Bill Livolsi: Would You Go to Prison for Your Spouse?

“I would hate to see somebody do what I did—sequester themself away. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.”

Bill Livolsi’s story comes from a different angle than most I’ve heard on this show. It’s about a married couple, both facing federal charges, with two young children at home. Bill was trying to help his wife out of a terrible situation. He ended up making it worse for both of them.

What got me was how isolated Bill became before he finally found the support he needed. And how that support—particularly finding Jeff Grant and the white collar support group—became the thing that kept him from completely falling apart.

Growing Up in His Father’s Shadow

Bill grew up outside Philadelphia in Montgomery County, the oldest of three kids. His dad was a baby boomer who used the GI Bill to get his undergraduate degree from Wharton at night, then built a successful career in pharmaceuticals.

“I wanted to be just like my dad,” Bill told me. “That was my role model.”

He followed the expected path: accounting degree, started at Philadelphia National Bank, moved up through a series of jobs. Eventually he found his way into advertising on the finance side and discovered he loved it. The creative people, the diversity, the energy. He climbed to VP of Finance and CFO at an agency that sold to a major international holding company.

By the mid-2000s, Bill was living in Las Vegas, commuting to New York City three days a week. He was financially secure with a new wife and young children. Life was good.

The Decision That Changed Everything

Bill’s wife was a private money manager. Her business wasn’t going well. There were lawsuits. Assets were frozen. Bill had invested some money. His parents had invested. Other family members too.

“You can imagine the conflicts that started to brew,” Bill said.

Around 2006 or 2007, Bill made what he calls a “horrendous decision.” He was arrogant enough to think he could fix any problem. He offered to help.

“I became a middle person,” he explained. “The assets were frozen, but there were people who wanted to make an investment. I said okay, I’ll receive those funds and make the payouts to other investors.”

If he’d had half a brain at the time, he said, he would have recognized what that was: the textbook definition of a Ponzi scheme. Taking new money to pay off old investors.

Then things went quiet for a few years. Bill thought maybe he’d dodged the bullet.

The FBI at the Door

In 2010, Bill came home from dropping the kids at school—they were 10 and 8—to find the FBI all over the property. An agent with a rifle over their shoulder told him to stop.

They arrested his wife that day. But Bill hadn’t been charged. Not yet.

For the next several years, he watched the case against his wife develop. He started cutting himself off from family. His father, his longtime confidant, had passed away in 2009. Bill didn’t know what to say to anyone. He was ashamed. He stayed in his own little world.

Then in early 2014, his wife turned down a plea agreement. Shortly after, a superseding indictment came down. Bill’s name was on it.

Finding Jeff Grant

When Bill was at his lowest, someone told him about Jeff Grant—an attorney-turned-minister who runs Progressive Prison Ministries and the white collar support group. Bill called from a Walmart parking lot after dropping the kids at school.

“We were on the phone for a long time,” Bill recalled. “He just let me lay it all out.”

That call changed everything. Jeff helped Bill understand the process. Told him it was normal to feel out of control. Gave him small nuggets to build on. They started talking regularly about the kids, about building support systems, about how to tell the truth in age-appropriate ways.

“I don’t know what would have happened if he hadn’t picked up,” Bill said.

Staggered Sentences

Both Bill and his wife were sentenced. She got 45 months. Bill got 24 months plus 9 months of home confinement.

The judge did something unusual: he staggered their sentences so one parent would always be home with the kids. The Real Housewives of New Jersey case had just been in the news with a similar arrangement, and Bill’s court-appointed attorney made that the centerpiece of his sentencing memorandum.

“I’m really grateful for that,” Bill said. “The judge really reflected on it.”

His wife reported first, around Thanksgiving 2015. Bill visited her regularly at Carswell in Fort Worth—about 600 miles round trip from Tulsa. He made at least 25 trips.

FCI El Reno

Bill surrendered to FCI El Reno in March 2019. His strategy was simple: this is the last thing I have to do. When it’s done, it’s done.

He went in determined to understand how he’d gotten into this mess. Not just what he did, but the underlying patterns. Why did he make those decisions? Why did he cut himself off from everyone who cared about him?

“I just did a lot of reading,” he said. “Books on codependency, CBT stuff from Psychology Services. A lot of my own work.”

The hardest part was expecting some moment of clarity that never came. He kept waiting to wake up feeling different, for the clouds to part, for the lightbulb to go off. It doesn’t work that way.

A friend finally told him: “You don’t see the difference from when you got here to where you are now. Just keep doing what you’re doing.”

Getting Out Early

Bill had no idea he was about to be released. The CARES Act had just passed. Prisons were making decisions about who to send home because of COVID. He thought he had months to go.

They quarantined about 40 inmates in a sealed-off wing for two weeks. Then they let them go. Bill called his son to say he was getting out. His son thought he was joking.

He walked out on April 29, 2020, and spent the balance of his sentence on home confinement. His probation officer set him up with a phone app for monitoring instead of an ankle bracelet—facial recognition and GPS. It made home confinement relatively easy.

White Collar Coaching

Today Bill runs White Collar Coaching, helping people navigate what he went through. He’s also deputy director at Progressive Prison Ministries and helps run the white collar support group that saved him.

“I found myself in this position where I had good advisors, a community of people who understood,” he said. “I would hate to see anybody have to go through this alone.”

His advice for people facing similar situations: Don’t sequester yourself away. Find someone who’s been through it. Ask for help—and remember, if it doesn’t bother you when someone asks you for help, why would it be different if you asked someone else?

“Everybody’s journey is different,” Bill said. “No one has the absolute answer about what you need to do. The more you listen, the more you absorb from credible sources, the better off you’ll be. Because nobody knows you as well as you do.”

You can reach Bill at whitecollarcoaching.com or email [email protected] for information about the white collar support group. He also facilitates a Thursday night family support group through Evolution Reentry (evolutionreentry.com).