A Kenai dentist who failed to pay more than a half-million dollars in taxes has been sentenced to five years in prison following his conviction on four counts of tax evasion, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.

Prosecutors say Glenn E. Lockwood, 61, funneled money overseas, used a sham trust account to disguise his interest in his assets and wrongly deducted expenses, such as a visit to a brothel, from his tax filings.

Lockwood, the owner of the Kenai Dental Clinic, was convicted of attempting to evade paying more than $575,000 in federal income taxes between 2000 and 2003, prosecutors said.

“Getting high-income earners to pay their income taxes shouldn’t be like ‘pulling teeth,’ ” Internal Revenue Service special agent in charge of Alaska Kenneth Hines said in a statement.

Prosecutors said after Lockwood funneled his money through Ireland and the Caribbean and used the bogus trust account, he claimed large deductions on the remaining income he reported. The result was that his tax bill all but disappeared, prosecutors said.

“Lockwood deducted practically every expense in his life from the relatively little income he did report,” prosecutors said in a statement.

Among the “business expenses” Lockwood claimed were clothes, groceries, gas, his vacation home’s utility bills and a $1,504 charge to Mabel’s House of Prostitution in Nevada, prosecutors said.

In addition to getting five years in prison, Lockwood was ordered to pay a $10,000 fine and another $42,000 in compensation for the cost of prosecution.

— Anchorage Daily News