The feds say he's a deadbeat dad. Evan Musikantow claims he's a victim.
He was once branded one of the worst deadbeat dads in Illinois.
Evan Musikantow, the son of a restaurant tycoon, owes his ex-wife more than $690,000 in child support, including interest, authorities say.
He faces six months in the Cook County Jail for failing to pay his support. He’s also supposed to go on trial next month on a felony charge of violating the federal Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act.
The 59-year-old Musikantow says he’s willing to pay his court-ordered child support. The problem, he says, is he’s broke.
In fact, Musikantow views himself as a victim.
He says his father’s company, which owned Applebee’s restaurants across the country, got sold for hundreds of millions of dollars but he never was paid his share. He says he worked for years acquiring property for the restaurants but didn't get the multimillion-dollar payout he was promised.
Musikantow says he can't get a decent job now because he went to prison in 2019 for drunken driving in Arizona and is charged with the pending federal case here.
“They got me out to be Al Capone,” he said of federal prosecutors in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times. “They say I am Public Enemy No. 1. They have a vendetta. They don’t care what the truth is. They dragged me through the mud saying I'm a deadbeat dad."
On Wednesday, Musikantow was dealt a legal setback.
U.S. District Judge John Tharp denied his requests to postpone his Sept. 24 trial and fire his two court-appointed attorneys.
Musikantow says he needed time to find a new attorney and conduct more research for his defense. He had previously fired two other attorneys.
Prosecutors had objected to his requests, saying they were part of a delay game Musikantow has been playing since he was charged in 2018.
Prosecutors also said Musikantow was found to overwhelm the courts with frivolous court filings while representing himself in legal cases in Arizona where he lives.
Musikantow’s long court saga began more than two decades ago after he and his wife got divorced in 2003 in Chicago. He was ordered to make monthly payments to help support a son and daughter, who've since graduated from college.
Then Musikantow moved to Arizona, where, according to prosecutors, he kept dodging his child-support obligations.
In 2015, lawyers for Musikantow's ex-wife told Cook County Judge Mark Lopez, who was presiding over their divorce case, that Musikantow was living in a 6,000-square-foot house in Arizona and driving a Mercedes. The judge upped Musikantow's support payments to $6,000 a month and issued an order for law enforcement officials to bring him to court to address his debt.
In 2016, Lopez found Musikantow in contempt of court and ordered him jailed for six months because he "flagrantly ignored his obligation to pay child support and nothing less than a period of incarceration will remind him of his obligation.”
But Musikantow has managed to stay away from Illinois — and Cook County Jail.
In 2017, Musikantow was still living in Arizona. At that point, he had paid only $3,132 in child support since his divorce, mostly from involuntary garnishments of his federal income tax refunds, authorities say.
So in 2018, a federal grand jury indicted Musikantow on a charge of willfully failing to pay child support under the Deadbeat Parents Punishment Act, a federal law that’s rarely used. Musikantow was only one of six people charged under that law across the country that year, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Congress passed the law because of the “cumbersome, slow, and tedious method” states employed to enforce child support orders across their borders, according to prosecutors.
As of April 30, 2017, Musikantow owed $494,239 in support and an additional $199,091 in interest, prosecutors have said.
Musikantow says he’s ultimately a victim of a Chicago law firm that set up a trusteeship for what he says was his 20% interest in the 2001 sale of his father’s restaurant company. He says he never got a dime of the tens of millions of dollars he claims he was owed. In 2015, he sued his father and the law firm over the money, but the case was dismissed.
“I am willing to pay and want to pay,” Musikantow says of his child support debt. “The family law court wants to put me in jail and the federal government wants to put me in jail. But I have no access to my money.”
He says he hasn’t seen his son and daughter from his first marriage in more than 15 years.
“Compared to that, none of this stuff matters to me,” says Musikantow, who remarried and has children with his second wife in Arizona.
An attorney representing Musikantow's ex-wife didn't return a call seeking comment. One of his current court-appointed attorneys declined to comment.
Musikantow was once on an Illinois list of 100 people — mostly men — who owed $5,000 or more in overdue child support. The “Deadbeats Most Wanted List” was signed into law in 2001 by Gov. George Ryan.
Before adding a person’s name to the list, the state had to make contact and provide a chance to pay the debt in full. The web site went live in 2003 and collections began the next year. Through 2018, the state had collected more than $2 million from people listed as deadbeats.
But the state took down the web site several years ago because it had “little impact on collections and because of a shifting focus to a whole-family approach to foster better outcomes for the children of Illinois,” said Melissa Kula, a spokesperson for the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services, which collects child support.
Kula said the state’s Family Resources Connections Program, made permanent this year, offers services to both the parents of kids.
Through June 2023, unpaid child support in Illinois totaled $2.6 billion, she said.