“Secondly, a lot of people are in oversight positions who don’t understand and feel comfortable with numbers and that’s dangerous,” she said. Once we start trusting people, we relax the rules we put in place that help protect us.”Īnother ingredient, Pope added, is unqualified personnel thrust in positions of financial responsibility. “We all trust people, but it has no internal control. “That one ingredient is called trust,” Pope said. “Every place has the propensity to have fraud and everybody has the capacity to commit fraud.”īut what is the main ingredient? What does Crundwell’s crime have in common with all the other cases of fraud - from Madoff to Trump University? “If it can happen in Dixon, it can and will and does happen wherever you are - whether at church, in the workplace or at a nonprofit - it is with you,” she said. Its attraction is as universal as its message, Pope said. The film has been an official selection at roughly a dozen national and international film festivals. Pope has screened the film twice in Dixon (whose previous claim to fame was Ronald Reagan’s hometown), attracting upwards of 2,000 each time, and she is planning screenings overseas in places like Australia and Amsterdam. A trailer of the film, uploaded to Facebook, was viewed more than 140,000 times and garnered some 2,500 shares within five days, she said. So far, she said, interest in the film has grown both rapidly and organically. Queen’s Horses is her first film to be picked up by a national distributor, Gravitas Ventures. In 2012, Pope created, and was executive producer for, an educational film on white-collar crime called Crossing the Line: Ordinary People Committing Extraordinary Crimes, which has won multiple awards and is used as a teaching tool in classrooms across the world. The filmmaking process wasn’t entirely foreign to the Oak Park professor. “Reading the deposition of an audit is very easy to me,” said Pope, an expert in fraud research and white-collar crime. She also interviewed dozens of people close to the crime - from FBI agents who worked the case to former coworkers of Crundwell, who was sentenced to nearly 20 years in federal prison in 2013. While making the film, Pope immersed herself in territory that she said comes naturally - boxes and boxes of files from the FBI and U.S.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |