Frederic Ingram

President Jimmy Carter's December 1980 decision to release Frederic B. (Fritz) Ingram from federal prison involved almost the inverse of the Rich case. Whereas some claim that big money and partisan politics were behind the presidential act that allows Mr. Rich to return to the United States from exile, a bipartisan effort among prominent people with no obvious vested interest set Mr. Ingram free – and he responded by angrily going into exile. Mr. Ingram, who grew up in Nashville and later made his home in New Orleans, was convicted in 1977 of bribing Chicago municipal officials in order to win a key contract for Ingram Corp., the company that he and his brother, E. Bronson Ingram of Nashville, jointly ran. Bronson Ingram was acquitted of the same charges. He went on to create Ingram Industries, Inc., which became one of the nation's largest privately held companies before he died in 1995. An appendix to Mr. Ingram's appeal, listing his civic activities prior to his incarceration, took up more than four pages of single-spaced text. He served on the boards of, and acted as a key supporter of, organizations ranging from Tulane University, to the New Orleans Museum of Art, to the New Orleans Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America. Some of the most prominent individuals in Nashville and New Orleans wrote letters to President Carter in support of Mr. Ingram's petition. On December 23, 1980, President Carter commuted Fritz Ingram's prison sentence to 16 months from the 32 months he would have served with time off for good conduct. He was released in May 1981. Afterward, a group of Nashville friends joined him in Beersheba Springs to celebrate his freedom. Later in 1981, Mr. Ingram traveled to Dublin, renounced his American citizenship, and became an Irish citizen. Mr. Ingram reportedly lived in Monaco and London after renouncing his citizenship. He and Bronson Ingram had divided the assets of Ingram Corp. before he went to prison, with Fritz, the older brother, retaining the company's more lucrative oil business. In 1983, according to trial testimony, that commodity business suffered a disastrous, $100 million loss in the course of six weeks. The distribution businesses of Bronson Ingram's Ingram Industries Inc., meanwhile, exploded into a multi-billion-dollar business empire during the 1980s.