A Hugo man has been sentenced to federal prison for stealing more than $1.3 million from an Inver Grove Heights trucking company where he worked as a service manager, spending the loot on gambling trips to Las Vegas, luxury cars and a boat.

Leon Arthur Keener, 55, pleaded guilty to mail fraud in April and was sentenced Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis to four years and three months, with two years of supervised probation following incarceration.

Keener admitted to carrying out a scheme to embezzle $1,314,633 from I-State Truck Centers from 2015 through 2022. In his role as service manager at its Inver Grove Heights location, Keener had managerial oversight for the financial operations at I-State.

Keener’s scheme involved misappropriating insurance reimbursement checks for supplemental repairs by writing off the work as a loss, indicating in the accounts payable system that the insurance company had refused reimbursement, according to court documents. He then deposited the insurance reimbursement checks — $562,000 in all — into a personal bank account under his control, officials said.

Keener concealed the embezzlement “by directing his employees to provide him directly with any checks received from insurance companies, cutting out the administrative and accounting employees on staff,” officials said.

Keener stole another $751,000 from I-State by generating and submitting false vendor-payment requests, which he diverted for his own use and benefit, officials said. Many of the bogus requests for payments were for a shell company that Keener created and controlled called “CR Services,” which he added to I-State’s accounts-payable system in 2012, before the system required verified vendor identification.

Minnesota court records show Keener has an extensive criminal history involving fraudulent or similar conduct dating back to the 1990s, all in Hennepin County. He was convicted of financial card fraud in 1990, theft by check twice in 1990, two counts of issuing a worthless check in 1994, theft by check in 1994, four counts of theft by swindle in October 2002 and one count two months later.

At Keener’s sentencing Wednesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Harry Jacobs asked Judge Ann Montgomery for the 51-month sentence that she handed down.

In a presentencing memo to the judge, Jacobs said Keener had “more than a sufficient salary to cover his wants and needs. But Keener used the money he stole from his employer to fund a lavish lifestyle of personal spending.”