Fireman Sentenced For Illegal Contributions

BOSTON (AllPolitics, Oct. 24) -- Simon Fireman, former vice chairman of Bob Dole's presidential campaign finance committee, was fined $1 million and sentenced to six months of confinement to his home after admitting to orchestrating $120,000 in illegal campaign donations.

Through his company, Aqua-Leisure Industries of Avon, Fireman funneled money to the presidential campaigns of Dole and Bush-Quayle in 1992, the Republican National Committee and a group supporting Rep. Joseph Kennedy II (D-Mass.).

Fireman skirted federal election laws that prohibit individual contributions greater than $1,000 to a presidential candidate by having employees give the funds in his stead. They were then paid back through an overseas fund. Aqua-Leisure was fined an additional $5 million.

Though this is the stiffest penalty related to political contributions ever handed down, U.S. District Court Judge William Young told the defendant that he was getting off easy. "Your sentence should have been prison. It was no aberrant conduct. This conduct was designed to frustrate, violate and pollute (the political) process," Young said.

The judge said that it was Fireman's World War II service that kept him out of prison. Young said, "You were not rich then, Mr. Fireman, but you were fighting precisely for those values you suborn with this conduct."

Fireman Sentenced For Illegal Contributions

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