STUMP » Articles » Followup on One of the Fraud and Pensions Cases » 27 January 2016, 18:13

It’s not directly about fraud and pensions, but it relates to one of the stories I put in my most recent post on yanking pensions of fraudulent officials:

“Now that Lake County authorities have ruled the death of Fox Lake police Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz a suicide, the village is expected to tackle the question of what pension benefits his surviving family members will receive.”

….
This does not mean that criminal officials shouldn’t get their pensions yanked, but it does highlight a secondary problem: our criminal justice system does not try dead people. So a criminal may think a way out for their family is to kill themselves.

This is an incentive that shouldn’t exist, either, but you want to make sure that due process is involved in yanking a pension.

There’s more explanation of that at the link.

The gist was that the cop was suspected of fraud. He committed suicide in September 2015, trying to stage it to look like a homicide to escape detection (maybe? it didn’t work.)

There’s an ugly follow-up: his widow has been indicted for money laundering and other charges:

The wife of disgraced Fox Lake police Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz has been charged with financial crimes, authorities said Wednesday.

Melodie Gliniewicz, 51, of Antioch was indicted by a Lake County grand jury and charged with four counts of disbursing charitable funds without authority for personal benefit or use, and two counts of money laundering. If found guilty of the most serious felony charges, she could be sentenced to three to seven years in prison.

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The charges are related to an investigation that began in November into the finances surrounding the Fox Lake Law Enforcement Explorer Post 300, authorities said.

Authorities said in a news release Wednesday the Lake County Major Crime Task Force investigators found inconsistencies in financial documents for Joe Gliniewicz while investigating his September death. During that investigation, task force officials determined Gliniewicz had killed himself and staged the death as a homicide to cover up the financial thefts.

Joe Gliniewicz oversaw the Fox Lake Explorers for more than two decades, authorities said, and Melodie Gliniewicz held a fiduciary role in the group as an adult adviser.

Of course, it may be that she had nothing to do with her husband’s supposed embezzlement. That will wait for trial.

But if she was complicit… yeah, that’s just a plain ole ugly situation.

To be sure, embezzlement happens at all sorts of charities, but when one is running a charity that’s related to the police… that’s a big abuse of trust.

If it turns out that Mrs. Gliniewicz was involved in embezzling funds from the charity, I imagine the pension board will not feel so disturbed over cutting the benefits.