Latest / Heist Masterminds / The Courthouse Cash Trail: Ferrets, Retrofit, and a $412K Vanish

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The Courthouse Cash Trail: Ferrets, Retrofit, and a $412K Vanish · Heist Masterminds

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: The courthouse cash trail. Ferrets. Retro. Ferrets. And the $ 412, 000 vanish.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: A woman walking her rescue greyhound found $ 41, 600 in banded
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: $ 50 bills stamped with Palomar County Superior Court. Evidence numbers
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: stuffed inside a sealed waterproof bag in a drainage culvert.
• 0:28
  Speaker 1: Months later, investigators pieced together how over $ 400, 000 drifted out
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: of a courthouse without a forced entry. How did routine
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: retrofit work? Badge logs, two diabetic ferrets, and a property
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: and evidence technician's predictable schedule let thousands of dollars slip
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: away in fragments. In this episode, we lay out the
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: sequence of discoveries and the occupational links that connected courthouse
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: staff Subcontractors and a security installer to missing evidence money.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: And we follow the question that kept investigators working for months.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: Which parts of routine access were exploited and who never
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: had to touch bulk cash? Person. Frank Erickson, person. Carla Simmons, person.
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: Richard Hunter event. Money found on a Thursday morning walk. Amount, $ 41, 600.
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: The waterproof contractor's bag contained $ 41, 600 in banded $ 50 bills
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: stamped with official courthouse evidence control numbers. Frank Erickson worked
• 1:36
  Speaker 1: in the Palomar County Sheriff's Office property and evidence room
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: for 11 years and was 44 years old. Erickson was $ 90, 000
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: in debt to a private lender named Douglas Watt by
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: autumn 2019. a debt that began roughly 18 months earlier
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: at about $ 4, 000. Retrofit-related entries show the money moved through
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: the basement maintenance corridor on 11 separate occasions between March
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: and September 2019. Carla Simmons badged into the corridor on
• 2:10
  Speaker 1: seven of those 11 sessions. Joel Vargas was involved in
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: the other four sessions and was eight months into a
• 2:16
  Speaker 1: part-time evidence technician role.