The former mayor of a southern New Jersey town has been sentenced to six months in prison for evading taxes on hundreds of thousands of dollars he got from an insurance broker over several years.

Carmine Inteso
Carmine Inteso (Facebook)
loading...

Carmine Inteso Jr. of Toms River also will have to serve six months of house arrest under the sentence imposed Monday in Trenton. He also must serve two years of supervised release once those sentences are completed.

Inteso was arrested in July 2012 at New York's Kennedy airport, following his return from Afghanistan. Federal prosecutors said he took a contractor job in Afghanistan after learning he was the target of the tax investigation.

Prosecutors say that between 2005 and 2008, Inteso accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments from a Maryland-based insurance broker whose companies provided services for several municipal entities in New Jersey, including Toms River Township.

Inteso directed the insurance broker to make the payments to a company he controlled and that had ceased operating by 2007, prosecutors said. He then used the funds to pay personal expenses and withdrew significant amounts of cash.

Inteso was Toms River's mayor in 2002, when the Ocean County community was known as Dover Township. He ran unsuccessfully against current Toms River Mayor Thomas Kelaher in 2007.

(Copyright 2014 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

More From New Jersey 101.5 FM