Editor’s Note: from time to time we’ll catch one of Jim Cavanaugh’s “War Stories” shared on social media. His tales from days serving in law enforcement are too good to miss, and he has agreed to allow us to share them with Brownwood News readers.
Written by Jim Cavanaugh – Our NY office always had some unique cases. One involved a computer programmer at a very large bank that had tentacles world wide. The guy re-did the bank’s computers to make every one of the customers’ accounts to be two pennies off.
Every month they would get their bank statement and it would not balance. There would always be $.02 less in the account that they should have had. Most people would not waste their time trying to find the error.
It wasn’t enough to justify all the time it would take. Most would assume that the bank’s computers were right and that they had simply made a mistake during the month in their check register.
The guy was named Stanley Rifkin and he had a brilliant plan. For all these customers the $.02 rolled down the computer list and the final entry was a deposit equal to the total of all those $.02 errors. Of course the deposit went into an account that good ole’ Stanley created.
Every month the banks books would balance since the deposit was the same as all the pennies he shorted the customers. Unfortunately for Stanley he didn’t really plan it out. His scheme was too successful. All the money he amassed was wired out of NY to an account Stanley opened at a bank across the country.
So much money started coming into this account that it caught the eye of bank officials at the site of the deposits. Stanley was dumb enough to leave identifying information at that bank which traced right back to him in New York.
When confronted, he confessed immediately.
Jim Cavanaugh
Justice of the Peace for Precinct 4 in Brown County, Texas
Jim Cavanaugh graduated from Lamar Tech in Beaumont in 1967, and participated in post-graduate studies at Sam Houston, South Texas College of Law, and the University of Virginia.
Cavanaugh was a Texas police officer before joining the FBI under the direction of J. Edgar Hoover in 1971 through 1996. He served as a contractor for the Bureau and a number of Federal Agencies post 9/11.
Jim Cavanaugh has served as the Justice of the Peace for Precinct 4 in Brown County since 2007.
