Frederic Bourke Jr. leaned back and stared at the ceiling in disbelief Friday as a jury convicted him of a doomed bribery conspiracy to gain control of a state-run oil company in Azerbaijan.
The face of the 63-year-old entrepreneur turned red as he absorbed the news he now faces prison time for a fiasco that already had cost him more than $5 million of his own money—a 1998 plan by scam artist Viktor Kozeny to bribe the then-president of the central Asian nation of Azerbaijan to get the inside track on the privatization of a state-owned oil company, Socar.
