A former seafood dealer was sentenced Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Portland to six months in federal prison for wire fraud, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Jonathan F. Cowles, 48, of Honolulu, Hawaii, and formerly of Rowley, Massachusetts, also was ordered to pay nearly $360,000 in restitution to his former employer, Maine Coast Shellfish, LLC, a lobster wholesaler in York.
That is the amount of money the company lost when Cowles had Maine Coast Shellfish ship 50,000 pounds of lobster to a customer in China whose identity he concealed and who never paid for the lobsters, according to court documents. In his plea agreement with federal prosecutors, Cowles agreed to pay that amount in restitution.
Between March and June 2014, Cowles used interstate wires to skim about $25,000 in commissions to which he was not entitled from his employer, according to court documents. He began working in November 2013 as an export sales manager for the York firm to sell lobsters throughout Asia and the Pacific region.
Cowles pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud on Jan. 22 in connection with the scheme to skim an extra 10 percent in commissions by having customers send payments to his private account rather than the company, court documents said.
A graduate of Shead High School in Eastport, the University of Maine and a U.S. Navy veteran, Cowles had no criminal history but in the midst of a divorce and custody battle, he believed he was not making enough money to pay legal and medical bills, his attorney, Federal Defender David Beneman, said in his sentencing memorandum.
In addition to prison time, U.S. District Judge Jon Levy sentenced Cowles to three years of supervised release.
Cowles is to report to a facility designated by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons on July 25.
Under the federal sentencing guidelines, the recommended sentence was eight to 14 months.
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