Month: December 2018

The Embezzler

I can never again be around money that doesn’t belong to me because someone might embezzle it right under my nose — and I can’t take that chance.

If that happened some people would surely say, didn’t this happened once before when that guy was in charge?

Indeed it did.

The embezzler was the church secretary and I was the church treasurer when it started. Another man was treasurer and I was chairman of the Finance Committee when it ended, when the preacher got suspicious and blew the whistle.

If I had had any idea the woman was stealing money, I could have caught her myself. I was an investigative reporter. And I had complete access to the books, to every financial record at the church.

But I didn’t suspect.

I had questioned various errors she made in the church financial records and had tried, unsuccessfully, to get her fired for incompetence.  That’s almost funny when you think about it:  She wasn’t the one who was incompetent —she was just a crook — I was the one who was incompetent.

As chairman of the finance committee I had to swallow a bitter pill, I had to tell the congregation what had happened on my watch.  We hired an auditor to figure out, best we could, how much money had been taken and I reported that to the congregation, too.

Later on we had a church meeting to decide whether to prosecute.  My wife and I voted “Yes” along with a few other people. Most people voted “No,” that wouldn’t the Christian thing to do.

I was relieved.

I thought she should have been prosecuted but, for selfish reasons, I was glad she wasn’t. I wasn’t looking forward to testifying about the safeguards I and my committee had not instituted or the warning flags I had not recognized.

Coming Friday: The New Covenant

The Debacle

The first series I wrote after I became a full-time investigative reporter, in 1969, was successful.  It was called “A Sewer Named Sugar” and it exposed polluters of a creek that ran though the most popular park in Charlotte and then south, through its wealthiest neighborhoods.

The Sugar Creek series won some prizes, including the top prize for Public Service from N.C. Press Association, and it got me my first invitation to speak about my work, at what was then known as Queens College.

I didn’t prepare a talk, no need to. It was just class of students and I knew that creek story pretty well — I had just finished reporting it. I’d wing it, answer a few questions, and go back to work.

Well, turns out, it wasn’t a just class of students, it was an auditorium full of students. It was a symposium, and I wasn’t the only speaker. I was just the only one who was not prepared.

I embarrassed myself. If someone had had a hook to pull me off the stage no doubt they would have used it. I was more than embarrassed, I was humiliated.

In the years that followed I got many more opportunities to talk about my work, at more than a dozen universities and a number of journalism conferences.  Each and every time I was invited to speak I thought about that Queens College debacle.  And I made up my mind –when I finished talking the worst thing anyone was ever going to say about me was this:

“Well, he won’t very good but he sure was prepared.”

Coming Monday: The Embezzler