Kozlowski didn’t get away, but others did

Dennis Kozlowski may not show outward signs of bitterness, but there are a lot of other people who do.

Kozlowski is the former CEO of Tyco, a conglomerate that once was “owned” by ADT. His claim to infamy is that he was one of the corporate executives to come under criminal scrutiny in the early 2000s Wall Street scandals.

In Kozlowski’s case, a jury in a New York state courtroom in June 2005 found him guilty of “essentially using Tyco as his own piggy bank” — as the New York Times once wrote in a story that appeared in this newspaper.

Kozlowski served a little over eight years — 100 months — in prison. He was released in 2013.

On Wednesday, Kozlowski made what was billed as his fifirst local public appearance, at the Gold Coast Tiger Bay Club’s monthly gathering, in Boca Raton, where he once led Tyco and ADT and was a major philanthropic and community player.

The version of events he told the dozens of people who attended the luncheon at City Fish Market framed his legal woes as an entanglement that began as a sales tax issue related to paintings, and which then morphed into an investigation of bonus money he was paid at Tyco. News accounts from a dozen years ago told a difffffffffffferent story — that he was part of a “$ 600 million looting of the company to fund a lavish lifestyle.”

In fairness, Kozlowski’s focus Wednesday was not to rehash or dispute the past but to discuss his time in prison and what he termed serious flflaws in America’s incarceration system and policies. He spoke about assisting other inmates in procuring high school GEDs, running the laundry department and generally spending his days in a prison cell.

Kozlowski told the friendly crowd he has emerged from the ordeal and the public humiliation associated with it. He is back in business consulting on mergers and acquisitions. And he chairs a charitable group, The Fortune Society, that helps former inmates avoid returning to prison.

“That’s been keeping me busy,” he said, adding that the Fortune Society work is “the most important job I’ve done in my life.”

During his talk, Kozlowski showed no signs of bitterness about, as he said, going from “having the world at my disposal to living in an 8- by-10foot cell.”

Others, however, still harbor resentment. I don’t mean toward Kozlowski personally, but toward the entire issue of corporate greed and abuse.

As Kozlowski spoke, I couldn’t get over the discrepancy in treatment of those executives like him who were prosecuted in the so-called Enron era and those who got a free pass in the fifinancial and housing fraud that led to the Great Recession.

Kozlowski and a number of other executives involved in the shenanigans of the early 2000s at least did time in prison. The post-2008 mortgage crises scoundrels not only got away with it, they cost homeowners homes, millions of workers their jobs and taxpayers a massive bailout to avoid a second Depression.

That bitterness hasn’t ebbed. It’s one reason so many Americans show little trust in institutions, and so many others demand that someone — anyone — “drain the swamp.”