Amit Patel, the former Jaguars employee who stole $22 million from the team, was sentenced to six and a half years in prison Tuesday in a U.S. district court.
The sentence ends a long, wild ordeal in which Patel admitted to stealing a fortune from the team over three and a half years through the Jaguars’ virtual credit card program, which he oversaw. Patel used almost all of the money on gambling, with $20 million being transferred to FanDuel and another $1 million going to DraftKings. The rest of the stolen money funded various purchases at Apple, which totaled $600,000, and more than $40,000 at Amazon and Best Buy combined.
Patel used some of the money to fund a luxurious lifestyle, transferring $5 million over from his daily fantasy sports accounts to pay for private jet charters and Tiger Woods’s putter from 1996.
He said he lives with an addiction to gambling and alcohol and that he has sought treatment for both since being fired from Jacksonville. During his hearing, Patel said he’s been sober for more than a year. The NFL’s gambling policy prohibits team and league employees from partaking in any sports gambling, including daily fantasy sports. The Jaguars sought to recoup the stolen money from FanDuel, but it has no legal obligation to give it back.
“We gave him his dream job,” said Megha Parekh, the Jaguars’ senior vice president and chief legal officer, in a statement in court. “We trusted him. We worked with him. We broke bread with him. We went through a pandemic and the highs and lows of the NFL with him,” Parekh said. “He betrayed us.
“We take no joy in his punishment. Make no mistake, Amit broke our hearts.”
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