Chapter 6: The Trial in Bridgeport
While the hammers rang in the Berkshire quarry, the federal trial against Julian and his corporate partners concluded in the United States District Court in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
The evidence presented by Judge Thorne’s independent investigative commission was indisputable.
Julian had orchestrated a twelve-million-dollar securities fraud, siphoning municipal development loans into private offshore accounts while falsifying environmental safety inspections at regional shipping docks.
Victoria sat in the front row of the gallery, wearing a plain dark wool dress, stripped of her designer jewelry, her face pale and exhausted as television cameras broadcast every detail of the family’s ruin.
Julian was sentenced to six years at a federal correctional facility in Otisville, New York, and ordered to pay nine million dollars in restitution to the dockworkers' pension fund.
As the marshals led Julian away in handcuffs, Victoria walked out of the courthouse onto the crowded steps of Golden Hill Street.
A swarm of journalists surrounded her, thrusting microphones into her face:
*""Mrs. Castile! Did you know about the Cayman accounts?""*
*""Where will you live now that the Greenwich estate has been converted into a children’s home?""*
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Victoria did not answer. She pulled her coat around herself, pushed through the crowd, and walked down the street alone, with four hundred dollars in her checking account and no home to return to.
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