Peter Bacanovic, the gay stockbroker found guilty of perjury, conspiracy, making false statements and obstruction of agency proceedings in the Martha Stewart ImClone insider stock trading case, expresses a simmering resentment towards his former friend in a NYT profile published today.
Bacanovic reveals that during his time in a Las Vegas prison (he was sentenced to five months in prison and five months home incarceration) fellow inmates didn’t bother learning his name, but referred to him as ‘Broker’. The entire experience has left him bitter, despondent, and compromised his immune system, according to his doctor:
“I am chronically sick and chronically unemployed and without any specific plan about how to proceed next.”
Bacanovic says he prefers not to think of or talk about Stewart: “I will reserve comment on my co-defendant but it’s very glaring to me to take such a cavalier outlook.”
He then, however, proceeds to unload on his icy former client:
“I was indicted not because I was the biggest criminal on the block or the biggest insider trader in history. I was indicted simply to bring a case against my celebrity co-defendant. I was a device… I’m not interested in lying to serve an overzealous 32-year-old prosecutor. I stood by my friend and client and told the truth. I am also aware that if the reverse were possible, the same would not have been done for me. This was business and my co-defendant is first and foremost a businesswoman…I am so tired of hearing her name attached to mine that the less I hear of it, the better my day is…I’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about my obituary in the last four years,” he said. “I would really rather my tombstone not read ‘broker, Martha’ with dates. I’d rather it read ‘Bacanovic, Peter’.”
While I think Bacanovic has a variety of valid points and there’s no doubt that the Stewart household can do ‘frigid’ really, really well (“I said, ‘This is harming me,'” Mr. Bacanovic, who had to borrow money to pay his fine, recalled saying. “And [Alexis Stewart] said, ‘No one here feels we owe you anything.'”) maybe the best way to escape the association is not by dredging it up in everyone’s memory via a laundry list of grievances in the New York Times.
