Imprisoned auto dealer Denny Hecker's road trip, courtesy of the federal prison system, has landed him in Oklahoma after a three-month stay in Indiana.
Hecker was transferred this week from federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind., to the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons confirmed Thursday.
Bureau spokesman Chris Burke described the Oklahoma prison as "an administrative facility housing male and female holdover offenders. The mission is basically to temporarily house inmates who are en route to another institution."
Hecker, who is serving a 10-year term for bankruptcy fraud and defrauding auto lenders out of millions of dollars in ill-gotten loans, began his federal sentence at the Federal Prison Camp in Duluth but was transferred in February. (He'd been jailed in Elk River before sentencing.) From Duluth he was taken to a prison in Wisconsin, then to Terre Haute.
Burke said he did not know why Hecker had been held in Indiana for so long. It was not his final destination, Burke said during an interview with the Star Tribune on Tuesday.
In a phone interview Thursday, the spokesman declined to say how long Hecker might be in Oklahoma.
Asked why the bureau bothered temporarily moving Hecker from one prison to another, Burke said, "When we transfer inmates, we have to utilize a network of transit routes and resources. Some of those resources are Bureau of Prisons resources and some are the U.S. Marshal's resources. It gets very complicated moving inmates. So it does take time, and it does take sometimes a distance as well."
Oklahoma City handles prisoners assigned to every security level. Hecker had been in a minimum-security prison camp in Duluth. It was not clear what security level he now holds.
While Hecker had the run of the minimum-security prison camp in Duluth, that changed around December when he was placed in special confinement, away from the general prison population.
Hecker was sequestered around the same time that his wife, Christi Rowan Hecker, was moved from a federal women's prison in Illinois to a halfway house in the Twin Cities. Rowan, who was serving a 14-month term for fraud, was released from the halfway house in February, the same month Hecker was moved to Indiana. Rowan served 12 months of her 14-month sentence before being released. She now lives in the Twin Cities.
Officials with the Bureau of Prisons and the U.S. attorney's office declined to say if the timing of Hecker's relocations was related to Rowan's release.
Hecker's former defense attorney Brian Toder said previously that Hecker was transferred out of Minnesota because he may have been deemed a flight risk.
Dee DePass 612-673-7725
