Legal News

Sam Israel?s Lady Friend Pleads Guilty to Abetting Failure to Surrender

By Dan Slater

Of the fugitive stories to emerge last summer, the most interesting, for our money, was that of former hedge fund CEO and convicted felon Sam Israel.

On June 9, when Israel was supposed to begin serving a 20-year prison term for fraud, police found his SUV parked unattended on the Bear Mountain Bridge in Westchester County. Portrayed as a suicide — the words “suicide is painless” were scrawled in the dust on the hood — authorities never found a body and later declared Israel a fugitive.

A couple weeks later, Debra Ryan, Israel’s longtime live-in girlfriend, was arrested and charged with helping him flee. (Israel, you’ll remember, got no further than the next state. By early July, he surrendered to police in Massachusetts.)

Today, Ryan, the lady friend, pleaded guilty to abetting Israel’s failure to surrender. According to the AP, Ryan told U.S. District Judge Kenneth Karas: “He woke me up and begged me to help him. I agreed to help. . . .I knew that was wrong.”

The max sentence for Ryan’s crime is 10 years, but prosecutors said in a letter to the judge that federal guidelines suggest a sentence of 4 to 10 months. Ryan, notes the AP, still faces local court proceedings for allegedly trying to mail Israel $300 in cash, hidden in the pages of a magazine, while he was at the Westchester County jail. She has pleaded not guilty. Her lawyer is Richard Strassberg.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 10, 2009 (boomark / email).