Businessman Denied Request to Pay for Penthouse to Be Used as His Jail

A wealthy Canadian businessman charged with hashish smuggling offered to pay for private guards and have his phone calls monitored if he could await trial in a downtown penthouse instead of a crowded jail cell.

Michael Medjuck, 41, faces 20 years to life in prison if convicted of conspiring to smuggle 70 tons of hashish into the United States. He is now in the Oakland city jail, held without bail with seven other inmates.

He asked to be detained in a rented 29th-floor suite, with off-duty police officers on guard around the clock. Medjuck offered to wear a transmitting device on his leg and see only his lawyers, their investigators and his guards.

But a federal judge was unmoved.

“No private system of incarceration can be as secure as the authority of the United States,” U.S. District Judge Eugene Lynch said Wednesday in denying the request.

Assistant U.S. Atty. Mary Pougiales, in court papers, likened Medjuck’s proposal to “preferential treatment for wealthy, high-level narcotics traffickers that occurs in Mexico and Colombia.”