$1.2-million spent to get prison transfers

Inmates paid $1.2-million for transfers before an investigation uncovered the deals.

By MEG LAUGHLIN, Times Staff Writer
Published November 14, 2007

	Corrections chief Jim McDonough: "It infuriates me that people are making big money to pre-empt the system." A telephone conversation between convicted murderer John Freund and his Tallahassee attorney, Bernard Daley: Listen to it
[Scott Keeler | Times files]

In June, a convicted murderer called his lawyer from prison to make sure that his transfer to a new prison would meet his expectations.

John Freund, a former Palm Beach oncologist who in 1984 stabbed a man to death at a party when injections didn't kill him, told attorney Bernard Daley that he wanted his prison lover transferred with him, his "extra property" and "a low bunk, a cotton blanket, a straw hat and medical passes."

"I'll certainly do it for you," Daley told him.

The conversation, which was taped and turned over to the chief of the Florida Department of Corrections, spawned a full-scale investigation into improper prison transfers and resulted in the demotion and firing of several prison administrators.

Now, five months later, the results of the investigation show that prison transfers were big business. In the past year, two lawyers and two retired prison consultants shared fees from inmates' families totaling close to $1.2-million for helping 371 Florida inmates jump the line and get transferred ahead of thousands of others.

The bulk of the money, the investigation showed, went to Daley, who received $7,500 from Freund for one transfer alone.

"It wasn't as sinister as it sounds," says Daley. "I was trying to assuage John in that conversation. I didn't really know what I could accomplish."

In Freund's case, the 57-year-old doctor jumped the line in March - with Daley's help - to get to an air-conditioned prison in South Florida. Freund's justification for the transfer was that he needed to take a beginning computer class there. But officials later determined that he shouldn't have been moved for that reason.

In June, after several phone calls tipped authorities off that Freund was paying Daley to help him bypass the rules, Freund was transferred by the department to a prison in the northern part of the state. It was in transit that he made the phone call to Daley telling him to make sure he landed in "the comfort zone."

Prison consultants

While Daley and Freund dealt directly with each other, most of the transfers were arranged by prison consultants, who got a cut of the lawyers' fees. These consultants persuaded employees in the prison system to push inmates to the front of the line, often ignoring obstacles that made them ineligible for transfer.

The investigation did not show that Corrections Department employees received any money for their part in the scheme.

To send a message that the unethical transfers must stop, the department took a number of steps, including removing 74 inmates from the institutions where they had paid to go.

Among them was Ken Langford of Naples, who is finishing a two-year sentence for a fourth DUI. His wife, Donna Langford, said she paid Daley $4,500 for a transfer to a work-release program, after being assured that it was legal and accepted policy. But her husband was recently transferred back to a harsher prison because, guards told him, he had not participated in the substance abuse programs needed to apply for work-release.

"It was up to Daley and his consultant to know the rules and not take our money," Langford said. "I'm filing a bar complaint against him."

Daley said that he had received a "lot of calls from irate families of inmates" who have accused him of wrongly taking their money for transfers that have been reversed.

"It's not my fault that corrections is suddenly taking a different view of a practice allowed for years," he said.

But Jim McDonough, chief of the Corrections Department, strongly disagrees: "It infuriates me that people are making big money to pre-empt the system."

Daley says to assuage the inmates whose money he took, he has hired a team of young lawyers to offer them free services.

Sending a message

Besides the 74 transfer revocations, the department has taken other measures to send a message that the unethical transfers must stop: Daley and his prison consultant, Ron Jones, received scathing letters from the department's general counsel reprimanding them for "misconduct contrary to concepts of honesty and justice" and forbidding them any contact with department personnel.

Because he requested transfers after getting paid, prison consultant Louis Wainwright, who was chief of the Corrections Department for 24 years, has been denied unimpeded access to the corrections central office in Tallahassee and must now sign in and have an escort.

"I defer to Secretary McDonough and accept whatever he decides," Wainwright told the Times several weeks ago.

One top prison administrator, David Tune, was fired, and two others, Rusty McLaughlin and John Becker, were demoted for a "failure of leadership."

"We are not doing any of these things to be mean," McDonough said. "We are doing them to be fair."

The investigation did not result in any criminal charges, and inmates who were transferred back can apply for transfers through the proper channels. But they will have to wait behind thousands of inmates who followed department rules.

Meg Laughlin can be reached at mlaughlin@sptimes.com.

[Last modified November 14, 2007, 06:46:37]