The unraveling of his old, happy life started with a canceled family vacation. Karen recalls, “I remember we were ­going on this cruise to celebrate my son’s graduation, and we’re walking out the door, and Mark said, ‘I can’t come.’ ” “He said, ‘All this stuff’s going on at work.’ And I said, ‘Well, what?’ And that was how I first heard about it.”

That was the summer of 2002; Koz­lowski, who was under investigation for not paying sales tax on some paintings, had just resigned. Three months later, Swartz and his ex-boss were indicted on more than 30 counts, including conspiracy, grand larceny, enterprise corruption, and falsifying business records.

During their trials, as in their business lives, Swartz took a backseat to the boss. Kozlowski was the guy who threw his wife a $2 million birthday party in Sardinia, complete with a nude male ice sculpture spewing vodka from its penis and a cake shaped like a naked woman. These ­details, along with Koz­lowski’s $6,000 shower curtain and $15,000 umbrella stand, became the defining excesses of the Tyco case. At one point during the trials, friends told Swartz that investigators were asking about women he’d slept with, looking for anyone who could prove he’d had an affair. No one ever surfaced. Swartz says, “The one good thing about it was that Karen knows I never cheated on her.”

What ultimately got Swartz sent to prison had nothing to do with decadent parties or the extravagant shopping sprees of his ex-boss. His case boiled down to this: Between 1999 and 2001, Swartz personally stole $50 million in il­legal bonuses and helped Kozlowski loot the company for more than $150 mil­lion. To this day, Swartz maintains that those bonuses had been authorized by Tyco’s board. But no records of these discussions exist, and during the trials, six Tyco directors testified that they never authorized any such payments. “The thing I regret the most,” Swartz says, “is that I never recorded the conversations I had with certain members of the board.”

The morning after his conviction, Swartz woke up sure he’d dreamed everything—the indictment, the trials, the verdict. “I remember feeling relief, like, Thank God that wasn’t real,” he recalls. That feeling didn’t last. What hit him first was not the dread of prison but the fact that, for the first time in as long as he could remember, he had nothing he had to do. He’d spent the past three years in and out of lawyers’ offices and courtrooms. Now it was over, and suddenly he was completely—if temporarily—free. He had three months to go before his sentencing—which, he says, was a bit like knowing you’ve got three months to live, with the health to enjoy it and plenty of money to do whatever you want. He still had everything he’d earned legally, as well as $50 million in severance and other deferred compensation from Tyco. He still had his homes—one in Florida, two beach houses in New Hampshire, and a farm in Virginia. Given all those resources and options, all he really wanted to do was spend as much time as possible with his family.

That summer he drove cross-country with his two sons and his older son’s fiancée; all three men shaved their heads in an act of solidarity. They went white­-water rafting in New Mexico. They drove to California to meet up with Karen and the Swartzes’ daughter, then dropped the younger son off at his college in Arizona. Of course, the shadow of his sentencing hearing was always there. Mark once asked Karen if she thought he should take classes to learn how to defend himself in prison. They briefly discussed martial arts lessons. “Then we realized that anyone who’d be attacking him would have a lot more experience in that kind of thing,” Karen says. “So we decided he’d be better off just being himself and doing what he’s always done: trying to talk things out.”

He spent the night before his sentencing with Karen at the Peninsula hotel in Manhattan. They had tea at the hotel, took a long walk through the city, and then brought pizza back to their room. Both had prepared themselves for a stiff sentence, but they still hoped that he would remain free on bail while appealing his conviction. When he’d left his home in Florida to come to New York for his sentencing, he hadn’t bothered to clean up his desk; he’d imagined that he’d be back in a few days. Now that desk, untouched since the day he left, is like a strange time capsule. There is a refund for a canceled Hawaiian cruise booked for July 2002, two months before his indictment; his daughter’s certificate for outstanding achievement in middle school swimming, dated May 15, 2003, shortly before the beginning of his first trial; a crisp playbill for Forbidden ­Broadway from December 2004, a few weeks before his second trial began; and a note Swartz faxed to his mother-in-law promising that the money she put up for his bail (his accounts were frozen) would soon be returned to her.

“I’m sorry I said that, Dad,” says Scott Swartz. He’s sitting next to his father in Oneida’s visitors room. He’s come to spend the weekend nearby while on a break from his studies at the University of Miami’s business school. Scott tries to visit at least every other month and speaks to his father on the telephone several times a week. Scott and Mark usually have fun during their visits, or as much fun as you can have in the prison’s visitors room. They eat Twinkies from the vending machine and rib each other. On this day, however, father and son are having a tense conversation. They are talking about Mark’s case, which is something they don’t normally do.

“I wish I’d told you to take [a deal],” Scott says. Four years ago, Mark had asked his family for advice: Should he negotiate a plea bargain in exchange for testifying against Kozlowski? Although no specific terms were ever discussed with the D.A.’s office, Mark knew this would be the fastest way out of his legal troubles. But when Mark broached the idea with members of his family, they were clear: no deal. This was back before his trials began, when it still seemed possible that a jury would find him not guilty. What’s more, the family agreed that if he testified against Kozlowski, he’d be sending an innocent man to prison.

“We discussed this. Remember?” Mark says to Scott shakily. He seems stunned by his son’s new take. It’s the first time he’s heard Scott talk like this. He looks crestfallen, as if he’s only now realizing the full impact his incarceration is having on his son.

“We all said it was the right thing to do,” Mark insists, but he looks uncertain, desperate. Scott tilts his chair back awkwardly and then says quietly, “I know, Dad, but obviously it wasn’t. I mean, look where you are now.” To this, Mark Swartz has no response.