As part of a wave of pardons, President Joe Biden commuted the sentence of Rita Crundwell, an Illinois public servant convicted in 2013 of the worst embezzlement of government funds in U.S. history.
Biden granted 39 presidential pardons on Thursday, commuting the sentences of an incredible 1,500 convicted felons, including Mr. Crundwell, in the largest single-day clemency act in modern history. , CBS News reported.
Crundwell was the comptroller of Dixon, Illinois, famous as the childhood hometown of Ronald Reagan. But investigators eventually discovered that she had been funneling millions of dollars a year from city funds into her personal accounts for more than two decades to fund her lavish lifestyle and business.
Crundwell was sentenced to 19 years in prison after Democratic Mayor Jim Burke finally began to suspect something was wrong with the town's struggling finances. Mr. Burke, who? passed He resigned in 2016 and then in 2015 following Crundwell's conviction. Additionally, the entire city government was cleared of offices and reformed from a committee style of leadership to a management style.
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Investigators found that Crundwell funneled city cash into several accounts. One is called the Capital Development Fund, and the other she named the Sewer Capital Development Account (RSCDA), which she devised to sound like the city's official account. She would create false work invoices, write checks to pay the invoices, and deposit them into the RSCDA account.
Ms Crundwell was discovered while on vacation and her temporary representative discovered an RSCDA account which she deemed suspicious. She and Mayor Burke then went to the FBI and reported the fraud. Mr. Crundwell was arrested in 2012 and sentenced on February 14, 2013 to 19 years and seven months in federal prison for embezzling more than $53 million in city funds. She pleaded guilty in November 2012 to a fraud case that began in 1990.
The 71-year-old former city employee was scheduled to serve until October 2029, but thanks to Biden's commutation, he ended up serving only about 11 of the 19 years in prison.
Mr. Crundwell admitted to using the stolen city funds for personal expenses and to fund a large-scale horse breeding operation. She had also purchased several homes in Illinois and Florida. Still, in 2020 she filed an application for mercy release with the warden of the federal prisoner of war camp in Waseca, Minnesota. A year later, she was granted release and ordered to home confinement at her brother's home in Illinois.
Dixon city officials who had opposed early release also expressed outrage that President Joe Biden commuted Crandwell's sentence and allowed him to move freely from his brother's home.
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Dixon manager Danny Langrossa released a statement expressing the town's anger.
The City of Dixon is shocked and outraged by President Biden's announcement that he has pardoned Rita Crundwell for the largest local embezzlement in our nation's history. This is a complete travesty of justice and a slap in the face to the entire community.
“While today's news is unimaginable, the City of Dixon is in an incredible situation today. We remain focused on the future and working to capitalize on the momentum we have created.
Former U.S. Marshal Jason Wojlo, who worked on Mr. Crudwell's criminal investigation, was also disgusted by the president's actions on Mr. Crudwell's behalf.
“Well, I think today she's dancing on the street in Dixon on her way to work because she just fooled the president of the United States,” Wojlo said. “This official act has made decades of hard work go to waste.”
“I'm shocked. It's an outrage. I also spoke today to people close to Rita Cromwell,” Wojlo added. “She has no regrets. She never did that. Her only regret is that she got caught.”
Lee Arellano, a Republican who became mayor after Crundwell's conviction and ran to clean up the mess he left behind, argued that Biden had simply shown that “crime pays.”
“Perhaps they are labeled as non-violent offenders,” he added. “If you think after robbing a town of $54 million that violence will go down and public safety won't be affected, you're wrong. Stealing 10 to 20 percent of a city's budget will absolutely increase crime.”
Arellano also noted that the city has yet to fully recover from Crundwell's crimes.
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