Felon Mayor Takes Bus Back Home

Sharpe James, the former mayor of Newark, has spent 18 months in prison, serving a sentence for fraud. He returned to his home city, where he will spend another nine months in a halfway house, by bus, sharing part of the journey with a bank robber, two drug dealers, and a New York Times reporter. James said, “All the inmates were saying, ‘Sharpe, I know your limo is out there waiting; I know you’ve got the private jet set up.’” He took the government’s free bus ticket instead. “They expected me on a plane, on a train. But if I did that, then I’m not who I say I am,” James added. While doing his time, James wrote the first 17 chapters of his memoirs and kept himself busy with exercise.