Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the onetime Chicago Public Schools CEO indicted nearly five years ago for her role in a brazen kickback scheme, has left a federal prison in West Virginia.
Though still technically in the custody of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, its records now show Byrd-Bennett is assigned to a residential re-entry office in Cincinnati. A spokesperson for the Bureau of Prisons confirmed Byrd-Bennett’s transfer to the supervision of the Cincinnati office, saying it happened Tuesday.
The prison spokesperson declined to answer questions about the reason for Byrd-Bennett’s release. Byrd-Bennett’s attorney did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.
A federal judge sentenced Byrd-Bennett in 2017 to 4 ½ years in prison for steering $23 million in no-bid contracts to consultants who’d previously employed her. In return, the schools CEO chosen by then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel expected hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks. They never arrived.
The largest of the three no-bid deals was a jaw-dropping $20.5 million principals-training contract handed to The SUPES Academy, which was finalized a month after Byrd-Bennett controversially shut down 50 neighborhood schools in 2013.
Much of the scheme that unfolded in 2012 and 2013 was captured in hundreds of frank and frequently humorous emails sent at all hours of the day and night, including a remark by Byrd-Bennett in which she quipped, “I have tuition to pay and casinos to visit (:”
Now 70, Byrd-Bennett served her sentence at a minimum-security prison camp in Alderson, West Virginia. When Martha Stewart served her own sentence there, it became known as “Camp Cupcake.”
The Bureau of Prisons still projects Byrd-Bennett’s official release date from its custody as June 28, 2021. Byrd-Bennett reported to the Alderson facility in August 2017, and she spent just shy of three years there. It’s unclear what prompted her release Tuesday, but many federal inmates have been asking for release due to the coronavirus pandemic. There is no court record of Byrd-Bennett making such a request, and the Bureau of Prisons has reported no positive cases of coronavirus at the Alderson facility.
Also sentenced in the scandal were SUPES Academy co-owners Gary Solomon and his former Niles West High School student Thomas Vranas.
Solomon got seven years and is in a minimum-security camp in Duluth, Minnesota. Though he isn’t due to be released until October 2023, federal prosecutors made the unusual move in February of asking a judge to knock as many as 13 months off his sentence because of his cooperation in a separate investigation.
Vranas got 18 months and got out in November 2018, prison records show.
Contributing: Lauren FitzPatrick
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