A 60-year-old Scottsdale, Arizona man was sentenced to two years in federal prison for willfully failing to pay more than $1 million in child support owed to his two children, a debt prosecutors say stretched back years and ballooned largely through unpaid interest. Evan Musikantow was sentenced Thursday in Chicago, after a federal jury convicted him in 2025 under a rarely used federal law aimed at parents who cross state lines to dodge court-ordered support.
U.S. District Judge John Tharp Jr. handed down the sentence, which also requires Musikantow to pay $1,092,561.80 in restitution. Prosecutors said he owed about $1 million in child support, with more than half of that figure made up of accumulated interest, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. The case was brought under the Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act, a statute the outlet describes as seldom used and specifically aimed at parents who cross state lines to avoid paying what courts have ordered.
The roots of the case trace back to Musikantow's 2003 divorce, after which the Circuit Court of Cook County ordered him to make monthly payments to support his son and daughter. By 2017, he had paid only $3,132 in child support since the divorce, and most of that came from the State of Illinois intercepting his federal tax refunds rather than voluntary payments, the newspaper's reporting shows.
Interest Piled Up as Payments Stalled
As of April 30, 2017, prosecutors said Musikantow owed $494,239 in support and an additional $199,091 in interest, a gap that only widened in the years that followed. A Cook County judge raised his required payments to $6,000 a month in 2015 and ordered law enforcement to bring him to court over the debt, the same reporting states. The following year, Judge Mark Lopez found Musikantow in contempt of court and ordered him jailed for six months over his failure to pay.
A federal grand jury eventually indicted Musikantow in 2018 on a charge of willfully failing to pay child support under the Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act. The Justice Department, in a statement from the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Illinois, said that from 2009 to 2017, Musikantow willfully failed to pay more than $1 million of child support — a timeframe that differs from the Sun-Times account, which cites records showing the unpaid support dates back to 2008.
Casino Bets and a Scottsdale Home Undercut Claims of Poverty
At sentencing, Judge Tharp pointed to specific spending that undercut Musikantow's claims of financial hardship. He noted that Musikantow went to a casino in 2014 and bet $11,000, winning another $3,000 — money that never went toward his children's support, per the Sun-Times report. Prosecutors also challenged his claim of being broke by citing a 2022 federal tax return listing $231,000 in gross income, along with a Scottsdale home he purchased for $660,000 in 2023.
Musikantow was not alone in facing this kind of federal scrutiny. He was one of only six people charged nationwide under the Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act in 2018, according to figures the outlet attributes to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. The scale of unpaid child support in Illinois is far larger than any single case, though: through June 2023, unpaid child support across the state totaled $2.6 billion, the same reporting notes.
Federal Law Treats Nonpayment as a Last Resort
Federal law identifies failure to pay legal child-support obligations as a distinct offense under 18 U.S.C. § 228, according to records published by GovInfo, the U.S. Government Publishing Office. The Congressional Research Service has noted that nonpayment of child support may subject a parent to incarceration under a state criminal nonsupport statute or to prosecution under federal criminal penalties, though the research body stops short of saying incarceration is an automatic outcome in such cases.
Illinois has used other tools to try to collect on unpaid support before cases reach this level, including a now-former Deadbeats Most Wanted List; through 2018, the state had collected more than $2 million from people named on it, the Sun-Times reported. It is not clear from available records how much, if any, of the $1,092,561.80 restitution order Musikantow has paid since Thursday's sentencing. WGN-TV, which also reported on the sentencing, identified the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Illinois as the agency that announced the case's outcome.
