Gabe Gladstone is a frail, year-old man who has suffered two heart attacks in the past two years. He is also the convicted operator of a prostitution ring -- surrounded daily by murderers and violent gang members in one of the state's highest-security prisons. Seeking to flee that environment, Gladstone went to Middletown on Tuesday to plead with a three-judge panel to reduce the remaining 11 years on his prison sentence for promoting prostitution, conspiracy and racketeering.
Gladstone became one of the state's most widely known criminal defendants in recent years because of his outspoken defense of his lucrative call-girl ring and his decision to flee for more than a year following his conviction by a New Haven jury. He was sentenced in absentia and returned to Connecticut after being cornered by FBI agents in a Tennessee motel in September In his typical, colorful fashion, Gladstone told the veteran judges on the state's Sentence Review Board that none of the newspaper advertisements for his escort service ever mentioned anything about sex.
In fact, Gladstone said Tuesday, some of his male clients paid money simply "to meet and talk and dance and go out" with his escorts. Because many of the male customers had "master's degrees from Ivy League schools," Gladstone said, he pushed his female escorts to get college degrees. Gladstone's attorney, John J. Markham of Boston, argued that his client was never violent and received a disproportionately high sentence as a first-time offender.
Under the state's rules, Gladstone must remain in a high-security prison -- even for a nonviolent offense -- because he received a lengthy sentence, officials said.
Markham said that Gladstone should not be punished for his outspoken interviews with reporters, which included lambasting the chief New Haven prosecutor, Michael Dearington, as "a poor man's Kenneth Starr" and a "keyhole peeper. But prosecutor Robert O'Brien rejected Gladstone's arguments for leniency, saying that he was not a traditional first-time offender because he ran the prostitution ring for more than 20 years.
