The son of an Applebee’s restaurant mogul was sentenced Thursday in Chicago to two years in federal prison — the maximum possible punishment under a rarely used law targeting parents who dodge paying child support.
The sentence came after Evan Musikantow, 60, was convicted last year of failing for almost two decades to pay support to his ex-wife for their two children, who grew up in the Chicago area.
Prosecutors say Musikantow, who lives in Arizona, owes about $1 million — more than half of that in interest — that he must pay his ex-wife. The unpaid support goes back to 2008, records show.
U.S. District Judge John Tharp Jr. said he was appalled when he learned Musikantow went to a casino in 2014 and bet $11,000, winning another $3,000. But not a penny went to his kids, Tharp said.
“You effectively abandoned those kids after bringing them into the world,” the judge told Musikantow.
If the law allowed it, Tharp said, he would have given him even more time in prison.
“This is not conduct that the justice system ignores,” Tharp said.
Musikantow’s long-running legal troubles began in the Cook County court system, where, in 2016, a judge found him in contempt of court in his 2003 divorce case. That judge told him that he had “flagrantly ignored his obligation to pay child support” and that only jail time would get his attention.
But Musikantow, who lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, with his second wife and their children, never served the six-month jail sentence imposed by the Cook County judge. That sentence was put on hold because of the federal case.
At the time, Musikantow was on Illinois’ now-defunct “Deadbeats Most Wanted List,” which named 100 parents who owed at least $5,000 in overdue support.
In 2018, federal prosecutors added to Musikantow’s legal troubles, charging him under the Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act, a seldom-used law aimed at parents who cross state lines to avoid paying court-ordered support.
The next year, he went to prison for drunken driving in Arizona.
Recently, Musikantow, who has a job assembling furniture, persuaded Tharp to have the government pick up the tab for his travel from Arizona to Chicago for sentencing, telling officials he’s indigent.
On Thursday, he arrived in court a free man. But he was immediately locked up after the sentencing.
Prosecutors said Musikantow’s claim that he was broke didn’t square with his finances. They pointed to a 2022 federal tax return listing $231,000 in gross income and also to a four-bedroom Scottsdale home he bought in 2023 for $660,000 and a Mercedes purchased the following year.
Musikantow’s lawyers said the house and the car belong to his second wife.
“They are living off her money,” defense attorney Mina Zardkoohi said.
Musikantow told the Chicago Sun-Times last year that the federal prosecution was “outrageously unfair.”
But he struck a contrite note Thursday, apologizing for his crime.
“This experience has deeply humbled me,” Musikantow told the judge.
Musikantow blames his financial problems on a Chicago law firm that handled a trust involving what he said was his 20% share of the 2001 sale of his father’s restaurant company.
Musikantow said he never received money he was owed. He sued his father and the law firm in 2015, but the case was dismissed.
His father, Allen Musikantow, testified last year that he gave his son about $1 million around 2002 — and owed him nothing more.
In a court filing, prosecutors said the trial showed that Evan Musikantow “was a college-educated, business-experienced, able-bodied defendant who dodged, bobbed and weaved his way around multiple court orders and findings of contempt year after year.”
On Thursday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Edward Kohler asked the judge to throw the book at Musikantow.
“There has to be a message sent to the community that, folks, you gotta pay child support,” Kohler said.