Mississippi man gets 5 years, must pay $1.65M for bank fraud

GULFPORT, Miss. (AP) — A Mississippi man convicted of bank fraud for inflating the cost of trucks he was buying to get extra money from lenders has been sentenced to prison and ordered to pay more than $1 million in restitution.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Mississippi says 60-year-old Louis Joseph Normand, Jr., has been sentenced by a federal judge to nearly five years in prison followed by five years of supervised release.

He was also ordered to pay $1.6 million in restitution.

Prosecutors said a local bank and private lenders had agreed to lend Normand 80% of the purchase price for “well over” 100 trucks he was buying for resale.