ST. LOUIS (AP) - The mayor of a tiny, struggling St. Louis-area community was sentenced Friday to a year and nine months in federal prison on charges that he misspent tens of thousands of dollars in the town's money on cruises, a time-share condominium and his bills.
U.S. District Judge Rodney Sippel also ordered Keith Conway, 47, to pay more than $62,000 in restitution for his fraud involving Kinloch, where he served as mayor for a decade. Conway pleaded guilty in August to wire fraud, theft and witness-tampering charges.
Prosecutors say that between 2009 and last March, Conway spent the stolen money on flights to Las Vegas and Florida, Bahamas cruises with a friend and a time-share condominium. Conway, who was arrested in May, also used the money to pay electric bills for a city-owned residence where he was living rent-free, and on personal federal income taxes.
Authorities say he stole from a $90,000 federal grant that was supposed to pay for an additional police officer for the community, which has fewer than 300 residents.
As a convicted felon, Conway is barred from holding public office.
After Conway's guilty plea, the supervisor of the FBI's St. Louis office, Dennis Baker, chastised the administrator for pilfering from a community that "couldn't even afford to pay its employees." On Friday, Baker pressed that corruption at any level was intolerable.
"This case clearly demonstrates federal law enforcement's commitment to root out public corruption no matter the size of a municipality," he said. "It doesn't matter if the city of Kinloch only has a few hundred residents, they deserve honest public service as much as anyone else."
Kinloch has a long history of corruption, with concerns often raised about the police department. On several occasions, St. Louis County police were brought in to patrol the streets.
Kinloch - home to a flourishing black community in the 19th and early 20th centuries - has been recognized as Missouri's first all-black community. The town's decline was hastened in the 1980s, when the city of St. Louis bought out property in Kinloch to expand Lambert Airport, eventually taking most of the community's homes and cutting the population by three-fourths.
Today, about 95 percent of Kinloch residents are black, and about four-fifths of the population lives below the poverty line, making it one of the St. Louis area's poorest communities.