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A Hedge Fund Manager Committed Fraud. Would the U.S. Let Him Go?
By DAVID ENRICHNOV. 18, 2017

TORONTO — Forty inmates lined up for the daily mail call at the Fort Dix Federal Correctional Institution, a complex of low-slung brick buildings in the middle of New Jersey.

It was July 2012, and one of the inmates was Philip Baker. A former hedge fund manager, he was serving a 20-year sentence for fraud. He had used bogus performance data to lure hundreds of people and institutions into his fund. His investors had lost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Mr. Baker, 46 at the time, admitted that he had committed fraud. “I’m a criminal,” he said recently. But he had convinced himself that he deserved to be free. And he was waiting for a letter that might turn his fantasy into reality.

Months earlier, Mr. Baker, who is Canadian, had signed a plea agreement that included an unusual caveat: Prosecutors would not object to the Justice Department’s transferring him to Canada to serve out his sentence.

Such transfers were rare. But Mr. Baker knew that if he could persuade the Justice Department to give him one, Canada would probably parole him after he had served only a fraction of his prison term.

Mr. Baker, a Baptist, prayed for God’s guidance. “Only he could set my direction straight,” he said during one in a series of interviews about his life and crimes.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/18/business/a-hedge-fund-manager-committed-fraud-would-the-us-let-him-go.html?