Herbert Hoelter, Prison Consultant to the Rich and Infamous, Dies at 73

In the summer of 2003, as Martha Stewart’s trial on charges connected to securities fraud was nearing its conclusion, the CNN news anchor Anderson Cooper aired a segment speculating about how severe her punishment would be if she were convicted.

“Sometimes,” Mr. Cooper said, “it seems as though rich criminals seldom end up swapping smokes on Cell Block H. So if it’s not hard time in the joint, what kind of sentence could she get?”

His guest was Herbert Hoelter, a sentencing reform advocate who, to fund his nonprofit work at the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, had become a concierge to the federal prison system for white-collar criminals, helping them to secure alternative or shorter sentences and to navigate life as an inmate.

“Our philosophy isn’t that punishment should not occur,” Mr. Hoelter said, “it’s that it should occur in different ways.”

Mr. Hoelter died on May 2 in Baltimore, not far from his home in Catonsville, Md. He was 73.

His daughter Katie Hoelter said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was complications of congestive heart failure and DRESS syndrome, a rare hypersensitive reaction to certain medications.

Mr. Hoelter’s client list was a Who’s Who of corporate and financial scandal, including Leona Helmsley, the hotel baroness convicted of tax evasion; Bernard L. Madoff, the architect of the largest Ponzi scheme in financial history; Ivan F. Boesky, the financier convicted of insider trading; Michael R. Milken, the so-called junk bond king; and, after she was convicted, Ms. Stewart.