Adam Torres and Kelly Pope discuss “Fool Me Once.”
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Show Notes:
New book alert! In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Kelly Pope, Professor at DePaul University. Explore Kelly’s book, “Fool Me Once: Scams, Stories, and Secrets from the Trillion-Dollar Fraud Industry” and her upcoming keynote at the State of the Woman Conference.
About Kelly Pope
Kelly’s passions are fraud, film and life-long learning. Her research focuses on how organizations design cultures and compliance systems to confront the challenges of misconduct, ethics and fraud.
In 2017, Kelly directed and produced the award-winning documentary, All the Queen’s Horses in 2017. All the Queen’s Horses explores the largest municipal fraud in United States history and premiered as the #1 documentary on iTunes, Amazon Prime Video, Google Play and Direct TV during its debut week on the video on demand platforms in April 2018.
Prior to joining the faculty at DePaul University, Kelly worked in the forensic accounting practice at KPMG. Kelly received her doctorate in accounting from Virginia Tech and is a licensed certified public accountant.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right, so today my guest is Kelly Pope, and she is a professor over at DePaul University.
Kelly, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Adam. All right, Kelly. So excited to have you on the show today. We’ve been doing this whole series of interviews for Gayle Letts and, and her team and really promoting the state of the Women Conference coming up. So I definitely want to talk about your involvement, what you can expo what the attendees can expect, and also some of the content that you’re going to deliver there.
So we’ll get into all of that, but before we do, we’ll start this episode the way that we start them all. With what we like to call our mission matters minute. So kelly we at mission matters. We amplify stories for entrepreneurs executives and experts. That’s our mission Kelly, what mission matters to you?
That’s a great question. I think the season that i’m in right now the mission that matters to me is educating the world about how fraud can happen. And so I think my mission changes probably quarterly, but that’s the mission right now for this season. Fantastic. Well, well, great having you on the show and I guess just to get us kicked off, State of the Woman Conference coming up.
Are you excited? I am. This will be my first time. I’ve never attended State of the Woman Conference, so I’m looking forward to learning from others and sharing. My thoughts, I think it’s, it’s something powerful when you get a group of really bright women to talk about the world, so watch out. Yeah.
So tell me a little bit about the programming and, and what, what you plan to contribute. Well, I plan to talk about my research area, which is white collar crimes, forensic accounting, and fraud. And I’ll talk about some lessons learned. From the research I’ve done to, for my book, which is called Fool Me Once, Scam Stories and Secrets from the Trillion Dollar Fraud Industry.
And specifically, I’m going to talk about some of the stories of female, of the female, not only white collar offenders, but female victims and female whistleblowers. What they share in common and what they have what, what differences they have experienced. And then what I’ve learned as I’ve interacted with all these different people.
Any, can you give us a little bit of a preview? Obviously, we’re not going to give them everything, but a little, a little bit of a preview for what that might sound like. Cause I’m, I’m interested in, I don’t, I don’t know if I’m going yet, but I I’m interested. Sure. Well, when women are, I’ll talk about from the perspective of that perpetrator.
So when women are find themselves Orchestrating a fraud. A lot of times their frauds are around embezzlement and a lot of, a lot of times I have to deal with what we have access to and you have some female offenders who are stealing because they have a shopping spree a shopping habit, but a lot of female offenders are stealing because they want to help somebody else and so I classify those people as racist perpetrators.
So I’ll be sharing stories. Okay. Of cases of women that I have met through the years that fall into these different categories of perpetrators that I talked about in the book. So you can be an intentional perpetrator. It can be an accidental perpetrator or a righteous perpetrator. So the story that I just gave you is an example of a righteous perpetrator.
And a lot of times Females tend to fall into this category, this righteous perpetrator category based on my research and that is people that will commit a crime in order to help somebody else. And I, I, and I did see your book on Amazon. So fool me once scams, stories, and secrets from the trillion dollar.
For all my long term listeners, they know I love promoting authors and I love promoted books. You gotta tell me. So this just came out, this just came out this year too, March March 21st, 2023. So how you feeling? The new release? It’s good. It’s been a great year. I’m about to celebrate my, the first year anniversary.
So I hope I’ve educated a lot of people not to be fools out there, but it’s been a great experience. Not only just the number of readers that reach out to you, but also the number of stories that people share with you of how they’ve been scammed or victimized. And so what I, what I realized is that.
The work that I’m doing has value and purpose, and I think that’s a really good feeling. So to know that you’re having some type of scalable impact. And so although I’m an academic and I’m an accounting professor, the book is very story driven, very character driven. So it’s not an accounting textbook, which is sometimes people might think because that’s who I am.
But it’s a fun read, and it’s had a really great impact on a lot of different, a lot of different people. What inspired you to write this book originally? I had been going around the country for years doing on camera interviews with white collar felons, whistleblowers, and victims of fraud. And I had directed and produced a documentary called All the Queen’s Horses, which chronicles the largest municipal fraud in U.
S. history. And that is the through story in the book. And so, there are so many experiences I had and learned doing the documentary as well as doing these interviews. With felons and perpetrators and victims that my friends were like, okay, you need to write a book. You need to write a book. And I said, well, I did a documentary.
Isn’t that enough? They’re like, no. You’re like, leave me alone. Isn’t that enough? Yeah, that’s exactly what I said. Leave me alone. But they’re like, there’s nothing like a book, a good book. And so it was it was, it started really during the. pandemic where I got serious about putting all my thoughts, you know, pen to paper.
And then so I, I wrote a book proposal and Harvard Business Review liked the proposal. And so they became my publisher and then I was assigned an amazing editor, Kevin Evers, over at Harvard at HBR, so shout out to Kevin, who really helped me through the process of getting the book out into the world.
So, it really started with just people encouraging me to put all the To put all of the thoughts in one place. Yeah, I’m a big fan of books and I’m glad that you’re, I’m glad that your friends got you on the hook for a book because it’s, it’s not, it’s never easy to finish a book, right? But it’s but once you’re done, it’s out in the world and you see that work, like how has this been received so far?
I see, I mean, you have a ton of great ratings on Amazon, but how, how have you received, have you seen it received because you’re out in the world promoting? It’s been received well, very well. And I think. It has a lot to do with writing it in a way that feels like I’m talking to people. And so it’s, and everyone loves a good story.
So because there’s so many stories and examples and lessons out of those stories. I think people can relate to it and they can find their story in, in those stories. And so it’s been, it’s been well received and it’s been, it’s still going strong. So a year later I still am able to share it with lots of audiences because what’s interesting about writing a book is you spend 18 months writing it and then you have your release date.
And so, you know, March 21st, 2023 rolls around. And you have a really solid month, and then you think about, okay, how am I going to keep this going? What I’ve been pleasantly surprised is how the train has kept rolling. You know, how people still reach out and they express their interest and they share a story.
And so it’s, it’s been a really good experience. Maybe share just a flavor of one of the stories in the book for the audience. Oh, you know, I’ll share you, I’ll tell you that the main story. Is really the inspiration of the book, which was All the Queen’s Horses. So, All the Queen’s Horses chronicles, the the All the Queen’s Horses movie and the All the Queen’s Horses story chronicles the largest municipal fraud in U.
S. history. And so, this female, this woman, by the name of Rita Cronwell, embezzled over 53. 7 million dollars over 20 years. And what, Why that story is so interesting and so compelling is Rita Cronwell is who I classify as an intentional perpetrator. The residents of Dixon are who I classify in the book as innocent bystanders.
The town of Dixon is who I classify as an organizational target, and the person that discovered the fraud is a woman by the name of Kathy Swanson, who I classify in the book as an accidental whistleblower. So the, so this story of this woman stealing this 53. 7 million over 20 years is, Really the anchor of understanding all these different types of fraud archetypes.
And so Rita Cronwell was a pretty creative accountant. She was the most trusted person in the town of Dixon. You know, what Rita said is what, was what happened. And all along, in plain sight, she was embezzling millions and millions of dollars. And what she did with that money is she bought quarter horses.
So she was one of the number one quarter horse breeders in the United States. Well, worldwide actually. No one realized that she was stealing this amount of money until that accidental whistleblower, her name is Kathy Swanson, noticed some discrepancies with money that was leaving an account that she didn’t know about.
So that’s how the fraud started. And so that story is the story that really It’s in each section of the book, so it’s really picking up where the documentary ended. Wow, that’s so, that’s so interesting, and for you to live in that, in that day to day world and years of of uncovering this and just through, and to come up with the book now after the movie, I mean, it’s, it’s an amazing story I, I’m, I’m, I’m excited actually.
Now I’m gonna have to check that out. I don’t think I caught that one, All the Queen’s Horses, so I’m gonna definitely watch that movie. That’s interesting. I didn’t, I don’t know how that got by me. It sounds super interesting. Yeah, all the clean sources. Catch it on Amazon Prime. It’s there. Fantastic.
That’s wonderful. Well, Kelly, I just have to say thank you for coming on the show today and giving us an update, of course, on, on state of the woman conference and all that you’ll be doing there and, and your book. And now I got another, and I got something from our watch list on Amazon prime this weekend to all the queen’s horses.
So this is all great. If somebody’s listening to this or watching this and they want to follow up or they want to continue to follow your work what’s the best way for them to do that? Oh, sure. You can find me on LinkedIn. I’m just Kelly Richmond Polk. You can find me on Instagram at Kelly R. Polk.
And then you can find me, send me a note for my website, which is kellyrichmondpolk. com. So pretty easy to find because it’s all under the same name. Fantastic. And for everybody listening, definitely pick up a copy of that book. So Fool Me Once, Scams, Stories, and Secrets from the Trillion Dollar Fraud Industry.
There will be a link to the book in the show notes, so definitely pick up a copy of that. Lots of great reviews there and I’m looking forward to digging into. And if you’re listening to the show for the first time and you haven’t hit that subscribe button yet, but now it’s your chance. Hit that subscribe button.
We have many more mission based individuals coming up on the line and we don’t want you to miss a thing. Kelly, again, thank you so much for making some time for us. Have a great day.
