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Former Jacksonville Jaguars employee Amit Patel was sentenced to more than 6 years in prison on Tuesday and ordered to pay back almost $22 million.
Patel was sentenced in U.S. District court on Tuesday to 78 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release.
He will also, according to CBS 47 News, be subject to having his personal computers searched upon reasonable suspicion, prohibited from opening new lines of credit, provide a probation officer his financial information for monitoring, avoid work in accounting unless approved by the court, and attend Gamblers Anonymous meetings.
Patel, 31, worked for the Jacksonville Jaguars from 2018 to 2023. During that time he exploited the team’s virtual credit card program. He allegedly used that money to buy two vehicles including a Tesla, two condominiums, a Patek Philippe watch worth over $95,000, a country club membership, private flights, cryptocurrency, keeping a criminal defense lawyer on retainer, and other items.
Among those other items was $200,000 worth of “golf memorabilia,” which included the $47,113.92 he spent to acquire the Scotty Cameron putter that was presented to Tiger Woods after he won the U.S. Amateur Championship for the third time in 1996.
He also allegedly purchased cryptocurrency and placed bets with online gambling sites using the stolen Jacksonville Jaguars money.
Patel reportedly lost approximately $20 million on daily fantasy and sports bets on FanDuel and about $1 million on DraftKings.
The embezzlement of funds occurred in part due to the fact that Patel was also the only employee in charge of monitoring those transactions and sending summaries to the Jaguars’ accounting department. Another employee from the accounting department who had been in charge of checking Patel’s submitted statements left the organization, but was never replaced.
According to court documents obtained by The Athletic, Patel “identified legitimate recurring VCC transactions, such as catering, airfare and hotel charges, and then duplicated those transactions; he inflated the amounts of recurring VCC transactions; he entered completely fictitious transactions that might sound plausible, but that never actually occurred; and he moved legitimate VCC charges from upcoming months into the month of the integration file that was immediately due to the accounting department.”
Amit Patel was fired by the Jacksonville Jaguars in February 2023, but reportedly continued to spend the stolen money even after his dismissal.
Patel pleaded guilty to felony charges of wire fraud and illegal monetary transactions in December. He had faced up to 30 years in prison.