100 years of hard time: Will Hoover has nothing but time to ponder the harshest white-collar sentence ever handed down in Denver.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: Interview - Cover Story

The stultifying routine starts every morning at five, as far away as a human can get from the upscale Greenwood Village neighborhood known as The Preserve that Will Hoover used to call home.

Or the office on Denver's trendy South Cherry Creek Drive where he used to work.

Hoover rises from a steel-framed lower bunk in a cell he shares with another inmate, puts on timber-green pants and a shirt with a V-neck collar, a brass-buckled cloth belt and black shoes, then lines up for the first of three inmate counts of the day. At 6 a.m., he files off to breakfast and a day of work at the Sterling Correctional Facility, work for which he's paid a daily wage of 63 cents.

But he's moving up. Hoover spent his first 109 days at Sterling working in the prison kitchen from 11 a.m. to 7:30 p.m., making biscuits, rolls, apple pie, pizza crusts and garlic bread.

Hoover spoke while sitting at one of 38 small rectangular tables in the prison's visitor center. He has privileges like access to the prison yard, and his cellmate has a TV purchased from the prison canteen, but it's hard to imagine a more drastic collapse of a lifestyle--from jet-setting financial adviser, a likeable, engaging workaholic who, by most accounts, had done well for his clients for 30 years since his graduation from the University of Denver in the 1970s, to a prisoner serving 100 years in the stark environs of the Sterling facility's second-most restricted unit. According to the Denver DA's office, Hoover's sentence is the harshest ever handed out for a first conviction of a white-collar crime in Denver.

It's a safe bet Hoover never imagined in his worse nightmare he'd end up in a place like Sterling--not some minimum-security country-club detention center, but a grim empire of concrete and razor wire with 2,445 other inmates on the windswept, treeless plains of northeastern Colorado.

The thin, 53-year-old man who sits in the prison visitor's room is barely recognizable from the chunky Will Hoover who not long ago did business in a stylish office, flew his own airplane to meet with far-off clients, and for years was one of Denver's best-known financial advisers.

He's lost 53 pounds from his 6-foot frame, an achievement he attributes to a routine of 200 situps, pushups, knee-bends and toe-touches done in stints throughout the day, but it seems equally possible that the prison food and the emotional jolt of a life sentence might be just as responsible for his gaunt appearance.

His wedding ring is so loose now on his ring finger that he wears it on his middle finger most of the time.

There's a prison exercise room, but Hoover prefers to work out in his cell, fearing for his safety at the gym.

Asked if anything has happened to cause him to fear for his safety, he answers curtly, "Yes."

Anything he'd like to talk about?

"No. All that would do is cause more problems," he says. "It's a very difficult environment."

Any friends?

"No," he says. At one point he breaks down, sobbing, tears flowing.

"I'm not even here. My heart, everything, is not here. That's why I have no friends. Can you imagine getting used to this? Oh God. It's unbelievable being unfree."

Hoover, who advertised regularly in ColoradoBiz until his conviction, was sentenced last July to 100 years in prison after he was convicted on 44 counts of racketeering, securities fraud and theft involving losses of $15.4 million for 25 documented victims.

He's been in the Sterling Correctional Facility since September. Denver Chief Deputy District Attorney Joe Morales, who handled Hoover's prosecution along with Denver Deputy DA Phil Parrott, says he offered Hoover and his trial attorney, Harvey Steinberg, an alternative to going to trial--but not much of one. "There's a term called 'plea bargain' in our system," Morales says. "Well, there was a plea, but it was no bargain. It was going to be a prison sentence one way or the other."

The deal Morales offered Hoover was for a minimum of 24 years and a maximum of 48. And so, says Morales of the defendant and his legal counsel, "They had to try the case. The only...