Francis increasingly took advantage of his confinement rules, according to new records on his household arrangements obtained by The Washington Post and interviews with people who knew or worked for him during his years in home detention. He hired servants to meet his family’s every need and undermined the court’s security requirements aimed at keeping him from fleeing by stationing his personal security guards in windowless garages, with no night patrols and no visitor’s logs. He seemed able to anticipate when federal officers were headed to check on him, the interviews showed, and allowed a video crew to film him days before he fled.

During his years on medical furlough, Francis stayed at three private homes, where his comforts and liberties grew. Most recently he, his family and an English bulldog lived in a five-bedroom, seven-bath home with a $7,000-a-month rent in a gated community, court filings and interviews show.

At his first stay outside a cell, in an apartment near his doctor’s office, Francis’s staff prepared so much food for him that uneaten meals filled two to three trash bags each day that would have to be placed in a commercial dumpster nearby, according to Ricardo Buhain, a live-in, around-the-clock security guard who said that he had been hired via an introduction from a doctor treating Francis and that Leonard paid him $10,000 a month.