Go big or go home.

I have written advice to those with a crooked bent before. I don’t advocate stealing or other criminal activity, but if you’re going to do it, steal big. Don’t throw away your life for some candy bars or a case of scotch. Steal enough money so you can live out the rest of your life comfortably in a country with no extradition treaty with the United States.

Two recent examples of people who followed this advice:

Amit Patel is a former office employee with the Jacksonville Jaguars. He was fired in February, and was charged this week with embezzling $22,221,454.40 from the team.

The filing alleges that Patel became the sole administrator in October 2019 of the Jaguars’ VCC program, which is a payment method that functions like a traditional credit card account but without a physical credit card. Certain employees were allowed to use the VCC program for business-related purchases and expenses. Patel is accused of duplicating legitimate expenses in an electronic ledger, inflating amounts of legitimate transactions and entering fictitious transactions, and then using the money for personal purchases.

Those personal purchases allegedly include “a condominium in Ponte Vedra Beach, a Tesla Model 3 sedan, cryptocurrency, chartering private jets, luxury hotel stays, a country club membership and luxury wrist watches.”

While Mr. Patel is, of course, innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, his attorney says he has a gambling addiction and was betting at FanDuel and DraftKings.

“approximately 99% of the misappropriated funds” were related to gambling losses.

By the way, NFL policy prohibits team employees from sports betting. I think NFL policy also prohibits embezzling $22 million from your team, but I don’t have a pointer to that section of the policy.

(Hattip to Lawrence on this, though I’m using a different link.)

Janet Yamanaka Mello was a civilian employee of the United States Army, working at Fort Sam Houston (down in San Antonio). She’s been charged with embezzling $100 million from the military 4-H program.

The alleged scheme took place while Mello worked for the Army as a civilian financial program manager at Fort Sam Houston. As part of her job, Mello determined whether 4-H Military Partnership Grant program funds were available for organizations that applied. Her supervisor would approve the funding award which she would sign off on and send to the Defense Financial Accounting Service. The service would cut and mail a check to the appropriate organization.
As part of Mello’s alleged scheme, she directed the funds to be sent to a UPS Store mailbox near San Antonio which she rented. Mello allegedly deposited the check into her own bank account.

Again, Ms. Mello is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 8th, 2023 at 11:55 am and is filed under Law, NFL, Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

One Response to “Go big or go home.”

  1. T Migratorious says:
    December 9, 2023 at 5:41 am

    Both embezzlers were very impressive. I’m not an accounting or financial type but it amazes me that these crimes weren’t detected earlier. When people in positions of trust live way, way beyond their means it’s a tipoff that something is wrong. I’ve worked in places where much smaller scale thieves got caught that way.

    But I guess I shouldn’t be surprise that DoD could be clueless about the disappearance of a mere $100 million.