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It’s pretty hard to get away with stealing $1.5 million worth of anything without someone eventually realizing something is amiss, and one woman who managed to pilfer thousands of cases of chicken wings learned that the hard way after officially learning her fate in court.
It goes without saying that the COVID-19 pandemic was an incredibly hectic time defined by an impressive amount of disorganization, and plenty of criminals attempted to take advantage of that fact by doing what they could to exploit a system that was thrown into disarray.
The Associated Press estimates unsavory individuals were able to steal more than $280 billion in relief funds when everything was said and done (the Department of Justice had only been able to recover a couple of billion as of earlier this year), but that’s far from the only way illicit actors took advantage of the situation.
In 2022, the business manager for Harvey School District 152 in the Chicago area conducted a routine audit that led to them discovering they’d exceeded their annual budget by $300,000 just halfway through the year.
According to ABC7, that revelation sparked an investigation that led to the discovery of a scheme hatched by Vera Liddell, a food service director who’d been with the district for more than a decade who managed to steal $1.5 million worth of chicken wings between July 2020 and February 2022.
Liddell seemingly took advantage of the program the district rolled out to deliver meals to students while they were learning remotely by ordering the chicken wings from a food supply company that was under the impression the purchases had been approved before picking them up.
When everything was said and done, she managed to offload more than 11,000 cases she ordered to other businesses before the racket was discovered.
The outlet notes part of the reason the orders stood out to investigators was the fact that chicken wings normally wouldn’t have been served to students in the first place due to choking concerns stemming from the bones, and Liddell was ultimately arrested in January 2023 before being charged with theft and operating a criminal enterprise.
Liddell pled guilty to those charges, and last week, she was sentenced to nine years in prison.