PRISON TERM Martha Stewart faces restriction on conducting business

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
ALDERSON, W.Va. -- When Martha Stewart begins serving her sentence this week, she'll no doubt be expecting a parade of friends trekking down to these remote hollows to visit.
But with some pals, Stewart will have to do something she's not used to -- hold her tongue.
That's because she faces a rigid prohibition on conducting business while she's doing time at the federal prison camp here -- torture for a workaholic known to rise before 6 a.m. and hit the phones.
"She's always working or thinking about work," said one source familiar with the matter. "I don't know how she'll be able to stop."
Traci Billingsley, a Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman, conceded that tracking whether an inmate is doing business during visits "would be very difficult, given those constraints. There would be no way we could regulate that, I suppose."
But, she added cryptically, the prison system has "other intelligence mechanisms in place to see if business is being conducted."
Prison officials monitor all mail and phone conversations, so Stewart will have to be careful not to talk business on the phone or issue orders through her letters.
An inmate who violates the rule against doing business while behind bars is subject to such discipline as loss of phone privileges or restrictions on commissary purchases.
Because Stewart's life tends to mix business with the personal, it can sometimes be difficult to tell the two apart.
Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia CEO Sharon Patrick and Susan Magrino, Stewart's longtime public relations adviser, are among numerous pals who have committed to a West Virginia weekend during Stewart's five-month stay, a source said.