Chapter 1: What scandal unfolded at the Columbus Zoo?
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Chapter 2: Who was the whistleblower in the zoo fraud case?
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The claims and opinions in this podcast are those of the speaker and do not necessarily represent the Knife or Exactly Right Media. The amount spent on catering, additional concert tickets, suites, everything all together, that was over a million dollars of Zoo's money just for these men and their personal entertainment. Welcome to The Knife. I'm Patia Eaton. And I'm Hannah Smith.
And today we have a really interesting story involving a zoo. A scandal at the zoo. How wild. Yeah, you found this article that you then sent to me. And maybe we should start with you kind of explaining what was in the article. Yeah, well, I'm always looking for a scandal story. And when I kind of saw that there was a fraud unfolding at the Columbus Zoo, I was like, okay, I need to know more.
And so it was actually in an article from a local newspaper in Ohio called the Columbus Dispatch. And It was written back in 2021. And in the article, essentially what was said was that a tip had come into the paper where someone had reported that these high-ranking zoo executives were misusing houses that were owned by the zoo. Which is just like, what are we talking about?
Houses owned by a zoo. I know. I was like, why does the zoo need all these houses? What are they doing with them? What are they doing with them? How does this work? I did a little research and basically zoos are, you know, they're nonprofit organizations. entities and nonprofit organizations.
And oftentimes if someone dies and wants to leave their assets to the zoo, that might include a property like a house. And the zoo can then own those homes and use them to some way benefit the zoo, whether it's like charging market rent to raise funds for the zoo or maybe housing a donor or... someone who's working on the zoo.
But this article was saying that a tip came in that these zoo executives were actually just using the houses to like give the people that they love free rent, which is not allowed. Yeah, not allowed. Not like the most scandalous accusation, but spoiler alert, it doesn't end there. It doesn't end there.
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Chapter 3: How did the investigation into the zoo's executives begin?
We would never do that. But it basically launches an investigation, a deeper investigation, because there's like, first of all, we don't know who's sent this tip in at this time, but it's like, okay, what's going on? Is there something to this? This local newspaper that reports on this, you know, they publish the article and the article ends up with the Ohio auditors.
So the state of Ohio has its own auditor's office and investigations unit. And so we're talking to Marissa Gibson today, who works for the auditor's office. She is an investigator, a special investigations unit investigator, and she was a part of unraveling the entirety of this fraud, which, you know, includes a pretty epic fall from grace for the people behind it. It gets bananas. Wild exotic.
Yeah. Untamed. Untamed. And, you know, Marissa gave us some stats that didn't end up in the episode, but I want to just mention them here because I think it's kind of good context as we go through this interview. These are annual salaries of other zoo staff at the Columbus Zoo from like 2015 to 2020 on average. So, you know, you have a lot of positions at the zoo.
There's also a lot of hourly workers. You think about like there's cafes and there's delivery people, but Animal nutrition assistance, we're getting between $44,000 and $51,000 a year. Head zookeepers, the range is $63,000 to $65,000. Non-head zookeepers, approximately $60,000. And then warehouse workers, $45,000 to $47,000.
Reasonable salaries for Columbus, Ohio, but it's not like people are getting wealthy. Right. They are making, you know, a livable wage, but not much more than that. Yeah. So let's get into the interview. As a note, no animals were harmed in this story. Thank you, Marissa, for joining us today. Thanks for having me. So this article from the Columbus Dispatch makes its way to your office.
The zoo executives have been misusing properties owned by the zoo and Franklin County residents are interested. Where does it go from there? So we start making inquiries because what we want to know is whether or not any of these levy dollars were misappropriated. So, you know, my partner on the case, who is Matt Klopik, he was the forensic auditor assigned to this from my unit.
So he starts looking at all of the levy dollars. And what we find is that, yes, the zoo is receiving these payments. And the specific levy language says that these funds are for animal care and for daily operation of the zoo. So he's looking at those and everything appears to be okay as far as how that particular money is spent.
But the problem is that the zoo was commingling these funds into general accounts. So now all of the money of the zoo is now commingled, your taxpayer dollars and the rest of your revenue.
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Chapter 4: What fraudulent activities were the zoo executives involved in?
So that opens up everything as free reign for us to look into all finances of the zoo. Okay, I see. So basically that initial look into their finances showed that funds were being moved around, but in ways that maybe didn't make a lot of sense. Money was commingling. At that point, you didn't know if that was intentionally criminal or maybe like poor internal organization.
But regardless, it didn't matter because it allowed you legally to have access to everything, all of the bank accounts associated with the zoo. Yeah. So now we have access to everything. And the zoo has many, many, many bank accounts. So it's not as if they just have one and we're looking in that one account.
So if you think about everything that goes into running a zoo, you have not only your payroll, but then you have all of your vendors that the zoo pays. You know, they have to pay for the feed of the animals. So they have produce vendors. The zoo has restaurants on site. They hold weddings there. It's a big venue for big events, you
There are so many different things that go into the daily operating of the zoo. So as you start the investigation and you start going through the accounts, who are the main people at the zoo that you start to focus on? So what would have been determined by the zoo's internal investigation is that generally speaking, we were looking at four executives here.
So the four executives were people at the top. So that would be the CEO, Tom Stahl, the CFO, who was Greg Bell, the director of marketing, who is Pete Fingerhut, and then the director of purchasing, which is Tracy Murnane. Very soon, they became aware that we were investigating and that this was going to be criminal. This was not going to just be a civil investigation.
That was done by their employer. So very, very quickly, all of our suspects retained defense counsel. And not only did they retain defense counsel, they retained the premier attorneys of Central Ohio. So the names that you see in the news, the ones that handle the big cases. So To me, this is just a sign that we're going to find something. There's something going on here.
Yeah, you don't want to pay those big attorney fees for nothing. It's just experience talking in that case. But yes, that was a pretty good clue to us that there is something here, for sure. Innocent until proven guilty, but doesn't look good. It did not look good, no. So...
What we like to do, and this is not just our unit, but typically law enforcement in general when you're doing a criminal investigation that involves multiple suspects, is that we like to start with who is perceived to be the smallest fish. Who looks like they have the least amount of criminal liability here? And I like to do that because that's almost always who is going to talk to you.
They're going to give you the most information on the others. So in this case, that was determined to be Tracy Murnane, who was the former director of purchasing at the zoo. We're not looking now just at zoo expenses. We have an open criminal investigation now. So we have, as a law enforcement unit, we have subpoena authority. So we start looking at his personal bank records.
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Chapter 5: What were the consequences faced by the zoo executives?
Why is this classic car company paying the zoo's director of purchasing? And it was several checks a month that were being deposited into his personal bank account. And because this is a two-year investigation that we're trying to cram into a one-hour podcast, I'm going to just get to the CliffsNotes version of Tracy's story since he's not our big fish.
But what it turned out that he was doing is that he was purchasing vehicles himself. And he wanted to sell them to the zoo. And he's solely in charge of, you know, as the director of purchasing, he's in charge of buying everything for the zoo. But he wanted to find a way that he could make some extra money. So he was buying these vehicles.
He knows that he cannot sell vehicles that are owned by him to the zoo because that's violating his code of ethics. So what he did is he had all of these vehicles quickly titled to Arena Motor Sales. And then Arena Motor Sales would, on paper, sell these vehicles to the zoo. So the zoo would pay Arena Motor Sales and then Arena would immediately cut a check to Tracy Murnane.
So Tracy is essentially selling vehicles to the zoo, but not on paper. He's using a straw man as the seller. They also had a little side hustle going on that did involve classic cars. And the classic cars, it was a mix of those vehicles and then the vehicles that he sold to the zoo that totaled that $576,000 in some odd sense. And, you know, what was his yearly salary?
I assume it changed a bit over the years, but what was the ballpark salary for Tracy? So he was definitely the lowest paid of our executives, and he was making around $120,000 a year at the time, shortly before he separated from employment. Just for comparison, Tom Stolf was making just under $500,000 a year as the CEO. And then Greg Bell, our CFO, he was making just under $400,000 per year.
That's a lot of money. Yes. And I think that's really important for people to know because these are not people who were financially strapped at all. These are big salaries for the Midwest, for a medium cost of living city. So, OK, does Tracy end up telling you anything about the others or is he, you know, staying quiet? No, he did. He was very forthcoming with information about the others.
He was not as forthcoming with information that would implicate himself because they never are. But he would say just enough and then we would have to push back and say, actually, that's not quite true. Let me show you this. What does he tell you? So he does give us some information.
A lot of it was just him solidifying what we already believed and him confirming that this is indeed the way it went. But he did get a lot of good information that he was willing to share on the other three. And that would be our CEO, CFO, and our director of marketing. He wasn't in their clique by any means. The clique was Pete Fingerhut, Greg Bell and Tom Stolf.
As we started to interview current and former employees from the zoo, I mean, for this case, we interviewed over 125 people, as I recall. And the zoo employees had some choice nicknames for these three individually. Tom Stolf was known by the employees there as the King because he did what he wanted and got what he wanted.
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Chapter 6: How did the zoo's financial mismanagement affect its operations?
Amongst the people under them, they were not held in high esteem. Let's just say that. Like, these zoo employees, they're not shocked when you come to them and say, something's going on. The general consensus was that these men were very entitled and they did what they want and they felt that they were above the law. That turned out to not be the case, but... Yeah.
And I know we're jumping ahead a little bit, but I can say that the majority of people that we talk to who are the former and current zoo employees, these are wonderful people who are there for the animals. You know, they're there for the right reasons. And they felt extremely betrayed by what happened, by their leadership. They were betrayed by this. They were angry.
Yeah, I really want to get into what comes to light that would make zoo employees so angry, as you just said. But also, I think I want to remind listeners here that a lot of the zoo employees are making a very modest, I mean, a good wage, but a modest wage. And there's also a lot of hourly employees, not all of them, of course, but there's this huge range of jobs at the zoo. Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, the Columbus Zoo is a nonprofit organization. It's great for the Columbus economy and draws a ton of visitors. But at the end of the day, the goal of the zoo is not for profit. On their website, it actually says that their mission is to become one of the most impactful wildlife conservation institutions globally.
They talk about the importance of conservation and education, as you pointed out. And that's, you know, I'm sure how most of these zoo employees actually feel. So as you started to comb through the spending of these three top dogs, you know, with these nicknames, King, Big Daddy, and Ticketmaster, what did you find? All of the credit card purchases were analyzed.
All the credit cards that were held by these zoo executives to see what they spent their money on. And what we found there was just a series of personal purchases to enhance their own lives and their own entertainment activities. I'll just give you a sampling. So Tom Stolf, for instance, he spent money on World Series tickets for his family.
I think those tickets alone are maybe just under $10,000. And then, you know, they can't have just the crap seats. They have to have the good seats. They have to have private catering. Pete Fingerhut, who is our ticket master, He went on multiple personal trips that he used the zoo's credit card to pay for anything that he wanted.
And of course, you know what they were doing, you know, like any bureaucracy, the zoo has credit card forms that you have to submit, you know, your receipt and what it is that you were doing and why you were doing it. And they would just falsify. I mean, period. Pete Fingerhut, he would manipulate invoices.
And this is something that he finally did admit to in an interview where his counsel was present. But he would just wipe things out on invoices, do a little photoshopping, make it say something else, and submit it to the Zeus Finance Office. But the way that they were able to get away with this is that, again, we're talking about the people at the very top.
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Chapter 7: What changes were implemented at the zoo after the scandal?
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We're going to sally forth. You guys stay sexy. Don't get murdered. Elvis, do you want a cookie? A cookie? Listen to My Favorite Murder on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Goodbye. The zoo also had, I'm going to call this a barter account system. That's the best way to really say it.
Ohio has this, and these are maybe nationwide as well, but there are these barter networks that companies can join. And essentially you have to put something of value out onto this barter market and then other businesses do the same. So the zoo's item of value were admission tickets for the zoo or for Zoom Busy Bay, which is their water park.
And then also rounds of golf at Safari Golf, which is the course that they own and operate. So the barter network is something that our forensic auditors examined as well. And what we found is that these executives were using those barter dollars, again, just to enrich their own life. We had the CEO who was using barter dollars to purchase limousines for his daughter's prom.
We had Tracy Murnane, who was using barter dollars to get a party bus for his son's wedding. We had Tom Stolf, the CEO, who was using the barter dollars to take his family on spring break trips. Some of these were really egregious. We had Tom Stolf, who was buying luxury watches for himself with these dollars. Greg Bell purchased an antique safe for his son.
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Chapter 8: How did the scandal impact the morale of zoo employees?
They got tickets to Hamilton, tickets to Les Mis, anything that you can imagine that would make your life fun and interesting. That's what they were doing. Wow.
And I don't know if this would have come up in your guys' investigation, but did you ever find any correspondence between either this clique of executives or them and their families where it's like, ooh, we really shouldn't be doing this or kind of alluding to like that others knew what they were doing or that they knew how bad it was? Oh, yeah.
In fact, honestly, that is what made this case so beautiful, is that we were given full access to the zoo executives' emails. Love that. Not only their emails, but also their Outlook calendars and all of their contacts. We were able to view all of their communications between themselves and also, yeah, between them and their family members and them and other people. And it became a blueprint of...
watching these people facilitate the fraud and how they were going to cover it up. I mean, they discussed everything over email as if nobody would ever see it. So little did they know those were going to be some of our best pieces of evidence. It was absolutely amazing. In fact, one of my favorite emails is, and we'll talk about this later when we talk about tickets that they were purchasing.
But one of my favorite emails in this entire case is when Our CFO, CEO, and director of marketing. So the king, big daddy, and ticket master. They're all talking to each other over email. And they're talking about suites that they have purchased at the Sean Steen Center for an upcoming concert, which of course, you know, was totally paid for by the zoo.
And one of them says to the other, we are so spoiled. And then another chimes in as a reply. Yes, we are. Like we are spoiled. Something to that effect. But it was just so egregious and awful and tone deaf because... yes, you're committing fraud. You are using the zoo's money to pay for something that no one else at the zoo knows about and that you are fraudulently listing on invoices.
The total loss associated with the barter network was around $70,000 of funds that were spent on this network that were supposed to be spent to better the zoo and for the zoo's day-to-day operations. But it ended up being Tickets and vacations, watches, you know, again, anything to make their lives fun.
Okay, so they've spent all this money on like concert tickets and suites and catering and vacations. What else were they buying? So going back to the self-importance, I'll move on to another scheme that they had. And that was, that involved memberships at some very prestigious country clubs here in central Ohio.
So these guys, they got some memberships at some country clubs that are here in Delaware County, which is the suburb of Columbus, the suburban area where the zoo itself is actually located. So they got these country club memberships. And what we were able to do is we subpoenaed all of the receipt details from these three different country clubs. And we got to see what they bought.
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