Hospitality Financial Leadership – Morning Golf

In my career, I have worked in some incredible hotels and resorts. One of my resort experiences included a summer where a group of us would gather each morning and play nine holes of golf before work. This story is about a new set of clubs, the video lottery machines, the local bank, and the cops.

My story starts in late May one year about 25 years ago. A friend at work told me at lunch in the Bean that he just bought a staff membership to the hotel golf course. I remember saying I would love to get one too but with work and three girls at home, there was just no time. He gave me the gears for a few minutes on my excuses and then he said something I couldn't forget. We could play in the morning before work!

With this idea in mind, I bought my membership the next day and we were golfing. Each workday morning, weather permitting that late spring and summer, we would meet at 6:30 a.m. and play nine holes of golf. Most days a couple of other colleagues joined us, and the golf was awesome. I have never played better. I'm typically a double bogie golfer at best but that summer I had several nine-hole rounds under 50. I was loving it and my game was coming to me.

One morning my buddy showed up sporting a brand-new set of top-of-the-line irons.

"Wow," I said, "Those are awesome," and the next words out of my mouth were, "How can you afford those?" It was kind of a compliment and challenge question at the same time. He worked in the same department as I did, and I knew how much he made, which was quite a bit less than me. I chalked it up to me being mortgage and kid poor and he was a DINK (double income no kids) with his girlfriend waitress. I think he even said it was tip money. Either way, he had a $1,000 set of irons and I was still using my $49 set of Canadian Tire clubs that were probably 25 years old. Such is life, I said to myself and that I thought was that, until…

A couple of weeks later the wheels fell off that explanation when my other friend the hotel Controller told me that my buddy was about to be arrested.

It seems my friend was a regular weekly customer at one of the four local banks in the small town where our hotel was located. The controller's wife had received a tip from a neighbor who worked in the bank and knew her husband was the financial guy at the hotel. It seemed odd to this lady that my friend made a weekly deposit of several hundred loonies (one-dollar coins). This had apparently been going on for months.

The arrest was going down that day, he told me. I asked, "How do you know what he did?" I was shocked to learn that there had been an investigation after the tip was received from the bank lady, and my friend was kiting the sequencing numbers from the lottery machines. Part of his responsibilities was emptying the video lottery machines, a couple of days each week. The control was a logbook for the numbers and the VLT readout slips were kept in a separate box. He simply wrote down the wrong numbers and did the right math in the logbook and pocketed the difference, and no one was double-checking….

Well, the cops showed up and as the sayings go, they got their man and crime doesn't pay. He was arrested, taken away in handcuffs, and a few weeks later found guilty by the judge and sentenced to a stretch in the local jail.

Now the moral of this story is: If something doesn't seem right, then it's probably not right. Trust your instincts because you're probably onto something. And, if you're going to steal $1 coins and you need a bank to launder them, don't go to the same bank. If my friend had just gone to the city close by, he could have gone to a different bank for years and probably avoided being detected.

My golf game has never been as good as that summer and someone told me a while back that my friend is now a doctor. Well, good for him I say and perhaps it's time for me to hit the links. It's never too late to get it together!

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