Copyright 2004 Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc. Palm Beach Post (Florida) January 24, 2004 Saturday FINAL EDITION
SECTION: LOCAL, Pg. 1B LENGTH: 741 words HEADLINE: 'TAX CHEAT' SENTENCED TO PRISON BYLINE: By MARY McLACHLIN Palm Beach Post Staff Writer DATELINE: WEST PALM BEACH BODY: Former Palm Beach investment adviser, computer entrepreneur, concert promoter and author Stewart Fason is afraid he's going to die in prison, and looks as though he might. The millionaire health-pill huckster is only 70 but looks 90, the consequences of a bad heart, dysfunctional arteries, multiple strokes and a bout with lung cancer. White-haired and gray-faced, Fason listened dejectedly Friday as a federal judge turned down his lawyer's plea to let him serve time for tax evasion at home instead of behind bars. "This is a sick man - if he continues to be incarcerated, he may lose his life," Miami attorney Allen Ross implored the court. "He is a tax cheat, pure and simple," U.S. District Judge Daniel T.K. Hurley said. "And he is someone who had the ability to pay his taxes . . . and he now comes before the court saying 'I'm sick, I'm old, send me home.' "And the answer I have is, 'Absolutely not.' " Hurley sentenced Fason to 28 months in prison, followed by three years on supervised release, plus a $6,000 fine and nearly $1 million in restitution for taxes he admitted not paying in the 1980s. Fason already has served seven months of the sentence since his arrest last June in South Carolina, where he was living under another name and helping his fourth wife promote a cure-all cosmetic called Raiza Creme on the Internet. Hurley agreed to recommend Fason be sent to a low-security prison near his home and said the Federal Bureau of Prisons is obligated to treat his medical problems, including surgery for his heart and artery conditions. The sentencing began in December and stretched through two sessions this week as government and defense lawyers argued over tax calculations and which parts of Fason's intricate tax-avoidance enterprises should be counted against him. The Internal Revenue Service said Fason cooked up elaborate schemes to hide money and avoid paying nearly $1.5 million in taxes in 1989 and 1990. They included a phantom alter-ego, shell companies in the Bahamas and a deal in which he supposedly paid $1.5 million for the rights to five "B" movies - Devil Man, Mask of the Devil, The Gods of Evil, Big Race and Slow Death - to show on television in countries such as China, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India and Nepal. A movie industry analyst hired by the IRS said he could find no reference to such movies, and if they did exist, they would have "a total value of zero" in such countries. In the 1980s, Fason got caught in a hoax concert promotion in which he purportedly found a young violinist by offering a $1,000 reward after hearing her playing on the street in New York City. He admitted later he knew the young woman and arranged the stunt. In the early 1990s, he made money by getting people in Palm Beach County to pay $10 a month to take part in a study of "miracle" vitamins that he claimed would cure serious illness. Fason once was an account executive with leading brokerage firms, lived in an 18-room Palm Beach mansion and owned luxury homes in Tequesta and Lake Worth. He played tennis, formed a society dedicated to the music of Chopin, lectured on how to make money and wrote a popular book titled License to Steal. His own words came back to haunt him in the courtroom when an IRS investigator read a passage that urged readers not to bother with secret Swiss accounts when "30 minutes by jet from Miami" are banks in the Bahamas that "don't care if you give your right name." The investigator then named a bank where prosecutors found an account Fason used for years under an alias. Fason's lawyer tried to convince the judge that the alias, the mysterious "Mr. Charles Sea," really did exist. He was a stocky, dark-haired, one-armed fellow, an elderly man with a Chinese accent, or a Jewish Holocaust victim who didn't understand Yiddish, according to various reports by people who spoke with him by telephone. Hurley didn't buy it. He noted the "fascinating coincidences" in which brokerage accounts, "Charles Sea" and the movie companies purportedly doing business with Fason intermingled the same Bahamian and Palm Beach County addresses, including those of Fason's then wife and mother-in-law. "I am well satisfied that Mr. Fason and Charles Sea are the same person and that the whole movie deal was a sham," Hurley said. "It was cooked up by Mr. Fason, and he is on all sides of these transactions." [email protected] NOTES: Ran all editions. GRAPHIC: PHOTO (B&W); RICHARD GRAULICH/Staff Photographer Stewart Fason, shown in a 1993 photo with the 'miracle' vitamins he peddled in Palm Beach County as a cure for serious illness. LOAD-DATE: January 25, 2004 -- The Silver List is a moderated forum for discussing Colloidal Silver. Instructions for unsubscribing are posted at: http://silverlist.org To post, address your message to: [email protected] Silver List archive: http://escribe.com/health/thesilverlist/index.html Address Off-Topic messages to: [email protected] OT Archive: http://escribe.com/health/silverofftopiclist/index.html List maintainer: Mike Devour <[email protected]>
