抖阴ap

The man at the defense table wore a boxy, tan prison jumpsuit with clashing red sneakers. His white hair was slightly mussed. He walked with a pronounced limp.

It was hard to imagine that this man, 64-year-old Thomas Quintin, was once Colorado’s most famous fugitive, a Cherry Hills millionaire gas-station magnate who fled to a life of luxury in the Cayman Islands as federal investigators compiled evidence that would lead to tax-evasion charges.

He and his wife were finally collared in 1998 in Toronto, where they had moved into a $5 million mansion. According to news accounts at the time, they were caught as they got into a limousine to attend a performance of “Les Miserables,” a musical about a runaway criminal.

In stark contrast to the life he once led, Quintin on Tuesday urged a federal judge to send him back to the prison cell in Littleton he has come to know well. The request came as part of a plea agreement settling charges that Quintin walked away from a halfway house in 2009, the latest in a string of legal run-ins that have marked Quintin’s fall.

U.S. District Judge Marcia Krieger sentenced him to 18 months in prison for the escape, and Quintin asked to serve them at the Federal Correctional Institution southwest of Denver, where he is currently housed as inmate No. 99779-012 and where the prison staff have learned how to manage his health problems.

“I would really appreciate any help I can get in that area,” Quintin told Krieger.

In the late 1980s, Quintin owned an empire of gas stations and truck stops in Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska and lived in a million-dollar Cherry Hills home. But in 1992, as he faced sentencing in California for a gas-tax-evasion scheme, Quintin and his wife fled to the Cayman Islands, beyond the reach of extradition.

Meanwhile, officials in Denver indicted Quintin in 1996 in another case, alleging he defrauded the federal government of $11 million by failing to pay fuel taxes. Quintin eventually was sentenced to four years in prison after a lengthy fight over extradition from Canada.

Upon his release, Quintin was soon back in trouble. In 2007, a federal judge sentenced him to nearly six years in prison for probation violations and for running a new tax scam. Quintin, according to court documents, was filing for phony tax refunds using the Social Security numbers of dead people.

Quintin told the judge he hoped to raise money with the new scam to pay off restitution owed from the previous scam.

“Only an idiot would do that,” U.S. District Judge Wiley Daniel replied, according to a 2007 Denver Post story.

In 2009, while serving that sentence, Quintin walked away from a southwest Denver halfway house, according to court records, bringing him back to court Tuesday. With time already served, he could be released shortly after New Year’s.

“We thought it was the appropriate sentence,” Quintin’s attorney, Harvey Steinberg, said after Tuesday’s hearing. “… He could be out in eight months or less.”