(Photo: Brent Meyer/Getty Images)

Sam Waksal’s friends are spreading word that the ImClone founder is coming back to New York. He’s five years into a seven-year insider-trading sentence at the federal prison in Milan, Michigan, but they say he’ll be out in August. Don’t expect a Labor Day blowout at his Hamptons haunts, however; he’ll likely finish up his summer at the Bronx Community Re-entry Center, a halfway house. Residents are only allowed to visit barbers and laundromats, attend religious services, and go on job interviews. But Alan Ellis, former head of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, suspects Waksal, who was linked to both Martha Stewart and her daughter, Alexis, won’t be in the Bronx for long. “If they realize he doesn’t need a bed or help getting a job,” he says, “they might decide after a month they can refer him to home confinement, like Martha was.” In the meantime, he’ll adjust, Ellis says. “You have to retrain yourself to do something as simple as slice bread, since you’ve been away from sharp objects.”

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Related:

• Archive: “Intelligencer”
• Articles by Beth Landman
• Table of Contents: Jul 21, 2008 issue of New York | Subscribe!