Yale Administrator Busted After Stealing FORTY MILLION DOLLARS During Decade-Long Scheme Selling Computers and Pocketing the Cash

Tim Clayton - Corbis. Getty Images.

The Daily Mail — Former Yale medical school official, 43, sentenced to nine years for $40M fraud which saw her order computers for the department and sell them - then use the cash to fund her luxury lifestyle.

Jamie Petrone, 43, was sentenced this week to more than nine years in prison. She pled guilty in March to a scam whereby she abused her role as Director of Finance and Administration for Yale's Department of Emergency Medicine.

“Director of Finance and Administration for the Department of Emergency Medicine at Yale University School of Medicine” sounds like a completely made-up job. It’s gotta be. That's not a real job. It’s way too many nouns. It’s a job title that university bureaucrats created the same way you wrote term papers in high school, going through it at the end with a Thesaurus app and changing all the simple words to big smart words.

Which, maybe that explains some things. Maybe if the bigwigs at Yale hadn’t spent so much time with their faces buried in the dictionary looking for fancy ways to say “secretary,” they would have noticed Director of Finance and Administration for the Department of Emergency Medicine at Yale University School of Medicine Jamie Petrone stealing FORTY MILLION DOLLARS in a DECADE-LONG scheme of purchasing computers and electronics with school funds and then pocketing the cash. 

According to the U.S. attorney's office, beginning in at least 2013 Petrone used her position as director of finance and administration for the school's department of emergency medicine to order millions of dollars of computer and electronic hardware for the school. 

She then shipped the goods to a company that paid her, and resold them.

Petrone also filed false federal tax returns from 2013 to 2016 and didn't file any returns from 2017 to 2020, according to the U.S. attorney's office.

Or, maybe I’m being unfair. Easy for me to say with the benefit of hindsight right? Who’s to say she wasn’t some criminal mastermind, utilizing all the tricks of the trade to keep a low profile and not trip any alarm bells. After all, the US attorney’s office said she kept all of her single transactions under $10,000, which is the threshold above which she would have had to get approval from higher up the food chain; enough savvy maneuvers like that, it’s possible the Yale administration isn’t a completely corrupt collection of absolute morons. It’s possible she’s just that good.

For that to be the case, we’d need to know the answer to a couple of questions. For one, is Instagram banned from employee phones and computers? 

It’s not banned from mine, which is how I was able to look at Petrone’s account and see what basically amounted to a long-running luxury car show in her driveway: a 2014 white Benz G550, a 2015 black Escalade, a 2016 white Escalade, a 2018 Dodge Charger, a 2020 red Benz, and a 2017 Range Rover affectionately named “Baby Girl 🥰”. 

The only thing Director Petrone loved as much as buying the newest edition of a $100-300K car every year was posting pictures of them publicly and bragging about how she bought them with her own money.

It wasn’t all cars though — it’s possible the posts of her car collection got buried in the posts of her house collection. 

There was the home in Georgia, then the home in Connecticut, followed by a second home in Connecticut — the third home in Connecticut could have easily been confused as a repost of one of the previous two Connecticut homes, instead of a completely separate and new third Connecticut home, which is what it was.

And that confusion would make all the difference. Every Finance and Administration Director of (a portion of) a College School of Medicine owns 3 homes. It's a 4th home that starts raising eyebrows.

Google Maps

Realistically, both collections may have been drowned out to even the most eagle-eyed Instagram addict by the veritable flood of posts from her multiple trips to Italy and the innumerable updates of her latest Gucci handbag purchase or addition to her jewelry collection, always shared while enjoying a fine wine vintage at The Gucci Garden. 

So even if IG isn’t prohibited on their phones and computers, it’s certainly possible they just missed this stuff. You know how it goes on the Gram.  One second you're wondering how the glorified secretary you pay to answer the phones and bulk order Microsoft Surface tablets has generated the personal wealth of a Saudi prince, the next you're watching Sommer Ray reels and sharing grapejuiceboys memes with the group chat forgetting all about it. 

Speaking of computers, are those banned too? 

That would explain a LOT. Like why it didn’t seem strange to anybody that they spent $40 million of the budget on them yet nobody got a new one for 10 years. 

I know this all seems like a stretch, that some of you probably think I’m being naive. I admit, it’s hard for me to not give every benefit of the doubt to an upstanding and honorable institution like the American College, especially a university as prestigious as Yale. Of course they would notice $40,000,000 missing if it weren’t expertly hidden from them — times are hard for everyone, not just you and me. Yale’s endowment is down to $42.3 Billion. No, not "down $42.3 billion" — down TO $42.3 billion. That’s so low that our taxes have to be appropriated to pay off other people's student loan debt without a single condition or even just a promise to do absolutely anything about the cost of tuition. They may have been so wholly unaffected by the disappearance of forty million dollars that they weren't even aware it was gone, but lower tuition even one penny and they'd probably have no choice but to shut down, leaving the country to figure out what it's going to do without Egyptology and Women's & Gender Studies majors entering the labor force.

And don’t forget, they DID catch her. It took 9+ years and $40 million, but they caught her. They caught her and punished her, and in the end, that's what matters.

Well, not them, per se. 

Not Yale. 

Yale didn’t catch or punish her. An anonymous tipster from outside of the school and the FBI did. 

Petrone was finally busted by an anonymous tip-off. 

It is unclear how bosses at the college - famed for its $42.3 billion endowment - missed the industrial-level fraud being carried out by the scammer. 

As far as I know everyone at Yale is still waiting for the Daily Mail to load on their Gateway PCs, wondering why they haven't seen the Director of Finance and Administration's Ferrari in the parking lot in a while. 

via Daily Mail