Just Desserts

January 1, 2016 10:13 AM

Sandy Jenkins was a shy, daydreaming accountant at the Collin Street Bakery, the world’s most famous fruitcake company. He was tired of feeling invisible, so he started stealing—and got a little carried away.
posted by katie (72 comments total)

Add a few more murders and get the Coen brothers signed on and we'll have a hit
posted by The Whelk at 10:23 AM on January 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

$17 MILLION and they couldn't figure out where it was going? There's a lot of money in the fruitcake business.
posted by shakespeherian at 10:32 AM on January 1, 2016 [24 favorites]

We pass their Waco shop every time we drive to Dallas. This story may finally inspire me to stop. But I am not eating any fruitcake, thank you.
posted by immlass at 10:38 AM on January 1, 2016

That company must've had a deeply insulated culture for someone to look at a ledger, go, "I didn't spend 23,000 on postage" and accept a totally hand-wavy answer. They must not have any real business competition. I bet they hardly have any employee turnover, either.
posted by Cool Papa Bell at 10:40 AM on January 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

"Semetric Walker" is a really interesting name. And 17000000 is a crazy sum, even over what, about eight years?
posted by From Bklyn at 10:52 AM on January 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

Wow. $17 million in 9 years ... and 10 years "confinement."

Also it's baffling that when he knew he was caught he waffled between Santa Fe and Austin and hit jewelry by a lake. Should have done some research.

“What’s so typical,” said an interested neighbor eating lunch at an area cafe the afternoon of the sentencing, “is he bought depreciable items! If he’d just invested in the market, he could have replaced the money, taken his share, and they would have been none the wiser.”

Great article, thank you for sharing.
posted by bunderful at 10:54 AM on January 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

“What’s so typical,” said an interested neighbor eating lunch at an area cafe the afternoon of the sentencing, “is he bought depreciable items! If he’d just invested in the market, he could have replaced the money, taken his share, and they would have been none the wiser.”

Nobody knows how to steal like the rich.
posted by briank at 10:56 AM on January 1, 2016 [81 favorites]

That company must've had a deeply insulated culture for someone to look at a ledger, go, "I didn't spend 23,000 on postage" and accept a totally hand-wavy answer.

I have all sorts of tedious questions about departmental budgeting and P&L reports and stuff.
posted by shakespeherian at 10:58 AM on January 1, 2016 [10 favorites]

"A frighteningly large Hummel figurines collection"? Oh COME ON.
posted by bitter-girl.com at 10:58 AM on January 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

I was a bit agog at the 50k salary, I mean for a chief position in a successful company that's ...peanuts.
posted by The Whelk at 11:00 AM on January 1, 2016 [12 favorites]

I mean for a chief position in a successful company that's ...peanuts.

I live in Texas and I can believe that part easily. Cost of living is cheap in Corsicana.
posted by immlass at 11:04 AM on January 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

Also paying full retail for brands. Yikes.
posted by The Whelk at 11:07 AM on January 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

I mean for a chief position in a successful company that's ...peanuts.

I live in Texas and I can believe that part easily. Cost of living is cheap in Corsicana.

I thought the same and then I saw the house here. From what I can gather of the narrative this was the house they bought before the theft started. That place is huge.
posted by thecjm at 11:08 AM on January 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

So he got 10 years if a federal pen and she received 5 years probation for stealing nearly $17 million dollars!! I bet he is out in 5 years. If he had enough sense to stash stuff (gold bars) he could easily say that crime pays!
These people are the epitome of scum and this isn't justice. Robbing a liquor for $100 could get you 20 years!!
posted by Muncle at 11:08 AM on January 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

So, according to Wikipedia, the company sells 1.5 million fruitcakes (alone) per year, with a minimum cost of $29 (some cost $89 each)... (according to the company's web site), that's 43 million in fruitcake sales alone...

17 million over 9 years is a small enough percentage that it might not be missed if the operation was sloppy enough.
posted by HuronBob at 11:11 AM on January 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

He stole from a fruitcake company and spent it on trinkets, his only problem was not knowing how to steal correctly. Should've bought a senator, much cheaper than a Lexus.
posted by The Whelk at 11:11 AM on January 1, 2016 [8 favorites]

17 million over 9 years is a small enough percentage that it might not be missed if the operation was sloppy enough.

He set up their computerized accounting system, so I'm guessing he was aware what kind of money with through their system. And it sounds like they thought they should be making more of a profit, given their volumes shipped each year, but when you accountant (who has 5+ years of reliable and timely service) says "eh, everything is in order," you can scratch your head and shrug your shoulders, hoping next year works out better.
posted by filthy light thief at 11:14 AM on January 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

See that's what I don't understand, because at all the businesses I've worked at the exec-level folks will tear apart a P&L regardless of how much the finance guys say it makes sense. I've spent way too much time breaking out expense lines items just to show why something that seems wrong to the owner or whomever makes perfect sense.
posted by shakespeherian at 11:17 AM on January 1, 2016 [10 favorites]

Weird thing: I saw the byline, Katy Vine, and remembered her from this outstanding Texas Monthly article about Jandek from....17 years ago now.

IN CLOSING, I AM OLD.
posted by Rev. Syung Myung Me at 11:19 AM on January 1, 2016 [12 favorites]

I detect a distinct flavor of chummy hands off insularity to the CEO, add an economy that borders on the surreal I figure something could slip through
posted by The Whelk at 11:20 AM on January 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Desire is suffering.
posted by LastOfHisKind at 11:23 AM on January 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

Yeah I mean I'm certainly not doubting that this happened, it just boggles my mind that everyone running the company was just shruggo
posted by shakespeherian at 11:24 AM on January 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

I can tell that I would be no good at embezzling just from the choking sense of anxiety this article produced in me.
posted by Adridne at 11:25 AM on January 1, 2016 [36 favorites]

I am amused by the author's deliberate nods to another tale of a mild-mannered Texan who enjoyed funeral homes.
posted by mwhybark at 11:27 AM on January 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

I remember those cakes being about 50% pecans by weight but $30? Man, that's pricey. One of the more odd Texas experiences I've had was a delicious Bulgarian dinner at a B&B in a tiny town west of Corsicana made by a man hired and brought to the US by the fruitcake bakery. He quit after a couple years of the brutal holiday rush. Corsicana had a lot of oil money and has lots of beatiful buildings and homes.
posted by Bee'sWing at 11:41 AM on January 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Fascinating read. I've driven through Corsicana countless times without a thought, it'll be different from now on.
posted by erikgrande at 11:45 AM on January 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

If an utter idiot at a fruitcake company can pull this off and get away with it for so long, it really makes you wonder about smart people at bigger companies. There's always got to be someone in charge of writing a check and balancing the books....
posted by miyabo at 11:46 AM on January 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

And I miss everybody a lot
But I'm not really sorry,
'Cause they were very delicious cheesecakes fruitcakes
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 11:54 AM on January 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

it really makes you wonder about smart people at bigger companies

Ever since I first heard about this, I've been meaning to see if I can find out from any publicly available documents what accounting software they were using. I'm pretty sure it wasn't the one I do, or I would have known about them when I worked in North Texas.

My gut says it was QuickBooks, though if this is one of those companies where basically every person in the back office is one of those "computers, how do they work?" types, it is possible to have accounting departments that are functionally illiterate in the accounting software, and happy to stay that way.

But still, it's possible with sufficient motivation and just one person who's good at Excel, and the management deserves a certain amount of responsibility (not criminally, just in a business acumen sense) for asking the question "how come we aren't makin' any money?" and not actually pursuing an answer. Even if the answer is the more typical "doing it wrong" rather than some bozo siphoning off seventeen fucking million dollars, you have to actually run a number or two to determine how you're doing it wrong. Sitting around wishing it was better is not your most productive tack.

This sort of headbuttery is really only possible in small, stupid companies. In larger companies, embezzlement is done with loopholes (and, usually, fake vendors at the very least, come on dude) rather than just blatantly writing checks. There's enough accountability in the financial reporting that you have to actually hide it somewhere.
posted by Lyn Never at 12:19 PM on January 1, 2016 [13 favorites]

Why wouldn't they give the company their money back (or whatever they could get of it) when they auctioned off the items?
posted by desjardins at 12:20 PM on January 1, 2016

The money from the auction did go back to the company. This wasn't a small company, during the holiday rush season they employ over 600 people.
posted by HuronBob at 12:26 PM on January 1, 2016

They way the culture of the town is described! Everyone belongs to supper clubs? The "fancy" book club? If you have a hangnail by the end of the day everyone knows, as one person put it?

Sounds miserable.
posted by Windigo at 12:37 PM on January 1, 2016 [8 favorites]

The management deserves a certain amount of responsibility (not criminally, just in a business acumen sense) for asking the question "how come we aren't makin' any money?" and not actually pursuing an answer.

I have to admit, with this guy's brazen behavior, what looks like a really toxic atmosphere in the town concerning wealth, and how little the company investigated all this. . . a very small part of me wondered if someone else there higher up was also embezzling and prevented some kind of true investigation, or was using him to cover their tracks, or maybe using the situation to their advantage for taxes . . . something to explain how implausible it seems. Even though there's the FBI investigation, maybe something just seems not quite right concerning the upper management's actions. Though I don't know, maybe it's just the right size of business that something like this could happen as laid out. It just seems weird.
posted by barchan at 12:40 PM on January 1, 2016 [9 favorites]

I'm wondering, did he want to get caught? His spending was so outrageously conspicuous. If the accountant--the ACCOUNTANT-- who makes 50k annually is all of a sudden buying multiply cars/houses, dressing to the nines, flying around in private jets, outbidding his employer at charity events, wouldn't you just be a bit suspicious?
posted by sfkiddo at 12:42 PM on January 1, 2016 [19 favorites]

So much of this makes no sense. No one noticed 17M was missing? No one noticed that SANDY FROM ACCOUNTING had 30K watches? How does a fruitcake bakery make that kind of money in the first place?

Excellent post.
posted by elwoodwiles at 12:45 PM on January 1, 2016 [10 favorites]

Based on how they acted after he was caught I assume everyone knew what was going on and was just waiting to watch him slip up eventually and then they'd have a great story to tell out of towers.
posted by The Whelk at 12:49 PM on January 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

I think that it's a combination of Sandy Jenkins being the one to computerize their accounting, starting in 1998, and a throwaway line in the piece: his office "had previously been inhabited by a husband-and-wife team for fifty years." If they were the accountants, and the line is literally true, that would mean that the business had had the same bookkeepers since the Great Depression. There's one mention of their auditing the payroll, specifically, when they were trying to figure out where the money was going. It's difficult to conceive of a successful privately-owned business as being this hothouse flower that has seemingly had no internal predators for half a century, but that's what was apparently the case here.
posted by Halloween Jack at 12:49 PM on January 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

Man, this is making me super curious about household economics in this part of Texas. Pre-theft, they were able to raise a kid and live a comfortable middle-class life, with a Victorian house and a Lexus, on a salary that gradually rose from $25,000/yr to $50,000. Then, after the theft started, almost nobody in this supposedly incredibly nosy town blinked at the idea that that salary could support multiple homes, highly visible philanthropy, and monthly shopping trips at Neiman-Marcus. Are housing prices just so low there that it's assumed that everyone with a reliable salaried job is able to use most of it as disposable income? Or what is it? Should I move there?
posted by ostro at 12:55 PM on January 1, 2016 [8 favorites]

"McNutt" is such a charming kids'-movie name for the owner of a fruitcake company, by the way.
posted by ostro at 12:58 PM on January 1, 2016 [17 favorites]

After the theft started, almost nobody in this supposedly incredibly nosy town blinked at the idea that that salary could support multiple homes, highly visible philanthropy, and monthly shopping trips at Neiman-Marcus.

"Both Sandy and Kay told people around town that they had inherited money." Which isn't just an explanation: it's a social repositioning of them as having Old Money; and into a social set in which it's not polite to ask about the Old Money. Note that townspeople only really became intensely curious about their spending after the embezzlement was revealed.
posted by We had a deal, Kyle at 1:07 PM on January 1, 2016 [16 favorites]

In a lot of towns like this people can live off the fumes of One Rich Relative for a WHILE, multiple generations sometimes. So it's not completely unheard of.
posted by The Whelk at 1:09 PM on January 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

I mean did they have NO metrics by which to judge their COGs? They weren't doing any projections? We're talking $1.8MM a year on average, and from the article it's a lot more towards the end.

I'm not going to be happy here until I see a balance sheet I guess
posted by shakespeherian at 1:10 PM on January 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

We don't need any of that fancy stuff here at Old Fashioned Down Home Business, why it's like a family!
posted by The Whelk at 1:13 PM on January 1, 2016 [9 favorites]

Btw, did anyone else think this article seemed to be going out of its way to point out stereotypically "effeminate" characteristics of Sandy's? Noticing and complimenting his coworkers' clothes and haircuts, the diamond ring at age 12, the Barbra Streisand, the fact that someone literally nicknamed him "Fruitcake" . . . it makes me wonder whether there was gossip around town about Sandy's sexuality that the reporter didn't feel comfortable directly referring to but couldn't resist hinting at.
posted by ostro at 1:15 PM on January 1, 2016 [22 favorites]

That's comes upon the similar and alluded to Bernie Tilde case, lots of pointing out stereotypically not-straight manner and likes - although the south and parts of Texas do have a tradition of heterosexual dandies, at least publically, because anything else is unspeakable/unimaginable.
posted by The Whelk at 1:20 PM on January 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

I worked at a small NYC computer business in the 90s where the accountant got caught writing checks to himself for several months. I never found out how much, but I remember it being awkward as he was the only black employee and seemed like such a nice guy. I'm not sure if they ever pressed charges.

Then a week later I answered the phone (that was my job) and it was his daughter. I told her he no longer worked there. Two minutes later, I got an angry call from his wife, "What do you MEAN he doesn't work there?" Boy was that a weird day.
posted by fungible at 1:25 PM on January 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

My gut says it was QuickBooks, though if this is one of those companies where basically every person in the back office is one of those "computers, how do they work?" types, it is possible to have accounting departments that are functionally illiterate in the accounting software, and happy to stay that way.

Quickbooks is fucking terrifying. I've seen too many instances of it being misused or mismanaged in small to frighteningly large medium-sized businesses, and since I still keep making the dumb mistake of letting people know that I'm good with computers I keep seeing instances where the entire heart and brain of a decent sized organization (read: sometimes millions of gross revenue/funds) is held in one obfuscated, easily broken file.

And then they're doing dumb stuff with the master company file like trying to share it across a network drive with multiple users trying to edit/process at the same time without running an actual Quickbooks server/service (this is how you corrupt that important file, guys!), with no backups, or at best the file is backed up every few months on someone's thumb drive and left in a desk somewhere.

Or even worse, they rely entirely on the Intuit/quickbooks spotty cloud service, because apparently keeping regular backups in a secure location is too much hassle, even if it's a couple of thumb drives that are stored in different locations, say, farther away from the master Quickbooks computer than the desk drawer that it's sitting on. (Come on, guys? How about at least a fireproof safe in another building? For fuck's sake, it'd be safer on my key ring!)

And if this file were corrupted, lost or maliciously edited it would pretty much kill or severely damage the organization/company, open it up to intensive auditing or lawsuits, etc.
posted by loquacious at 1:53 PM on January 1, 2016 [9 favorites]

And then they're doing dumb stuff with the master company file like trying to share it across a network drive with multiple users trying to edit/process at the same time without running an actual Quickbooks server/service (this is how you corrupt that important file, guys!), with no backups, or at best the file is backed up every few months on someone's thumb drive and left in a desk somewhere.

QuickBooks Online at least reduces this kind of idiocy, assuming a company migrates to the Online version. It is horrifying in entirely new ways, mind you.
posted by shakespeherian at 2:02 PM on January 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

There have been a few cases like this in my town.
Not as big, several hundred thousands to a few million, but big enough to make me think one of the smartest things you could do if you run an business of any appreciable size is to have external audits of the books on a regular basis.

Probably once a year if you're small, once a quarter if you are large enough.
Even if you don't catch deliberate theft, you'd probably catch some losses due to simple oversight.
Even the most cursory glance at the ledger surely would have caught this guy writing checks directly to his credit card company.
I mean, that's not even smart embezzling.
posted by madajb at 2:21 PM on January 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

How does a fruitcake bakery make that kind of money in the first place?

Everything's bigger in Texas, natch.

ostro and The Whelk, earlier when I linked to the Bernie piece I was in fact amused. After a few hours of thinking about it, I'm not amused anymore. I actually do think that however archly both writers put it, both pieces are deliberately othering their subjects as sources of danger and corruption within the context of Texan society and using these behavioral cues of effeminacy as expressive of that. Shame on them.
posted by mwhybark at 2:45 PM on January 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

How does a fruitcake bakery make that kind of money in the first place?

They're really good fruitcakes. My father's family had kind of a tradition of buying them (specifically Collins Street, I mean, not the crappy little things you find at the drug store) at Christmas and I imagine other families do, too. And they sell other stuff - cookies and cheesecakes and coffee.
posted by dilettante at 2:55 PM on January 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

mwhybark, I respect your opinion, but in this piece I took the mention of the diamond ring as indicative of Jenkins' affection (even as a youth) for the finer things, and his obsession with his hair as demonstrative of his vanity -- in fact, the hair thing made me think of none other than Donald Trump. I thought the writer was using these details to show Jenkins' motivations for embezzling such a massive amount of money rather than to hint he's effeminate.
posted by katie at 3:07 PM on January 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm wondering, did he want to get caught? His spending was so outrageously conspicuous. If the accountant--the ACCOUNTANT-- who makes 50k annually is all of a sudden buying multiply cars/houses, dressing to the nines, flying around in private jets, outbidding his employer at charity events, wouldn't you just be a bit suspicious?

If you work in a financial institution, your yearly training generally outlines red flags for embezzlement that look pretty much exactly like this. Maybe fruitcake companies don't have that kind of training?
posted by bunderful at 3:11 PM on January 1, 2016

Yeah, I did not see effeminency but of a yearning for something more. His is a story of being thwarted and doing what was expected e.g., wanting to go into the funeral business and being pushed to business administration.

The description of the wife was a bit awkward with the neighbors commenting on her lack of cosmetic surgery. If anything, the neighbors are what struck me. It sounds difficult being in a community that is that stratified and I guess, kind of mean and petty.

Dealing with the cost of living in Texas, I am struck by the low cost of living, too. I am addicted to a home repair show, Fixer Upper, and the husband and I are astounded at how CHEAP the houses are on that show. It is based out of Waco. We have a new faculty from UT-Austin and he commented on how horribly expensive the Twin Cities were in comparison to Austin. Heck, I used to think that living in the upper midwest was kind of inexpensive, relatively, but nothing like Texas.
posted by jadepearl at 3:18 PM on January 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

Maybe fruitcake companies don't have that kind of training?

Non-regulated industries don't have any kind of training, not mandated and pretty much never by choice either. And small family businesses often don't even have any MBAs on the payroll. Somewhere along the line they've probably got an actual CPA who files their taxes, but that person is not going to be doing audits of any sort, they're basically getting a copy of the balance sheet prepared by the controller.

A lot of these guys will tell you they have "street MBAs" - they've been coloring pictures in daddy's office since they were in diapers, worked summers and weekends in high school, probably got a Business degree at Baylor but as much for solidifying a place in the Good Ol Boy Network as the book-learning, before starting full-time preparing for daddy's retirement. They have lots of social skills but not nearly the business acumen they think they do.
posted by Lyn Never at 3:27 PM on January 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

the Collin Street Bakery, the world’s most famous fruitcake company

Can I just point out how ridiculous and parochial that sort of sentence sounds to my ears?
posted by signal at 3:59 PM on January 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

I had an uncle who sent us one of these every single year. He probably sent them to lots of other people, too. You get enough people who send one of your fruitcakes to everyone they know, that's quite a bit of money.
posted by Juliet Banana at 4:47 PM on January 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Here's two reasons never to trust your bookkeeper too much, $1 million over 9 years and over $19 million in two years. The Chocolate Box is still trading. Clive Peeters, not so much.
posted by antipodes at 5:05 PM on January 1, 2016

Locally, here's someone who embezzled $34 million over 12 years. Almost sounds like some sort of mental illness.

Sachdeva is serving an 11-year prison sentence after pleading guilty in 2010 to embezzling more than $34 million from Koss. The money was used to finance a lavish lifestyle including vacations, cars and shopping sprees during which she bought designer clothing, furs and jewelry, much of which she never wore.

"The FBI collected 38 boxes of clothing, shoes and jewelry which Sachdeva was storing in the empty office next to hers at Koss, all paid for with funds she embezzled from Koss," the suit states.

The article I linked is about a bank that sued Koss, saying they should have known what she was doing.

The suit notes that Sachdeva was hired as a temporary employee through ProStaff in 1990. By 1992 she was the firm's vice president of finance and oversaw the company's accounting department "even though she does not have a degree in accounting and is not a CPA," the suit states. "Nor was any other employee of Koss a CPA from 1987 to 2009."

posted by desjardins at 5:19 PM on January 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

Ah, here we go. A common link with Mr. Jenkins:

Her attorneys said the binge spending stemmed from a shopping disorder. She has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder that prompted the sprees, and also is an alcoholic, according to documents discussed in court Wednesday.

posted by desjardins at 5:21 PM on January 1, 2016

Could've ended worse for Ol' Fruitcake: "Paul's Case", by Willa Cather.
posted by John of Michigan at 5:28 PM on January 1, 2016

Oh, since I don't see a link yet: Collin Street Bakery.
posted by dilettante at 6:04 PM on January 1, 2016

QuickBooks Online at least reduces this kind of idiocy, assuming a company migrates to the Online version. It is horrifying in entirely new ways, mind you.

Yeah, but in practice in the real world what I see happening more often than not is that there are usually two or more disparate licenses from different years, and even though one workstation might have been upgraded to a recent enough version that their online/cloud backup is available, but they'll still refuse to use it because it means finally migrating from that 2012/2013 or whatever master company file that they're still using in backwards compatibility mode even though they might have 2015 installed on the main workstation and then you have to convince some technophobe that this is actually really important and we should subscribe to the online versi...

OH MY GOD THIS IS SO NOT MY JOB ANY MORE I'M NOT EVEN SUPPOSED TO BE WORKING TODAY I HAVE TO BE UP AT 5:30 TO OPEN TOMORROW...

...and yeah, brb, drinking liquor straight from the jug until I forget everything again, wee!

And my current boss wonders why being a barista and food monkey barely ever even phases me, that I really like being mindlessly busy and in the zone. It's because I don't have to explain how a latte or sandwich works, or what the best, most secure practice for using and deploying a latte or sandwich is.

In fact it's delightful how little I care what someone does with their latte or sandwich after I deploy it if I prepare and fire it right, which I nearly always do. For all I care they could wear it as a hat or stuff it down the front of their pants or cram it in their shoes with their feet still in them.

Which, oddly and unfortunately, never happens in my cafe. But people metaphorically did just that all the time with my efforts in IT, especially if it was some majorly mission critical thing like, oh, the entire accounting, payroll, payables and receivables matrix of a 100+ person organization.
posted by loquacious at 6:14 PM on January 1, 2016 [18 favorites]

I'm surprised that no one so far has mentioned Rita Crundwell, former comptroller of Dixon, Illinois, who stole a cool $53.7M from the city over 22 years to become the quarter-horse queen. It took her a while, but this is a public official of a not-that-big town we're talking about here. Private business? Pfft, that's the amateur division.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:41 PM on January 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

I was disappointed to discover he embezzled money rather than $17M worth of fruitcake.
posted by storybored at 10:17 PM on January 1, 2016 [8 favorites]

Here in Brisbane we had this delightful fellow who had a grand old time with the taxpayer's money for a while there.
posted by h00py at 3:52 AM on January 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

"A frighteningly large Hummel figurines collection".
The thing is, if you reorder the words slightly:
"A largely frightening Hummel figurines collection".
It becomes redundant.
posted by plinth at 5:05 AM on January 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

Thoughts while reading the article very late at night: This kind of embezzlement is so simplistic, and so grandiose, that if it were a question in an accounting textbook the students would roll their eyes in collective disbelief, but clearly it happens. Of course it took a new employee to catch the fraud. I did a little googling and apparently the company last had an audit in 1998, the year Jenkins was hired. I wonder why they did the audit - possibly to satisfy bank requirements to get a loan for expansion? New partners brought on? I, too, am also stunned that a company with that much revenue didn't have a computerized accounting system until the late-90s. I wonder how much their insurance covered. I wonder at a town that seems so stratified. Are the rich people of Corsicana really rich, or, like, upper-middle-class-for-a-LCOL-area and like to think of themselves as rich, and thus have no idea what chartered private jets cost? They all seem so petty and mean.
posted by stowaway at 9:15 AM on January 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

He likely got away with this for so long because in insular stratified groups, you tend to be judged purely on your ability to follow the social rules and values of said group. Like it's mentioned in the article, people only got skeptical when the wife talked about the money. It doesn't surprise me one bit that it was an "outsider" that found him out.

Sadly, abusers, con-artists, and sociopaths use this basic flaw to their advantage, and as a society, we pretty much can't shake that tribal instinct enough to sniff them out until they do way too much damage.
posted by billyfleetwood at 3:05 AM on January 3, 2016 [4 favorites]

I am just a totally normal person and I know people who seem to spend way above their means, including cars, houses, and even private jet travel. I assume it's family money and/or massive credit card debt. Maybe it's embezzling, but that would never have occurred to me.
posted by miyabo at 8:13 AM on January 3, 2016

Granted, a lot of people are private about where their money comes from and what they are spending it on. But from the article it sounds like everyone in this town was so very deeply up each other's ass!
posted by stowaway at 10:01 AM on January 3, 2016

Oh, since I don't see a link yet: Collin Street Bakery.

Ah yes, those checks. Gaze upon this cheesecake. Stare into the creamy abyss. You have no questions. There is no problem.

(sound of HypnoToad)
posted by hal9k at 7:08 PM on January 3, 2016