Latest / Crime Bloodlines / The Safe in the Shallows: How Little League Money Disappeared

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The Safe in the Shallows: How Little League Money Disappeared · Crime Bloodlines

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: At 7.40 in the morning on August 9th, 2011. A
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: birdwatcher named Gloria Erickson walked the eastern bank of Lacamont
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Retention Pond and found a fire-resistant document, safe sitting in
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: the shallows, with its lid forced open. The foam lining
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: inside was still faintly dry. Whatever had been in there
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: had not been in the water long. Two things were
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: left inside that safe. A laminated employee badge from the
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: Sutter Falls Youth Athletic Association and a handwritten ledger, Columns
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: of numbers in blue ballpoint, with a single word written
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: across the top. Reconciled. Gloria called the non-emergency line. Within
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: 48 hours, a financial crimes investigator named Christine Vogel had
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: the safe on her desk and the full weight of
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: a question she could not yet answer. Who throws away
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: the proof that they were keeping score? That question would
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: take investigators inside a decade-long operation running beneath 4,000 children's
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: baseball and soccer seasons. It would expose a structure so
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: carefully layered that the people running it had, for years,
• 1:04
  Speaker 1: nothing to fear from anyone. Not from auditors. Not from
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: the board. Not from the bank. The answer, when it came,
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: would not arrive the way anyone expected. Sutter Falls is
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: the kind of mid-sized city where civic life runs on
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: a small number of institutions that everyone knows and no
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: one examines too closely. The school district. The hospital auxiliary.
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: And the Sutter Falls Youth Athletic Association. which by 2011
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: had approximately 4,000 registered players per year and an annual
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: operating budget of around $ 800, 000. The SFYAA was not glamorous.
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: It ran baseball diamonds and soccer fields at Lakemont Park
• 1:43
  Speaker 1: and two satellite sites. It sold concessions out of three
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: cinderblock stands. It negotiated equipment contracts, maintained a modest staff,
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: and each spring it stretched a new season of hand-painted
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: sponsor banners along the outfield fences. For most families in
• 1:58
  Speaker 1: Sutter Falls, It was simply the place where their kids
• 2:00
  Speaker 1: played on Saturday mornings. Nobody thought much about the money.
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: Keith Vickers had been part of that world for nine years.
• 2:07
  Speaker 1: He was 52 years old in the summer of 2011,
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: living on Carlos Street, in a rented house, driving a
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: 10-year-old Silverado with a cracked passenger side mirror. He kept
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: meaning to replace. He coached 11 and under baseball on
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Ground balls, relay throws... the particular
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: patients required when a 10-year-old fields a grounder with his
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: eyes closed. His title at SFYAA was equipment coordinator, ordering helmets,
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: tracking jersey inventories, signing off on delivery receipts, the kind
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: of role that runs entirely on institutional trust and is
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: almost never audited. Every Wednesday, without exception, Vickers drove to
• 2:45
  Speaker 1: the north side of the city. His older brother Raymond
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: lived in a supervised residential facility there. Seven years after
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: a stroke that had left him needing full-time care, Vickers
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: brought soup from Hazel's on Birch Connector Road, the same
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: order most weeks. He stayed a few hours. He drove home.
• 3:02
  Speaker 1: His ex-wife Pam, when investigators eventually spoke to her, offered
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: one sentence about Keith Vickers that stayed in the record.
• 3:09
  Speaker 1: She said he was always slightly more afraid of things
• 3:12
  Speaker 1: than he let on. It is a sentence that earns
• 3:14
  Speaker 1: its place in this story. Because sometime in 2003, roughly
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: 18 months after Keith Vickers joined the SFYAA as a volunteer,
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: a man named Kent Bauer had a conversation with him.
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: And after that conversation, Keith Vickers began signing delivery receipts
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: for equipment that would never arrive at Lakeymont Park. Kent
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: Bauer was 60 years old and operated Bauer Property Holdings,
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: six strip centers and a warehouse park on the east
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: and south sides of Sutter Falls. He was not a
• 3:41
  Speaker 1: baseball man. He never coached. He never attended a game.
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: To the SFYAA board, he was simply a generous civic
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: partner whose company sponsored youth sports and supplied equipment. and
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: operated the concession stands under a long-standing lease arrangement. Three
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: separate companies, all pointing back to Bauer, Riverside Concessions, Riverside
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: Concessions Supply, and a promotions firm called Taft Promotions, run
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: from a strip mall office on Meridian Court by a
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: man named Ed Taft. The board saw a philanthropist. Christine
• 4:13
  Speaker 1: Vogel would eventually see something else entirely. But in the
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: summer of 2011, Vogel had not yet been assigned the case.
• 4:21
  Speaker 1: the SFYAA's part-time executive director, Connie Marsh was keeping her
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: own handwritten ledger of sponsor sales in a binder on
• 4:28
  Speaker 1: her desk. Meticulous, unmanipulated, maintained without any reason to falsify
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: a single entry. And Phil Rudd, the board's treasurer and
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: the loan officer at Sutter Falls Community Bank, had successfully
• 4:41
  Speaker 1: killed two separate internal audit proposals in 2006 and 2009,
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: each time reporting the attempt to Kent Bauer within 48 hours.
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: The operation had been running, in one form or another,
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: since 2001 at SFYAA alone. Before that, according to later
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: investigative findings, Bauer had run structurally identical schemes through a
• 5:03
  Speaker 1: softball league in Creston and the Youth Hockey Association, 60
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: miles north, both of which wound down without prosecution. By
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: the night of August 8, 2011, it had been a decade,
• 5:13
  Speaker 1: and then Keith Vickers drove to Lakemont Park in the dark,
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: saw a vehicle he did not recognize. A Parks Department
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: truck left overnight for the morning mowing crew and made
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: a decision that collapsed everything. The safe went into the
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: water because Keith Vickers saw headlights he did not expect.
• 5:30
  Speaker 1: That is the whole hinge. One Parks Department truck left
• 5:33
  Speaker 1: overnight for a morning mowing crew, and a 52-year-old equipment
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: coordinator made a choice that undid 10 years of carefully
• 5:40
  Speaker 1: maintained silence. Christine Vogel was assigned the case, 48 hours
• 5:44
  Speaker 1: after Gloria Erickson's call. Vogel was 38. a financial crimes
• 5:49
  Speaker 1: investigator with Sutter Falls PD. And her specific skill was this.
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: She could look at a spreadsheet until when someone had
• 5:56
  Speaker 1: worked too hard to make it look normal. The concession
• 5:59
  Speaker 1: lease agreements were her first stop. She pulled the files
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: going back to 2002. Three stands, seven years of reported
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: gross revenue, and the numbers did not move. Year after year,
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: stand after stand, the reported gross came in between $ 11, 000
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: and $ 13, 000. A variance of less than 8% across seven
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: full seasons. That is the first image. Hold it. Outdoor
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: concession revenue is not flat. It moves with heat, with rain,
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: with a team that makes the playoffs, and draws 300
• 6:30
  Speaker 1: extra families on a Saturday afternoon. Revenue that does not
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: move is revenue that was decided in advance. Someone had
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: picked a number and written it down, year after year,
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: without ever forgetting to make it look slightly different. Slightly.
• 6:45
  Speaker 1: Never too much. Vogel walked to the equipment room next.
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: She brought a clipboard. She matched every item on the
• 6:51
  Speaker 1: SFYAA inventory list against the physical stock on the shelves.
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: The math was off by roughly 30%. Helmets listed. Not present.
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: Batting cages recorded. Not there. No transfer logs. No retirement records.
• 7:06
  Speaker 1: No documentation of anything leaving that room, through any official channel.
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: 30% of the inventory had simply ceased to exist on
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: paper and while continuing to exist somewhere else. Investigators would
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: later trace those items to an Eastside storage unit rented
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: in Keith Vickers' name, paid in cash reimbursed through Riverside's
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: petty cash account, and then sold in bulk to a
• 7:27
  Speaker 1: used sporting goods reseller in a neighboring county. Vickers had
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: signed the delivery receipts himself. Every one of them now
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: hold two images at once, the flat revenue line and
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: the missing equipment. Neither one is an accident. Both require
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: someone inside the organization to look the other way. or
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: to actively participate, for years on end. The third image
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: arrives through the sponsorship records. Connie Marsh, the SFYAA's part-time
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: executive director, kept a handwritten ledger of every sponsor sale
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: in a binder on her desk. She had no reason
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: to falsify it. A dental practice on the north side
• 8:01
  Speaker 1: had paid $ 3, 500 for an outfield banner. Marsh had recorded
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: exactly that. But the remittance from TAF promotions to SFYAA
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: showed one $ 200 received. and attached to it a production
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: invoice billing SFYAA an additional $ 500 for the banner itself.
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: The dental practice had paid $ 3, 500. The SFYAA netted $ 700.
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: Taft Promotions, operating out of a strip mall office on
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: Meridian Court, kept the rest. That model repeated across 23 sponsors,
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: every year, for eight years. Ed Taft did not build
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: Taft Promotions. Search warrants executed in early September of 2011
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: reached the registered agent filings for Riverside Concessions. Riverside Concessions Supply,
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: and Taft Promotions. All three shared an address. All three,
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: in practice, ran back to Kent Bauer. Sixty years old,
• 8:53
  Speaker 1: owner of six strip centers and a warehouse park on
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: the east side of Sutter Falls. A man who had
• 8:58
  Speaker 1: never once attended an SFYAA gang. The board had known
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: him only as a civic partner. The paperwork had always
• 9:05
  Speaker 1: been clean. And Phil Rudd, the board treasurer, who also
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: held the SFYAA operating credit line at Sutter Falls Community Bank,
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: had made certain that no one looked too carefully. In 2006,
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: a board member proposed an internal audit. Rudd killed it.
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: He reported the proposal to Bauer within 48 hours. In 2009,
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: it happened again. Same result. Over seven years, Rudd received
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: approximately $ 90, 000 in cash through a fictitious maintenance contract on
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: one of Bauer's strip centers. The safe was the crack
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: in the wall. Not because of what it contained, not yet,
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: but because of what it proved the moment Vogel's team
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: opened it. The foam lining was still faintly dry. The
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: safe had not been in that water long. Someone had
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: put it there the night before Erickson found it. The
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: laminated badge inside belonged to Keith Vickers. His name, his photo,
• 9:57
  Speaker 1: his title, Concessions Coordinator. sfya the ledger beside it was
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: handwritten columns of numbers in blue ballpoint at the top
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: of the page one word reconciled vickers had been keeping
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: a private record of the scheme that single fact upended
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: every assumption about where the case was going investigators had
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: been working inward from the concession anomalies from the missing inventory,
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: from the sponsorship spread, building toward whoever sat at the center.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: The equipment coordinator was a peripheral figure. He signed delivery receipts.
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: He rented the storage unit. He was a man who
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: drove a 10-year-old Silverado and coached 11 and under baseball
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. He was also the person
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: who had been quietly writing it all down since 2008.
• 10:41
  Speaker 1: Vickers had started his ledger three years before the safe
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: went into the water. His ex-wife Pam had once said
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: that he was always slightly more afraid of things than
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: he let on. Whatever the reason, whether it was fear
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: or guilt or something he could not have named cleanly,
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: he had kept the numbers, columns that matched nothing in
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: any official record, because the official records had been built
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: to match nothing real. When Vogel's team compared Vickers' handwritten
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: figures against the Riverside remittance logs, the gap materialized precisely.
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: The ledger was not a confession. It was not addressed
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: to anyone. But it was accurate. And that accuracy was
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: what broke the case open. Picture the concession stand at
• 11:18
  Speaker 1: Lakemont on a Saturday in late May. A parent pays
• 11:21
  Speaker 1: $ 3 for a hot dog. The register turns over $ 600
• 11:25
  Speaker 1: that afternoon. Under any honest accounting, that number flows into
• 11:29
  Speaker 1: a gross revenue report at the end of the season.
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: Under the Riverside lease, it flows into a reported gross
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: that never changes because the number was chosen before the
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: season started. If the only record of that transaction is
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: the one Riverside produces, there is no contradiction. The stand ran,
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: the money moved, the lease payment arrived. The scheme held
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: for a decade because every document in the official record
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: had been produced by someone inside the scheme. Every document
• 11:56
  Speaker 1: except one. Connie Marsh's handwritten binder had not been produced
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: by the scheme. She had no reason to lie. Her
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: sponsor sold entries reflected what sponsors actually paid because sponsors
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: had called her directly and she had written it down.
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: When Vogel laid Marsh's records beside the Taft Promotions remittances,
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: the spread became visible immediately, not as a theory, But
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: as arithmetic, the question Vogel carried into the indictment phase
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: was not whether the fraud had occurred. That was settled.
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: The question was how far back the structure went and
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: how many times it had been built before. The answer,
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: drawn from later investigative findings, reached back past 2001. Bauer
• 12:33
  Speaker 1: had run structurally identical operations through a softball league in
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: Creston and a youth hockey association 60 miles north, beginning
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: in the mid-1990s. Both of those wound down without prosecutions.
• 12:45
  Speaker 1: No violence, no confrontation, just a quiet end, followed by
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: a quiet beginning somewhere new. The SFIAA operation was not
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: an experiment, it was a refinement. And the thing that
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: finally stopped it was not an audit, not a regulatory review,
• 13:00
  Speaker 1: not a whistleblower who had gone to a prosecutor. It
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: was a 52-year-old man who panicked at a Parks Department
• 13:06
  Speaker 1: truck in the dark, abandoned a safe he should have
• 13:08
  Speaker 1: destroyed and walked away, not knowing that he had left
• 13:11
  Speaker 1: behind the one record that could not be explained away.
• 13:14
  Speaker 1: Vickers had written, reconciled at the top of that ledger.
• 13:17
  Speaker 1: Whether he meant it as a record of the scheme,
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: or as something he was trying to make peace with
• 13:21
  Speaker 1: inside himself, Christine Vogel said she was never entirely sure.
• 13:25
  Speaker 1: That uncertainty stayed with the case. It stays with it still.
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: The indictments came down in October of 2011. Kent Bauer
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: faced 12 counts of wire fraud, three of money laundering,
• 13:37
  Speaker 1: and one conspiracy count tied specifically to obstructing a non-profit audit.
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: The audit obstruction charge was precise in a way that
• 13:44
  Speaker 1: must have felt personal to every board member who had
• 13:46
  Speaker 1: ever floated the idea of an independent review and been
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: quietly talked out of it. Phil Rudd was indicted on
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: four wire fraud counts and one conspiracy count. Sutter Falls
• 13:57
  Speaker 1: Community Bank terminated his employment before the verdict. He lost
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: his professional licensing. The institution that had held both SFYAA's
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: operating credit line and three Riverside LLC accounts in the
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: same branch, without anyone raising a flag, was not named
• 14:12
  Speaker 1: as a co-conspirator. Prosecutors could not establish that to the
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: standard required. That fact sits in the record, unresolved without explanation.
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: Ed Taft did not go to trial. He pleaded to
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: a single fraud count in exchange for cooperation and received
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: two years probation and a restitution order. His testimony helped
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: lock the timeline on the sponsorship spread, specifically which remittance
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: figures Bauer had directed and which ones Taft had simply
• 14:39
  Speaker 1: processed without knowing the full picture. That distinction mattered at sentencing,
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: if not in moral terms. Bauer was convicted on 10
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: of the 12 fraud counts, plus both conspiracy-adjacent charges. Sentenced
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: to 11 years federal, he served eight. Eight years for
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: an operation that had run, in one form or another,
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: since the mid-1990s. The arithmetic on that is uncomfortable to
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: sit with. Keith Vickers was not charged. His cooperation agreement held.
• 15:07
  Speaker 1: He paid $ 41, 000 in restitution. a figure the court derived
• 15:11
  Speaker 1: from his direct financial benefit from the equipment ghost billing.
• 15:14
  Speaker 1: He was permanently barred from fiduciary or contracting roles at non-profits.
• 15:19
  Speaker 1: The bar was broad and specific at the same time.
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: It covered exactly the kind of role he had held,
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: and no other kind. He continued his Wednesday visits to Raymond.
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: The soup from Hazel's on Birch Connector Road. Nothing in
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: the public record changed that. SFYAA went into court supervised
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: ruck structuring in the spring of 2012. The new board
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: rewrote vendor policy from the ground up. Registration reopened in
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: August of 2012. Parents brought their children back to Lakemont Park.
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: The fence lines were mostly bare that first season. The
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: banners that had funded a decade of quiet theft were gone,
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: and no replacement sponsors had been locked in yet. For
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: one summer, the outfield at Lakemont looked the way it
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: might have looked before Bauer ever walked into a board
• 16:02
  Speaker 1: meeting and introduced himself as a civic partner. There is
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: a detail that the record preserves without fully explaining. and
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: it has stayed in the story from the beginning. Keith
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: Vickers started keeping his handwritten reconciliation ledger in 2008, three
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: years before the safe ended up in the retention pond.
• 16:18
  Speaker 1: He drove a 10-year-old Silverado and coached 11 and under
• 16:21
  Speaker 1: baseball on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons and brought soup to
• 16:25
  Speaker 1: his brother every Wednesday. His ex-wife Pam said he was
• 16:28
  Speaker 1: always slightly more afraid of things than he let on.
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: He had been inside the scheme for eight years by
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: the time he started writing those columns down, and he
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: wrote them down anyway. Christine Vogel, BIEC, Christine Vogel, the
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: financial crimes investigator who cracked the concession flatness and matched
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: Marsh's handwritten sponsor ledger against the Taft remittances, said she
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: was never entirely sure whether Vickers kept the ledger because
• 16:50
  Speaker 1: he wanted the scheme to be visible, or because he
• 16:53
  Speaker 1: needed to tell himself he had the numbers under control.
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: Those are very different things, and yet the ledger existed
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: either way. The word at the top, written in blue ballpoint,
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: was reconciled. It is the kind of word that can
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: mean the accounts are balanced. It can also mean that
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: a person has made a kind of peace with something
• 17:11
  Speaker 1: they are not proud of. Vickers never fully clarified which
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: he meant. Vogel said she stopped expecting him to. What
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: the ledger did, regardless of why it was written, was
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: create a document that could not be explained away. Not
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: by a competent attorney. Not by a sympathetic account of
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: confused record-keeping. Not by anything. When Bauer's attorneys tried to
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: argue that the equipment discrepancies were administrative errors, the ledger
• 17:35
  Speaker 1: was there. Signed. Dated. Labeled. The scheme ran for a
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: decade at SFYAA because it was designed to be invisible.
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: Flat numbers that looked like stability. Shell vendors that looked
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: like civic partnership. A treasurer at the bank who killed
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: audit proposals before they could take root. An equipment coordinator
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: whose salary was funded by the very entity billing against
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: the organization he served. What ended it was not a regulator.
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: It was a birdwatcher at 7.40 in the morning and
• 18:04
  Speaker 1: a foam-lined safe with the lid forced back and a
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: word written in blue ballpoint by a man who was,
• 18:10
  Speaker 1: by his ex-wife's account, always slightly more afraid of things
• 18:13
  Speaker 1: than he let on. Gloria Erickson called the non-emergency line
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: because she did not know what else to do with
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: what she had found. She was looking for herons. The
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: fence lines at Lakemont came back the following year. Different sponsors,
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: different vendors, proper contracts. 4,000 children registered that season. Most
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: of them never knew what had happened in the years before.
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: Most of them never knew what had happened in the
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: years before. Never knew there had been a break at all.
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: Never knew anything except the ordinary Tuesday when the phone
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: rang and someone they recognized said their name. This show
• 18:45
  Speaker 1: is made by Obamiti.