other departments as they were set up and took shape with the various "administrations", authorities" and "offices" arrayed beneath the state secretaries in the governor's new cabinet, including newer unprecedented departments such as the environment, general services, public safety and correctional services, and natural resources. Mandel's idea to grow Maryland business and create more jobs was to attract existing overseas companies to the state. In 1972, Mandel selected Philip Kapneck, a local businessman, to start Maryland's International Business efforts by opening an office in Brussels, Belgium. In 1974, Mandel appointed Kapneck as Maryland Trade Ambassador. Mandel's initiative was so successful that over the next 40 years, his Trade Ambassador attracted hundreds of businesses, creating more than a hundred thousand jobs. Legal controversy Mandel was convicted in 1977 along with five co-defendants of mail fraud and racketeering. The charges stemmed from what prosecutors said was a complicated scheme in which Mandel was given money and favors for vetoing one bill and signing another to help his friends make money on a race track deal. On June 4, 1977, he notified Lieutenant Governor Blair Lee III that Lee would have to serve as "Acting Governor of Maryland" until further notice. Lee continued to serve as "Acting Governor" until January 15, 1979, when Mandel rescinded his letter appointing Lee as "Acting Chief Executive" (just two days before the expiration of his second full term) on the basis of his overturned previous legal conviction and the neutral legal opinions on the status of his appeal case, that the governor was now eligible to re-assume the powers of his office previously delegated to Lee, even at that late date. Mandel had already served nineteen months of his original sentence in the low-security federal prison camp at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, before having his sentence commuted by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. Based on the reasoning of an opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court, a U.S. District Court judge overturned the former governor's conviction in 1987. A year after that, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit affirmed the final decision, ending the long legal and political saga. In addition, in 1980, Mandel's administrative aide Maurice R. Wyatt, Maryland District Court Judge Allen B. Spector, and State Health Department director Donald H. Noren were tried and convicted by Judge James MacGill on bribery charges related to payments for land development and septic