Ex-Financier’s Penalty Unchanged at Hearing

A federal judge ordered Martin Frankel on Thursday to serve the same sentence he got in 2004 for stealing $200 million from insurance companies: nearly 17 years in federal prison.

The former financier was ordered resentenced after a Supreme Court ruling last year gave judges more leeway in their use of sentencing guidelines.

During a brief hearing in U.S. District Court, Judge Ellen B. Burns said she saw no reason to alter the sentence.

Frankel, 51, wearing baggy brown prison scrubs and large glasses, stroked a long gray beard that he grew in prison as Burns reread the 200-month sentence.

He spoke briefly, asking Burns to note that he was at risk in prison.

Defense attorney William Koch elaborated after court, saying that the highly publicized case, which inspired two books, made Frankel “particularly vulnerable” to physical assaults in prison.

He will be eligible for release in 2015, according to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.

Frankel was convicted of taking over and looting insurance companies in Arkansas, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Missouri and Tennessee.

He bought the insurance companies through a trust set up to hide his involvement, having been barred from securities trading because of a similar scheme years before in Ohio.

He claimed that he was investing the companies’ assets, but instead stole the $200 million to pay for an expensive lifestyle, with a two-house compound in Greenwich, Conn., luxury cars and several girlfriends.

Prosecutors said Frankel was motivated by greed and a lust for the high life.

Frankel fled the country in May 1999 shortly after a meeting with Mississippi regulators, who questioned his management of several insurance companies.

He was arrested in Germany four months later and pleaded guilty to 24 counts of fraud and racketeering in 2002.