In Million-Dollar Theft Case, Church Worker With a Secret Past

By SHARON OTTERMAN and RUSS BUETTNER NY Times

For eight years, the woman worked in accounts payable for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York, gaining the trust of her superiors.

Colleagues praised her quiet dedication and hard work, and noted that she prayed often; her volunteer work at an event at St. Patrick’s Cathedral won mention in the church’s newspaper, Catholic New York. No one, then, questioned the hundreds of checks she wrote at the archdiocese to cover small expenses, like office supplies and utility bills.

On Monday, the woman, Anita Collins, 67, was charged with embezzling more than $1 million over seven years from the archdiocese.

Prosecutors in Manhattan said she did not live lavishly. But at her modest home in the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx, a particular interest of Ms. Collins’s became apparent: expensive dolls.

Detectives emerged from her three-bedroom apartment on Monday carrying boxes filled with personal effects: 17 or 18 were labeled dolls, many from the Madame Alexander catalog; about three more were labeled bears. And when a postal service carrier walked by, she noted the volume of mail and packages that the family received.

“They get packages like no tomorrow,” she said.

Joseph Zwilling, a spokesman for the archdiocese, said Ms. Collins was confronted about the missing money in December after an annual audit raised red flags. She was fired, and the archdiocese referred the matter to the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr.

When Ms. Collins was hired by the archdiocese in June 2003, it did not perform criminal background checks on prospective employees, as it does now, Mr. Zwilling said. So church officials were unaware until recently that she had been convicted of grand larceny in one case and had pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in another.

Mr. Zwilling said the scheme diverted money “designated for the purpose of helping to provide Catholic education.” The archdiocese has been closing churches and schools for lack of money, and asking for more than $15 million in an annual charity appeal.

“We are continually reviewing how money is handled, our financial controls,” Mr. Zwilling said, “because we want to be good stewards of the money entrusted to us.”

Prosecutors said Ms. Collins had issued 468 checks from the archdiocese to “KB Collins,” the initials of one of her sons. After each check was printed, she would change internal records to show that the check had been issued to a legitimate vendor, prosecutors said.

“At first, we thought it was only a handful of checks, but we quickly realized that it was much bigger,” Mr. Zwilling said.

She kept the amounts to less than $2,500 each to avoid the approval of a supervisor required for larger checks, a prosecutor, Amy Justiniano, said during Ms. Collins’s arraignment.

“She held herself out to be a religious woman, going to church every day,” Ms. Justiniano said.

But all the while, the prosecutor said, she was “lying” and “stealing” and writing checks to herself in all but one month during her years at the archdiocese.

Ms. Justiniano said Ms. Collins also used the money on $18,000 in furniture from Bloomingdale’s, $37,000 in clothes from Barneys and Brooks Brothers, and $19,000 in goods from an Irish gift shop. Ms. Justiniano said that Ms. Collins had confessed.

Ms. Collins appeared in Manhattan Criminal Court wearing a green cable-knit sweater over a white turtleneck, her white hair pulled back in a short ponytail. She said nothing during the arraignment.

Ms. Collins was charged with first-degree grand larceny and falsifying business records. She could face a maximum of 25 years in prison on the grand larceny count. Mr. Vance’s office intends to seek a grand jury indictment this week. Judge Michelle A. Armstrong set bail at $750,000 in a secured bond or $350,000 in cash.

Ms. Collins’s court-appointed lawyer, Howard Simmons, said she had no money left and seemed to have “accepted her fate.” She has two grown sons in Florida and a daughter who lives with her and is being treated for cancer, he said, but none of her relatives came to court.

Ms. Collins and her daughter have for 15 years lived in a $1,400-a-month apartment in a multifamily building in the Bronx, blocks from the intersection of the Bruckner and Throgs Neck Expressways, one of the building’s owners, Domenica Viscogliosi, said.

“It makes me upset, because they were nice people,” said Ms. Viscogliosi, whose own daughter lives in a unit below Ms. Collins. “She was quiet, a nice lady.”

Ms. Collins sometimes attended Mass at a nearby church, Saint Benedict’s. The priest there, the Rev. Stephen Norton, said he did not know Ms. Collins well but would address the concerns of his parishioners.

“These things are always difficult,” he said. “But we’re a church of redemption.”

Two years ago, Ms. Collins helped organize a ceremony at St. Patrick’s Cathedral for 600 people preparing to enter the Catholic Church.

“It’s a wonderful day for the Church of New York, and it’s great to see this new blood entering the Church,” Ms. Collins was quoted saying in Catholic New York. “Seeing people coming into the faith makes me feel good because my faith has always been a steadfast part of my life, and to me it’s very heartwarming to see this. I think it’s marvelous and I just love it.”

According to court records, Ms. Collins was arrested in June 1999, and charged with stealing at least $46,000 over 16 months from AccuStaff, a Manhattan temporary employment agency where she worked as a payroll manager.

In that case, she was accused of issuing duplicate checks to some employees, and then cashing them with check-cashing cards she had issued to herself under various names.

She pleaded guilty to one count of grand larceny in the third degree and received five years’ probation. Her sentence also required her to pay $10,000 in restitution to AccuStaff and complete 100 hours of community service, records from the district attorney’s office show.

Ms. Justiniano, the prosecutor, said Ms. Collins was still on probation when she began working for the archdiocese.

In January 1986, she was arrested in the Bronx on multiple counts of criminal forgery and grand larceny. In that case, she pleaded guilty to a Class A misdemeanor and received three years’ probation, according to court papers.

The current accusation against Ms. Collins has also set off an additional review of financial procedures and oversight at the archdiocese, Mr. Zwilling said, though he added that at this point, no disciplinary actions were being considered against any of Ms. Collins’s superiors.

Hannah Miet, Noah Rosenberg and Kate Taylor contributed reporting.

After S.C.: Newt Heads for Fla. with Victory in Sight

Posted by John Cassidy The New Yorker

Give the devil his due. In South Carolina on Saturday, Newt Gingrich didn’t just defeat Mitt Romney and the other Republican candidates: he crushed them. With the scale of his victory, he is now perfectly placed to rampage into Florida. If he doesn't defeat Mitt there, he will surely give him the scare of his life.
Closing out an amazing week, Newt won the Republican primary by twelve percentage points—40-28—and carried forty-three out of forty six counties. Even in Charleston, a virtual retirement home for rich corporate executives like Mitt, he ran within a few points of the erstwhile front-runner.

The CNN exit poll illuminated the extent of Gingrich’s victory and Romney’s defeat. Newt won by sixteen points among men and nine points among women. He topped Romney in every age group by at least eight points. He outpolled him handily in every income group except those earning more than two hundred thousand dollars a year, which Romney won by four points. He ran well ahead of him in every education group except post-graduates.
Newt stomped on Romney so badly that even Karl Rove, doing his punditry duties on Fox, could hardly think of anything positive to say about the candidate he and many other members of the Republican establishment have thrown in their lot (and cash) with. The best Rove could come up with was that previous Republican winners in South Carolina had done even better than Newt. Since 1980, he said, they had averaged forty-five per cent of the vote and a victory margin of seventeen per cent. But none of the prior winners had started the final week so far behind in the polls, and none of them had been heavily outspent by another candidate. Newt overcame both of these things. Given where he was a couple of weeks ago, this wasn’t just a win over Romney: it was a whupping.
In the circumstances, he could afford to be magnanimous in his victory speech, and he was. With the mannequin-like Callista by his side, her peroxide helmet seemingly held in place by a cryogenic freezing agent, he didn’t waste time attacking Paul, or Santorum, or even Romney. Paul was right about the monetary system and had been for twenty-five years; Santorum had displayed great courage in Iowa; Mitt was a hard-working fellow who did a terrific job at the 2002 Winter Olympics.
Yes, that Mitt—the one Newt has spent the past month depicting as a job-destroying, company-looting, tax-evading plutocrat. The former Speaker, it was clear, had now moved on. Beyond South Carolina, beyond Florida, which votes January 31, beyond all the Republican primaries and to the fall, when he would be where he feels most alive—on a debate stage, facing down Barack Obama, the liberal media, and all the other members of the New York/Washington “elite” that take their inspiration from the legacy of Saul Alinsky.
Saul Alinsky? If you haven’t heard of the Chicago-based community organizer, who died in 1972, a year after he published a book called “Rules for Radicals,” you haven’t been listening to Newt for the past twenty years—and for that I commend you, and envy you. Alinsky is a fixture in Gingrich’s speeches. In this one, he came up three times, which was twice more than Romney did. “The centerpiece of the campaign is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky,” Newt declared.
If you suspect that most Americans had no idea who Gingrich was talking about, you are right. ("He was a Jewish guy who tried to help blacks," my wife said, after looking it up.) But Newt is a lot cannier than he sometimes appears. When many Republicans listen to him speak, they don’t sweat the details. They let the aura, the anger, and the erudition pour over them, and it feels good. Here is an eloquent pugilist who gives voice to their resentment and fears and desires, and he’s not doing it from a bar stool, or a church lectern, or the back of pick-up truck with a confederate flag on the bumper. He’s a PhD and former Speaker of the House, who can quote just as many obscure professors and academic studies as any Harvard-trained Democrat.
This isn’t just my theory of Gingrich. It’s his, almost entirely. “It’s not that I am a good debater,” he said in a display of false-modesty that didn't fool anybody. “It is that I articulate the deepest held values of the American people.” Substitute “prejudices” for “values” and “some of the” for “the,” and there you have Newt in a nutshell.
Now onto Florida. Romney has money (which means ads), endorsements—but not one from Jeb Bush, it emerged Saturday night, and an estimated 200,000 votes that have already been cast in advance of polling day. In an electorate that may total 1.2 million, this is a big margin for Newt to overcome. Right now, I’d bet on him doing it.
Why so? Lots of reasons. He has the best storyline: the “double Lazarus.” That will ensure him lots of free media. There are two television debates to come—Monday and Thursday—where he will get the opportunity to demonstrate, yet again, that he is a far better speaker than Mitt. Plus—and this is important—most of the dirt on him is already out there. Short of a former lobbyist for Lehmann Brothers stepping forth to reveal he’s been having a torrid gay affair with Gingrich behind Callista’s back, it’s hard to see what could unbalance the portly Georgian.
But the main reason I think Newt could win is what is happening to Mitt's campaign. Outside of his own backyard, the former Massachusetts governor has yet to win more than twenty-seven per cent of the vote. At this stage, he is beginning to look ominously like another establishment favorite from the North East who had everything going for him except the voters in his own party: Ed Muskie.
Mitt's poor showing on Saturday, and his potential weakness in Florida, reflects several factors. First, there was his religion. It clearly cost him in Iowa, where he did very poorly among evangelical Christians, and the same thing happened in South Carolina. According to the CNN exit poll, twenty-seven per cent of those surveyed said that in deciding how to vote the religious beliefs of the candidate mattered a great deal to them. In this group, Gingrich got forty-five per cent of the vote, and Romney got nine per cent—yes, nine. Another thirty-three per cent of those questioned said the candidates’ religious beliefs mattered somewhat. In this group, Gingrich got forty-seven per cent of the vote, and Romney got twenty-seven per cent.
Then there is the issue of Romney’s record at Bain Capital, and, inextricably linked to it, his tax history. This is now threatening to rob him of what was supposed to be his greatest advantage: his strength on economic issues. Ninety-seven per cent of the people interviewed in the CNN exit poll said they were worried about the economy, but that didn’t help Mitt much. More than six in ten voters said the economy was the most important issue in the election. And in this group, he lagged Newt by eight points—32-40.
The other problem facing Romney is his weakness as a campaigner. In the last couple of debates, particularly, his performance has been lackluster. When he was going up against Rick Perry, Herman Cain, and even Rick Santorum, his failure to engage the audience, and his tendency to get rattled by questions he doesn't like, didn’t matter very much. But in taking on a buoyant and deadly brawler like Newt, he desperately needs to step it up.
The Romney campaign knows it is facing a crisis. If he loses in Florida, the Republican establishment will look around for another candidate—a Chris Christie or a Jeb Bush—to enter the race and take on Gingrich. Mitt will now go after Gingrich more aggressively, especially on his record as Speaker. He may even release some information about his taxes. Will this be enough? CNN's David Gergen, whom I regard as the best cable pundit of the lot, expressed some doubts. “Newt Gingrich is a street fighter who carries a switchblade,” he said. “I don’t think Mitt Romney owns a switchblade.”

Gergen regards Newt as a potential menace not just to Romney and Rove, but to President Obama too. This, of course, is a minority view. Most Democrats think that if Newt were to secure the nomination the Obamas could start ordering new curtains for the Lincoln Bedroom. But Gergen points out that things might not be so straightforward. Gingrich could end up doing a better job than Romney of appealing to white working class voters—the sort of voters who often decide the presidential election. “He speaks in the vernacular—there’s a strength to it,” Gergen said after Newt’s victory speech. “That sledgehammer approach—in a country that’s angry, that’s something for the White House to be worried about.”
Maybe that is getting ahead of things. But one thing is incontestable. The 2012 election looks different now than it did a week ago.

Chris Crocker on “Me @ the Zoo,’ YouTube & More

Chris Crocker hit the viral jackpot with ‘Leave Britney Alone!’ Now the star of a documentary, he talks to Adam Auriemma about bullies, porn—and YouTube’s new “Disney Channel” vibe.

by Adam Auriemma |                                                   

The first video ever uploaded to YouTube is 19 seconds long. In it, Jawed Karim, a co-founder of the site, stands in front of an elephant exhibit at the San Diego Zoo. “The cool thing about these guys is they have really, really, really long trunks,” Karim says. He pauses. “And that’s pretty much all there is to say.”

Not quite. That was a simpler time, before Chris Crocker came along. In 2007, the gay Tennessee native uploaded a histrionic screed against Britney Spears haters— “LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!”—that blew up the video-sharing site for the first time, racking up millions of hits overnight. But the dialogue about the then 19-year-old Crocker quickly turned nasty. CNN, Fox News, and late-night hosts caught on, mercilessly mocking his androgynous looks and obscene sobs. He was the original Rebecca Black, except rather than a slick music video, the world was making fun of the shaky recording of a kid in his bedroom.

Crocker was put through the pop-culture wringer, with much of the attention focused on his looks; his experiments with hair extensions and make-up bordered on drag. Now he’s the subject of a new documentary, aptly titled Me @ the Zoo, premiering at Sundance on Saturday. (HBO has already snapped up U.S. broadcast rights.) He’s also barely recognizable, sporting a buzz cut and 30 extra pounds of muscle. Crocker calls it a gradual transformation and says it has nothing to do with the feedback: “I don’t give in to the pressures of society.”

Almost a third of the film is lifted straight from Crocker’s massive YouTube catalog, before and after the infamous Spears outburst. Most of the videos are silly—teasing his grandmother, cold-calling his online fans, strolling through Walmart—but all of them are honest. “A lot of YouTubers are just on there to make money and do make-up tutorials and wack shit,” Crocker says in an interview as he prepares to head to Sundance. “I feel like I have a real relationship with my audience.”

But the site, he says, feels much different now. “I think that I made YouTube sort of stand up on their toes and realize anyone can become the face of YouTube overnight. So I think that since then they’ve created roadblocks...It feels a lot more controlled now. Everything feels so Disney Channel to me.”

Chris Moukarbel, who directed Zoo with Valerie Veatch, agrees. “It probably unsettled people at YouTube…He’s not necessarily who they would want to be the face of the site.”

But Crocker has undeniable star quality; Moukarbel and Veatch didn’t even intend to make a film about him. “We were making a history of reality TV,” says Veatch. “Initially, we interviewed him for this larger film. We just kind of focused on Chris once we realized that his story was the film.”

Besides being an irresistible screen presence, Crocker exemplified—in his typical over-the-top way—the perils of making one’s life available for viewing on the Web. “He’s definitely an indicator of how people will socialize in the years to come,” Veatch says. “Chris’s experience—his immersion in the medium—is going to be the standard.” And not just for young people, she adds. “My mom has to pick out a Facebook profile photo.”

The film’s most poignant scene is, in a bizarre but heartbreaking way, tied to “Leave Britney Alone!” Moukarbel and Veatch, who filmed Crocker for more than two years, capture a day Crocker spends with his mother, an Iraq War vet who had him when she was 14. At night, they head to his car and she asks her son to just drop her off somewhere downtown; she hasn’t had a home in five years.

Crocker didn’t realize until he saw the film that his idolization of Spears was tied to his missing mother.

“When my family gave up on my mother, I was the only family member that still was rooting for her. I was very sympathetic to my mom still when everyone else was just turning their backs on her. And that was happening at the same time that Britney was going through [her own struggles]. And I felt like at that time I was the only person that was looking at Britney as a young woman who has kids, and everyone’s talking about her weight when she’s clearly on drugs.”

In this context, “Leave Britney Alone” feels less psychotic and more cathartic. Not all of Crocker’s videos have such a raw subtext, but the entire collection is grown from a dark place.

Starting from preschool, Crocker was intensely bullied. “Every single day was hell for me. I live in the dirty, dirty South.” It got so bad so he was yanked out of school on the advice of his guidance counselors. “When you live in the South, they can spot it 10 miles ahead, before they even see you. They’re like, ‘That’s a gay kid.’”

Lonely and with a well of young angst, Crocker was primed for YouTube. “I had to really just own whatever I was at an early age or let that defeat me. And so I just don’t have shame in any kind of way. Not having shame, I guess, makes someone very watchable on camera.”

When Crocker says no shame, he means it. He’s been flirting with a career in porn for some time now. And he doesn’t understand why anyone would be surprised. “I’ve always photographed myself in my own—I would say privacy, but it’s not really private when I’m uploading them to the Internet…I don’t see what’s different between the porn stars and the people that watch it.”

Chris Moukarbel and Valerie Veatch

With Zoo bringing him more attention than any time since 2007, Crocker says he’d be open to getting back into the entertainment business, but he’s wary of jumping into the wrong project. After the Britney video blew up, he moved to L.A., chasing a reality-show deal, and admittedly became a caricature of his YouTube persona. “I would flash the paparazzi and act outrageous in public to keep it going,” he says. The antics backfired, and video in which he satirized himself by saying Britney Spears was more important than 9/11 was the final straw. He left, broke, for home.

Crocker says he turned down another reality offer just a few days ago. If all else fails, he’ll go back to school. “I dropped out of school in eighth grade and I’ve wanted to get my GED for a long time. It’s just that this Chris Crocker thing has provided me with monthly income for a while.”

“Not having shame, I guess, makes someone very watchable on camera.”

One of the most-watched clips in YouTube history is called “David After Dentist.” It’s gotten 105 million views—outpacing “Leave Britney Alone” by 60 million. In it, a young boy who got way too much nitrous oxide at the dentist’s office is acting woozy in the backseat of his dad’s SUV. “Is this real life?” he asks. “Is this going to be forever?”

In more grownup terms, Crocker and Me @ the Zoo are tackling the same questions. “My life has changed because of my online life,” Crocker says, “and people that don’t necessarily know me in person recognize me in real life. And so there’s really…the blur is kind of becoming clearer and clearer. It’s all real life.”

 

©2011 The Newsweek/Daily Beast Company LLC