JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — One-time Jacksonville businessman Jose Lantigua, who faked his death in a multimillion-dollar insurance scam, was among nearly 1,500 federal prison inmates whose sentences President Joe Biden commuted last month, court records show.

The former owner of Circle K Furniture had been serving a 14-year sentence since 2017 for crimes including mail fraud, bank fraud, passport fraud and aggravated identity theft.

Lantigua, now 71, was picked for clemency as part of a crop of inmates the White House said had been put in home detention under the pandemic-era CARES Act more than a year before the commutations were announced Dec. 12. Another 39 people received pardons.

His commutation to time-served was effective Dec. 22, his court docket said.

It did not eliminate other parts of the sentence, which included a requirement for five years of “supervised release” after confinement and a $2.9 million restitution order imposed in 2017 on Lantigua and his then-wife, Daphne Simpson, who was sentenced to five years’ probation.

Biden’s clemency added a final twist to a winding trail of deception in which Lantigua, who held a series of life insurance policies and mounting debts, spun stories about deadly illness, secret military missions, blackmail and a drug cartel’s revenge.

Lantigua, who had met his wife in 2011, lied to her early in their marriage that he had Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, a fatal brain affliction, then said that was a lie and that during an earlier chapter of his life he led an Army Special Operations team that secretly killed the son of a Mexican cartel leader.

Lantigua convinced Simpson he needed to fake his death to protect them and their families from the fictional cartel boss, then traveled to Venezuela in 2013 to buy forged death records his wife would use to get the American embassy there to issue paperwork she needed to try to collect $6.6 million from his insurance policies.

Asking the insurers to pay triggered a lengthy court fight that was still raging when Lantigua was stopped by authorities in March 2015, establishing that the man driving a Jeep near the couple’s vacation home in North Carolina was not dead. Lantigua was charged there and in Jacksonville with federal crimes he pleaded guilty to. His wife spent more than a year in jail awaiting trial before her own lawyer convinced her Lantigua hadn’t been part of any secret government work and that she should plead guilty.

Federal sentencing guidelines recommended about seven years behind bars for Lantigua’s crimes, but U.S. District Judge Timothy Corrigan said in 2017 the “perniciousness and callousness” of the deception justified more time.

Public defender lawyers for Lantigua had been looking before the president’s order for ways to shorten his sentence through a 2023 package of changes in sentencing rules.