Bernie Kerik/facebook

Bernard Kerik, the former police commissioner of New York City whose meteoric rise to the national spotlight was matched only by his even faster fall, pleaded guilty Thursday in federal court to eight felony counts that included lying to the White House and tax crimes. The plea agreement calls for a sentence of up to nearly three years.

“It is a sad day when the former chief law enforcement officer of New York City pleads guilty to eight federal felonies,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a prepared statement.

Lawrence Kobilinsky, an acquaintance of Kerik and a forensics professor and chairman of the Department of Sciences at John Jay College in New York , was trying on Thursday to grasp the idea of the tainted American icon going off to prison for a while.

“That is just amazing,” Kobilinsky said. “It’s ironic to see him behind bars right now. It’s kind of shocking in a way. It’s sad, especially since he was the commissioner of corrections. This is astonishing.”

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John Gotti Jr./trutv.com

On Wednesday, after the judge dismissed two jurors who weren’t getting along, Gotti’s mother loudly voiced her opinion from the gallery, not far from where her son sat.

Meanwhile, Gotti’s attorneys on Wednesday won a victory when the judge ruled that the jury can hear evidence  contained in an FBI report that a top mobster approved killing Gotti after he said he had quit the mob.  The paper reported that the evidence could bolster Gotti’s claim that he quit the mob in 1999.

The U.S. government has agreed to pay him $3 million to settle a lawsuit in Washington in which Horn alleged that the CIA and a U.S. diplomat spied on him  and illegally wiretapped his conversations while he worked at the U.S. Embassy in Burma more than ten years ago, Politico reported.

Politico reported that Horn’s lawsuit alleged that the CIA officer and the diplomant “conspired to place a listening device in a coffee table at Horn’s residence and that the pair then relayed information they obtained to Washington.”

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