One-Year Sentence For Producer Scam Artist Proves Showbiz Crime Pays A Little
TV producer impostor and charlatan Joseph Medawar, who swindled 50 people out of millions of dollars by convincing them they'd have a stake in an nonexistent Department of Homeland Security drama, has been handed down a far more lenient punishment than federal prosecutors had hoped for—a single year in prison:
The sentence given to Joseph Medawar, 44, by a federal judge was a fraction of what prosecutors had sought.
U.S. District Judge Manuel Real said he wanted Medawar free after a year to earn $3.46 million in restitution to investors. The judge also sentenced Medawar to 3,000 hours of community service.
A year of killing time doing supervised Tai-Bo in a white collar prison yard hardly seems adequate penance for a man who literally drained widowed pensioners' nest eggs in order to bankroll a decadent lifestyle. On the contrary, for a man with criminal instincts like Medawar's, 12 months seems the perfect amount of time to concoct an elaborate scam in which he'll bilk fellow prisoners out of 800 cartons of contraband Marlboro reds in exchange for what he'll pitch as a once-in-a-life's-sentence opportunity to get in on the bottom floor of a proposed reality TV series set entirely on the inside, working title: The Simple Life 6: In The Pokey.
