In the years that followed, she appeared in photos in the Telegraph with City Council members or at swearing-in ceremonies. She moved up in responsibility and job titles.” “Darlene hired Rita Crundwell as a part-time work-study,” said Lohse, now 80. Shortly after, with Dixon as mayor, Crundwell was appointed comptroller. Herzog, who died in 2009, left May 1, 1983. He said he believed Crundwell could take over the comptroller’s office. Lohse told the council that Crundwell, then the city clerk, had told him she was interested in the position. Shortly before that, Finance Commissioner Walter Lohse, a council member, announced that Herzog was resigning earlier than scheduled because of health issues. Dixon won big in the April 1983 election. (Rockford, for instance, had the highest unemployment rate of any metropolitan area in the country for a time in 1982.)ĭixon’s budget suffered, and Lindquist’s rival, Jim Dixon, promised change at City Hall. Lindquist had taken back the mayor’s seat 4 years earlier, but tough economic times followed in Dixon and the region.
RITA CRUNDWELL FAMILY PROFESSIONAL
The state Department of Financial and Professional Regulation, which has a database containing the names of active and inactive engineers, doesn’t include Jerry Crundwell. Record searches turn up nothing, other than a February obituary that indicated his brother died in Florida.Īn engineer with Homer Chastain since 1982 said this week that he never knew anyone by the name of Crundwell at his firm. She testified that her take-home pay was about $20,000 a year. Route 52 and her 1980 Oldsmobile Cutlass. The fax came in, and she saw this secret account with money coming in and money going out.Under the settlement, Crundwell kept their $80,000 house at 1673 U.S. One day, when Rita was out at a horse show, and Kathe was busy doing work and needed to do her treasurer’s report, she requested information from the bank. Pope: Kathe Swanson was the city clerk that reported to Rita. And just did that 179 times with phony invoices. She literally set up a bank account and moved money from one legitimate account into this secret account. It’s not an Enron-type scheme or extremely complicated.
Especially when you don’t have a lot of internal controls around a process, it can easily happen. But, we all have a Rita in our organization - someone who we unconditionally trust - and when they tell us something, we don’t check up on it because we know them well.
And like we say when I teach my forensic accounting class: Trust is not an internal control. Pope: I think it happened because everyone trusted Rita. A lot of people also ask now: Did she do it alone? How could one person do this? One, Dixon has this much money? It’s a really small town, and $53 million, even in a large city, is a lot. Pope: Well, there are several main questions. I mean, horse names like I Found A Penny and Careful Who U Invite? Those are some pretty interesting names. There were no questions about if she exuded wealth, because she definitely did. What this is is lifestyle fraud: She lived right out in the open. You don’t make a lot from it, but you put a lot of money into it. Kelly Richmond Pope: Her family showed horses, and she had this hobby, but the operative word is hobby. On Crundwell’s fascination with show horses Pope, director of the documentary All the Queen’s Horses that chronicles the story, joined Morning Shift to discuss how Crundwell did it, how she got away with it for so long, and how fraud easily happens. But how it happened and why it happened wasn’t really discussed a lot. “As the story played out in the media, there’s so much focus on how this person steals this money, and buys horses, and lives this lavish lifestyle. “I was amazed at how one person could really do this,” Pope said Wednesday on Morning Shift.
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