In this week’s Curious City episode, Rita Crundwell gets busted. But first, there’s a story about the first public employee to embezzle money from Dixon. As former mayor Jim Dixon tells it, his great-great-great grandfather John Dixon, the city’s founder, was the local supervisor for a statewide road-, canal-, and railroad-building project. After the project was completed, he sent his clerk, Orrin Hamlin, to Springfield to collect the $11,400 reimbursement. The comptroller paid Hamlin in cash. Hamlin boarded a boat to return to Dixon, where he was lured into a poker game “for the first and last time.” Thinking he had the best hand at the table, Hamlin wagered $8,000 of Dixon’s money. As it turned out, he only had the second-best hand. John Dixon was ruined financially.

“That wasn’t the first time a city employee would drain Dixon until it was broke,” says narrator Alexa Burke.

“Yeah,” agrees Jim Dixon. “Dixon got stuck twice.”

So how did Dixon discover its hard-working farm girl comptroller embezzled $53 million from the city? Crundwell had established a secret bank account, the Reserve Sewer Development Construction Account, into which she deposited payments from the state of Illinois, and out of which she wrote checks to herself. To ensure that no other Dixon city employees learned of the fund’s existence, Crundwell always went to the post office to pick up the city’s mail, which included bank statements, or had a family member collect it. 

Since Crundwell spent Dixon’s money to buy and show quarter horses, it’s appropriate that her crimes were discovered when she took off work to attend a horse show, to which she drove in her $2 million Liberty Coach, hauling horses in a trailer labeled “RC.” In October 2011, while Crundwell traveled the horse show circuit, she left city clerk Kathy Swanson in charge of Dixon’s finances. As Swanson was putting together a treasurer’s report for the City Council, she realized she needed the city’s bank statements. Swanson asked the bank to fax them to City Hall.

“I saw this one account that I had never heard of before,” Swanson tells Curious City. “It was RSCDA. And what I noticed on it was three large deposits for that month. It was $300,000, and it was in care of Rita Crundwell.”

Swanson informed Mayor Jim Burke. Burke called the FBI. The FBI issued a grand jury subpoena for the bank statements. For the next six months, as the feds investigated, Swanson had to keep her mouth shut every time she saw Crundwell write a check, even though she knew the checks were made out to “Rita Crundwell.”

Crundwell wrote so many checks to herself that Dixon was in absolute penury, unable to perform even basic municipal housekeeping tasks. Construction season was coming. Dixon’s inloader had three flat tires. Streets Commissioner Jeff Koons demanded Crundwell find the money for four new tires.

“She always gives me this line, ‘Let me go to the money tree, see if there’s any money, then you can have it,’” Koons says. “She says, ‘No, there is no money.’ Then she says, ‘All right, I’ll get you some money. I just have to move the money around.’”

Finance Commissioner Dave Blackburn wrote in a memo that “payments from the state of Illinois seem to have slowed down.” (They hadn’t slowed down; Crundwell was stealing them.) “We have absolutely no money. We need to hold off on any and all purchases.” The memo was cc’d “Rita Crundwell,” who knew very well that the city was broke, and why.

Crundwell was arrested on April 17, 2012. Curious City doesn’t give the details of her arrest by three G-men at Dixon City Hall, but you can read them in Chicago magazine’s story. (A podcast is not a magazine, so that was an artistic decision, apparently.) Instead, Curious City gives us the reaction of Lee Berryhill, Crundwell’s friend and trainer, who was preparing her horse, Good I Will Be, for a show in Tampa. Berryhill was on his way to Crundwell’s ranch when he got a call from one of her employees.

“Don’t go to Dixon,” the man said. “A bunch of people drove in here with big black cars and big guns.”

By the end of the day, the story was on gohorseshow.com. The entire horse world knew its “grande dame” was the most prolific municipal embezzler in American history.

Listen to previous episodes and read our recaps here:
Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3