Originally published at: Former Yale employee lived life of luxury while stealing more than $40 million from the university | Boing Boing
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This seems on-brand for someone following the footsteps of Elihu Yale.
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Once again it seems like the same traits that drive the willingness to pull such a swindle also drive the hubris to think you’ll never get caught so you don’t quit while you’re ahead.
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Petrone would order…thousands of items over the years…using the Yale School of Medicine’s money. She would then arrange to ship the stolen hardware…to a business in New York, in exchange for money once the electronics were resold.
Capitalism! Ain’t it wonderful?
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That’s just poor financial planning. For 40M and 10 years of work you should have a backup false identity and fuck off fund stashed away ready to go.
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How did no-one notice that she was ordering five million dollars worth of electronics every year? That is such poor oversight I’d being looking very carefully at all of the purchases made at Yale.
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If only she used some of that to make a donation to Yale, she’d be a student and they’d have excused it as a youthful indiscretion.
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Is it victim-blaming to feel this reflects very very very badly on what is supposed to be one of the world’s truly elite organizations?
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I mean, even just 5 million in a 2% account would net her $100k a year. I’d be happy as hell with that much.
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the unnamed company probably got most of the money.
while wikipedia says you can earn up 20%-50% of the stolen value of something by fencing, to me that seems quite high. that’s more likely what the fence is re/selling the item for – my bet would be she received something between 2-5% … and she’s returning 1.3%.
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That’s the smarter move: work the scam for three years, slowly escalating the amounts stolen, then reverse the process and she could walk away with $8- or 10-million after the fence company took its cut with no-one the wiser. Put it in an index fund and go by the conservative 4% rule and she’s taking out $300- or $400k per annum while the principal grows. She’d have to wait a bit longer for the houses and cars but they’d come in time without the risk of someone noticing.
Like most crooks who get away with something for long enough, though, she became greedy and careless.
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If Yale is anything like my campus (it isn’t, of course) then while this administrator was buying truckloads of expensive equipment without oversight, faculty would have needed to get at least three signatures to buy a pencil.
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If a university can lose $40m without noticing it, I feel that it might be over funded.
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Huh, I wonder where their auditors got their degrees from.
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8 years? $40,000,000? She had a good run.
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As with democracy, its the worst option, except for all the other ones.
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Yeah, $5mill/year is big money for an administrator; that’s college football coach territory.
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A university bureaucracy (or even a corporation internally if not externally) is basically a command economy rather than a capitalist market system. As we saw in the Soviet Union, people who had positions of power in a command economy could (and generally did) enrich themselves at the expense of their institutions. Most oligarchs of modern Russia were people who were in charge of something back in Soviet times and just rolled with it after the Soviet collapse.
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I think in trying to make an equivalence between corruption under capitalism and communism you are using a very poor example. Russia is hugely more corrupt now and enriches the corrupt far more than the Soviet Union did.
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10 years and 40 million? just one person ordering electronics? And nobody suspected anything? that is 4 million dollars stolen every year? seriously? Nobody saw anything?
I don’t buy it. I wonder who else was on that gig, I bet she was the front
Come on, I just got a rejection on my mileage expenses because the date on the VAT invoice for petrol was a day off the date I entered in the system. A grand total of 25 pounds, caught by the automatic audit on the system, it didn’t even make it to my boss for authorisation…
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