Floridians may remember the strange case of Jacksonville businessman Jose Lantigua, who faked his own death in 2013 in an attempt to collect millions of dollars in life insurance proceeds. His deeds earned him a spot on the Coalition Against Å˽ðÁ«´«Ã½Ó³» Fraud’s Hall of Shame in 2015 after he was sent to prison.
Today, Lantigua is a free man, for the most part. U.S. President Joe Biden last month commuted Lantigua’s 14-year sentence to time served, news sites reported. He had already been released from prison and put on home detention more than a year ago under a COVID-era federal program, and was one of hundreds of people who received pardons or commutations in the waning days of the Biden administration, the Florida Times-Union newspaper and others .
The man, now 71, was the owner of Circle K Furniture in Jacksonville in the 2010s and was facing mounting debts, according to news reports. He worked with his wife to obtain fake death certificates from Venezuela, after he claimed that a drug cartel was after him. When the wife tried to claim more than $6 million in life insurance proceeds, the insurer, The Hartford Life Å˽ðÁ«´«Ã½Ó³» Co., began investigating.
Lantigua’s son accused the insurance company of falsifying information about Venezuela nullifying the death certificates, and a judge agreed that some papers had been faked, the Jacksonville Business Journal reported at the time.
In the midst of multiple lawsuits, Lantigua, in hiding and using someone else’s driver’s license, applied for a passport. Federal authorities reportedly used facial recognition software to determine that the photo on the passport application matched Lantigua, who had already made headlines for allegedly faking his death, according to court documents and ABC News .
Authorities staked out his residence in North Carolina and stopped him while he was driving. The deception quickly unraveled, the Times-Union noted, based on information from court records and prosecutors.
Lantigua pleaded guilty. His wife spent a year in jail then pleaded guilty to federal charges, allowing her to remain on supervised release.
After the commutation, Lantigua remains on supervised release for five years. He was not absolved of his court-required $2.9 million in restitution. The 2015 indictment can be seen here.
From IJ in 2015: Florida Businessman Who Faked Death Arrested in North Carolina
Topics Florida
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