James Botti, the Shelton real estate developer sent to prison during a federal probe into corruption within City Hall, was released to a halfway house Tuesday.
Federal prosecutors had accused Botti of plying Shelton officials, including Mayor Mark Lauretti, with gifts in order to curry favor with development proposals.
Lauretti denied the accusations and the feds never brought a case against him.
A jury hearing Botti’s case couldn’t come to a decision on the conspiracy and bribery charges.
Botti was convicted of mail fraud and hiding financial transactions connected to his local business dealings.
Botti was sentenced to six years in prison in 2010.
Halfway House
Botti was transferred Tuesday from a minimum security prison in Morgantown, WV to a “residential reentry center” — aka a halfway house, according to Chris Burke, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Burke declined to say at which facility Botti is completing his sentence, citing security and privacy reasons.
Botti will be supervised until February by Bureau of Prisons officials in Philadelphia, Burke said. After that he’ll be on probation for three years.
Botti could very well be in Connecticut, one of the areas covered by the Philadelphia office.
The office also covers middle Pennsylvania, eastern Pennsylvania, Maine, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire and Vermont.
A beaming Botti reunited with his family at an airport, as shown by a 13-second video posted by a relative on Instagram at 10:26 p.m. Tuesday.
“Well, you made it,” the young relative says off-camera to Botti.
While at the halfway house, Botti will have to find a job, and will have to get approval from supervisors for each and every trip outside the home. Botti will have to stick to an approved itinerary, and halfway house supervisors can check up on him while he’s on the outside at any given moment.
He and his roommates are subject to random drug and alcohol tests, and there are several counts during the course of a day to track the inmates.
“It’s designed to house inmates in a controlled environment, but inmates are allowed to go out during the day for approved activities such as job searches,” Burke said.
The federal Second Chance Act allowed Botti, a non-violent offender, to apply to a halfway house.
It is designed to reduce recidivism by easing an inmate’s re-entry into the world by giving them community support, often through support services provided by non-profit groups.
Staff members at the halfway houses assist inmates in obtaining employment, and inmates are required to pay a “subsistence fee” to help defray the cost of their confinement.
Click here for more information about federal halfway houses.
Corruption Legacy
Botti was one of four convictions from the federal corruption probe in Shelton. His father, Peter Botti, was convicted of helping to hide his son’s money from the IRS.
Developer Robert Scinto was sent to prison for a short time for lying to federal officials investigating corruption in Shelton.
Former Shelton building official Eliot Wilson was convicted of lying to a grand jury about accepting gifts and cash from people doing business with the city.
In May, the feds officially acknowledged their probe in Shelton was over.
Meanwhile the feds, under the protection of prosecutorial immunity from a defamation lawsuit, alleged a widespread system of cronyism inside Lauretti’s City Hall.
Lauretti lashed out at the feds, calling their tactics unfair, and essentially dared them to charge him with a crime.
Despite the government’s contention of a culture of corruption in Shelton, the feds never brought charges against Lauretti.
Click here to read the Valley Indy’s coverage of Botti’s trial.
