out of her health savings account, she was forced to spend money on medication that normally would have gone to her car payment. After her car got repossessed, she also lost her job because she couldn't get to work.

Living the life

Bottinelli initially told friends that the changes wrought by the Affordable Care Act of 2010 had effectively put Axis out of business. Federal prosecutors came to a far different conclusion: Bottinelli had pocketed the employees' money to support his extravagant lifestyle.

Bottinelli never contested the charges. He agreed to plead guilty last spring to a single count of theft in connection with health care.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Donna Maddux painstakingly compiled a list of expenditures that illustrated Bottinelli's prodigious appetite for the finer things in life. On March 5, 2011,he racked up a $1,162 tab at the renowned French Laundry restaurant in California's Napa Valley. On Nov. 11, 2011, he spent $1,774 at Le Pigeon in Portland. A month later, he stayed at the famed Chateau Marmont in West Hollywood. The bill: $3,857.

The optics, as they say in politics, were not good.

But Bottinelli, clearly an aficionado of good food, had a plan. He would remake himself as an authentic, work-a-day barbecue chef. He opened Botto earlier this year. He told a customer on a recent busy lunch hour that he learned how to cook barbecue in Austin, Texas, where he'd gone to college and earned the nickname Botto.

Bottinelli, reached earlier this week at his food cart, declined comment. Price, his attorney, argued in court Wednesday that Bottinelli's