Handler of Trumann firm’s books sentenced to five years in prison

A Mammoth Spring man who stole more than $9 million during 21 1⁄2 years as the accountant for a family-owned manufacturing business in Trumann was sentenced Tuesday to five years in federal prison.

Edward M. Cooper Jr. used his ill-gotten gains to travel extensively, shower his wife with jewelry and furs, and build a $2 million cabin on the Spring River in Fulton County, he admitted when he pleaded guilty to bank fraud in January before Chief U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr.

But even after he turned the cabin and other assets over to Roach Manufacturing Corp. to pay back some of the stolen funds, and even after the accounting firm he worked for settled a lawsuit to help cover the theft, the 71-year-old Cooper still owes more than $7.4 million in restitution.

It’s a figure the company doesn’t ever expect to recoup in full. But Mike Roach, whose father founded the company in 1969, said after court Tuesday that “we’re doing a lot better now,” with Cooper off the payroll.

Roach is vice president of manufacturing for the company, which makes and sells industrial conveyor belts. He said the company donated the river house to John 3:16 Ministries, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center for men in Independence County. The ministry plans to name the building Landon’s House, in memory of Katelyn Furnish’s 22-year-old son, Landon, who died last year in a car accident.

Furnish, who is Mike Roach’s niece, is a vice president of the company and discovered the embezzlement after becoming the company’s financial manager in October 2017. After discovering some irregularities, she asked Cooper for bank statements but didn’t get them. Then she reviewed the statements online and found an April 2016 check payable to Cooper for $39,947 on which the names of the company’s president and secretary/treasurer were forged.

A subsequent review of bank records indicated that the check was only one of 138 unauthorized checks of varying amounts that Cooper had written to himself on the company’s account over the years, according to federal prosecutors.

Cooper said in January that he provided summaries of the company’s bank statements, rather than the actual statements, to the company. Defense attorney Bill Stanley of Jonesboro has said that the statements themselves were mailed to the company, but no one ever opened them. He said the company instead “just put them in a box.”

Roach said Tuesday that the settlement with the accounting firm, Osborn & Osborn, was donated and shared with the company’s 350 “honest and hardworking employees.”

In fact, he and Furnish told a reporter, the company is thriving now that Cooper is no longer there — so much so that in May it shared $1 million with its employees.

Roach said the family trusted Cooper and never suspected him of stealing from the business. He said Cooper spent money flamboyantly, but told people it was because he had inherited $4 million from an uncle.

He wasn’t a certified public accountant but worked for the Jonesboro accounting firm, through which he performed work for Roach, from November 1996 through May 2018.

“I really want to apologize to all the Roaches. They trusted me implicitly, and I took full advantage of that,” Cooper told the judge. “They treated me like family, and I didn’t respond that way.”

While Stanley asked the judge to consider Cooper’s age in imposing a sentence below the 51-63 months suggested by federal sentencing guidelines, Mike Roach asked for the harshest sentence possible.

“In this case,” Marshall said, “that would be 30 years. That would not be a just sentence.”

Still, the judge said, a significant penalty was needed to account for the amount of the theft, the length of time it was carried out and the fact that Cooper took advantage of a position of trust. Marshall said he also wanted to deter others from committing similar crimes.

He told Cooper, “you’re not a young man, it is true, but I believe you will live through that [five-year sentence] and come out able to make good on your promise” to pay the rest of the money back.

In a statement Mike Roach made to the court on behalf of the company, he said, “my father started out building conveyors in a garage, and today we operate three locations in Arkansas totaling 975,000 square feet. In 2019, we shipped over $60 million in equipment through North America.”

When his father started the business, he said, “he began a long-standing business relationship and friendship with Jim Osborn, an accountant in Jonesboro. ... In the early 1980s, Jim brought in a young accountant to help him — Ed Cooper.”

Over time, Cooper became responsible for all of the company’s accounting, bookkeeping, advising, financial reporting and tax filings, and even handled personal taxes and accounting for many members of the Roach family, Roach said.

“He literally had the keys to the business,” Roach told

the judge. “We all trusted him and relied on him.”

When Roach’s sister, the company treasurer, developed cancer in the early 1990s, she turned many of her duties over to Cooper, and “that’s when we believe the deceit and theft started, although our records have only allowed us to go back to 1995 to verify his theft,” he told the judge.

Cooper and his former wife, LaNita, had four children when she filed for divorce in December of 2018. Roach Manufacturing intervened in the divorce, filed in Craighead County Circuit Court, and the Coopers agreed to turn over the Spring River house. The divorce decree, issued in September, released LaNita Cooper and the children from liability for Edward Cooper’s actions.

Bryan Tuggle, who has operated the 3:16 Ministry for 18 years, said later Tuesday that he plans to use the house for special events and a work base for the 185 men currently enrolled in the program. He said they perform service work as a key component of their rehabilitation, and “there’s lots of people up and down that river that we can help.”

“This is how God works,” Tuggle said. “This helps them heal,” he added, referring to the men in the program and the Roach family.

He said the Landon House will bear a plaque with these words: “This is a house built by the devil, taken over by God and named for an Angel.”

CORRECTION: Gordon Rather, an attorney for the Osborn & Osborn accounting firm in Jonesboro, said the accounting firm for which Edward M. Cooper worked settled a claim brought against it by Roach Manufacturing of Trumann, but for “considerably less” than $500,000. He said the exact amount is confidential. A previous version of this story incorrectly reported that a $500,000 insurance settlement described by Roach Manufacturing officials was tied to the accounting firm.

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