Bill Walker has a date with the judge. Will he return to prison for failing to pay?
Bill Walker, the former head of the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources, is being hauled back into court a second time over failure to pay restitution in a public corruption case.
Walker was convicted of conspiring with his son, Scott Walker, to defraud the government while he headed the DMR. Scott Walker also pleaded guilty to the conspiracy charge and to fraud against the city of D’Iberville in a separate case that did not involve his father.
Both men served prison sentences beginning in late 2014 and were ordered to pay restitution for their crimes. But Bill Walker is still under court supervision while Scott Walker is not.
Bill Walker, who is retired, has not paid his monthly restitution of $5,000 since February, although any payments after Aug. 13 would not be reflected in court records.
Scott Walker, who now owns a real estate management company in Ocean Springs, hasn’t paid restitution since January. He was ordered to pay $750 a month in each case.
Bill Walker will appear at 1:30 p.m. Sept. 1 at the federal courthouse in Gulfport before U.S. District Judge Keith Starrett. Starrett is expected to decide after a hearing whether Walker’s supervised release from prison should be revoked. He has about a year left on the sentence.
Starrett has already hauled Bill Walker back into court once, in the fall of 2018, for failing to pay restitution. The judge sent Walker back to prison for more than two weeks, then released Walker when he promised to get his finances in order and pay the monthly restitution.
Bill Walker and his wife receive monthly retirement and Social Security income of around $16,623, he told the judge in 2018. Starrett warned Walker then that he had the income to make full restitution payments and that he could not “live large.”
Starrett also ordered Walker to serve an addition 35 months and two weeks on supervised release, on the condition he continue the payments.
After 11 years as DMR director, Walker was fired at the end of 2013 amid federal and state investigations.
While he headed DMR, Bill Walker misspent federal money so a nonprofit group could buy a lot his son owned in Jackson County after Hurricane Katrina flooded the house.
Bill Walker also illegally diverted state and other funds intended for DMR to a nonprofit corporation he set up.
His total restitution to two federal agencies and the state auditor’s office was $572,689.14. He still owes $373,248.06 in restitution, plus a $125,000 fine to be paid after restitution is complete.
Scott Walker is jointly responsible for $210,000 restitution in the case with his father, plus an additional $180,000 jointly owed with his co-defendant in the D’Iberville case, former city manager Michael Janus.
Scott Walker’s outstanding restitution for both cases totals $131,153.15.
This story was originally published August 21, 2020 at 5:50 AM.
