Prison for Minnesotan who stole $1.3M from his truck repair employer, bought luxury cars and trips

A Hugo man received a prison term topping four years for embezzling $1.3 million from the truck repair company he worked for and spending the money on luxury purchases.

Leon A. Keener, 55, was sentenced Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis after pleading guilty to mail fraud in connection with the scheme he ran from 2015 through 2022 while he was a service manager for the I-State Truck Center in Inver Grove Heights.

Keener spent some of the money on fancy cars and a boat, and to fund gambling trips to Las Vegas. According to state records, during the time of the alleged embezzlement he bought a Ford Mustang GT, a Ford Expedition, a Jeep Wrangler, and a 1930 Ford, model not specified.

Along with his 4¼-year prison term, his sentence from Judge Ann Montgomery includes two years of supervised release and an order to pay $1,314,633 in restitution.

Before sentencing, the defense argued for Keener to receive a “substantial downward variance” from the federal guideline recommendation of 3½ years to 5¼ years.

“Mr. Keener endured some of the most horrible traumas imaginable as a child — things no child should ever have to deal with,“ his attorney, Ian Birrell, wrote to the court in a public version of the filing with the specifics heavily redacted.

The prosecution countered in a filing that Keener “has an extensive criminal history. … Dating back to the early 1990s, Keener has several convictions for writing bad checks. He also has three felony convictions for theft by swindle and grand theft.”

Ultimately, Montgomery agreed with the prosecution’s recommendation of 4¼ years.

According to court documents:

Keener was hired in 2011 as a service manager at I-State Truck and oversaw its financial operations. He was responsible for providing vehicle owners and insurance companies with estimates on repair costs for damaged vehicles.

He also provided insurance companies with any additional repair estimates discovered during the repair process and after the original estimate had already been provided. If the insurance company denied reimbursement of some or all of of the second claim, I-State absorbed the denial as a loss.

When insurance companies did pay I-State for follow-up repair work, Keener redirected more than $562,000 of that money to his personal bank account and then wrote off the additional work as an insurance denial.

Keener also stole $751,000 from I-State by generating and submitting false vendor payment requests, which he kept for himself. Many of these concocted requests came from a shell company he created and controlled called “CR Services,” which he added to I-State’s accounts payable system in 2012, before vendor verification was required.

He then transferred the stolen money from a CR Services bank account to his personal account.