Inmate, Francis Sharrak, Ran Multimillion-Dollar Porn Site From His Prison Cell
A jailed porn king ran his web empire for more than 18 months behind bars by using a laptop in his cell and prison telephones, authorities said. Francis Sharrak, 44, of Farmington Hills, was acting as his own lawyer at the time.
He asked for the laptop to prepare arguments in his federal court sentencing for tax evasion in April.
Sharrak was being held at the Wayne County Jail in Detroit in a cell for high-profile inmates.
Jail officials acknowledge that Sharrak had the computer without proper permission but called it an isolated incident.
The case involved an employee who has since been fired for other reasons, under-sheriff Daniel Pfannes said.
During a recorded phone call from jail in January 2011, Sharrak can be heard saying: ‘Now, I am the first one ever to have a computer in the history of this jail.’
Federal prosecutors asked the judge to consider a transcript of the call when sentencing Sharrak.
Pfannes said: ‘We were misled initially by an employee who said there was a court order giving him access to a laptop computer.’
Officials later learned there wasn’t a court order and the department also changed policies to avoid a repeat in the future.
On March 8, the sheriff’s department seized the convict’s computer. Sharrak filed a motion to have it returned, saying he’d had it since August 2010 and that it was essential to his defense.
A federal judge denied the request.
Sharrak currently is in federal prison. He wasn’t charged for any actions in jail but prosecutors asked a judge to consider them at sentencing.
‘Through his past conduct as proven at trial, and his apparently continuing conduct of the same nature, even while confined, defendant has shown that he simply refuses to abide by laws, rules, restrictions and directives imposed upon him,’ Assistant U.S. Attorney Carl Gilmer-Hill wrote in a sentencing memorandum.
Between 1997 and 2001, federal prosecutors said Sharrak made $3.7 million from his business operating and promoting adult websites and from being a consultant to strip clubs.
He also was convicted of failing to file tax returns. His sentence included six years in prison and $4.2 million in restitution.
He is being held at a federal prison in Morgantown, W.Va.
Stephen Willard | Elite.
