DOING 8 ½ to 25 years in the slam, disgraced former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski bounds across the visiting room with a big smile to greet me as if we were going fishing.
But I guess he’s been pretty lonely lately. He tells me his beautiful, blond wife of 5 ½ years has only visited him once while he’s been a resident of the Mid-State Correctional Facility – and it was to drop a bomb on him.
She said she wanted a divorce.
“It was the first time she had visited me here in upstate New York,” Kozlowski told me. “It was the last time I saw her.”
“It wasn’t a long conversation, but she seemed to mean what she said. She said pretty much this: ‘I retained some lawyers, I have to move on with my life, I am divorcing you,’ and then she added, ‘I need money.’
“Yeah, I was a little surprised. Right now, I am supposed to owe the government something like $100 million, I couldn’t squeeze out a dime.”
Dennis Kozlowski, 60, credited with one of the sharpest but flawed business minds in the country, laughed heartily.
“I should have known – the first tip I got when she rarely showed up in court for the second trial,” he said.
“Since that day, I have never seen or heard of her. I heard from someone that she spent the summer in Newport and she might be in Boca Raton now that it’s getting colder.”
Kozlowski could not suppress a second laugh: “Talk about bayoneting the wounded, but what the heck? Karen always liked a very good life.”
Bitter?
“No, surprised. Certainly surprised.”
Locals in Boca say Karen comes and goes, continuing her jet-set ways. She was always nice to me at the courthouse when I covered Dennis’ trial – but now she’s not returning my phone calls. Go figure. Dennis had two trials. His first ended in a mistrial.
He was then found guilty of 22 counts of grand larceny for looting the conglomerate out of $600 million to fund the lavish lifestyle Karen so enjoyed.
He was ordered to pay $97 million in restitution and a $70 million fine. The money is being paid from court-approved sales of frozen assets.
He claims everything was aboveboard and approved by the board of directors.
“Nothing really hurts because all I can tell you is right now, I have to deal with this situation, take it as it comes and concentrate on one thing – and that’s my appeal to go free.”
He’s appealing on grounds that the evidence was insufficient to convict.
The details of the case made great headlines – he was accused of such ridiculous waste as spending $6,000 on a shower curtain for his $31 million duplex overlooking Central Park.
“I never saw that damn curtain,” he told me. “It was in the maid’s room. I didn’t decorate the apartment. It belonged to Tyco.”
Dennis met Karen when he was the boss of Tyco and she was a waitress at a restaurant in New Hampshire.
He would later buy Karen her own restaurant, a high-end joint in Boca Raton that didn’t quite do as well as the socially conscious Karen would have liked.
But for the waitress, life took off to dizzying heights – ski houses in New Hampshire and Colorado, beach houses in Nantucket and Boca Raton, a sumptuous apartment in Manhattan and a $13 million yacht, called the Endeavor, which was docked in Florida.
The U.S. was their playhouse, Europe was their playground.
During his trial, prosecutors played a video from Karen’s 40th-birthday party on the isle of Sardinia – which cost husband Dennis $2 million.
Food to die for, male extras in togas, and an ice sculpture of Michelangelo’s “David” urinating high-end vodka.
“The guests loved it, Karen loved it. Me? I was a son of a New Jersey cop. I grew up broke – being broke is nothing new to me.”
On the day I spoke to him upstate, a cold, damp day far from the Florida sun, he’d just heard that Enron’s Jeffrey Skilling had been sentenced to 24 years.
“I never knew any of those guys. I wish I’d never heard of Enron or WorldCom.
“From the beginning, when I moved into Tyco, it was a $24 million-a-year company, and when I left as CEO, it was almost a $40 billion-a-year company.
“After the crash in 2000, which highlighted Enron, there was a dip in our stock – but it went straight back up.
“The trouble is that in the public’s mind, Mark [Swartz, his co-defendant] and I were lumped into that same group. Not one member of Tyco’s 245,000 work force lost a dime in pension or anything to do with their 401(k)s.”
“First of all, Tyco owes me $100 million in deferred pay and $300 million in retention bonus.
“I left that money in the company – so who was I stealing from? Myself?”
Dennis explained the retention bonus came in late 2001, when he was thinking of moving on to other horizons.
“The four-member compensation committee approached me and said that if I stayed on as CEO until I was 62, I would be paid $300 million plus my $100 million deferred pay. It came to more than $400 million.
“I really outstayed my welcome at Tyco, and for some of my enemies, it was a mistake to agree to that money. It made me look greedy.
“And the lifestyle – which I didn’t particularly enjoy, because 80 percent of my time was work and travel to the 60 countries where Tyco had business – went against me.”
Now life for Dennis is dramatically different.
“I get up at 6 a.m. to help prepare food delivery to the 20 inmates in the protective-custody unit. I serve them breakfast, lunch and dinner, then I mop the floors.
“At 8:30 a.m., we go into the yard, pick up trash for an hour and then have recreation for an hour where I throw around the football or shoot hoops.
“I’ll busy myself doing anything and any job to stay out of that cell. I read three to four books per week – all nonfiction. I saw enough of fiction during the trial.
“Weekends are full with visitors – my daughters, sisters and friends. At least six of my friends were executives at Tyco.” Does he think about the old times when luxury was the norm?
“Two weeks ago, the government sold my yacht. Doesn’t bother me. I only have to concentrate on one thing, and that’s the appeal. Of course, those days drift back into your mind, but you must not, never dwell on it, it will destroy you,” he said.
The man, who had constant goals of being the millionaire whiz kid of American business, says his main goal right now is helping three fellow inmates pass their GEDs.
“Just now, in mathematics, I finally got one inmate to master division.”
Karen is trying to prevent the government from immediately selling off Kozlowski’s luxury properties – since she feels she’s still entitled to half of the marital assets.
It appears she excelled at addition – and subtraction.