The man who prosecutors said was the mastermind of the fraud, a former Marbella urban planning adviser, Juan Antonio Roca, received the biggest sentence — 11 years — for money laundering, bribery and fraud.
The court heard that Freddie Kendakumana, 27, a Congolese refugee, who received the biggest sentence, of eight and a half years, had first been interviewed by Greater Manchester police in December 2008.
"They answer back in just these big sentences".
"For a long time, prosecutors have defined themselves through conviction rates and winning the big cases with the big sentences," Nicholas Turner, the president of the Vera Institute, told me.
"A big sentence will send a message that we are not going to be allow men and women to kill each other.
And here we are: the final Sentence of the Week before our big Sentence of the Year competition, the runup to which began last March with Charlotte Brontë, my first SOTW winner.
"At that point, he would've loved to come to the States and get a big sentence reduction," a government official who worked on the case said, of La Barbie.
"I am convinced that it was planned in advance to give out big sentences so that people would stop coming to the meetings and to justify a ban against them in Moscow," she said.
"We're hoping for a big sentence only as a deterrent," Cynthia Friedman, a victim of Mr. Madoff's fraud, told a crowd of reporters before his sentence was handed down.
That big sentence gets at a big idea behind "L'America," which is that romantic passion is catalyzed by the erotic pull of place, especially when that place happens to be somewhere other than the one you call home.
