Flouting Fines

How cons con the Government

When convicted pimp Sterling Godfrey walked out of the federal prison in Atlanta in 1977, after serving nearly five years of a maximum 15-year term, he still owed his $35,000 fine. But Godfrey said he was short of cash, so the U.S. Attorney's Ofiice in the capital obligingly allowed him to pay exactly $10 a month, thus giving him almost three centuries to pay his debt to society. Godfrey fell behind that undemanding schedule, even though the FBI discovered that he had re-established a lucrative prostitution business, opened a bicycle shop and acquired a Cadillac, a Mustang, a customized Dodge van and a motorcycle.

The Justice Department has a roster of some 18,000 federal cons who, all told, owe about $80 million in fines and bail bond forfeitures. Some of the deadbeats, among them many Prohibition moonshiners, are dead; others are in prison, untraceable, or truly too poor to pay (tightlipped Watergate Burglar G. Gordon Liddy, for example, has paid only $5,051 of his $40,000 fine, and Justice considers his pleas of poverty to be genuine). Yet the Department says that there are some 3,500 debtors who can claim no excuses. Their fines total about $20 million.

Haled before a federal district judge in Washington last week, and threatened with contempt of court, Godfrey agreed to begin paying off his fine at a rate of at least $50 a month during most of the year and $100 a month in the summers, when his bicycle business booms. Godfrey's case followed a similar action against Gambler Alvin Kotz, who in January became the first person in Washington, and perhaps in the entire country, ever convicted of willful failure to pay a criminal fine.

In 1973 Kotz was jailed for 30 months for gambling and fined $5,000; yet he said le could pay only $10 a month, because ae had to support his "aging Italian parents." In fact, he managed to pay a mere $40 in six years, even though he went on gambling trips to Las Vegas, where he tad a $10,000 line of credit at Caesars Palace. Startled by the Kotz and Godfrey cases, the U.S. Attorney's Ofiice in the capital has been reviewing its long list of cons in arrears.

Experts say that such delinquencies, which are a nationwide problem, could be curbed if judges handed out more sentences that prescribe imprisonment if fines are not paid by a certain date. They also urge that payment schedules be set up by judges rather than clerks in the U.S. Attorney's Ofiice, who can be soft touches. It was a clerk who believed Godfrey in 1977 when he said he was "meeting expenses" while working for a group called Elements of Love.

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