Let’s
Write a Mystery: Embezzlement
“The
Turkey Hawk Brief—A Key West Mystery”
Martha K. Huggins, Ph.D.
The Pitch: Everyone’s Good Ole Boy meets a softball
champ at work. When the “Softball Queen”
gets buried in debt from wagering in Good Ole Boy’s personally lucrative sports
betting operation, she turns to pilfering
money from her employer, just a
little at a time over four years. Fortunately
her colleague, “Turkey Hawk Stan”--as Good Ole Boy is called--is their
employer’s computer programming expert. He
can help hide “Softball Queen’s” monthly revenue shortfalls. But her alleged thefts are very belatedly discovered and this happens
at the same time as “Turkey Hawk Sam” is arrested for running an illegal sports
betting operation.
My
mystery will to show that “Softball Queen’s” and “Turkey Hawk Stan’s” actions
were interrelated and that even ‘good’ people can commit ‘bad’ acts. A “thriller,” this mystery novel places the
action inside a government agency where elected and appointed officers see
their careers ending if their agency’s
money problems cannot be contained and “Turkey Hawk’s” illegal gambling
business shown to exist outside his
place of employment-- government agency.
Mid-way through my novel, we see
the officials who fired “Softball Queen,” shaking in their boots because some
were Good Ole “Turkey Hawk Stan’s” sports bidders. As such these officials were not in a
position to investigate too deeply into the financial and gambling shenanigans within
their agency.
On the edge of a precipice stand
regular conventional politicos and managers who have everything to lose from
the ‘truth’ being disclosed: How will
the ending look?
Rooted in Real Events
All good
mysteries are linked to real-life events.
So let’s start with our own Monroe County School Board. It has just decided not to hire an expensive forensic accountant to examine the county
school system’s financial accounts:
That’s actually very scripted behavior for an entity that ‘loses’ other
people’s money: hiding
losses is ‘good business.’ Whether the entity is a government agency, bank,
public corporation, medium or small business, not-for-profit organization, or
political party, the most common action in the case of financial shortfalls is to hide missteps and swallow the loss. The organization’s reputation is saved. Unless, that is, the shortfall makes it into the media Normally, however, a whole lot of white-collar criminals in positions of trust get away
with stealing a whole lot of money, especially because pursuing a fraud will surely expose the
complicity of higher-ups.
Setting the Stage
The
Monroe County School Superintendant’s computer tech “Joe Weed” Clements—an
employee of Monroe County—has been
arrested for allegedly running a sports betting operation. Given the fast-paced nature of betting one can assume that posting bets would have
taken up at least some of “Joe Weed’s” on-duty hours. A mystery writer might easily
posit for the story’s purposes that her story’s “Turkey Hawk Stan” was using
the County’s computer and software to run his personally lucrative betting
operation.
And
there’s a nice plot twist; how about “Turkey Hawk Stan” being involved in a school’s financial shortfall allegedly perpetrated by “Softball Queen”? Again, connecting mystery fiction to the real,
ELC Manager, Tina Godfrey, a softball player on Key West’s “‘Better Than Sex’
coed softball team…was named [in 2012] Key West Softball Athlete of the Week.”[i] I’d say, ‘You cannot make this stuff up,’ if
I were not proposing doing just that for a mystery novel.
Ramping Up the Mystery. It tweaks one’s imagination that two Monroe County employees—the
ELC’s Tina Godfrey and “Joe Weed”
Clements, a computer programmer-- had
their apparently separate ‘irregularities’ discovered within about twenty-four hours of one another. As police detectives so often say, ‘There are
no coincidences where crime is concerned.’
So I ask, for the benefit of my mystery
novel, could the “Softball Queen” be one of “Turkey Hawk Stan’s” sports betting
clients? Could “Softball Queen” have
gotten into deep debt via “Turkey Hawk’s” sports betting operation? Did she need quick money to pay her debts? Might I assume that “Softball
Queen” took small sums of money each week, since most do, at relatively low-risk? The real world teaches that if employee theft goes unnoticed over a period of time, then administrative
oversight has been absent?
Linking Social Facts to Mystery
Fiction. These teaser
questions and presumptions are mystery
novel’s grist. Some social science facts
will help to anchor the plot: Women commit “employee theft”; men “embezzle”--
which points to the likely social class of
one of my main characters, “Softball
Queen”: women overall earn much less
than men, even for the same work; a day care manager certainly makes far less
than an accountant or a computer specialist.
“Softball Queen” will be a working class women who helps support a family of, let’s say, four people.
As
for what motivated “Softball Queen’s” theft, criminologist Donald Cressey’s 53 year-old research in embezzlement[ii]—still
the gold standard for those in white-collar-crime
security work—shows that the turning point
for a person who is taking in and recording other people’s money comes
when this worker faces a financial crisis perceived
by this person as ‘un-shareable’
with anyone: an un-payable gambling or credit
card debt, for example. This worker slowly ‘pays-away’ her debt illegally by using the easily-accessible money
that she controls.
Computer
specialists have been added as threats to workplace finances:
Today,
the computer provides the most available means to commit embezzlement, and
knowledge relating to the manipulation of large-scale computerized financial
databases has become the primary tool of the embezzler…. Embezzlement can be
classified as a ‘computer-assisted’ crime [:]… the computer is used in a
supporting capacity. The specific crime, such as embezzlement, predates the
introduction of computers.”[iii]
It
helps to hide employee theft if the thief is in connected to a computer ‘jock” who understands financial management records and their
management and manipulation much better than others in the
organization.
Enriching
the Plot
Who better to
help “Softball Queen” pay back her debt to “Turkey Hawk Stan” than “Turkey Hawk
Stan” himself, the organization’s computer
jock. But as a writer I must keep the central characters be squeaky clean: “Turkey Hawk Stan” will raise money for a sick
friend; “Softball Queen,” a skilled athlete, will be a dedicated wife and mother. Here the place for a plot twist: today’s theft
prevention experts remind clients of embezzlement’s,
“10-10-80 rule: 10 percent of people will never steal
no matter what, 10 percent of people will steal at any opportunity, and the
other 80 percent of employees will go either way depending on how they
rationalize a particular opportunity.”[iv] So how do otherwise ‘good’ people come to
carry out fraud against their employer, given the likelihood that most people will
act criminally?
The Best Mysteries Include Powerful People
Security specialists recommend what any government agency or
business that handles money should
already know: There must be regular
mechanisms for monitoring employees who interact with money and unannounced
audits must be carried out regularly throughout the entity’s finance system. Administrators
who do not promote these actions or equally effective ones, are part of the
problem. The pattern seems to be for
administrators to hide losses and hope that the theft goes away. Simply put, hiding losses is ‘good business’: Many business owners prefer to swallow
financial losses and keep their
management reputation intact. Consequently,
a great many white-collar law violators in positions of trust get away with
stealing a great deal of money. Many
policemen assert that ‘the system is stacked in the
embezzler's favor.’
Write me if you
can suggest an ending for, The Turkey
Hawk Brief—a Key West Mystery
[ii] https://books.google.com/books/about/Other_People_s_Money.html?id=FgAFAAAAMAAJ).Cressey’s
mentor Edwin Sutherland, also of the Chicago School of Criminology, came first
with, White Collar Crime (1949)
[iii] http://faculty.uml.edu/jbyrne/44.203/digital%20crime.pdf
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