PITTSBURGH — The former live-in girlfriend of convicted scam artist Michael Carlow has pleaded guilty to conspiring with him to defraud the Internal Revenue Service out of more than $6 million in taxes, interest and penalties he still owes from his conviction in a $31 million check-kiting fraud in the 1990s.

Elizabeth G. Jones, 51, faces up to five years in prison when she’s sentenced Jan. 4, but she has agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors, who typically recommend leniency in return.

U.S. Attorney David Hickton, who’s prosecuting the case, declined to comment on a sealed plea agreement, though the parties could be overheard discussing Jones’ agreement to cooperate against Carlow at a sidebar conference with U.S. District Judge David S. Cercone during Tuesday’s guilty plea hearing. Jones and her public defender, Jay Finkelstein, didn’t acknowledge a reporter’s questions afterward.

In the 1990s, Carlow gained infamy by publicly buying into several iconic Pittsburgh-area businesses, including those that made Clark candy bars and Iron City Beer and running them into the ground while using their bank accounts to kite checks — that is, writing bad checks on the accounts that were covered by deposits made with other bad checks in a cyclical fashion.