More Embezzlement! This time, “Public Servants”
Missouri, and St. Louis County especially, has a large number of small cities. I previously lived in Crystal Lake Park, which is and was the smallest city in the state with 250 houses and about 500 residents, and is approximately half a square mile in area. I ran for Alderman with the platform of abolishing the city because it was simply unneeded. I lost, but later it became apparent that the well-meaning amateurs running it had made some zoning errors that cost the city about $450,000.
Many similar but larger cities are run by amateurs, some well-meaning but few who know how to prevent fraud.
Recently two former clerks in Flordell Hills, who wrote themselves hundreds of checks amounting to roughly $647,000, were sentenced to prison. Maureen Woodson, 68, the former city clerk, was sentenced to 18 months in prison and ordered to repay the $487,673 that she stole. Donna Thompson, 76, who worked as Woodson's assistant, was sentenced to a year and a day for stealing $159,903. They had pleaded guilty to charges in February, 2023.
The two best friends who "happened to be White" (some of you may get the George Carlin reference) spent six years writing themselves more than 600 checks and using city money for gambling and personal expenses. In the process, they cost the city of roughly 800 people, roughly half of whom live in poverty, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Flordell Hills has an annual budget of around $400,000.
The embezzlement forced Flordell Hills to borrow money to pay bills and contractors. Street and sewer repairs stalled, and the city couldn't benefit from federal COVID-19 pandemic financial aid it received in 2020 and 2021. City officials stopped taking salaries to keep the city afloat, and employees volunteered to repair equipment and mow lawns.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Hal Goldsmith said the case "is maybe the worst" example of public corruption he has prosecuted. "This is a Black community, more than half are living below the poverty line. They're surviving," Goldsmith said in an interview. "The harm this caused to them is staggering."
Woodson and Thompson lived together and suffered from an uncontrollable gambling addiction that drove them to steal, but otherwise, they had an upstanding public and private life, the two women's attorneys and family told the court. Before working for Flordell Hills, both women had raised families and retired from careers as clerical administrators with the Missouri Board of Probation and Parole.
Woodson, in a letter to the court, said gambling "replaced an emptiness in my life" after her husband and her mother both died in 2006. She retired from the probation and parole board the next year and was raising her 14-year-old child solo, she said.
"Your honor, there has not been one night since this case started that I do not ask for forgiveness from my Higher Power," Woodson said. "I take full responsibility and regret wholeheartedly the wrongs I have committed."
Flordell Hills had tried to prevent fraud by requiring at least two signatures on checks, Goldsmith said, but Woodson and Thompson got around the rule by forging signatures of the mayor and treasurer. Small cities like Flordell Hills lack the means to have strict oversight, and rely on "their trusted employees," Goldsmith said.
Prosecutors sought at least two years and three months imprisonment for Woodson, and a year and nine months for Thompson, citing the seriousness of the case and the intense harm to residents of Flordell Hills.
"Public humiliation" from the high-profile corruption case was already a punishment, said Dan Juengel, attorney for Woodson.
I know that defense attorneys are supposed to do their best, but Mr. Juengel has hutzpah! The way I figure it, Woodson made $325,000 per year for her 18 months in Club Feb, and Thompson $159,000 -- in addition to their regular salaries. I know a lot of people who would be willing to be humiliated for that kind of dough and relax in a low-security prison. At least their buddies on the Missouri Board of Probation and Parole won't have jurisdiction over letting them out because this was a federal offense!
These women must have misunderstood the term “Public Servant.” Their jobs were to serve the public, not themselves!