The Alderson Sentence

October 8, 2004, the Federal Prison Camp at Alderson, West Virginia. Martha Stewart, sixty-three, reports to the camp her lawyers and the judge — Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum — have agreed should be her sentence: five months of imprisonment, two years of probation, and a $30,000 fine, for obstruction of justice in the ImClone insider-trading case. She had sold 3,928 shares of the biotech company on December 27, 2001, the day before the FDA rejected its Erbitux cancer drug application. The shares were worth $228,000. The conviction and the prison camp make her the most prominent woman incarcerated in the United States that year.

Elliot Cranmer's biography opens earlier — in Jersey City, where Martha Helen Kostyra was born in 1941, the second of six children of Polish-American parents — and follows the arc through the Barnard modelling years, the 1961 marriage to Andrew Stewart, the Wall Street stockbroking and the Westport catering company, the 1982 Entertaining and the Kmart 1987 partnership, the launch of Martha Stewart Living in 1990 and the 1999 IPO of MSO that made her a billionaire on paper, the ImClone trade and the federal trial, the Apprentice spin-off and the long second act on Sirius XM and the Snoop Dogg cooking show, Martha & Snoop.

What emerges is a portrait of an American domestic-lifestyle empire-builder and the federal trade that the country did not believe was an accident.