The former chief financial officer for a Carolina-based manufacturing supply company must spend more than three years in prison and repay $2 million he embezzled, which includes payments made by the firm’s insurance carrier.
Samuel Allen Mouzon, 62, for 20 years was CFO at Air Power Inc., headquartered in High Point, North Carolina. He was sentenced Tuesday to 41 months in federal prison, three years of supervised release, and fines and restitution, according to federal court records and local news reports. As part of that, he must forfeit $500,000 in cash, a beach condominium, two houses, cars, golf carts, boats and other property that he purchased with the illicit proceeds, federal prosecutors said.
“Corporate executives who steal from their employers will be prosecuted in the Middle District of North Carolina, where our prosecutors will seek active prison sentences,” U.S. Attorney Sandra Hairston said in a statement.
The statement and court records did not reveal the name of the insurance company that covered the company’s losses, and an assistant U.S. attorney said she did not know. The statement and several court filings also did not name Mouzon’s employer, but his Linkedin web page and a local TV news report notes that he worked for Air Power. The company began as an assembly supplier for High Point furniture makers in the late 1960s, and now has operations across the South and in Mexico, its website shows.
Mouzon was charged in June after investigators found that he had skimmed $2.04 million from a company account. That included some $750,000 in federal pandemic relief funds, prosecutors said.
After Air Power’s founder and owner died in 2017, Mouzon had access to a bank account that only he and the owner were aware of, according to local news reports. From 2017 through 2021, the man used the funds to repeatedly purchase luxury items and property for himself and his family, prosecutors said.
“It was further a part of the scheme that Samuel Allen Mouzon caused approximately $2,175,538.86 of victim company’s funds to be deposited into the BB&T Account, the account over which he was the sole signatory,” the charging information document reads.
Mouzon employed three methods to facilitate the scheme, the information shows: He had third-party checks to his employer deposited into the secret BB&T account rather than the company’s operating account; he used wire transfers to move funds into the secret account; he had checks drawn on the operating account deposited into the secret account. He then wrote checks from the BB&T account, which were deposited into his personal bank account and were used to pay his credit cards and loans on cars and boats.
The documents did not indicate how the theft came to light, but investigators from the U.S. Secret Service and the U.S. Small Business Administration were involved.
After his arrest and forfeiture orders, Mouzon was unable to afford a defense attorney, and the court appointed one to represent him, records show.
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