President Joe Biden on Thursday commuted the sentences of two of the Chicago space’s most infamous fraudsters: former Dixon Comptroller Rita Crundwell, who embezzled practically $54 million from the tiny city to fund a lavish life-style, and Eric Bloom, the onetime chief of a Northbrook administration agency who defrauded buyers of greater than $665 million.
The selections within the clemency petitions for Crundwell and Bloom have been introduced by the White Home as a part of a massive list of some 39 pardons and 1,499 commutations. Biden’s orders don’t wipe out their felony convictions, however finish their sentences instantly.
Crundwell, 71, pleaded responsible in 2012 to what authorities then known as the largest municipal fraud in the country’s history, admitting she stole $53.7 million from the town over greater than a decade and used the cash to finance her quarter horse enterprise and lavish life-style.
She was sentenced in 2013 to just about 20 years in federal jail. In April 2020, Crundwell had petitioned a federal choose for early compassionate launch primarily based on her poor well being and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I’ve finished the whole lot in my energy to be a ‘mannequin inmate.’ To work as exhausting as I can and have by no means complained about my situations right here or the pay we obtain,” Crundwell wrote. “There’s by no means a day that goes by, I don’t remorse my crime.”
She’d served about eight years behind bars earlier than being launched in 2021 to a midway home in Downers Grove, U.S. Bureau of Prisons data present. Crundwell would have accomplished her sentence in October 2028.
Bloom, in the meantime, the onetime head of Sentinel Administration Group, was convicted by a jury in 2012 in what was billed by prosecutors on the time as the largest single financial fraud within the historical past of Chicago’s federal courtroom.
Prosecutors alleged that as head of Sentinel, Bloom secretly started exposing his well-heeled prospects to an more and more dangerous mixture of leveraged offers in 2003, resulting in the corporate’s collapse 4 years later.
“Ask (my assistant) to look in my sofa for spare change,” Bloom was quoted in courtroom filings as telling an affiliate throughout a name days earlier than Sentinel’s collapse.
Bloom, 59, was sentenced in 2015 to 14 years in jail. He was presently serving out his sentence at a residential reentry facility in Florida, jail data present. His sentence had been because of expire in Might 2026.
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