JALLEN wrote:That story about the friend making the loan then getting charged with embezzlement is a sanitized version of it, I will wager, the way the felon wished it would have happened rather than the whole story. If not, she is too stupid to own a gun.... IMnotalwayssoHO, of course.
Well, it's the truncated version anyway, the friend has been such since 1964 and has always been just a little too trusting. The situation is hard to describe in short, but my wife and I knew this person independently of each other since back in those days and that such a thing could happen to her came as no surprise. We were one of the first calls made when the investigation, indictments, and arrests started, and she was up in NY State and us down here in TX. There is indeed a lot more, but my description stands on its own: A successful if somewhat naive independent business woman who would give a friend the benefit of the doubt got taken in by a very old scheme and when the original schemer got caught, she deflected the blame.
Initially we couldn't believe that she had fallen for the scheme, but with facts that I didn't present here, and knowledge of the other person's activities and issues, it became apparent to us that she had been caught in a very tangled web knitted by a scheming spider who does not deserve the kind of consideration she was given. There were drugs involved, with the original criminal embezzling to cover losses in both legitimate business and drug dealing, and nobody that I know would have anticipated that SHE would have been involved in such thing, much less our friend.
Actually, the original criminal was caught in a drug sting, and the embezzlement had not been discovered. She revealed it as part of a plea, and presented it, right from the start, as our friend's plan, and even tried to implicate her in the drug deals. Alibis and tests showed that our friend could not have been directly involved in any drug transactions or use, so all of her charges were related to the money laundering scheme.
Yes, lots more to the story, and I am sure that there is much I don't know, but I remain confident that my friend was an innocent victim of her own trusting nature.
BTW, we were asked to provide false testimony for our friend, and resisted the temptation. Our rights are just too important to us to lose them that way, even if it would have been hard to prove. Our friend was desperate by then, and grasping at anything to try to save herself, and her daughter who was merely her business partner and had absolutely no involvement at all.
Ironically, another couple of months and the "loan" would have been repaid and the involvement would have been much harder to prove.
, but there are reasons, those unwilling to look at each event individually, and not as a one size fit all answer, in my opinion, truly do not understand what and how our laws are supposed to be applied.
