Court records contain images of passports that show the face of Napoleon Gonzalez, but the name of his brother Guillermo, who died when he was an infant. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer

An Etna man was ordered to pay back more than $175,000 to the federal government after using his dead brother’s identity to obtain Social Security benefits.

Napoleon Gonzalez, 87, was sentenced Thursday in U.S. District Court in Bangor for identity theft, passport fraud, Social Security fraud and mail fraud. He was also ordered to serve five months of probation.

A jury found Gonzalez guilty of the federal charges after a two-day trial in August 2023. According to court records, Gonzalez first started using his brother Guillermo’s identity in the mid-1960s.

The sentence is significantly less than the five to 20 years of prison time Gonzalez faced, and the hundreds of thousands of dollars that legally could have been imposed in fines.

“In sum, the defendant’s persistent and unrepentant fraud over a period of decades merits significant punishment,” prosecutors wrote in a sentencing recommendation to the court. “Identity theft is a serious issue. Though the defendant’s brother died as an infant and was not harmed by the instant offense, he repeatedly misled a government agency and defrauded it of a substantial sum of money.”

At sentencing, court records indicate Gonzalez’s attorneys requested leniency, given their client’s old age, and raised concerns about how prosecutors calculated what Gonzalez owed the government as a result of fraud.

Guillermo died as an infant in 1939, but Gonzalez applied for a Social Security number for him in 1981. By 2001, he was receiving Social Security benefits for both himself and his brother, according to court records. He also fraudulently ordered passports in Guillermo’s name.

This 2010 photo of Napoleon Gonzalez was presented as an exhibit during his trial.

In January 2020, a little-known law enforcement arm of the Maine Bureau for Motor Vehicles realized Gonzalez’s fraud after scrubbing through all of the photos in their database using new facial recognition technology.

They discovered Napoleon Gonzalez’s photograph in his driver’s license, issued in 2018, was remarkably similar to that of Guillermo Gonzalez’s, issued in 2015. The bureau investigated with help from the federal Social Security Administration, which suspended Guillermo’s payments in early 2020. Prosecutors say Gonzalez then forged a letter in Guillermo’s name to the federal government, requesting the benefits be reinstated.

He was indicted in July 2021.

This was not Gonzalez’s first time being caught for fraud.

According to a 1985 story in the New York Daily News, Napoleon Gonzalez had been arrested in Puerto Rico a year earlier for faking his death.

The story said Gonzalez even purchased a man’s body for $7,000 and buried him, in his military uniform, as Napoleon. Before his “death,” Napoleon Gonzalez had taken out a $300,000 life insurance policy.

A man identifying himself as Guillermo Gonzalez showed up months later, claiming to be Napoleon’s brother and the beneficiary of his estate. Napoleon Gonzalez was eventually charged with falsifying documents and fraud.

The New York Daily News story did not indicate how that case was resolved, but Napoleon told police in 2020 that the story was true and he spent three years behind bars.