A Lakewood woman pleaded guilty in federal court in Santa Ana Tuesday to essentially driving a Buena Park credit union for Pepsi Cola employees into the ground–not through her decade of management but through her decade of embezzlement.
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Judge James V. Selna sentenced 50-year-old Wendy Wall to 21 months in federal prison to be followed by a year of home confinement that's part of four years of supervised release, according to Assistant U.S. Attorney Brett Sagel.
Oh, yes, and Selna also ordered Wall to pour out $480,273.77 in restitution.
Wall was the manager of Pepsi Cola Federal Credit Union from 1993 through February 2014, but over that time she created fictitious bank accounts and loans based on those accounts to divert credit union funds to accounts belonging to her and her family. (Betcha they're Coke drinkers!)
Madame Manager was undone by a National Credit Union Association audit that led to an FBI investigation that discovered the credit union's eventual failure was due to Wall's decade-long embezzlement. She pleaded guilty on Sept. 2.
One bright note: The National Credit Union Administration indemnified credit union members against the losses.
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.