Martin A. Armstrong

Martin Armstrong (born 1950) is a former chairman of Princeton Economics International Ltd, who wrote financial newsletters from prison while serving time for contempt of court and alleged fraud involving Japanese investors. He was not formally tried on the fraud charges during his first seven years of incarceration, served in a maximum security Manhattan prison where he was severely beaten by an inmate and required intensive care treatment. He served a later sentence at Fort Dix, where he continued to write his newsletter despite periods spent in the 'hole'. Armstrong was originally jailed for contempt of court in January 2000 and held for seven years before being brought to trial when a judge who had annually renewed the contempt ruling was removed from the case. The period of imprisonment for contempt, without trial, was one of the longest in US history. Armstrong was finally released into house arrest in March 2011 for a period to run to September of that year. In 2007, he had pleaded guilty, in a plea bargain, to a single charge of criminal conspiracy relating to a period when he was managing $3 billion in assets and working from an office overlooking the royal palace in Tokyo. The conspiracy charge brought a further sentence of five years with no remission for time served.