others became the first African Americans from Florida elected to Congress since Reconstruction. Her sprawling 250-mile-long north-south district spanned 14 counties, including portions of Orange, Seminole, Lake and Volusia.
She unsuccessfully challenged a new map approved by the Florida Supreme Court that shifted it to an east-west district, stretching from Tallahassee to Jacksonville, on grounds that it violated the Voting Rights Act by reducing the black voting-age population from 50 percent to 45 percent. She was defeated in the 2016 primary by former state Sen. Al Lawson, who went on to win in the general election.
During her time in office, Brown worked to secure local spending through earmarked bills and met with Justice Department officials to investigate the 2012 Trayvon Martin shooting in Sanford, saying the 17-year-old’s death was a hate crime.
Brown could be released on good behavior after serving four years and three months, Levine said. She is appealing her conviction and sought to remain free on bond during that process, but U.S. District Judge Timothy Corrigan denied her request.
At sentencing, he said the actions of Brown and Simmons were a “crime born out of entitlement and greed committed to ensure a lifestyle that was beyond their means.”
jruiter@orlandosentinel.com or 352-742-5927; Follow him on Twitter at
@JasonRuiter1.
@JasonRuiter1.
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From Jacksonville's Florida Times-Union:
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From Jacksonville's Florida Times-Union:
Posted January 29, 2018 11:52 am | Updated 07:30 pm
ByEx-U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown starts 5-year prison sentence
COLEMAN| Former U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown began a five-year sentence Monday at a minimum-security camp inside one of the country’s largest federal prison complexes.
The 12-term congresswoman was driven, without stopping, past a cluster of reporters outside the Sumter County complex she was assigned to after her sentencing on 18 felony convictions involving fraud and tax crimes.
Her arrival was unannounced, but easily spotted.
Twenty minutes before the noon deadline a judge set for Brown to report, a black limousine-style minibus with tinted windows turned into the prison driveway and stopped. Bishop Kelvin Cobaris, an Orlando-area religious leader, had been waiting across the road and walked up to the bus and climbed in.
He said later Brown was in the bus with a few family members and others, and she asked him to pray for her. He said he encouraged her to look at prison as a way to impact the lives of people she could help.
Asked if Brown seemed afraid, Cobaris answered: “The congresswoman is a very strong woman. I didn’t see fear. I saw nervousness.”
The Jacksonville Democrat is still trying to avoid serving her full sentence in prison.
Brown’s challenge of her May conviction is pending in an Atlanta appeals court, but her request to remain free during the appeal was rejected last week.
Her arrival drew attention to the 6,600-inmate complex of prisons that people in Central Florida generally give little thought.
Juanita Sanders, who lives in the area, stopped Monday morning to shoot some pictures outside the main entrance. She had a friend she used to visit who served time for embezzlement at the same women’s camp, and said the experience could end up being good for Brown.
“She got away with quite a bit — or she thought she got away with it,” Sanders said of Brown, adding that time in prison could teach her to appreciate life and the things she already has.
Brown will be treated like any other inmate, said Joe Rojas, local president for the prison staff union, who used her arrival as a chance to talk to reporters about the impact of staff cuts set to start next month. He had been to her office years before and remembered her staff touring the complex with other lawmakers, and said her conviction was “unfortunate.”
He said the complex plans 177 cuts, 150 of them eliminating existing job vacancies. Each one, he said, adds potential for violence and disruptions inside the complex’s mix of low-, medium- and high-security lockups where the minimum-security camp is a tiny presence.
Brown’s incarceration for conspiring to cash in on more than $800,000 her supporters donated to a sham charity, One Door for Education, was a sad finale to her storied career.
Her 1992 freshman election ended more than a century when Florida didn’t send any African Americans to Congress, and in the years that followed she was an outspoken advocate on civil rights and interests of disenfranchised. She remained in Congress until she lost reelection in 2016, a few months after she was indicted.
Earlier this month, she was part of a procession of black politicians recognized at a Clay County commemoration of the life of Martin Luther King Jr.
That made the irony of her prosecution over One Door more bitter.
One Door donors testified at Brown’s trial that her personal request to help One Door, which she falsely described as being a tax-exempt charity, was a big part of why they wrote checks that sometimes topped $10,000 or $20,000.
The Virginia-based organization was started by a schoolteacher’s daughter as a scholarship fund and support system for projects to help the poor or disadvantaged. But the founder, Carla Wiley, raised no money before she began dating Brown’s longtime chief of staff, Ronnie Simmons, who brought One Door to the congresswoman’s attention.
Jurors at Brown’s trial were told that she, Simmons and Wiley all used money meant for charity to pay for personal expenses, which ranged from mortgage payments and travel to shopping in Beverly Hills.
One Door money also paid for tickets to a Beyonce concert in Washington and a reception at a game between the Jaguars and the Washington Redskins.
Wiley and Simmons both pleaded guilty and testified at Brown’s trial, with Simmons acknowledging his routine of withdrawing money from One Door’s bank account and depositing it in cash in Brown’s accounts and sometimes handing her money personally.
Brown alone insisted on her innocence through the court process, a fact that helped lead to her drawing the longest sentence of the conspirators. Wiley was sentenced to 21 months in prison and also told to report Monday. Simmons began a four-year sentence earlier in January.
Brown’s appeal of her conviction has centered on U.S. District Judge Timothy Corrigan’s decision to remove a juror who said during jury deliberations that “the Holy Spirit” told him Brown was innocent. Corrigan said that belief was different from ordinary prayer for guidance and was comparable to using information from outside the trial to decide a verdict, which is explicitly banned in federal courts.
The juror’s removal was followed the next day by the guilty verdict, so Brown is seeking a new trial.
An attorney who doesn’t represent Brown, Charles Truncale, has said ministers’ groups have discussed filing briefs to the appeals court.
Steve Patterson: (904) 359-4263
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Former US Rep. Brown reports to federal prison for fraud
Updated 12:35 pm, Monday, January 29, 2018
COLEMAN, Fla. (AP) — Former U.S. Rep. Corrine Brown has begun serving a five-year federal sentence for her part in a fraud scheme that helped end her long career.
The Florida Times-Union reports that Brown surrendered Monday at a minimum-security camp at the Coleman Federal Correction Complex in central Florida.
The 71-year-old Democrat was sentenced for fraud as well as lying on tax returns and other documents about income from a purported charity for poor students that she used as a personal slush fund.
Brown is appealing her conviction, saying it was wrong for the trial judge to dismiss a juror who claimed the "Holy Spirit" told him she's innocent.
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