Alessandra Petlin
The U.S. Attorney's office charged Debra Ryan with helping her boyfriend, the financier-turned-fugitive Samuel Israel III, vanish the morning he was slated to enter a federal prison for a 20-year fraud sentence. Her role in his desperate, half-baked escape has left her $500,000 in debt and battling an aiding-and-abetting charge that could put her behind bars for a decade.
Ryan says the day Israel's lawyer informed him that money was gone for good, she found him naked, on the toilet, moaning, "My life is over."
Ryan attended Israel's April sentencing at a Manhattan courthouse clad in head-to-toe black. "It was a funeral to me," she recalls. The judge ordered Israel to serve 20 years in a federal prison and pay $300 million in restitution, one of the harshest punishments ever meted out to a white-collar criminal.
Then, just days before he was to turn himself in, Israel had Ryan meet him at an auto-body shop in a neighboring town, where he asked her to attach a scooter to a motor home he'd purchased, which she did, although not without asking a few questions: What are you doing? What's going on? Finally, he howled, "I can't go to prison!" "I'm shaking my head, going, 'Oh, my God, you gotta be kidding me!'" The rest of the night, Ryan prayed he wouldn't flee.
Continue Reading "My Boyfriend Stole $450 Million and I Got Arrested!"
By Karen Weinreb
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