I am a senior forensic auditor. My work consists, in the plainest terms, of finding money that people have tried to hide and reconstructing the trail of decisions that led to it being hidden. I work with the financial equivalent of a very bright light and very detailed maps, and the people I build cases against are almost always, by the time I am finished, wishing they had been considerably less clever.
Three weeks before Easter, I had been reviewing my own financial records, ordinary preparation for maternity leave, updating account access, checking the equity position on the house to understand what collateral was available if the leave extended longer than planned. What I found instead was a discrepancy in the title documentation. Small. Irregular. The kind of thing that a person who was not specifically trained to notice irregularities would almost certainly have attributed to an administrative error and moved on.
I did not move on.
Four hours of targeted forensic digging produced a picture that was, in terms of criminal sophistication, almost insultingly crude. David had forged my signature on a series of loan documents using a notary he had known since college, a man who charged a fee to not look too closely at the identification presented to him. Against the equity of a home I had owned outright before David and I ever shared a mailing address, my husband had taken a collateral loan of five hundred thousand dollars.
The destination of the money was where the story became both worse and, from a professional standpoint, almost impressively brazen.
Two hundred thousand dollars had been wired to an offshore account in the Bahamas that I traced, without significant difficulty, to an illegal gambling operation. The debts were Eleanor’s. She had been accumulating them for decades, the kind of debt that does not appear in any social register but that produces phone calls at unusual hours and occasionally produces other, more physical forms of communication. David had been servicing them quietly, using money that was not his.
The remaining three hundred thousand dollars had been routed to a luxury property management company downtown. It had covered two years of prepaid rent on a high-rise condominium. The tenant was a twenty-two-year-old fitness instructor named Chloe, and the lease had been signed four months before I became pregnant.
What He Stole
