The son of an Applebee’s restaurant tycoon has been convicted in federal court in Chicago of failing to pay his ex-wife more than $690,000 in child support, including interest.
A jury found Evan Musikantow guilty under the Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act, a federal law that’s rarely used. On Thursday, he told the Chicago Sun-Times his conviction was “unfair.”
“They can put me in prison and that will not help anyone,” he said in a text message.
Musikantow, who lives in Arizona, was once on Illinois’ now-discontinued “Deadbeats Most Wanted List” of 100 people who owed $5,000 or more in overdue child support. He was charged in federal court here in 2018.
That was two years after a Cook County judge found him in contempt of court in his divorce case, saying he “flagrantly ignored his obligation to pay child support and nothing less than a period of incarceration will remind him of his obligation.”
But Musikantow remained in Arizona and avoided the six-month jail sentence the Cook County judge imposed.
A decade ago, lawyers for Musikantow’s former wife said he was living in a 6,000-square foot house in Arizona and driving a Mercedes, but failing to pay the child support ordered in his 2003 divorce.
In a filing in federal court last month, prosecutors said he obtained a mortgage in 2023 to buy a $666,000 home in Scottsdale, Arizona. On the mortgage application, he said he was the owner of Apple Musik Development LLC with a gross income of more than $15,000 a month since 2011, prosecutors said.
They also said his 2022 federal income tax return, which he filed separately from his current wife, showed $231,000 in adjusted gross income and a $105,000 donation of furniture to charity.
U.S. District Judge John Tharp denied a request by prosecutors to admit the mortgage and tax return into evidence in Musikantow’s trial. He was convicted Wednesday after a three-day trial and remains free on bond as he awaits sentencing.
Musikantow has said he was the victim of a Chicago law firm that set up a trusteeship for what he said was his 20% interest in the 2001 sale of his father’s restaurant company. He said he never got a dime of the tens of millions of dollars he claims he was owed. In 2015, he sued his father and the law firm over the money but the case was dismissed.
In a court filing this year, Musikantow said he was indigent and his job at a furniture assembly company couldn’t cover the cost of flying to Chicago and staying in a hotel for his trial.
On Thursday, he said in a text message: “I devoted my life to making money to provide for [my children] and run our family business, and that’s just not how it came out in court.”
He said prosecutors used “mixed-up, incorrect accounting” and that he “obviously couldn’t pay child support” with his current wife’s premarital assets.
Musikantow added that the government’s case was “outrageously unfair.”