He spent nearly 20 years on the run and fought bitterly against extradition from Britain but when the fraudster Tuvia Stern arrived back in New York, he found prison authorities surprisingly accommodating.
The former fugitive, jailed for three and a half years in March for fraud, was allowed to throw two parties for his family behind bars, even hiring his own kosher caterers and a prominent Jewish singer.
He hosted a lavish Bar Mitzvah for his son and later an engagement party for his daughter. For the Bar Mitzvah, prison officials allowed 60 guests to party for six hours in the jailhouse gym last December in a detention centre grimly known as “The Tombs”.
Five top prison officials — including a rabbi and his boss, a Muslim imam — have been disciplined.
Stern, an American and member of the Orthodox Jewish Satmar community, was charged in 1989 with two fraud schemes in New York that he initially claimed were organised by his older brother, Ephraim.
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The pair were accused of a $265,000 (£160,000) cheque fraud against Morgan Guaranty Trust and a $1.5 million plot to defraud an equipment leasing unit of the Bell Atlantic telephone telephone company.
Tuvia Stern fled America on the eve of his trial on the advice of his rabbi to avoid giving evidence against his brother, his lawyer told the City of London magistrates court during the extradition battle. He moved to of São Paulo, Brazil, with his wife and their children and successfully fended off US efforts to extradite him.
The father of seven was arrested in Britain in December 2006, however, as he tried to visit two of his children on a new US passport. He was extradited to America after the British courts refused to intervene.
Denied bail Stern pleaded guilty in New York and was sentenced in March to two-and-a-half years in prison for grand larceny and one-year for bail-jumping, records show. Before being transferred to an upstate jail to serve his sentence Stern was held at the downtown Manhattan detention centre known grimly as “The Tombs”.
Stern hired his own caterers who supplied not just kosher food but also cutlery — including knives. Friends and family were allowed to keep their mobile phones in another breach of normal prison rules.
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Stern himself was able to shed his prison uniform and dress up for the event. The guests were entertained by Yaakov Shwekey, a popular Orthodox singer, and a band.
The New York City Department of Corrections even paid the overtime for prison guards at the party.
The first party went off so well that prison officials gave permission for a second jailhouse event several months later, allowing ten guests in for an engagement party for his daughter.
Martin Horn, the city’s corrections commissioner, reportedly livid by the revelations, has now suspended Rabbi Leib Glanz, the prison chaplain who arranged the Bar Mitzvah, for two weeks. He has also stripped four other officials of two weeks holiday, including the assistant commissioner for ministerial services, an Imam.