| A few notes: The missing amounts keep climbing; they seem to have settled around $44 Million. As far as we know. I am sorry about Natwar Gadhi's incompetence, we all thought he was doing a great job managing the District's finances. And finally, we had another case a few years ago that to my mind was even worse: the case of Barbara Bullock, who was the chairman of the Washington Teachers' Union. She embezzled more than $5 million from the teachers! They had a TV crew filming the perp walk of all her ill gotten gains from her house to the evidence van. But they didn't perp walk the things I wanted to see most: her dozens and dozens of wigs. |
The courthouse files look like the Christmas list of a high-society fashion maven with a purse fetish: mink coats, jewelry, Faberge eggs, a Mercedes Benz and more than 100 handbags and wallets with designer names like Chanel, Hermes and Louis Vuitton. Those are among the items the FBI found at the Washington home of Harriette Walters, who until recently was an $81,000-a-year city tax official.
Her salary was a pittance compared with the tens of millions of dollars prosecutors say she and at least five others stole in what may be the biggest embezzlement case in the city's history.
Authorities say Walters was the ringleader of a scheme in which she and the others wrote themselves bogus property-tax refund checks. The scam went on for seven years until a bank employee last summer noticed irregularities in the checks. The rip-offs were so brazen that one $346,000 check was made out to a fictitious company the embezzlers named "Bilkemor LLC."
The audacious scheme has been an embarrassment for the city's finance chief, Natwar Gandhi, who has been praised for helping to produce surpluses and strong bond ratings for Washington, a city that was headed toward insolvency in the 1990s after years of mismanagement. |