Sentence comes 6 years after plea
Prison follows case where tax return checks sent to the dead
The scheme was ghoulish and nefarious.
In 2011, Joseph Carbonara, a man with a half-dozen lowlevel offenses on his record, played a key role in a criminal conspiracy to trick the federal government into sending out tax return checks to the dead. He paid co-conspirators to deposit the money in bank accounts in Schenectady in the name of the deceased. He later pocketed much of the loot.
The scheme lasted into 2012, but Carbonara, a native Long Islander who relocated to the Capital Region, ultimately pleaded guilty in January 2014.
His day of legal reckoning, however, would wait for nearly seven years — serving as an example of how justice can be delayed repeatedly.
On Monday, Senior U.S. District Judge Gary Sharpe sentenced Carbonara, 40, to two years in prison — in addition to time served and a year of supervised release — for his guilty pleas to to conspiracy, theft of government funds and aggravated identity theft.
Carbonara, a former Schenectady resident who was also ordered to pay $27,813 in restitution to the Internal Revenue Service, must report to prison by Jan. 26.
The delay in Carbonara’s sentencing was due to a number of factors, including a fire caused by lightning that burned Carbonara and his family out of their home in 2015. COVID -19 slowed the process this year.
The judge granted a request from Carbonara’s lawyer, Lauren Owens, to seal the defense sentencing memo in the case “for reasons essential to preserving Mr. Carbonara’s privacy.” Owens declined to comment.
Court documents show that in 2011, Carbonara obtained 16 tax return checks from his co-conspirators that were filed in the names of 15 deceased people.
Carbonara recruited another co-conspirator who was instructed to open bank accounts, deposit the checks and withdraw the money.
“His actions involved sophisticated planning and coordination with co-conspirators and demonstrate that his first several criminal convictions and the resulting sentences did not result in a decision by the defendant to abandon further criminal conduct,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Coffman stated in 2015 in a sentencing recommendation to the judge.
“His conduct and history make clear that only a significant period of incarceration may dissuade him from continuing to escalate his profitmotivated criminal activity, or at least prevent him from engaging in criminal activity for a significant period of time,” Coffman wrote.
James Long, Carbonara’s lawyer at the time, told the judge in a memo that his client experienced an extremely difficult upbringing: His father died when he was seven; his mother was addicted to drugs; he suffered physical abuse by her boyfriends.
“Identity theft in any form is a serious crime with farreaching and deleterious effects for its victims,” Long said. “... These problems, however, do not come into play where the victims are dead.”