Rita crundwell family7/23/2023 ![]() ![]() But accountability for the people who hadn’t done anything specifically wrong - but were seen as having failed nevertheless - would be a harder and longer process. She pleaded guilty to wire fraud and in February 2013 a judge sentenced her to nearly 20 years in prison. “Would he turn all financial controls over to an employee of his business, with the almost total lack of oversight that this city had had? Would he run his business that way? That’s the way he ran Dixon.” There was an ongoing FBI investigation, and only so much officials could say in their own defense, even while they grappled with their own anger and sense of betrayal by a close colleague.Īccountability was surprisingly easy, at least when it came to Crundwell herself. “Mayor Burke has his own business,” one speaker said. The other council members mostly kept mum as Dixonites demanded resignations, or, in rare cases, defended the city and its management. ![]() ![]() “It’d be nice to see you on a regular basis and not when there’s such huge drama here in our city,” remarked Councilman Dennis Considine dryly. But most of the standing-room-only crowd were new to the meeting. Citizens had come armed with justifiable questions about the performance of the people they had elected to protect their interests: How, in such a small town, could someone steal so much and get away with it for so long? How could the city’s leaders simply not catch on to the disappearance of tens of millions of dollars? The crowd included the usual gadflies - the man well-known for driving a Dodge truck around town with a sign accusing the mayor of being a “dictator on steroids ” the woman who had noticed a jump in her water bills and had taken to asking the council whether the pipes were lined with gold and a local businessman and Tea Party activist named Liandro Arellano, Jr., who liked to monitor the council’s doings and disliked Dixon’s archaic government structure. “That’s very indicative of Dixon at that time.”īut now the shock of April had become the simmering rage of early May. “Have you ever heard the phrase ‘We grew up poor, but we didn’t know it?’” asked Matthew Lenox, who was 16 at the time of the arrest and now works for the Dixon Chamber of Commerce. Police had stopped using the road along the picturesque Rock River as a speed trap because no one sped there anymore: The rutted pavement damaged cars at high speeds. He did not take questions.Ĭrundwell’s arrest itself had begun to answer many of the more basic questions: why city budgets had faced such steep cuts for years why some municipal vehicles had holes in the floors and the ambulance spewed smoke why sidewalks were crumbling and pipes disrepaired to the degree that, within a few years after Crundwell’s arrest, a sinkhole would open up on West 7 th Street like some kind of ham-handed metaphor for disappearing taxpayer dollars. Burke vowed to help the FBI investigate and recover the assets. Yes, the city had struggled financially, then-Mayor Jim Burke acknowledged at the press conference announcing Crundwell’s arrest in April 2012, but Dixon was no different than many other communities around the country: Declining tax revenues, tardy payments from the state, rising health care costs and infrastructure investments all added up, he said, to a “plausible reason for the financial problems our community is facing.” Burke did not note that all of this had happened as Crundwell herself was building a nationally renowned horse-breeding empire, racking up awards and riches while only making about $80,000 a year in her day job. The bank that handled city accounts had never flagged anything amiss. Dixon’s finances had not only passed annual independent audits but also audit reviews by the state of Illinois. What had so enraged the citizens of Dixon was that until late 2011, no one seemed to notice this theft – for some 20 years.
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