Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the onetime Chicago Public Schools CEO indicted just about 5 years in the past for her function in a brazen kickback scheme, has left a federal jail in West Virginia, information display.
Though she continues to be technically within the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, its information now display Byrd-Bennett assigned to a midway area close to Cincinnati. Neither a Bureau of Prisons spokesperson nor Byrd-Bennett’s legal professional instantly replied to messages searching for remark Wednesday.
A federal pass judgement on sentenced Byrd-Bennett in 2017 to four ½ years in jail for guiding $23 million in no-bid contracts to experts who’d up to now hired her. In go back, the colleges CEO selected by means of then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel anticipated masses of hundreds of bucks in kickbacks. They by no means arrived.
The biggest of the 3 no-bid offers was once a jaw-dropping $20.five million primary coaching contract to SUPES Academy, finalized a month after Byrd-Bennett controversially shuttered 50 group colleges in 2013.
Much of the scheme that opened up in 2012 and 2013 was once captured in masses of frank and often funny emails despatched in any respect hours of the day and evening, together with a statement by means of Byrd-Bennett wherein she quipped, “I have tuition to pay and casinos to visit (:”
Now 70, jail information had proven Byrd-Bennett serving her sentence at a minimum-security jail camp in Alderson, West Virginia. When Martha Stewart served her personal sentence there, it changed into referred to as “Camp Cupcake.”
The Bureau of Prisons had calculated Byrd-Bennett’s liberate date as June 28, 2021.
Also sentenced as a part of the scandal was once SUPES co-owners Gary Solomon and Thomas Vranas. Solomon were given seven years and is in a minimum-security camp in Duluth, Minnesota. Though he isn’t due out till October 2023, federal prosecutors made the peculiar transfer in February of asking a pass judgement on to knock as many as 13 months off his sentence on account of his cooperation in a separate investigation.
Vranas were given 18 months and was once launched in November 2018, jail information display.
Contributing: Lauren FitzPatrick