Money hungry: Meet 4 Kansas City embezzlers who stole a combined $3.3 million
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Embezzlers next door
The case of Scott Simkins, a Johnson County man who had it all but still wanted more, raises confounding questions about embezzlers: Why do they steal? How do they do it? And how can they be caught?
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Trusted but greedy, these Kansas City area embezzlers lied, cheated and stole from non-profits and big companies. Consider this rogues’ gallery:
▪ Kathleen Frederico, a veteran of the U.S. Navy, worked nearly 19 years for the Saint Luke’s Foundation. Over 14 of those years, as an accounting and special projects manager, she gradually embezzled some $557,000 from the nonprofit, partly blaming her crime on addiction to opioids.
She spent $150,000 on shopping, $67,000 in cash, $30,000 in travel, $21,000 on internet drugs, her mortgage and other bills. Sentenced in 2019, she spent just over two years in prison. Frederico was released in January.
▪ Patricia Webb embezzled a combined $1.5 million from two separate employers, Garmin International and Black & Veatch, and forged thousands in checks at a third, John Knox Village, the senior living community.
A Lee’s Summit mother with grandchildren, Webb had done good in her life, extracting herself from mentally and physically abusive relationships to set up her own nonprofit, “Beauty Within Me,” to help battered women.
As a payroll administrator, Webb nonetheless stole $1.2 million from Garmin in just three years, 2011 to 2014, stealing the identity of an employee to extract money from his flexible spending account and diverting employee relocation money into her own “Beauty Within Me” account. Her theft was not discovered until after she left and went to Black & Veatch as a global payroll manager.
In just 14 months at the engineering firm — from January 2015 to March 2016 — Webb stole an additional $302,000, taking money that was to be used for overseas employees. It was later discovered that Webb, under the name Patricia Holmes, had previously pleaded guilty to two counts of forging checks for some $3,300 while working at John Knox Village. Three days prior to being sentenced for the John Knox forgery, she stole $31,000 from Garmin. Webb in 2018 was sentenced to eight years in prison. She was released in March after five years.
▪ Tonya A. Topel, 44, of North Kansas City currently sits in federal prison in Pekin, Illinois, having embezzled four times in a row from four companies. The first occurred over a three-month period. From October 2011 to January 2012, she stole more than $24,000 from her then-employer, Preferred Contracting Systems in Leawood.
While that criminal case was winding through the court, she got a job as a senior auditor in June 2012 for a nonprofit, CBAC, the Construction Benefits Audit Corporation in Kansas City. Over the next four years, she stole more than $295,000 using some of the money, most brazenly, to pay her lawyer in the previous case, plus restitution, which got her off of parole before she was found out. She used the rest at spas and restaurants, for Kansas City Chiefs and Royals tickets, on trips to Boston, Arizona, the Bahamas and Hawaii. She bought a new Ford Mustang and put it in her daughter’s name.
When Topel was caught in May 2016, she claimed to have used the money for her own cancer treatments, but investigations showed she did not have cancer. In late 2018, she ultimately pleaded guilty to wire fraud and, in April 2018, was sentenced to eight years in federal prison. By the time she was sentenced, she had gotten two other jobs and, as was later discovered, embezzled from both: $26,000 in three months from U.S. Real Estate Equity Builders and nearly $143,000 as office manager for SunSource Homes. There, too, she used company credit cards and checks made to herself to fly to the Bahamas and Florida. She bought cars and used money and checks she stole from SunSource to pay her lawyer and restitution in the CBAC case. She is scheduled to be released in 2027.
▪ John L. Kirwin of Lee’s Summit worked as an internal recruiter for J.E. Dunn Construction. His task was to fill job vacancies for projects across the country. In 2018, he was sentenced to one year and a day in federal prison for defrauding the company out of $800,000.
In the scheme, most of which unfolded over just 18 months between 2014 and 2015, Kirwin worked in cahoots with two outside employment companies, one in Tulsa, another in Houston, which were to be paid by Dunn to find worthy candidates, whether they were hired or not. Using fraudulent and inflated invoices, Kirwin arranged for the companies to get paid — sometimes $17,000 to $28,000 per candidate. But the vast majority were never hired. The firms instead got their money, then kicked back half — some $435,000 — to Kirwin.
This story was originally published June 8, 2022 at 5:00 AM.