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Dragon Lady sent up the river. I don't get it — Martha Stewart makes an insider trade that nets her about $220,000, hurts no one, and she gets six months in prison. Darleen Druyun, former Air Force procurement officer turned Boeing spy, gets only nine months for "helping Boeing in raising the price for the Air Force on the multibillion dollar deal [borne by US taxpayers] while secretly negotiating a job for herself."

Martha got a month of prison for roughly each $37,000 of her financial nastiness. Druyun, on the other hand, was sentenced for her conflicts of interest in a Boeing contract worth $23.5 billion of public money. If $37,000 worth of financial misbehavior gets Martha a month of prison, by this formula Darleen Druyun should get 635,000 months of prison, or 53,000 years.

Shouldn't victimless crimes, like drug possession and certain less pernicious forms of insider trading, get smaller sentences or fines, while those white-collar crimes that significantly erode the public trust, like Druyun's, get the book thrown at them? What's the matter with the judicial system? Can't judges do simple calculator-level math?

Our reverse chronology of the Dragon Lady Drama (also starring her daughter and former Boeing CFO and author Michael Sears) starts here.

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