Dennis Kozlowski's real (estate) problems

FORTUNE -- We don't have guillotines here, so the best we can do with our miscreants is to torment them with news of a better life they may never experience again. Dennis Kozlowski --- Wall Street crook and notorious party reveler who gave Stolichnaya a bad name-welcome to today's real estate report!

"Tyco Jailbird Can't Go Home Again!" proclaims one real estate site. (The editors ranked the news as the most important of the day, even beating out a report that Woody Allen's futuristic "home" near Denver in the 1973 classic Sleeper is in foreclosure.) Apparently, that magnificent oceanfront estate in New Hampshire Koz used to own hits the auction block on Tuesday. The place has more bathrooms (12) than bedrooms (five), a 13-seat home theater, two pools, nine fireplaces, sauna, spa, steam room, gym and tennis court. You can add a gift shop yourself. And there's no minimum bid. But, wait, there's journalistic fine print: The place doesn't belong to Kozlowski anymore, so he couldn't go back anyway-so we're not really upsetting him with the news. Somebody from Arizona owns and did a renovation costing more than $10 million and is now getting out.

There is other real estate news about Kozlowski. The Wall Street Journal, recently reported that his Boca Raton mansion, with 604 feet of shoreline, is now on the market for only $19.5 million, down from nearly $25 million early last year. According to the listing, the 1.6-acre compound at "Sanctuary Point" is a "masterwork" that "evokes the exoticism of Morocco," where "indoor and outdoor living spaces interweave amid the romantic gardens and pool in a seductive mise en scène." There's even "dockage for multiple yachts." So there, Dennis! Such a description will surely make him wistful, given that his current accommodations -- 1 BR, 1 bath -- consist of a small cell, lousy heat, no view and a metal toilet.

These days, of course, the former CEO of Tyco is inmate No. 05A4829, serving a sentence of 8 1/3 to 25 years in upstate New York. Nine years ago, after transforming a backwater manufacturer with a market cap of $1.5 billion into an industrial conglomerate worth more than $100 billion, Kozlowski was convicted of systematically looting his company of millions of dollars. He went from being a symbol of corporate success --in 1986 Fortune included a 39-year-old Kozlowski on a list of People to Watch -- to the poster boy of excess and greed. Gordon Gekko wouldn't have made the invite list for one of his parties. [For more on Fortune's coverage of executives when they were under 40, see: When They Were Young.]

It's easy to have sport with a man who had a $6,000 gilded shower curtain in his apartment or who held forth in an infamous video of a Roma-orgy birthday celebration for his wife in Sardinia (co-starring the ice sculpture of David peeing vodka). Tee-hee, ha-ha -- there goes another home or yacht or fine antique of the fallen CEO.

Trouble is, there are other things to write about Kozlowski. Yes, he was convicted, but, no, it's not clear it was done fairly. Leave aside for a moment the length of his prison term -- once upon a time Michael Milken had hundreds of millions in ill-gotten gains and served less than two years. Kozlowski has persuasively argued for years that he was denied access to prosecutorial evidence that might have helped his defense. The constitutional issue is substantial, not some legal technicality with which to escape the pokey.

Kozlowski has filed for a writ of habeas corpus, in effect seeking a new trial. A federal judge in Manhattan has had the case under for review for eight months. There are no deadlines in such matters; a ruling could come in a month or a year. At this point, he's entitled to a quick resolution. He won't be going back to the Boca compound or New Hampshire getaway. But there's a chance that maybe, just maybe, Kozlowski should get to go home again.