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Ailing 'Gifting Tables' Leader Fears Return To Prison

Hartford Courant (CT) - 6/26/2016

June 26--NEW HAVEN -- Church bells ring at the top of the hour throughout downtown New Haven one recent Friday afternoon. Though pleasant sounding on this warm spring day, the tolls heard through the open windows of her lawyer's office are a reminder that the clock is ticking for Donna Bello.

The thought of federal authorities taking her into custody and hauling her away for a second time is a scary, dark situation, says Bello, 59, dressed in cropped jeans, sandals and a sleeveless blue blouse. She pets her service dog, Bailey, a small, white Cavachon, as it sits on her lap next to Barnum, another of Bello's Cavachons that is sleeping on a white, fuzzy throw.

She likens the thought to the times in childhood when she believed in monsters.

"Remember when you were a kid and you had a fear of the boogeyman? You're in your dream and you just know the boogeyman is right around the corner and you can actually hear your heart beating and feel it, and the terror and not being able to scream or speak out. Then you wake up and your mom tells you, 'It's just a dream. ... There's no boogeyman,'" Bello says.

"Well, in my life I have that feeling because I know there's a boogeyman, because he caught me once and put me away, and I'm just waiting for it -- again. So it's that terror of having to leave my family and just trying to put it together again."

Since her release from prison two years ago while challenging her 2013 conviction for organizing a "gifting tables" pyramid scheme -- which federal authorities said duped more than a thousand Connecticut shoreline women out of millions of dollars -- Bello has been struggling to pick up the pieces of a shattered life.

She says she has battled cervical cancer, tuberculosis, mental health issues and thoughts of suicide, and also mourned the loss of her baby grandson. She has struggled to save her 13-year marriage to Joel Schiavone, a well-known developer and former Republican mayoral candidate in New Haven, and to regain her standing in the social circles that once embraced her as a lavish-party host -- support, she says, that has since "evaporated."

But those strides could be for naught, Bello says, if she is sent to prison again at a resentencing hearing scheduled for August in U.S. District Court in Hartford. She was sentenced there in August 2013 to six years in prison on tax and fraud charges after she was convicted of running the scam from 2008 to 2011. On appeal, her conviction was upheld, but her sentence was overturned.

"My fear is that I'll slide back, which can happen very easily in there. The pain of hopelessness is so severe that it physically hurts. There's no hope in the future, no hope for yourself. The pain of depression is so severe that it hurts to breathe," Bello says slowly, through tears.

She goes silent and appears hesitant to continue. But she does.

"And the only way you can rid yourself of that pain is to end your life," she says.

'Preyed' On Women

Federal prosecutor point in court filings to the damage Bello's scheme caused to the women who struggled financially to stay in the gifting tables, women who held out hope that their investment and loyalty to the tables would yield a financial windfall eventually.

Bello's new prison sentence should reflect how she "systematically preyed" on women in difficult financial circumstances, according to federal prosecutors' resentencing memorandum.

"Several witnesses testified regarding the dramatic steps they took to pull together the required $5,000 payment, including borrowing against or taking a disbursement from a retirement plan, borrowing from a parent or a child, diverting money that otherwise would have been used to pay bills, using back child support payments and taking out a home equity loan," prosecutors wrote in the memorandum.

"The evidence regarding the recruitment of financially vulnerable women buttresses the need for an appropriate sentence in this case."

Prosecutors' calculations show that Bello could face a sentence of 51 to 63 months, according to the government's memorandum.

Bello's lawyer, prominent criminal defense attorney Norman A. Pattis, said he will fight Bello's return to prison. Serving anymore time than the seven months Bello has already served would lead to further declines in her medical and psychiatric health, he says.

"The function of incarceration has been served, she's been adequately punished, she's been traumatized and she's been deterred from future conduct of the sort the government's convicted her of," Pattis says. "Sending her back at this point would be abjectly cruel."

Stephanie Schacher, a clinical psychologist, diagnosed Bello with post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, according to a March 28, 2016, letter Schacher wrote to federal probation officials. Bello was hospitalized for 10 days at the Connecticut Mental Health Center in May 2015 due to suicidal ideation, Schacher said.

"She frequently cannot get herself out of bed, shower, eat or take care of herself appropriately," Schacher wrote. "She isolates at home quite a bit and continues to struggle with a sense of hopelessness, helplessness, and a pervasive feeling of malevolence in the world. ... Her mental health will likely deteriorate further if she returns to prison, and her prognosis would be poor."

Hope, Bello says, was hard to find in the cramped quarters of the Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia, the same facility where celebrity homemaker Martha Stewart served a five-month sentence beginning in 2004 for lying about a stock sale. Bello began her prison stay in October 2013.

Early on, Bello realized she would have to learn to adapt to a lifestyle far different than the one she lived in Guilford, where she entertained friends and family at her luxury home and ran a successful salon.

"I was well off," she says. "My life was so good. I had two successful kids, a successful business, a successful husband, successful marriage, a nice house in the suburbs, plus I had many, many friends. I had a good life."

Attacked In Prison

The prison lifestyle meant enduring assaults, respecting "territories," eating raw poultry and the same beans for five days and trying to sleep with bright overhead lights on all night while trying to block out the nighttime cries of women who were missing their families.

Early on, when she said she was being harassed by other inmates and there was talk that she would be attacked with a "slock," a lock hidden in a sock, she tried but failed to get help from a guard.

"He said, 'Where you from?' I said, 'Connecticut.' And he said, 'Oh you're Mary Poppins from lily-white Connecticut. Where are you?' I said, 'I'm in your office.' He said, 'No, where are you?' I said, 'Um, Alderson, West Virginia?' He said, 'No, where are?' I said, 'I'm in prison." And he said, 'Yeah, that's right. You're in [expletive] prison. It's not your country club.' He said, 'You better get used to the way it is here." Then at that point, I realized that there's nobody here for me."

So when another inmate started attacking her with chest bumps, Bello said she let her do it, making sure she stood up every time the inmate knocked her to the ground.

"I had to hold my ground," Bello says. "I knew that if I didn't, I would be a target from then on," she said. "So I learned a lot about a life I had never seen. These people have gone through so much in their lives. There's a reason they're the way they are."

The first week, Bello said, she had to go cold turkey off the medications she had been taking since the trial -- Prozac, anti-anxiety medication, sleeping pills -- and had to kick the habits she looked to for comfort after the trial -- smoking, drinking alcohol and overeating.

Sweating and jittery, she said she called her husband every day and would cry for the entire 15-minute call. Schiavone also made the 11-hour drive to see her each weekend. Though still legally married, Bello says their marriage has ended.

But eventually Bello realized that she had to shut out her previous world and adjust to living in prison, which meant trying not to think too much about the people she missed, her husband, her two adult sons and their wives and the rest of her family.

"I just shut myself down. If you're thinking about your family, it's too painful, so you get involved in prison. It becomes your reality, your new normal."

At Christmastime, she participated in a pageant, preparing for it by working on crafts with empty toilet paper rolls for 45 minutes each day. She built the Eiffel Tower, the Big Ben clock tower and a sleigh. Her group re-enacted the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, incorporating the warden's dog in the festivities. They won the pageant and the prize: being first in line for food and a movie night with popcorn.

Bello also talked with other inmates about their crimes and lives, conversations she says she has continued through a support group for female felons she helped form. In her bunk area, the crimes ran the gamut. One woman had microwaved her baby, a former judge and a former doctor had committed financial fraud and others sold drugs, including a nurse who sold medication to put her children through college and a doctor who illegally prescribed medications.

"In prison, they're not trying to get themselves back up," Bello says. "They're trying to survive. There's no talk of the future except every fifth person is trying to on their own write an appeal out or something and I was the first one to get out."

Bello is referring to a May 2014 federal appeals court ruling that ordered Bello and her friend, Jill Platt, released while they appealed their convictions. The court said the women raised "substantial issues" likely to result in a reversal of their convictions or a substantial reduction in their sentences. Platt was serving a sentence of 4-1/2 years in prison for her role in the gifting table scheme.

On the day of the ruling, Platt ran to Bello's bunk area to tell Bello about the ruling, Bello said. "Everybody just stood up and started cheering and they were crying," she said. "It wasn't about me, it was about possible hope for them, that they could get out."

'Women Supporting Women'

Like Bello, Platt also was convicted of tax and fraud charges. Authorities said she helped Bello run the fraudulent gifting-table scheme in which new members were recruited in social gatherings and induced to make $5,000 "gifts" -- money that was transferred in sums of $40,000 to longer established members of the "tables." New members were told that they could collect $40,000 if they stayed on their "table" long enough and recruited new members.

Bello, Platt and other women associated with the gifting tables have described them as social and charitable organizations whose members met regularly for self-empowerment and to help one another through difficult times.

Bello, in the recent hourlong interview, declined to discuss the scheme and was stopped by Pattis when she did. She said only that a friend had introduced her to the gifting tables and that seeing the troubles of other women involved in it reminded her of the seven years she spent as a single mom raising two boys after divorcing at a young age.

"What was behind it was women supporting women," Bello says, adding that she has always been there for "the underdog."

But Pattis was not so cautious with his comments in a blog post he wrote after Bello's sentencing.

"Six years for a grandmother and hairdresser. The sentence imposed reflected a staggering, almost other-worldly, sense of unfairness. I've yet to see a predatory lender sent to jail for scamming people," Pattis wrote. "The government granted immunity to those from whom it needed testimony. It relied on secret recordings. Reluctant women were summoned to grand juries, and, in some cases, threatened with prosecution. All this because the women obstructed the Internal Revenue Service's efforts to determine just how much taxable income participants in the gifting tables received."

Pattis said witnesses at the trial testified that they enjoyed their time on the tables, and some said they would have continued to participate if they would not get in trouble.

"I watched the imposition of sentence as though I were in an airless room," Pattis wrote "Six years in prison. The crime? Impeding the IRS' ability to determine taxable income; misinforming others about IRS gift tax exemptions. Give me a break. Predatory lenders crash the economy, and we bail out bankers. But we call justice sending grandmothers to jail for long sentences in which only willing participants were hurt, if they were hurt at all."

Following the May 2014 ruling that freed her, Bello's misery continued. She was diagnosed with cancer and underwent surgery and radiation. Doctors recently found a lump in her breast and a biopsy is planned. Bello also lost her grandson, who suffered from a genetic disorder, shortly after his birth.

Pattis said that at the resentencing hearing, he plans to ask the judge to let Bello go home. He has some hope because, although she faces a possible sentence of 4-1/2 to 5 years, the range was higher when she was sentenced the first time and the sentencing judge sought a downward departure on the grounds that Bello's case was "outside the heartland of what the drafters of the guidelines contemplated."

Pattis said what is "particularly alarming" is that the government now is trying to change its sentencing theory about whether co-conspirators in the case could be victims.

"Our view is the court is limited to the issues on the remand and the government doesn't get to change the strike zone because it doesn't like the way the game is being played," Pattis said. He said sending Bello back to prison "would be an obscene injustice."

For example, he cited the recent case of H. James Pickerstein, a former federal prosecutor who was sentenced to 30 days in prison for stealing more than $600,000 from one of his clients, convicted Danbury mobster James Galante.

"Whatever the government's theory of the case was here, there was nothing approaching that and somehow we're supposed to say that for Donna Bello, seven months wasn't enough? That she needs to go back for one, two, three, or five years? That sort of reasoning does not promote respect for the law. It promotes contempt for the law. I am hoping that [U.S. District] Judge [Alvin W.] Thompson will conclude that she has served enough time."

Until then, Bello says she will continue on a path toward improvement, both in action and in thought, caring for her elderly parents in Florida on some days and on others, trying to overcome her need to seclude herself since her release from prison.

"When I meet somebody now, I look at them differently because of this experience," Bello says. "My personality is the same, but I've grown to such depths that I see things differently. Now there's empathy, and I look at things as though we're all in this human experience, with all of this emotion."

Bello says that while she is still trying to understand the silence she encountered when she returned to Guilford from prison, "I still love the town." She says she chooses not to spend her time thinking about the women who no longer talk to her and instead thinks about the women she met in prison and ways of offering support to them and other incarcerated women.

"I had a dream a few weeks ago. I was outdoors and all of my friends were there, all the women I knew and they were all smiling at me. And then two of them parted and behind them was a guillotine."

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(c)2016 The Hartford Courant (Hartford, Conn.)

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