Contractor ordered to be resentenced

Bernard Bucheit was convicted of giving unlawful gratuity to a congressman.
YOUNGSTOWN -- A month after retired contractor Bernard J. Bucheit left federal prison for a halfway facility, three judges at the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati ordered that he be resentenced.
The appellate court this week affirmed his conviction but, because of a change in the sentencing guidelines, vacated his sentence and remanded the case to U.S. District Judge Lesley Brooks Wells in Cleveland. As of Wednesday, no resentencing date had been set.
Bucheit, who retired to Florida from Boardman, had been at the Federal Correctional Institution in Elkton since Sept. 26, 2003. On April 26, he transferred to Community Corrections Association on Market Street and will stay until June 22, when his sentence is complete.
Bribery conviction
In April 2003, a jury found Bucheit guilty of conspiracy to violate the federal bribery statute, giving an unlawful gratuity to a public official (then-U.S. Rep. James A. Traficant Jr.) and perjury before a federal grand jury. Judge Wells sentenced Bucheit to 24 months in prison and fined him $5,000.
Bucheit earned good time in prison, which knocked about six months from his sentence.
Traficant, convicted of racketeering, bribery and tax evasion, has been incarcerated since July 30, 2002. In early December 2004, he was moved from a prison in New York to the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minn., for an undisclosed physical or mental health problem. Traficant accepted roughly $30,000 worth of remodeling work at his Greenford horse farm in the early 1990s from Bucheit, who collected political favors instead of cash for the work.
On appeal, Bucheit's Akron lawyer, Christopher C. Eskew, argued that the case was barred by the five-year statute of limitations and there was insufficient evidence to support the verdict.