The Nation : Fugitive Ex-Lawmaker Returned to U.S.

Former New Jersey state Sen. David Friedland, who faces seven years in prison for fraud, was returned to the United States, ending two years as a fugitive that began when he faked his death while scuba diving. The Hudson County Democrat arrived aboard a flight from Zurich at New York’s Kennedy International Airport and waved to reporters as he was escorted past a phalanx of U.S. marshals who were waiting to take him to the federal correction facility in Manhattan. Friedland, 50, faces trial on other fraud charges. He was to be arraigned today in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn. Friedland, who resigned in 1980, was captured earlier this month on the Maldive Islands south of India. He disappeared two weeks before he was indicted for defrauding a union pension fund and three weeks before he was due in court seeking a reduction in his seven-year sentence on a 1980 conviction in an earlier swindle involving the same fund.