A Yonkers flooring contractor who evaded $1.8 million in payroll and personal income taxes is not going to prison.
U.S. District Court Judge Philip M. Halpern sentenced Brian K. Murray, 60, to time served and to three years of supervision, including 18 months of home confinement.
“Time served” amounts to the time spent during a March 27 arraignment before a magistrate judge who release him after he posted a $100,000 bail bond.
Murray had made a plea deal with prosecutors over on-again, off-again tax compliance for more than two decades.
The actual taxes owed, from 2001 to 2016, totaled nearly $2.6 million, according to court records. But in 2017 the Internal Revenue Service wrote off $636,000 in unsuccessful collections because the statute of limitations had expired. The IRS tried again, focusing on 2018 to 2022.
Murray owns High Rise Flooring & Construction in Yonkers. According to the government, he employed a variety of techniques to conceal income: cashing business checks instead of depositing them in a bank account, using the cash to pay for personal expenses, paying workers off the books, and reporting no business income.
White Plains defense attorney Jason Swergold described Murray as the “epitome of the American dream,” in a sentencing memorandum in which he recommended five years probation.
Murray grew up on a modest family dairy farm in Ireland. As a child, he woke up early to milk the cows, went to school, and returned home to more chores. He immigrated to America at age 18 to join three older brothers, lived in the Bronx, and worked as a construction laborer.
In 1987, he started a residential flooring company. He married and raised two girls. But his life hit a low point in 2001, Swergold says. While working on jobs in lower Manhattan, he had come to know people who were killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attack.
According to court records, he plunged into a dark period of heavy drinking, engaged in an affair that beget a son, and separated from his wife. But around 2004 he began to turn his life around, according to Swergold. He resolved to stop drinking, gained custody of his son, and worked 15 hour days, six days a week at High Rise Flooring.
Swergold says Murray stopped paying taxes during his low period, then resumed paying after he turned his life around. But from 2017 through 2022, for reasons not explained, he stopped filing tax returns.
Murray agreed in his plea deal to pay $1.1 million in restitution, and he has already done so by selling two rental properties.
“Brian is precisely the kind of person who should receive a non-incarceratory sentence,” Swergold argued. He is a “non-violent offender who came from difficult and humble beginnings and provided a life for himself and his family through hard work and determination.”
Non-mandatory federal sentencing guidelines called for up to two-and-a-half years in prison. The U.S. Probation Office recommended six months. Assistant federal prosecutor Jeffrey C. Coffman argued for one year in prison, “to promote general deterrence and respect for the law.”
Murray committed the crime despite enjoying significant financial success and material comforts, Coffman said in a sentencing memo, and not out of a financial need. He has a net worth of $3.5 million, and clearly he could have paid the tax debt years ago.
Instead, Murray “perpetrated his crime over and over again for years in order to personally enrich himself at everyone else’s expense.”
