He was called a coward, a crook and a con man by some.

Others called him a community philanthropist, a man of honor, an inspiration to kids and a great father, grandfather and friend.

But starting next week, you can also call Greg Solano an inmate.

The 47-year-old former Santa Fe County Sheriff who resigned in November after getting caught selling county-owned items on eBay was sentenced Friday to one year of incarceration — three months in jail and nine on electronic monitoring — to be followed by four years probation.

Addressing the court, and dabbing at the tears in his eyes, a repentant Solano said, "The rest of my life I'll keep saying I'm sorry because I don't know what else to say. ... I'm not making excuses. There is no excuse."

Ordinarily, defendants in this situation with no prior criminal history might be given a conditional discharge, allowing them to avoid jail time and a felony conviction on their record. But Solano was no ordinary defendant.

The sentence imposed was far less time than the eight years in prison special prosecutor Matt Chandler, the Ninth Judicial District Attorney from Clovis, had requested. "As long as the benefits of public corruption outweigh the consequences, it will never stop," Chandler said.

Solano will be eligible for day-for-day good time while in jail, meaning he may be released in about 6 to 7 weeks. As a former cop, he will likely be kept in protective custody the entire time he is in jail.

District Judge Stephen Pfeffer told him to report next week to the same Santa Fe County jail he once helped run as sheriff.

Last month, Solano was ordered to pay an estimated $25,000 in restitution and came to court Friday with a $10,000 check to start repayment.

Chandler originally sought $137,000 — the $73,000 Solano earned selling the 328 items on eBay as well as the cost of an investigative audit.

In arguing for the harsher sentence, Chandler emphasized that the man once affectionately dubbed the "blogging sheriff" was living a double life as a con artist.

He pointed out that Solano wrote a blog in April 2007 on money, politics and corruption. In a May 2007 posting, Solano wrote, "when one of our own gets arrested ... it's a black mark" in reference to a Sheriff's Office sergeant who had been fired. In August 2008, Solano wrote that "an honest sheriff is a poor sheriff," referring to their low pay.

Defense attorney Brooke Gamble called the former sheriff's numerous supporters — among them community activists, his younger sister, his wife and a Catholic priest — before Pfeffer on Friday. They portrayed him not as a criminal but as a good man who did a bad thing.

All spoke of Solano's service to the community and painted a picture of a homegrown hero who was raised by a single mother in Santa Fe's Hopewell Street projects and became a decorated cop and promising politician.

His wife of 27 years, Antoinette Solano, asked Pfeffer for mercy, not only for her husband, but for herself and her adult children who rely on his income from four jobs.

"It was not just Greg's life that was shattered that November day," she said. "It was mine as well."

But Friday's sentencing was not about whether Solano was a good man, Chandler said. It was about the five felony fraud charges Solano pleaded guilty to in July — charges stemming from his selling more than 300 county-owned items on eBay over at least a four-year period. Those sales included new and used items ranging from bulletproof vests and handcuff/handcuff key sets to office supplies.

"Who buys bulletproof vests on eBay?" Chandler asked, suggesting the buyers could be drug traffickers or bank robbers who might later end up in standoffs with cops around the world.

New Mexico State Police agent Jesse Williams said the case was "difficult" for him because the more he researched Solano's eBay sales, the more he began to wonder if some violent person he tried arresting the next day might be protected by a bulletproof vest bought from Solano. He said he tracked the 114 vests sold and was able to get only three buyers to agree to return them when they learned of the fraud.

In his November resignation letter, Solano claimed he sold the vests to families of men and women working in the Middle East who needed the extra protection, but acknowledged there was no way to know for sure who the buyers were. He also said the scheme started in 2007 when his home was being foreclosed on.

"I should have thought that they could have gone to the wrong hands as well, but I never thought about that," he said.

Former reserve deputy David Yount looked directly at Solano and called him "a truly dishonest man" and a "crook with a badge."

Santa Fe County budget administrator Carol Jaramillo, also a former reserve deputy, said that "while everyone else [in the county] was cutting their budgets, Greg Solano was stealing county property."

Jaramillo listed some of the uses the county could have had for the $64,200 it spent on an independent forensic audit. That list included another deputy on the street, three months' worth of stipends for the county's volunteer firefighters or 7,300 lunches for the senior-citizen Meals on Wheels program.

"The reality of Greg Solano's crimes is far worse than fraud and embezzlement," she said.

Last month, Chandler asked that Solano be required to pay back the cost of the audit as well as his earnings from the eBay sales, but Pfeffer said the evidence presented did not indicate how much of the audit was related to Solano's crimes and how much was related to the Sheriff's Office in general.

Some of the items embezzled from the Sheriff's Office were originally bought with money from a law-enforcement grant. Santa Fe County Manager Katherine Miller has said the county will do whatever the agencies that provided the grant money requested.

In response to an email on that issue, Tim Korte, spokesman for the state's Department of Finance and Administration, wrote Friday that the department had met with a group from the county on July 29 and, "We told them that DFA won't require the county to pay back the lost funds. In our view, that would be penalizing Santa Fe County taxpayers twice."

Solano earned a salary of $68,308 at the time of his Nov. 24 resignation. He was about five weeks shy of his completing his eighth year in office. Chandler said among the audit, the cost of the stolen items to the county and eight years of salary, Solano cost taxpayers $505,568.

Solano did not talk to reporters as he left the courtroom Friday.

Contact Geoff Grammer at 986-3076 or ggrammer@sfnewmexican.com. Read his blog at santafecrime.com.