Longtime Long Island Rail Road employee Thomas Caputo was sentenced to eight months in prison Friday for his role in an overtime fraud scheme that made him the MTA’s highest-paid employee in 2018, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams announced Friday.

Caputo, 56, was sentenced for conspiracy to commit federal program fraud after he submitted time reports that falsely claimed he worked thousands of hours of overtime, which included time he spent playing in a bowling league, according to the United States Attorney's Office. He pleaded guilty last August.

“The sentences the court imposed on the participants in this egregious overtime fraud scheme send a clear message: If you commit overtime fraud, you will go to prison," Williams said. "The public expects that public employees will show up and receive honest pay for an honest day’s work, not line their pockets with double-time or time-and-a-half pay while out bowling.”

Prosecutors say Caputo, who was an LIRR employee responsible for track inspection, was paid $461,000 by the MTA in 2018 — his approximately $117,000 base salary, plus approximately $344,000 in overtime pay — which made him the agency’s highest-paid employee that year, more than even the chairman of the MTA. According to authorities, he falsely claimed to have worked approximately 3,864 overtime hours in addition to his 1,682 regular hours, an average of about 10 hours of overtime per day.

Two co-conspirators, John Nugent and Joseph Balestra, were previously sentenced to five months and three months in prison, respectively, after pleading guilty in connection with the scheme.

In all, prosecutors say Caputo, Nugent and Balestra — plus two others, Frank Pizzonia and Joseph Ruzzo — schemed to receive thousands of dollars in pay from the MTA for hours they did not work.

To catch the five employees, the U.S. attorney’s office says staffers from the Office of the MTA Inspector General worked with criminal investigators to gather their cellphone data, social media history and email records, and also reached out to third parties, like the bowling alley that hosted Caputo's league.

Along with his jail time, Caputo was ordered to pay restitution in the amount of $109,641.74, and was sentenced to three years of supervised release with six months of home confinement, as well as 200 hours of community service.

A report on MTA overtime from 2019 indicated that the agency spent $1.3 billion in overtime costs in 2018.