Newell (Click on photo for more)

Warren Newell, the former Palm Beach County commissioner sentenced to five years behind bars as a result of a sweeping political corruption investigation, has been released from the Federal Prison Camp in Pensacola more than two and a half years early.

Several sources tell Page2Live that the 55-year-old former Lake Worth city leader returned to the county he once ruled Monday and is currently undergoing orientation in a halfway house.

Newell, a four-term county commish, was given a two-year sentence reduction after he ratted out former County Commish Mary McCarty, who’s serving a three-and-a-half-year sentence.

Newell is expected to remain at the halfway house, the Salvation Army’s Center of Hope on Military Trail, through the summer. His stay is designed to help the former boating enthusiast’s return to society.

“He’s been here for two days and he’s going through orientation, so he can’t leave yet,”  a fellow inmate said this morning, as he smoked a cigarette on the center’s campus. The inmate asked that his name not be used. Two other residents confirmed that Newell indeed had arrived.

“He’ll see a psychiatrist, among other things, and they’ll tell him the hundreds of rules,” the inmate said. “Then he’s going to go look for a job. Warren’s a smart man. He’ll come out just fine. His family already visited him.”

For more, and the poll, look below or click (Read more…)

Kevin McCarty and Mary at a court appearance in March (Palm Beach Post photo)

Kevin McCarty, the husband of jailed former Palm Beach County Commissioner Mary McCarty, has left the federal prison camp he was sent to in the wake of the public corruption scandal that ensnared the power couple.

According to records, the 60-year-old Kevin was released from the Federal Correctional Institution in Miami Oct. 27. On the same day, he checked into a halfway house downtown West Palm Beach, where he’ll finish his sentence.

Incidentally, the halfway house is operated by the Salvation Army, for which McCarty and his family raised hundreds of thousands over the years.

“I’m almost done,” McCarty told Page2Live in an exclusive interview. His release date is Jan. 24. “I’m extremely gratified about how folks have reached out to me to support me over the past few months.”

McCarty, a former chairman of the South Florida Water Management District and a bonds trader, started serving in May his eight-month sentence for not reporting his wife’s misdeeds, including her commission votes that financially benefited both of them.

At the prison camp, McCarty slept two bunk-beds away from Tony Masilotti, the first commissioner to fall in a wave of political scandals that shook the county’s establishment in 2006-07. Masilotti is serving five years for using his elected office in crooked land deals from which he may have made as much as $10 million.

“I saw a lot of Tony,” McCarty said. “When I got there and we saw each other for the first time, we just had to laugh. He was a gentleman to me from day one. We’ve become friends.”

For more, how McCarty took up yoga, and the poll, look below or click (Read more…)

David and his wife (Courtesy New York Magazine)

– Rough patch for captain of industry George David, whose UTC owns Palm Beach County’s second largest employer, Pratt & Whitney. The 67-year-old is going through a nasty divorce in Connecticut. The wife, Marie Douglas-David, wants $100 million to go away. And the dirty laundry aired out in court Tuesday, according to the Hartford Courant, included how David spent one weekend on the French Riviera with his mistress, a New York financial advisor, and the next in Paris with his wife. David averted disaster in Paris when, walking with his “ole’ lady”, he saw another couple who’d met him and his mistress on the Riviera. David made sure to steer is wife out-of-sight. The wife’s attorneys accuse David of going on a shopping spree with the mistress at the time he was trying to patch things up with the wife. The spree included $10,000 worth of Manolo Blahnik shoes and a $15,000-fur coat. Meanwhile, 11,600 of UTC’s employees could be shown the door this year.

— Palm Beach Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff has just arrived at the Butner Federal Correctional Complex in the Raleigh-Durham, N.C., area. Madoff, 71, is scheduled to remain at the low to medium security facility until 2139, according to Bureau of Prisons records. The complex also includes a hospital.

McCarty

– Speaking of federal prison, the supporters of disgraced former Palm Beach County Commish Mary McCarty received this e-mail from her family after she checked into her new digs for the next five years, the Federal Prison Camp Bryan, a women’s camp in Texas. Corruption was her crime. Three and a half years the sentence. The e-mail: “Mary landed in Bryan Texas over the weekend.  Any cards or letters should be sent to the following address: Mary Ballard McCarty, Register #: 73341-004, FPC Bryan, PO Box 2149, Bryan, TX 77805. Should you have any questions regarding visitation, commissary funds, sending magazines/books, please don’t hesitate to contact us.”

Commissary funds? Or sure, let me send her five bucks right now!

Here is the latest communication from behind bars by deposed Palm Beach County Commish Mary McCarty. One of her family members has just e-mailed this to two dozens of her supporters.

McCarty

McCarty, 54, is serving three-and-a-half years for misusing her county commission seat at the tough Federal Detention Center downtown Miami.

“ Hi Everyone,

We want to thank those of you who have been sending Mary cards and letters.  Please remember to include your return address on the envelopes. Also, there have been several requests to visit her while she’s down in Miami and she is only allowed her attorney or Mother at this location.

Thank you again for all your kind notes…with some luck Mary will only be at this location for another month or so before moving to a permanent facility.

All our best,

Mary’s family”

The list of  e-mail addresses this message was sent to includes: Florida Commission on the Status of Women member Claudia Barto; Former Delray architect Digby Bridges; David Burke, vice president of The Breakers; Palm Beach Gardens builder Dan Catalfumo; Conservative radio host Dick Farrell; Cliff Hertz, partner at the lawfirm Broad and Cassel; former Miami Dolphins tough guy Bob Kuechenberg; advocate for the homeless Ezra Krieg; south county political operative Dennis McIlwain; and Cyndy Stephens, assistant to the board of commissioners.

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Disgraced former Palm Beach County Commissioner Mary McCarty has been transferred to a notorious federal prison that once hosted a deposed dictator and would-be dirty bomber.

McCarty's new home

A week after she was sentenced to three-and-a-half years for her role in a public corruption scandal and immediately taken into custody, McCarty, 54, was moved from the Palm Beach County lockup and driven to Miami’s Federal Detention Center.

And if she thought she had it rough on Gun Club Road, (where she bitterly complained about being cold, lonely and being served bad food in an e-mail to friends), wait until she gets a load of this Soviet-looking high-rise smack dab in the middle of downtown!

According to the federal Bureau of Prisons, the Miami FDC is an administrative facility. And ”administrative facilities are institutions with special missions, such as the detention of pretrial offenders; the treatment of inmates with serious or chronic medical problems; or the containment of extremely dangerous, violent, or escape-prone inmates,” according to the BOP website.

To find out who else is housed with McCarty, and vote on our poll, look below (Read more…)

Two weeks before disgraced former Palm Beach County Commish Mary McCarty is sentenced in a corruption scandal, citizens’ letters to the court about her punishment started trickling in.

Mary and Kevin McCarty (Lannis Waters/The Palm Beach Post)

So far, eight people have taken the time to write federal Judge Don Middlebrooks.

Seven letters, peppered with words like “dishonor” and “political aristocracy” and calling her Palm Beach County’s version of The Godfather’s Don Corleone, asked the judge to throw the book at McCarty, demanding the “maximum.”

So far, just one, a school district employee, asked for leniency. But McCarty recently told friends she is expecting onslaught of more than 60 requests for a lenient sentence over the next few days.

In the end, McCarty is expected to get five years in a minimum-security prison camp for women – quite possibly the West Virginia facility that housed insider trading domestic diva Martha Stewart.

For more letters and the poll, look below (Read more…)

U.S. District Judge Kenneth Ryskamp must really like Kevin McCarty.

Ryskamp allowed the disgraced husband of soon-to-be-jailed former Palm Beach County Commissioner Mary McCarty to roam free for another three weeks even though Kevin was supposed to surrender to authorities Monday and star serving his eight-month sentence.

Because the feds have not contacted Kevin with information about his prison destination, Ryskamp signed a motion this week allowing McCarty to report May 26.

Ryskamp also spared McCarty the humiliation of being temporarily held at the Palm Beach County jail until he’d be transported to his permanent camp.

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Yet another West Palm Beach city commissioner is feeling the economic pinch.

Commish Kimberly Mitchell, who’s mulling over a run for mayor, soon could lose her day job.

Her bonds underwriting firm, the Chicago-based Loop Capital, is considering a strategic change in Florida.

Kimberly Mitchell

Mitchell is Loop’s sole representative in the state, at a time when the government bonds business has slowed to a crawl. So Mitchell’s scheduled to fly to the Windy City next week to discuss the firm’s new plan, which may not involve her.

“The issuance of bonds in the state is down 50 percent,” Mitchell said. “Loop is a small firm and their resources may be better allocated in a more active place.”

Bonds are financial instruments by which government raises capital, often for things like land purchases and construction.

Mitchell said the situation has nothing to do with the fact that Palm Beach County is re-thinking how it deals with bond issues. Former PBC Commish Mary McCarty is facing five years in prison partly because she voted to favor her husband Kevin’s bonds business.

“That hasn’t been part of the discussion,” Mitchell said.

Mitchell has underwritten bonds for the county and the South Florida Water Management District. Her fourth term as commissioner is considered a part-time job. Her City Hall pay is $30,000.

Earlier this year, her fellow commissioner Molly Douglas faced watching her home getting sold on the courthouse steps. She said she paid off her loan.

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Show me yours, and I’ll show you mine — celebrity, that is.

Disgraced former Palm Beach County Commish Mary McCarty and Mark Foley, the former U.S. congressman who quit in 2006 when his suggestive text-messages to young pages surfaced, were name-dropping like there was no tomorrow at a recent luncheon.

They were loud enough that a bat-eared source overheard the two fallen Republicans from a nearby table at the Lake Park soul food emporium Pritchard’s.

(Read more…)

A Scripps Florida higher-up has been wining-and-dining soon-to-be felon and former Palm Beach County Commissioner Mary McCarty in a strange show of support.

Ben Starling

McCarty, 54, is scheduled to plead guilty to a corruption-related charge later this month.

But that hasn’t stopped Scripps Director of Philanthropy Ben Starling from cozying up to the disgraced commissioner in an oh-so-public display of affection.

On at least two occasions this year, Starling invited large groups of friends to lunch with McCarty at, of all places, the Lake Park soul food emporium Pritchard’s.

Starling picks for those rendezvous a table smack-dab in the middle of the small, busy restaurant.

In late January, three sources told Page2Live, Starling gathered a group of about 20 to hang with the former south county Republican powerhouse. Among them: Former U.S. Rep. Mark Foley, who also knows a thing or two about the proverbial hot seat. (Read more…)