‘Black widow’ ordered to pay IRS nearly $95,000 for tax fraud
A former tax-preparer, serving life in prison for hiring a hit man to kill her second husband, also has been ordered to pay the Internal Revenue Service nearly $95,000.
Emma Jean Raine, 52, was sentenced to two years in prison Friday and ordered to make restitution of $94,107.01 on a guilty plea involving false tax returns she prepared for clients in Gulfport and Poplarville.
Judge Sul Ozerden sentenced her in U.S. District Court in a case that included allegations of bankruptcy fraud and deception. She had increased her husband’s life insurance just before he was killed, records show.
Ozerden ordered the tax-fraud prison term be served concurrently with the prison term for her husband’s murder.
Raine has been widowed three times. Prosecutors in New Orleans portrayed her as “a black widow” during her murder trial there last year.
Raine provided income-tax service in Poplarville and Gulfport. She had lived in Poplarville and Jackson County.
Raine admitted she filed false income-tax returns for clients for several calendar years starting in 2009. She also admitted she had continued to file false returns under a new business name after her electronic-filing identification number was revoked, her charge said.
The charge is obstructing and impeding due administration of internal revenue laws.
She had been set for trial in January 2016 on a 35-count indictment. Her trial was postponed because she was set for trial on the murder charge in New Orleans.
Raine received a life sentence in October. A jury believed she hired Terry Everette to fatally shoot her second husband, Ernest Smith, in 2006. Everette is also serving a life sentence.
Raine’s first husband, Leroy Evans, paralyzed after he was hit by a car in Vicksburg, died in 1994 while choking after his feeding tube was somehow removed.
Court records show her third husband, James Raine, was shot to death in 2011 at the Poplarville home the couple bought with Ernest Smith’s life-insurance money.
Raine pleaded guilty to the tax charge in November.
This story was originally published February 11, 2017 at 12:00 AM with the headline "‘Black widow’ ordered to pay IRS nearly $95,000 for tax fraud."