Penn’s ‘free’ advice
SEAN PENN warned lawmakers Monday that a Brooklyn businessman being held in Bolivia for suspicion of money laundering is a “Dead Man Walking.”
The actor and activist said Jacob Ostreicher, 54, has been held without charge for nearly two years in the South American country and remains under house arrest even though 13 of his accusers are now in prison.
Penn told a House foreign affairs subcommittee that Ostreicher is in danger because his Bolivian enemies want to kill him.
“I believe Jacob’s life is in dan- ger as we sit here today,” the film star, an Oscar winner for “Dead Man Walking,” said.
Ostreicher was initially arrested on suspicion of money laundering and spent 18 months in the brutal Palmasola prison.
Penn has been pushing for Ostreicher’s release and lobbying Bolivia’s leftist president, Evo Morales, to take action.
Eventually, a judge moved the businessman out of prison and the officials who had put him there were arrested on extortion allegations. But Penn has been unable to bring the Brooklyn Heights man back home.
The detainee himself has told Penn, “It won’t happen,” the actor testified Monday.
“These (expletives) want to kill me,” Ostreicher said, according to Penn. “I’m too dangerous to them as a witness.”
The actor said the people who threw Ostreicher in prison are “people who have played very serious baseball.”
He suggested that the U.S. government should intervene — before it’s too late. “I think we’re at a point now where we don’t want to look back and say, ‘ We should have,’” Penn told the subcommittee.
He suggested diplomatic pressure and the release of Cuban spies. Ostreicher suffers from Parkinson’s disease, compounded by the stress of his confinement, Penn said.