Looks like alleged theft by public officials isn’t limited to just downstate Illinois.
Or at least, it looks like upstate authorities are starting to see that it’s going on in their areas, too.
Up in Burnham, Illinois, a small suburb of Chicago (with a population of 4,500), an elected village clerk has been charged by the feds for allegedly filching village funds to the tune of $650,000 over the past ten years.
This poor gal, Nancy Dobrowski, has been the village clerk for the past three decades…but at age 70, she became the target of the feds after the office which she oversees was raided by the feds last May. She resigned and has been under investigation for a year now.
Yesterday, she was charged in federal court with a count of wire fraud and a count of filing a false federal tax return.
According to the Chicago Tribune:
Court records show Dobrowski and her husband filed for bankruptcy in 2004, the same year the charges alleged she began stealing from the village. The couple claimed to be more than $200,000 in debt, mostly from credit card spending. In the filing, Dobrowski listed her annual income as village clerk as about $37,000. Her husband reported working as a janitor for the local school district.
However, in 2012, she filed a tax return showing income of $309,181…which of course came to the feds’ attention.
Was it gambling income, or was she trying to use that as a cover for money allegedly stolen? Hard to say. But the evidence shows that she did have a gambling issue, and had had one since 2004.
You can read more about it at this link; kudos to the feds for going after those who allegedly are taking the peoples’ money…but there’s always more out there. After situations such as that with former Bridgeport mayor Max Schauf (as well as others such as Toni Hart, Cindy Crewell, and the latest to be charged, Kim Yost-Winningham), are authorities doing enough to curb this proclivity among some public officials? Your opinion welcome.