Three women who toiled for a combined century together at First National Bank of Lawrence County in Walnut Ridge could have taught the legendary bank robber Willie Sutton a thing or two when it came to the easiest and most lucrative way to rob one.
The trusted employees admit they used a mix of customer relationships, betrayal and stealthy teamwork over 10 years to steadily drain nearly $4 million from the respected bank established in 1919.
I can imagine the exploits of the trusted 61-year-old head teller Peggy Sutton (no relation to Willie), head cashier Cindy Tate, 57, and teller Brenda Montgomery, 57, being made into yet another one of those quirky independent Hollywood film. It has all the elements.
All three pleaded guilty in May as part of an agreement that netted each fewer than five years in federal prison.
In case you missed recent news accounts, the women's recipe for cooking their bank's books simmered a full decade. Then a perceptive employee in the bank's information technology department smelled something foul, which led to the three getting burned (sorry, couldn't resist).
What makes the story all the more intriguing for me is that while quietly peeling away money, much of it rightly belonging to the bank's 74 shareholders and some 60 employees, the three were able to keep auditors from discovering the thefts.
Sutton had been at First National 30 years, Montgomery for 35 and Tate, 37. All were home-grown, raised near Walnut Ridge, as were the bank's president, Milton Smith, and his two older sisters, Virginia Smith Fields and Elizabeth Smith.
The news account by reporter Linda Satter said all three Smiths and several shareholders and bank employees were in the courtroom of U.S. District Judge Kristine Baker last week where the Smith family and others delivered "scathing victim impact statements aimed at persuading the judge to put the women behind bars for as long as possible."
Their scheme worked to perfection for a long time. The forensic audit in 2015 found that between 2005 and April 2015, the total amount stolen from this small-town bank had reached an astounding $3,953,025. But how?
Satter's story reports that Assistant U.S. Attorney Angela Jegley said "the women's duties collectively put them in charge of reconciling cash in the teller drawer and the vault, and they conspired to take cash from the vault while coordinating their records to hide the thefts."
Since the bank always gave head cashier Tate advance notice of internal audits, when an audit alert went out, Tate arranged with her cohorts to bring in cash from branches to cover shortages in the main vault. Afterwards, the funds were returned to the branches.
Virginia Fields, who also happens to be a prosecutor for the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, said a female information technology employee became suspicious of Tate's refusal to let anyone else access records related to the women. She began monitoring their emails, and once she was certain a crime was unfolding, she reported it to the family.
Soon, an audit firm the bank had never used showed up to conduct a surprise review. According to Fields, Sutton was then confronted with the results. Sutton immediately confessed, then tried committing suicide with pills. Sutton soon outed her two partners in crime.
In the May agreement that allowed them to avoid a grand jury investigation and the possibility of paying a $1 million fine and up to 30 years in prison, the women each pleaded guilty to one count of bank fraud conspiracy and received sentences of 51 to 57 months. Each also must repay a third of the total amount stolen, or $1.317 million.
That seemingly light sentence of a "federally sponsored vacation" didn't sit well with the Smith family and other bank shareholders and employees. Prosecutors basically explained that accepting the employees' plea bargains upfront saved a lot of investigative time and money while securing their convictions.
Being from Harrison, I can relate when I hear the Smith family bemoan how this scandal has besmirched the hard-won reputation of an established bank in a values-laden community of nearly 5,000.
"During his tenure at the bank, my grandfather never received a salary," Fields told the judge. "The founding philosophy of this institution was not to garner profits, but to serve with great loyalty and commitment our banking family, customers and the farming community."
The defendants, she said, "engaged in a concerted effort to literally rob the graves" of her father and grandfather, resulting in "harm to the stellar business reputation and good will built by three generations of my family."
I can't help but believe these three women today are desperately wishing they could trade that $3.9 million for a return to their former lives with legitimate paychecks and the respect of Walnut Ridge.
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Mike Masterson's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at mmasterson@arkansasonline.com.
Editorial on 10/08/2016