Year-End Roundup of Comings, Goings, and Doings in POLAR PEN [UPDATED]

Anchorage—


Disgraced briber and former VECO executive Rick Smith is set to enter prison next month to start serving his sentence. As reported by Jill Burke of www.alaskadispatch.com, ex-VECO Vice President Smith has been ordered to prison starting January 12. Smith will begin serving his 21-month prison sentence at Sheridan Federal Criminal Institute in Oregon, a medium-security facility that also holds ex-State Rep. Tom Anderson (R.-Anchorage) and also held former Rep. Pete Kott (R.-Eagle River) until Kott’s release this summer while a judge sorts out allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.


Smith’s former boss Bill Allen is still in limbo as to when his three-year sentence starts, as Richard Mauer has reported in the Anchorage Daily News that federal officials are still figuring out where the multimillionaire former VECO CEO will go. [SEE BELOW FOR UPDATE.]

Reaching even farther back to catch up, the New York Times has reported that Department of Justice attorney Nicholas Marsh has been working in his new Department of Justice job to get filmmaker Roman Polanski extradited to the U.S. to face sentencing for having sex with a minor more than three decades ago.

A former prosecutor of ex-U.S. Sen. Ted Stevens and other defendants in the federal probe into Alaska public corruption, Marsh left DoJ’s Public Integrity Section after the Ted Stevens prosecution collapsed in April. The lawyer was re-assigned to the lower-profile Office of International Affairs to handle extraditions, including that of the movie director who has long been a fugitive in Europe.


Some might detect irony here: As the former go-to guy on the ground in Alaska on the POLAR PEN investigation, Marsh spent a lot of time with Bill Allen, who for years has fought off allegations that he had sex with underage girls.


Merry Christmas.

UPDATE--Jill Burke of http://www.alaskadispatch.com/ has kindly pointed out that her publication has previously reported that Bill Allen is going to federal prison on January 12, the same day as Smith. In a story that I had seen and then somehow missed upon looking again, the Alaska Dispatch reported that Allen is headed for Terminal Island, a low-security facility in California set up to handle prisoners with medical issues.