Rita crundwell family8/4/2023 ![]() “When you think about an administrative assistant who has access to a corporate credit card, it’s easy to make personal purchases with that. “A lot of times women are in more mid– to- lower-level jobs in government, or corporations,” says Pope. found that 61 percent of the perpetrators were women, and that the majority of embezzlers-nearly 70 percent-held bookkeeping or finance positions (most embezzlers were driven by a desire to live a richer lifestyle, not financial woes). A 2013 report on major embezzlement crimes in the U.S. “Rita was from the Dixon community, she went to high school there, and they were proud of her success she was one of the top quarter horse breeders in the country,” says Pope.īut other than the enormous amount of money she stole, Crundwell’s crime was also, in one sense, nothing unique. Watch an exclusive clip from All the Queen's Horses The scope of her breeding farm is truly awe-inspiring-the stables and barns seem to stretch on endlessly-as is her trophy room, literally filled floor to ceiling with the ribbons and plaques she won. You can get a sense of this from a sequence in the film that takes place at an auction of her stables, horses and breeding equipment organized by the U.S. She said enough things that were highly plausible.”īesides, Crundwell’s breeding success-and the extent of her holdings-was a source of local pride. “When she started saying, ‘I have an investor,’ those things are hard to verify, and they are believable. ![]() ![]() “We really don’t know where people who have money, where it’s coming from,” says Pope. Many Dixon locals also just assumed that her money came from an investor and her hugely successful horse breeding business. She led people to believe that her parents were investors in the Campbell’s Soup Company or that she had inherited money from a deceased boyfriend. It’s that lifestyle that seemed to be a red flag-especially given Crundwell’s $80,000 yearly salary-but Rita had that covered, too. Then she transferred money from legitimate city accounts to her fake one, and wrote checks to finance her lavish lifestyle. So the person who will handle everything, like Rita, you’re relieved about that, because no one else wants to.”Ĭrundwell’s process was a simple one, and one often used in fraud cases: she set up a secret city banking account, and made out phony invoices (179 in all) for imaginary capital improvement projects (one fake invoice for $350,000 was from the State of Illinois for a sewer project). ![]() “She had access, she was a trusted person, and oftentimes people don’t want to know about the money, the financial details. “Rita did it because Rita could,” says Kelly Pope, director of the documentary and an accounting professor at Chicago’s DePaul University. Why she did it, and how she got away with it for so long-a combination of misplaced trust, banking and auditing negligence, and a certain amount of small-town naiveté-is the subject of All the Queen’s Horses, a compelling documentary that enjoyed its world premiere at the Martha’s Vineyard African-American Film Festival, and will be released theatrically in the fall. The amount Crundwell embezzled is astonishing enough, but becomes even more mind-boggling because of the small size of the city she robbed. She used the money to finance a lavish lifestyle that included a Florida mansion, $2 million custom-made motor coach, spa visits, jewelry, and a horse breeding business that involved over 300 equines-and all this as her crimes caused a financial shortfall forcing Dixon to make cuts in many of its essential services. history.įor 20 years, Rita Crundwell, the city’s comptroller, used a secret bank account to steal over $53 million from a town whose annual budget never exceeded $8 million. A bucolic, all-American river town two hours west of Chicago, the boyhood home of Ronald Reagan, and victim of the largest case of municipal fraud in U.S.
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