Dennis Kozlowski, former CEO of Tyco International, says a jury sent him to prison for being rich.
“I was a guy sitting in a courtroom making $100 million a year,” the 60-year-old felon said on “60 Minutes” on Sunday evening. “And I think a juror sitting there just would have to say, ‘All that money? He must have done something wrong.’ I think … it’s as simple as that.”
Here in Denver, there’s another guy on trial for making $100 million a year.
Each morning, former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio faces a jury not of his peers but of 18 people who will collectively make considerably less in their entire lives.
One thing Nacchio has going for himself as he battles 42 counts of illegal insider trading is that he’s not the symbol of excess that Kozlowski became.
“Oink, oink,” screamed a 2002 New York Post headline when prosecutors accused Kozlowski and an associate of using their company “as a personal piggy bank” and looting about $600 million.
Kozlowski showed up for court each day with his second wife, Karen, who was a waitress at Ron’s Beach House when Kozlowski met her in the 1990s.
Nacchio comes to court not with a trophy blond but with his wife, Anne, who looks like a sensible and concerned mother from New Jersey.
Nacchio’s money is equally unobtrusive. Unlike Kozlowski, Nacchio is not known for buying $10 million worth of Renoirs and Monets and evading the sales taxes. Sure, Nacchio has mansions in New Jersey and Florida. But these properties have not garnered nearly the attention of Tyco’s $19 million Manhattan apartment with its $6,000 shower curtain.
This shower curtain was so obscenely priced, Kozlowski couldn’t cop to it in his nationally televised jailhouse interview.
“I signed off on a decorator to decorate, you know, the Tyco apartment,” he told CBS News’ Morley Safer. “That was my involvement. … The first time I heard about that shower curtain … was after I was out of the company, and I read about it in a newspaper. And I was calling around asking: ‘Where is this shower curtain?’ But to this day, I wouldn’t know it if it fell on me.”
Kozlowski also could not admit to having a good time at the $2 million party he threw for his wife’s 40th birthday on the Italian island of Sardinia. It featured toga-clad models, squirting ice sculptures and singer Jimmy Buffett – and half of it was charged to Tyco.
“It was over the top,” Kozlow ski said. “I was taken aback by it, but I smiled and worked my way through it, wanting the night to end as fast as I could.”
Even Kozlowski’s 8,600- square-foot log cabin atop a mountain in Beaver Creek recently fetched $10 million.
Now, Kozlowski’s wife has filed for divorce, and his friends don’t visit him in prison. All this money. What was it for?
“It’s a way of keeping score, I guess,” Kozlowski said.
Today, Kozlowski scores $1 a day “mopping floors” and “slinging hash,” CBS reported. He’s been ordered to pay $167 million in fines and restitution, but he is still tens of millions short after liquidating most of his treasures.
He’s doing 8 1/3 to 25 years with “murderers, drug dealers and pedophiles,” CBS reported. It’s going to be a long time.
“When you’re sleeping in jail, you wake up all the time because there’s a light on all night,” Kozlowski said. “So you kinda wake up every hour, hoping and wishing and praying and hoping it was just a dream, you know. It’s reality, and it’s where you are.”
The Mid-State Correctional Facility in Marcy, N.Y., where Kozlowski serves his time, is about 250 miles from Manhattan. I’m sure the place is crawling with cons who swear they didn’t do it.
“I am absolutely not guilty of the charges brought upon me,” Kozlowski said. “There was no criminal intent here. Nothing was hidden.”
To hear Kozlowski tell it, there was no crime at Tyco. It was flash, glitz and a big paycheck that did him in.
At least Nacchio’s attorneys don’t have to explain $6,000 shower curtains. Unlike Koz lowski’s money, Nacchio’s money remains an abstraction in the courtroom, just numbers on a chart.
In the end, though, I don’t think it matters. Juries are not out to felonize the rich. It’s not about how indicted executives spent their money. It’s about how they made it.
Al Lewis’ column appears Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Respond to him at denverpostbloghouse.com/lewis, 303-954-1967 or alewis@ denverpost.com.
