By Pete Brush

Law360, New York (May 8, 2020, 3:47 PM EDT) -- A 75-year-old businessman doing 10 years for building a $220 million loan-sharking empire won't be freed on compassionate grounds, but the Illinois prison where he's housed would be justified to furlough him while coronavirus remains a threat, a Manhattan federal judge said Friday.

U.S. District Judge Edgardo Ramos turned aside Richard Moseley Sr.'s application for release from a minimum security camp in Marion, Illinois, saying he already cut Moseley a break because of his advanced age at his 2018 sentencing.

"I believed then, and I believe now, that a sentence of 10 years is appropriate," Judge Ramos said.

Moseley — who was arrested in 2016 and convicted by a jury in 2017 on counts of racketeering, wire fraud and aggravated identity theft — charged usurious interest rates of more than 700 percent, and heavy fees, and signed people up for loans they didn't authorize at his Missouri loan business. Moseley has appealed his conviction. Arguments were held in January but the Second Circuit had not ruled as of Friday.

Moseley is the second megafraudster serving time at the camp to be denied compassionate release by a Manhattan federal judge in recent days. On May 1, U.S. District Judge William H. Pauley III said former lawyer Paul Daugerdas, 69, who is imprisoned there for orchestrating a $7 billion tax fraud, can't be released on compassionate grounds but, like Moseley, could be furloughed to promote social distancing in the system.

As of Thursday there had been no reported virus cases at the Marion camp or its adjacent medium security penitentiary, Moseley's lawyer Amy Adelson told Judge Ramos during a morning teleconference.

But numbers in the federal prison system at large are starting to jump, she said, and it is only a matter of time before her client's facility gets on the board. On Thursday, the Bureau of Prisons reported a total of 2,646 positive cases among inmates, with 44 deaths and 591 recoveries nationwide.

Her client, who suffers from hypertension and other medical conditions that put him at increased risk of death from coronavirus, shouldn't have to sit and wait to become infected, she said.

"This is a fluid situation," Adelson said. "This isn't disappearing in the federal prisons."

Judge Ramos denied Moseley release despite observing that the pandemic has "changed the calculus" for such motions and that COVID-19 means "this is a closer case than it might otherwise be."

But the judge pushed backed against Adelson's assertion that, at bottom, Moseley was just a longtime businessman who simply saw payday lending as another opportunity that "went very wrong" — and that he is "not your typical fraudster."

An animated Judge Ramos said Moseley directed his underlings to lie about the nature of his business, showed "no remorse" until sentencing and lied on the stand during his trial when he falsely told the jury that his lawyers always told him his loan-sharking was "perfectly legal."

"He perjured himself. He clearly perjured himself," the judge said.

Prosecutors, who opposed release, told Judge Ramos that Moseley has barely begun to serve his term.

"Twenty-one months is simply not enough for the serious crimes that this defendant committed," prosecutor David Abramowicz said.

Moseley is represented by the Law Offices of Amy Adelson LLC.

The government is represented by David Abramowicz and Edward Imperatore of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York.

The case is USA v. Moseley, case number 1:16-cr-00079, in the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York.

--Editing by Stephen Berg.

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