Jail for top team at Adelphia

John J. Rigas, who built the Adelphia Communications Corporation into the country’s sixth-largest cable company, was sentenced to 15 ye...

John J. Rigas, who built the Adelphia Communications Corporation into the country’s sixth-largest cable company, was sentenced to 15 years in prison on Monday for looting hundreds of millions of dollars from the company’s coffers and concealing its true debt load from investors.

Timothy J. Rigas, Rigas’s 49-year-old son and Adelphia’s former CFO, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for his part in the fraud.

Each man potentially faced up to three decades in prison just for bank fraud, the most serious in a list of convictions that also included securities fraud and conspiracy. The sentencing is one of the largest in a corporate crime case since the Supreme Court ruled last January that judges did not have to adhere to federal guidelines when issuing sentences.

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The elder Rigas spoke hoarsely and hunched over as he pleaded for leniency, and his family wept quietly as he was sentenced. ‘‘To my stockholders, I apologise — this whole thing has happened to all of us,’’ he said. ‘‘There are many things that I wish I had done differently.’’

His son, in his speech asking for leniency, said, ‘‘Our intentions were good; the results were not so’’ — to which Judge Leonard B. Sand replied, ‘‘I think your intentions were to deceive the market.’’ — NYT