Remember David Bergstein? He was one of the most controversial Hollywood figures of the past two decades before being arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced in 2018 to eight years in federal prison. Now, thanks to Covid-19, he’s out early and is said to be lurking around L.A. 

If you don’t recall, Bergstein first appeared on the scene in the early 2000s with a powerful friend, construction magnate Ron Tutor. The duo took over Elie Samaha’s defunct Franchise Films library before recruiting a hedge fund to back their own distributors ThinkFilm and Capitol Films. Bergstein and Tutor became fixtures on Cannes yachts and red carpets, but by 2008 the companies were floundering, creditors forced them into bankruptcy, production staffers were being stiffed on pay, and two films—Tony Kaye’s Black Water Transit and David O. Russell’s Nailed—were never released as intended. (Russell famously bailed on the $26 million project starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Jessica Biel and went public with complaints about Bergstein squeezing the project.) The whole enterprise imploded in litigation, and Tutor moved on to buying Miramax from Disney for $660 million with a group that included Trump buddy Tom Barrack and actor Rob Lowe. (They later sold … after Bergstein sued over a fee he was allegedly owed as a “consultant” on the deal.) “Believe it or not, I like him in spite of all the misery he’s caused me,” Tutor, now 80, once said of Bergstein in a deposition. Hollywood friends, man.

But Bergstein actually didn’t go to prison for any sort of film finance shenanigans. The feds arrested him in 2016 for allegedly swindling investors in a fund called Weston Capital Asset Management and using the money for Vegas trips and a lavish lifestyle. A Manhattan jury convicted, and Bergstein—who cried at his sentencing, begging for leniency—was given eight years to “send a message,” the judge declared. He most recently was serving his time in a low-security facility in Taft, California.

Then the pandemic hit, prisons became overrun by Covid, and the CARES Act authorized U.S. attorney general Bill Barr to release tens of thousands of at-risk inmates to home confinement. Last week, a good source told me Bergstein has been reconnecting with friends and business associates in L.A. So I called Bergstein’s criminal lawyer, Lee Ginsberg, who told me that his client was indeed home in Hidden Hills and is under supervision. He’s in his late 50s now and has a heart condition, Ginsberg says, putting him at a higher risk of Covid and eligible for home confinement. 

Now that the pandemic is subsiding, a D.O.J memo says federal inmates could soon be ordered back to their cells. But Ginsberg (ever the defense lawyer), notes that Covid is still a huge problem in prisons and says he doubts inmates will be ordered back anytime soon, if at all. 

Could Bergstein re-establish himself in the industry? “There’s not necessarily an absolute prohibition on working in your chosen field,” Ginsberg told me.