Jason Meisner, Chicago Tribune
Updated Thu, December 12, 2024 at 7:12 PM CST
President Joe Biden on Thursday commuted the sentences of two of the Chicago area’s most notorious fraudsters: former Dixon Comptroller Rita Crundwell, who embezzled nearly $54 million from the tiny town to fund a lavish lifestyle, and Eric Bloom, the onetime leader of a Northbrook management firm who defrauded investors of more than $665 million.
The decisions in the clemency petitions for Crundwell and Bloom were announced by the White House as part of a massive list of some 39 pardons and 1,499 commutations. Biden’s orders do not wipe out their felony convictions, but end their sentences immediately.
The White House said the commutations were for people released from prison and placed on home confinement during the coronavirus pandemic.
Crundwell, 71, pleaded guilty in 2012 to what authorities then called the largest municipal fraud in the country’s history, admitting she stole $53.7 million from the city over more than a decade and used the money to finance her quarter horse business and lavish lifestyle.
She was sentenced in 2013 to nearly 20 years in federal prison. In April 2020, Crundwell had petitioned a federal judge for early compassionate release based on her poor health and the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I have done everything in my power to be a ‘model inmate.’ To work as hard as I can and have never complained about my conditions here or the pay we receive,” Crundwell wrote. “There is never a day that goes by, I do not regret my crime.”
She’d served about eight years behind bars before being released in 2021 to a halfway house in Downers Grove, U.S. Bureau of Prisons records show. Crundwell would have completed her sentence in October 2028.
Republican U.S. Rep. Darin LaHood, who represents Dixon, said the president showed a disregard “for our justice system and rule of law” by commuting Crundwell’s sentence.
“While many families in Dixon were living paycheck to paycheck, she took advantage of their trust in government and used her access to live an unearned life of luxury, in what the FBI still believes to be the largest theft of public funds in U.S. history,” LaHood said in a statement Thursday. “Commuting her 20-year sentence is a slap in the face to all the hardworking police officers, firefighters, city workers, and residents of Dixon.”
Bloom, meanwhile, the onetime head of Sentinel Management Group, was convicted by a jury in 2012 in what was billed by prosecutors at the time as the largest single financial fraud in the history of Chicago’s federal court.
Prosecutors alleged that as head of Sentinel, Bloom secretly began exposing his well-heeled customers to an increasingly risky mix of leveraged deals in 2003, leading to the company’s collapse four years later.
“Ask (my assistant) to look in my couch for spare change,” Bloom was quoted in court filings as telling an associate during a call days before Sentinel’s collapse.
Bloom, 59, was sentenced in 2015 to 14 years in prison. He has been serving out his sentence at a residential reentry facility in Florida, prison records show. His sentence had been due to expire in May 2026.
jmeisner@chicagotribune.com
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