Free Republic

HAZLETON – Jan Lewan is reinventing himself as a polka rapper. Fresh out of prison and set to begin repaying his debt to the people he swindled, the area polka legend said he was exposed to rap music while behind bars and took a liking to the art. He admits it took a little while for him to get used to the genre, but he finally started liking it when he realized he could tell a story, along with the uplifting melody. “My rap will be a melody of polka. It is something different and something I hope polka people...

SCRANTON - He had just pleaded guilty to felony charges that could send him to prison for up to 10 years, but polka king Jan Lewan's spirits seemed high as he left a federal courtroom Tuesday. "Yes, merry Christmas," Lewan said when asked by a reporter if he had anything to say about his plea to bilking hundreds of investors out of at least $1 million. Four of his investment scam victims who attended the brief hearing were not nearly as jovial. "I know the money is lost. The satisfaction is he will be going to jail," said one victim,...

An attack on Jan Lewan while he slept in a prison cell has an attorney for the former polka entertainer criticizing Delaware officials responsible for his safety. An inmate cut Lewan, 61, across the neck and on the back with a razor at the Delaware Correctional Center in Smyrna, said attorney David Glassberg of Hazleton. Glassberg identified Lewan's assailant as Keith Garner. According to The News Journal in Wilmington, Del., Garner is serving a life sentence for rape. Glassberg questioned the decision by prison officials to assign Garner to a cell with Lewan, who is serving a sentence for securities...

A former Hazleton polka band leader who defrauded fans and other investors in 22 states of millions of dollars is staying in a Scranton halfway house as he finishes his prison term, which is set to end next month. Jan Lewan is in the Community Corrections Management program of the federal Bureau of Prisons and due to be released April 16. While in a halfway house, inmates are expected to work as they prepare to return to life outside the prison system, Carla Wilson of the bureau’s northeast regional office in Philadelphia said. John F. Mikulak, a director of a...

SCRANTON - Calling the case "an American tragedy," a federal judge on Thursday sentenced world renowned polka musician Jan Lewandowski to 71 months in prison for a investment scheme bilking investors of millions. U.S. District Judge Thomas Vanaskie cited the amount of the loss and the impact on the victims for imposing the maximum sentence allowed under federal law. "You used the trappings of trust to convince them to invest," Vanaskie told Lewandowski, better known as Jan Lewan, as the 62-year-old stood before a courtroom filled with more than two dozen of his victims. "It was an expression of faith...

Hazleton polka musician is taken to Delaware jail. He was found guilty of a securities scheme. By TERRIE MORGAN-BESECKER tmorgan@leader.net Disgraced polka king Jan Lewan traded the glitz of the stage for the starkness of a prison cell Friday as he began serving a five-year prison sentence imposed that morning by a Delaware judge. The once beloved and trusted entertainer was led off to state prison after entering a plea to a racketeering charge Friday in Wilmington, the last of six charges leveled against him for an securities scheme that cost two Delaware families $87,000. The sentence ends the first...