Greeley – When officials at the Erie Chamber of Commerce began to notice problems in the chamber’s bank accounts, they called for an audit that showed $33,000 was missing.
An investigation led to the chamber’s former executive director, who faces trial on embezzlement charges this year – a stunning crime for the fast-growing northern Colorado community of 10,000.
“It’s a small town, and everyone knows everyone. We were dumbfounded,” chamber president Rick Hulstrom said. “This is just the way things happen now.”
The growth in white-collar crime has forced Weld County’s new district attorney to take an unusual step. Ken Buck, a former prosecutor who specialized in economic crimes at the U.S. attorney’s office in Denver, is raising money from businesses hurt by white-collar crooks to pay an investigator or prosecutor dedicated to stopping the crime.
“There are new businesses and new people that don’t operate on the old handshake-is-a- bond mentality, so there is a lot of fraud going on in Weld County,” Buck said.
A handful of prosecutors elsewhere have taken similar steps to combat “the dark side of economic growth” that comes with rapid population growth, said Josh Marquis, the district attorney in Clatsop County, Ore., and a vice president of the National District Attorneys Association.
“You have things happening quickly, you have people with money, and those are targets of opportunity,” Marquis said. “So people who are running scams will go there. It also overwhelms the existing public safety (officers), who generally are used to dealing with crime in the old sense of the word.”
He said a consortium of large banks in Washington state and Oregon has helped finance federal and state prosecutions of economic crimes.
Once known strictly for feedlots and wheat fields, Weld County is now home to eight of the 10 fastest-growing communities in Colorado. New housing developments serve commuters to the college town of Greeley and the sprawling Denver area, 50 miles to the southwest.
Since 1990, the county’s population has grown by about 78,000 to nearly 210,000 people, with about 40 percent of that growth in the past five years, according to state figures.
The growth has resulted in a higher rate of economic crime, but it also brought a sharp rise in violent and gang-related crimes, which require heavy investments of time and money by prosecutors, Buck said.
“(White-collar crime) oftentimes gets short shrift because people want murderers, rapists off the street, drug dealers off the corner, and district attorneys and other prosecutorial agencies don’t quite feel the pressure in the white-collar area they may in the area of street crime,” Colorado Attorney General John Suthers said.
Like Suthers, Buck attributes the rise in check fraud and identity theft to people trying to raise money to feed a methamphetamine habit. Still, there have been cases of more traditional white-collar crime.
Buck’s spokeswoman, Thea Mustari, said there were no reliable statistics on the number of white-collar crime cases in Weld County. However, Buck’s office – with 30 attorneys – is prosecuting 19 first-degree murder cases, including six gang-related homicides, she said.
About 15 banks so far say they will help fund white-collar crime investigations, said Patty Gates, executive vice president of Bank of Choice, which has six branches in Colorado.
“I think every banker in town will tell you that at some point or another they’ve all suffered some losses due to white-collar crime,” Gates said. “I haven’t had situations in the past not handled appropriately, but there are budgetary limitations that force (the district attorney) to prioritize where he puts his resources.”
Buck has asked banks and retailers to put donations into a fund managed by county commissioners. He said he does not want to know which businesses contributed or how much.
