Rita Crundwell and the Dixon Embezzlement - Chicago magazine - December 2012 - Chicago: The mayor would have been even more aghast had he known what the world soon would: the amount the feds allege that Crundwell stole. Since 2006, according to an indictment filed in May in U.S. District Court, Crundwell filched some $30 million, or an average of $5 million a year—more than half of Dixon’s entire operating budget over that period. From 1990 to 2006, she stole another $23 million, the feds say, bringing the grand total to an unthinkable $53 million.
If the allegations against Crundwell prove true, she not only is the biggest municipal embezzler in U.S. history but ranks fifth among embezzlers of any kind, says Christopher Marquet, CEO of Marquet International, a Boston-based security consulting firm that specializes in employee misconduct. And though the amount that Crundwell is alleged to have stolen does not reach Madoffian proportions, it’s still “an outrageously, grotesquely huge amount,” Marquet says. “That she was able to do that and no one smelled it—it almost seems not possible.”