New Lodgings for Leona : Hotel Queen Gets 4 Years in Prison, $7.1-Million Fine : Her Tearful Plea Leaves Judge Cold

A weeping “Hotel Queen” Leona Helmsley was sentenced today to four years in prison for cheating the government of $1.2 million in taxes.

Helmsley, who once boasted to a housemaid that “only the little people pay taxes,” was also ordered by U.S. District Judge John M. Walker to pay a $7.1-million fine.

“No person, no matter how wealthy and prominent, stands above the law,” Walker said. He said “naked greed” prompted her to evade income taxes by billing her hotel empire for personal items.

The judge also imposed 750 hours of community service at Hale House, a home for drug-addicted children, three years probation and repayment of close to $2 million in unpaid taxes.

Helmsley, whose glitzy ads portrayed her as a gracious hostess offering perfection in hotel service but whose enemies described her as a haughty, harsh and hotheaded tyrant, was allowed to remain free on bail.

With her husband, Harry, Helmsley operates a $5-billion New York hotel and real estate empire.

In a sobbing appeal for leniency before sentencing, Helmsley said she has been humiliated beyond imagination.

“I am more humiliated than anyone could ever imagine. . . . I feel I am in the middle of a nightmare,” she said.

“I’m sorry, Your Honor, I’m sorry,” she told an unmoved judge.

Helmsley, 69, was found guilty last August of writing off a wide variety of personal items as business expenses, including bras, shoes and dresses, groceries, a $1-million swimming pool cover that doubled as a marble dance floor, jade figures worth $500,000, and a $130,000 stereo system.

Harry Helmsley, 80, had been charged with the same tax offenses as his wife but at age 80 was ruled not mentally fit to stand trial.

His wife could have received up to 127 years in prison.

Leona Helmsley, who wore a high-necked black dress, said she and her husband had been kept prisoners for the three years of the case, afraid to go to a film or a restaurant.

She said their private lives have been violated to the extent that her son Jay’s grave in Florida has been dug up.

“I beg you, don’t let me lose Harry too,” she said, sobbing, her cheeks flushed and stained with tears. “Our whole life has been work and each other. Please don’t. We have nothing else.”

Harry Helmsley sat in a third-row seat and seemed to nod off several times during his wife’s appeal but he looked alert when the sentence was passed.

Walker, after listening to the two-minute appeal for leniency, passed sentence, saying she had shown no remorse.

Helmsley was found guilty of evading federal taxes from 1983 through 1985, most of it by fraudulently billing $3.1 million in expenses from the Helmsleys’ Greenwich, Conn., mansion to their real estate empire.

Two former Helmsley executives also were sentenced for helping in the tax fraud scheme. Co-defendant Joseph Licari received 30 months in prison, three years probation and a $75,000 fine. Co-defendant Frank Turco received a two-year term, three years probation and a $50,000 fine.