An Atlanta real estate practitioner was sentenced Friday to 14 years in federal prison for mortgage fraud.

Joseph Sterling Jetton, the 61-year-old owner of Precision Construction Co. in Woodstock, Ga., was ordered to pay $11.2 million in restitution on charges of conspiracy, bank fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering.

According to the Department of Justice, Jetton orchestrated a mortgage fraud scheme that involved millions of dollars in fraudulently inflated mortgage loans being provided to unqualified straw borrowers from late 2004 through early 2006. The straw borrowers were paid through shell companies as much as $600,000 per property from the loan proceeds.

Jetton was accused of writing sales contracts for inflated sales prices, then he and 10 others implicated in the scheme skimmed hundreds of thousands of dollars out of the loan proceeds. According to court documents, Jetton personally derived more than a $1 million in commissions from the mortgage fraud.

Source: U.S. Department of Justice