Uh well, yikes: a husband and a wife have been arrested for trying to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars from Columbia. John Bzdil III and his wife Heather Brooke Rinehart scammed the University by sending in fake invoices that somehow, in fictitious criminal land, related to the Pediatric Neuroscience department at the Med School, of which Bzdil is the former manager.
They also tried to bill personal items — like their own wedding (at the pretty fancy looking Skytop Lodge, in Skytop, Pennsylvania) — to the University. They managed to steal about $200,000 in total.
Documents detailing the team’s corruption after the jump.
33 Comments
@Blah The new Bonnie & Clyde? C’mon, this story is over three monthes old.
@Jason The name is pronounced, (biz-dell). How do I know this? I graduated High School with him!
@information Updated info on CubMail: http://cuitalerts.columbia.edu/node/381
@SDA Man, and to think of the shit you have to go through to get reimbursed $50 for play props. How the hell does someone authorize a $25,000 reimbursement without checking to see what it was for?
@some teachers are affected, too. Cubmail down for about 4,000 people rumor has it.
@Gmail rules. period.
@bad timing WHY, CUBMAIL, WHY?
@dfg USE GMAIL, or FWD your email from GMAIL automatically.
CUBMAIL is the milk of the infidel
@quickie why do people use cubmail when there’s gmail?
@same My Cubmail hasn’t worked for a full TWO DAYS and I NEED to access my e-mail immediately :( :( :(
On the CUIT page it says that there’s an “outage” and that 5% of Cubmail users are affected. WHY ME.
@SAME HERE mine is not working either. it says 0 messages in all the folders, i dunno wtf is going on. my friend’s is working.
@CRAPP Bwog please find out why my cubmail hasnt worked all day and if it will be working soon? This reading week! I need my damn email!!!
@bwog please come and kill the pianist in lerner. he/she is playing the same 5 note sequence over and over again – and somehow, he/she keeps screwing up.
@yay! he/she stopped. let the heavens rejoice!
@if they had stolen 300,000 more, they could have gotten themselves a senate seat! So close!
@well i think my cubmail is working, I just checked with someone.
@bwog! Why isn’t my cubmail working??
@rofl the offending couple:
http://www.poconorecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071223/NEWS08/712230303/-1/rss03
@WOW This is so cool! I love it when people do things that belong in movies. How do they even come up with this stuff? At the dinner table, “Hey honey, so I was thinking about stealing tons of money from Columbia, what do you think?”
“AWESOME! Can we wear costumes!” “Ya, if you want”
“Cool, let’s do it! I love costumes!”
“Ya me too, we can disguise ourselves through the fax machine, and you can wear a candy striper’s costume and non-chalantly collect the faxes at Columbia’s end and deliver them to someone super secret! But they’ll think you’re a candy striper, so it’ll be legit!”
“YA!! I wonder if we could get our wedding covered”
“Probs, they won’t know the differences because you will be in costume!”
“I LOVE COSTUMES!”
“I LOVE PLANS LIKE THIS! It’s sure to work!”
“Yay!”
I think that I just had a conversation with myself, but this probably isn’t what happened. It would be cool if they wore costumes though. That’s what I’d do anyway.
I don’t want to write my paper :(
@i'm john bzdil we rob schools
@AlreadyGotOne maybe if u had a personality you would get an offer….pwned
@Help Are there any other seniors out there who are freaking out because none of us are going to get jobs? (Humanities majors, I’m talking to you!) Seriously–WE’RE NOT GOING TO GET JOBS NOT ONE OF US
@hey ED’s find out tomorrow evening. it’s the beginning of the unlucky ’13s.
@I like How people defrauding Columbia for a couple of hundred thousand dollars is not even a top story.
Also…that’s just 4 student’s worth of yearly fees. Sad, no?
@Pretty sure “Bzdil” is impossible to pronounce.
@i assume one would pronounce it “bizdil”
@hmm Although if the money they stole would otherwise have been invested in stocks, if they pay back $200,000 versus whatever the investment would have been worth after declining in the stock market, Columbia could come out ahead.
@wow good call — I didn’t take my logic out that far, but you’re spot on … getting defrauded for hundreds of thousands of dollars: the ultimate perfectly hedged portfolio for an endowment that’s rolling in toxic investments
@addendum: fuck these bitches
@here's hoping their restitution payments are inflation-adjusted cuz by the time old alma sees any of this money the dollar is gonna be worth a lot less
@wow “Each count carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.”
Daaaamn!
@ummm great story bwog
@Nice guys Stealing from those who save lives. Very nice guys.
Bwog how did you find this? Good catch.