Christiansburg multimillionaire gets prison time for tax evasion

“This is an outrageous tale of fraud and deception, and it must be punished appropriately,” U.S. District Judge Michael Urbanski said in imposing the maximum called for by sentencing guidelines.

A federal jury convicted Jones last November of corruptly obstructing the Internal Revenue Service, evading taxes and six counts of filing false tax returns from 2013 to 2018.

As the owner of Lifeline Ambulance Service Inc., Jones withheld taxes from the paychecks of employees of his business, keeping the money for himself rather than turning it over to the IRS.

When an investigation began in 2015, Jones concealed personal assets that included four luxury, beachfront apartments in the Caribbean island of Saint Martin and a classic car collection worth more than $2 million, according to evidence presented during a six-day trial.

Jones is “a multimillionaire who has not paid one cent in taxes to the United States government in well over a decade,” Francesca Bartolomey, a tax attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice, wrote in court papers.

Lifeline Ambulance Service is no longer in business. Jones, 62, was allowed to remain free on bond after Tuesday’s hearing; he must report to prison when notified by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.

Urbanski also ordered the defendant to make restitution of $394,508 to the IRS and pay a fine of $250,000.

Although prosecutors portrayed Jones as a multimillionaire, Assistant Public Defender Ben Schiffelbein said his client is now indigent.

“Mr. Jones was living the American dream,” Schiffelbein said. “And something changed. It’s not clear what changed.”

Jones, who denied the charges and testified at trial that prosecution witnesses were lying and conspiring against him, chose not to make a statement before he was sentenced.

In court papers, Schiffelbein wrote that Jones’ behavior “demonstrates that he lives in a world populated largely by his own beliefs that have little bearing on reality.”

Witnesses told the jury that Jones made false statements on tax forms, transferred assets to foreign entities, lied about property transactions and used his business acumen to establish off-shore accounts to conceal his wealth.

“This was not a momentary lapse in judgement,” Bartolomey told Urbanski in arguing for a long sentence. “This was a longtime, calculated campaign by the defendant.”

In 1999, Jones ran as a Republican for a state Senate seat occupied by the late Madison Marye, D-Shawsville. He was soundly defeated, but outspent Marye by more than 2-to-1 with the investment of more than $180,000 of his and his family’s money in the campaign.

Late in the campaign, it was revealed that Jones had been convicted six years earlier of a misdemeanor assault charge involving an employee’s accusations of sexual advances.

Jones denied the charges at the time, calling them an extortion attempt.