Karen looks a lot like the soccer mom she’s become—no makeup, sensible haircut, old jeans. During Mark’s trials, a New York Times article titled “The Wifely Art of Standing By” described her as a “model” courtroom wife: “She smiles politely and dresses in the kind of suit a first lady might choose.” Still, she has an edge—she speaks bluntly and has strong opinions. Of her husband’s conviction, she says flatly, “He was railroaded.” When asked about how life has changed since Mark’s been locked up, she says, “Well, the prison doesn’t allow conjugal visits, so it’s definitely a dry spell here!”

Karen says the first time she visited her husband was the worst. When she saw him walk in wearing a prison jumpsuit, it hit her hard that the life they’d spent nearly 30 years building together was over. She broke down, the only time she’s cried since her husband’s troubles started. She soon realized that she needed to build a new life with him, one that meant spending her days in a prison too.

Life as a prison wife has taken some getting used to. Karen once saw an inmate punch his girlfriend. She’s learned how visitors smuggle cocaine into prison: Liquefy it, soak a Kleenex in it, and pretend to use the tissue to blow your nose. Then there are the rules of dress. At Downstate, under­wire bras are banned—they can be used to make shanks—as are miniskirts, plunging necklines, and anything else that shows too much skin or might arouse the inmates.

Karen sees her husband once a month; each visit is about six hours long. She also speaks to Mark on the phone every night. He calls collect, racking up a $750-a-month phone bill. They talk about their kids and friends, and about celebrities; they both read Us Weekly and Star magazine and avidly follow the gossip about Brangelina, Britney, and Paris. They talk about piano; Mark is learning to play on a keyboard in his cell; Karen plays a Baldwin baby grand in her living room. He keeps her up-to-date on such prison gossip as which inmates have married women they’ve met through classified ads in magazines. Karen describes the latest movies she’s seen and family vacations she’s planning. Sometimes they fight. Sometimes they talk about his appeal; both of them have decided it’s better to assume that they won’t win.

A few months ago, Mark told Karen to throw away all the clothes and other ­personal items he’d left at home. “I couldn’t do it,” she says. “That’s like when someone dies. But he’s not dead.”

Mark Swartz is the son of second-generation Polish and Russian Jews. (About 20 members of his family died at Auschwitz.) He grew up in a middle-class home; his father was an accountant and his mother a homemaker. He met Karen during freshman orientation at the University of California–San Diego, in 1978, and they married two years later. When he graduated—with a major in political science—he began working as an auditor at Deloitte & Touche. The Swartzes were not rich. One photograph from 1984 shows Mark and Karen’s first home, a white ranch house in San Diego with a dirt lawn; they could not afford landscaping. Over the next five years, they had three kids—Scott, Eric, and Andrea. They appeared to have been an ordinary—even dull—suburban American family. Then, in 1991, Swartz took a job at Tyco and met Dennis Kozlowski.

The 10 years that Swartz worked under Kozlowski were some of the best of his life. When Swartz joined Tyco, he was an assistant controller making $45,000 a year. The company was smaller back then; it had $3 billion in revenue, four divisions, and a two-story headquarters in Exeter, New Hampshire. But under Kozlowski, who became C.E.O. in 1992, Tyco went through an extraordinary transformation. In that decade, Kozlowski grew the company into a $36 billion-a-year conglomerate with five divisions worldwide. He was a bold and aggressive dealmaker: At one point Tyco was averaging 200 acquisitions a year. As Tyco’s C.F.O., Swartz was a perfect foil for Kozlowski. While his boss was the big-picture, big-idea guy, Swartz was the details guy who tied up the million loose ends.

Swartz loved his job. He traveled all over the world, the deals he was working on made headlines, and he had real power. He also had real money. He got his first major bonus—$2 million—in 1995, and after that, the cash poured in. For the most part, though, he kept out of the spotlight. His name rarely appeared in the press, other than in short articles about the company’s accounting and finances. The biggest profile of him was a piece in the October 2000 issue of CFO magazine, which credited Swartz with helping create Tyco’s “tightly structured acquisition approach.”

Unlike his oversize boss, Swartz didn’t throw big parties, collect art, get divorced, or marry a younger woman. He spent most of his time outside of work with his wife and kids—Saturday was usually devoted to swim meets or ball games, followed by pizza at the kitchen counter. He once got into an argument with Kozlowski over taking an afternoon off to go to his daughter’s volleyball game. He says Kozlowski threatened to fire him if he didn’t come back in to work on a deal. Swartz stayed at the game and made up with Kozlowski later.