Former Senator says he faked death to save his life
About the article
This is a digitised version of an article from The Cayman Compass's print archive. Occasionally, the digitisation process introduces transcription errors, or other problems.
See the article in its original context from January 1988.
Brought to you by
He staged a scuba diving death on Labour Day 1985 in the Bahamas to escape people who thought he would testify against them and to avoid a seven-year prison sentence, according to a transcript of the interview to be aired Monday on the U.S. television network CBS.
"I lived in a tent in Africa for a while with the lions walking within 15 feet (five meters) of my tent," he said.
There were elephants and African warriors in his camp, he said.
"Glamorous, glorious life this was out in the wild, tenting out," he said.
"I wanted to live as a basic simple person. I like to be close to nature, close to the land and I wanted to get far away from all the concrete and all of the problems plaguing me and the fears I had."
But after more than two years, "I wanted to stop running," he said in the interview, videotaped Thursday at the jail where is incarcerated.
The 50-year-old Friedland was detained in the Maldive Islands, his Indian Ocean hideout for 18 months, on Dec. 12.
He has begun serving the seven-year sentence on his conviction for accepting 360,000 dollars in kickbacks in return for arranging a 4-milliondollar loan from a union pension fund in New Jersey, his home state.
