East Aurora chiropractor John Weisberg was sentenced Wednesday to 21 months in prison for not paying about $144,000 in taxes, the Justice Department and Internal Revenue Service reported.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Hon. Hugh Scott ordered that Weisberg, as a condition of supervised release, cooperate with the IRS in filing tax returns and paying back taxes. A federal jury convicted Weisberg of three counts of failure to file tax returns following a trial in February.

Evidence showed that in 1997 Weisberg became a member-client of a Florida-based tax-defier organization known as American Rights Litigators. Weisberg purchased a service that responded to IRS notices seeking his returns. Prosecutors said the letters to the IRS included false and frivolous tax-defier claims and requests denoting reasons why the defendant was not required to file returns or pay taxes. Weisberg stopped filing tax returns in 1995 and did not pay any federal income taxes between 1995 and 2003. The tax loss associated with Weisberg's failure to file is approximately $144,000.

Despite Weisberg's claims during trial that he had relied in good faith upon the advice of ARL, the evidence at trial showed that Weisberg was warned of his legal duty to file returns not only by the IRS, but also by Buffalo-area accountants and attorneys. Evidence also showed that Weisberg employed other tax schemes, including an offshore bank account in the Bahamas, to evade the IRS.

Justice Department Tax Division trial attorneys John Kane and James Strawley prosecuted the case, along with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Western District of New York.