In California, a septuagenarian nun faces up to 40 years inward prison after pleading shamed to federal dupery and money laundering charges.

Sister Madonna Margaret Cooper admitted embezzling $835,000 from St James II Catholic School in the LA suburban area of Torrance. Most of the pecuniary resource she blew on gambling trips to Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe with her friend and housemate, Sister Lana Chang.

Cooper is the school’s former principal. She ran the establishment on a shoe string while plundering an answer for containing tuition fees and charitable donations over a full point of X years.

Nuns connexion Cooper’s order, the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, use up vows of poorness when they are called to their vocation.

Rumbled past Audit

But according to the US Attorney’s Office Central District of California, Cooper diverted monetary resource “to pay off for expenses that the say would not have got approved, much less paid for, including large gambling expenses incurred at casinos and sure deferred payment scorecard charges.”

Kreuper claimed she had a rich uncle who paid for the trips.

She was rumbled inwards June 2018, simply as she was virtually to strike out after 28 years as principal, when an internal scrutinize blew the lid turned the racket.

The scrutinise uncovered a long-forgotten accounting into which Kreuper would divert checks made out to the school. Meanwhile, she would distort monthly and annual reports to cover song upward her conduct.

This “lulled St. St. James School and the Administration into believing that the school’s finances were being the right way accounted for and its financial assets in good order safeguarded, which, inward turn, allowed suspect Kreuper to defend her access code and command of the school’s finances and accounts and, thus, proceed operating the fraudulent scheme,” according to the DOJ.

Kreuper is also accused of directive schooling employees to castrate and destroy financial records while the scrutinize was inwards process.

She confessed after the bishopric hired an ex-FBI factor to grille faculty members at the school.

Parents Fight Back

But many parents were furious when they discovered the bishopric had decided not to mechanical press charges against Kreuper because she had “shown remorse.”

Parents told The Daily Breeze inwards December 2018 they were not prepared to absolve Kreuper of her sins. They noted that a repose mortal inward the same state of affairs could wait a lengthy prison sentence.

They were raging that their children had been denied young facilities at the shoal because of Kreuper’s transgressions. Some parents said they planned to depart to the police as a complaining party.

Kreuper testament follow arraigned on July 1.