There were times, during and after Bruce Thompson’s
sentencing in federal court on Wednesday, when it almost appeared that the
former county commissioner was there to be given a good citizenship award, not a
punishment for admitted fraud in the amount of a quarter of a million dollars.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Tim DiScenza, who can sink
battleships with his ferocity, went extra-light on his prosecutorial rhetoric and
was almost gentle. In pre-sentencing discussions, he yielded on key points to
the defense and then asked for a sentence of only a year and a day — far
lighter than the 21-to-27-month incarceration that federal sentencing guidelines
for an already watered-down indictment called for.
U.S. District Judge Jon McCalla ended up bestowing a
sentence that was lighter yet – only six months, to be followed by two years of
supervised probation, a hundred hours of community service, and a $10,000 fine.
The math was easy enough for courtroom spectators to do in their heads:
Subtracting $10,000 from the total sum involved in the fraud left a remainder of
$260,000. Keepers for Thompson, who had been paid $270,000 by H&M Construction
of Jackson, Tennessee, for his help in securing a Memphis school-construction
contract.
‘Consultant’ Thompson
Much – perhaps most – of that $260,000 was long gone, of
course – some of it expended in the course of what a publicly penitent Thompson
told the court had been a “painful and expensive divorce,” some of it paid to
his legal defense, led by the able Leslie Ballin, much of the rest consumed in
the last year to compensate for Thompson’s “depleted savings” and the loss of
clients from his investment business. Some, too, had been set aside for use as
payments to members of the Memphis school board.
The idea, as Thompson had repeatedly and admittedly told
the construction company, was that these “campaign contributions” to board
members — along with “consultant” Thompson’s influence as a member of the
county commission, which substantially funded the schools’ budget – would induce
the school board members to award H&M the multi-million dollar construction
project which it sought.
And therein, in a touch that most comic ironists would shy
away from as over the top, lay the legal basis for the fraud. Thompson had been
indicted, not for what lay people might consider a shakedown of the construction
company, but for deceiving the company into believing that he had more power
over the school board members’ votes on awarding of contracts than he actually
had. Thompson was being judged not for extortion, in other words — nor the
construction company for bribery – but for his inordinate boasting.
The construction company, as Judge McCalla noted, had not
asked for restitution – perhaps, he theorized, because the H&M folks had had
enough dealings with Shelby County. Another possibility, of course, was that,
as Ballin candidly suggested, “they did not seek restitution because they got
the contract.”
In any case, neither the prosecution for the judge
considered restitution a necessity.
‘Good people who make bad mistakes’
There was one character witness for Thompson prior to
sentencing – his Presbyterian minister, Craig Strickland, who testified that
this instance of law-breaking by Thompson was “inconsistent with his character,”
that he had performed valuable service in the church’s mentoring program, and
that he purposely sought to achieve humility by scrubbing the church’s toilets.
Judge McCalla, too, seemed taken with Thompson’s better
side, likening him to other “good people who make bad mistakes,” telling the now
acknowledged and sentenced felon that he “appreciated the way you’ve handled
this” (presumably by offering a guilty plea and eschewing a trial), and going so far as to tell Thompson directly, “Thank you.”
When Ballin rose to ask if Thompson’s six months could be
served at the nearby federal prison camp at Millington, a minimum-security
dormitory-style facility, McCalla assured him he thought the Bureau of Prisons
would assign Thompson to a venue “more appropriate even than Millington.” There
was no clue as to what that might be. (“The Peabody?” one wag would venture
afterward.) Even Ballin, asked to venture a guess afterward, was buffaloed. He
theorized that another minimum-security facility at Maxwell Air Force Base,
Alabama, might be his client’s destination.
Wherever he ends up doing his time, Thompson, grinning ear
to ear, was clearly pleased with the outcome. (He might have suffered from
nerves earlier; asked how his client had handled the hour or so in the
courtroom, Ballin had jested that Thompson had been just fine “but for the bowel
movement halfway through.”)
At a subsequent press conference, Ballin was asked: Would
the apparent lightness of the sentence serve as a deterrent for others tempted
to similar crime? “For someone like Bruce Thompson, just to be prosecuted is the
deterrent to the individual,” he answered.
