Today, we take a peek at Martha Stewart, as she begins her prison sentence for insider trading--her broker (Peter Bacanovic) also got five months. He had simply left a message on Martha's answering machine that he "thought the stock (ImClone) might start trading downwards". Clearly, that is part of a broker's job, so somebody was leaning on him to confess to something. But Martha was the big fish.
Ah, Martha, the first celebrity bust of the century. It is clear now (2014) that she was innocent, that the authorities had criminalized an ordinary business transaction for their own edification. Here are some gems you probably didn't know. As a "struggling student", Martha's teenage modeling rate was $50 per hour (around $437 per hour today). In 1956, she paid as little as 4% income tax. A house sold for $22,000 and minimum wage was $1.00 per hour ($8.75 today).
Martha has had all pictures of herself younger than 21 purged from the Internet, but here is a still from her Lifebuoy soap commercial, at age 15 in 1956. She babysat for Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra. In 2008, she was denied entry into the United Kingdom because of her "criminal record", but domestically, she turned the prison sentence into one massive publicity grab, tripling her net worth to around $700 million at last count (2011).
Here is a photo of her prison cell.
