Sister Mary Margaret Kreuper: Unholy Roller

17:08Lana Chang:playing things so close to the chess made many parents frustrated she says we need more money she says we didn't make as much last year but she's not telling me what that was or what i need

17:19Mary Margaret Kreuper:to do so you're almost like and after two or three years there like that's a bunch of bullshit without an official accounting from the nuns parents started to make their own calculations like you know we you know you started to have the lady at the taco stand who did it for like five years she literally went back and counted all the food they cooked from three years ago and then for two years she documented every ticket sale so they had their own numbers and then of course we would all meet after she would say well congratulations to this food the candy booth they sold the most and then you talk to the person's candy booth they're like yeah we did four or five thousand this week in the taco beer like we did twenty thousand what the hell she taught like you would catch them but you couldn't really confront them they would say no you're wrong you don't know what you're talking about, you know.

18:07Lana Chang:The math, as the kids say, was not mathing. But even with such blatant discrepancies, people hesitated to say anything to the leaders of the school. They figured they must be missing something. And they were. It wasn't until the summer of 2018 that the truth finally came out. After 25 years of service as St. James principal, The time came for Sister Mary Margaret to retire. As part of the transition process, the diocese that oversell the school called for an audit to make sure the books were in order for the next administration. It was a routine procedure, just due diligence. But Mary Margaret was nervous.

18:53Lana Chang:Squirrely, even. She directed two school employees to destroy documents and not tell the auditors they were missing. The employees reported this to the pastor. And then, it just so happened that while this routine audit was happening, a St. James parent made a standard request. They needed a copy of an old tuition check. But when they got it, they noticed something strange on the back. It wasn't deposited into the school's account. Instead, it had been signed over to a mystery account with no ties to official school business whatsoever.

19:37Lana Chang:After these alarming discoveries, the administration brought in the big guns, and the routine audit became a more intense deep dive that lasted for months. And the auditors uncovered something shocking. In November 2018, the school community received an innocuous, understated letter breaking the news.

20:00Mary Margaret Kreuper:Parents received a letter from Monsignor Michael Myers, the school's pastor, stating that the archdiocese did not wish to pursue criminal proceedings against the sisters, that they preferred to address the situation internally with the school and the sisters' order. In the letter, they told parents that there would be new procedures and oversight policies for the school's finances to prevent this from happening again, and that they would be figuring out a plan for restitution. But parents I spoke with said they were outraged by the decision. It had been a while. None of my children were still at the school.

20:35Mary Margaret Kreuper:I came home one night. My wife had received a text from a friend. And she goes, you're not going to believe it. And I said, what? And she goes, maybe you're right after all. I said, what? She goes, there's an investigation into embezzlemental funds at St. James. And I just said, send me that letter.

20:54Lana Chang:In the letter, the church's pastor wrote, It is with much sadness that I am informing families of St. James School that an internal investigation has revealed that, Over a period of years, Sister Mary Margaret Cooper and Sister Lana Chang have been involved in the personal use of a substantial amount of school funds. The personal use, Cooper later admitted, was to gamble at casinos and pay the nuns' credit card bills. And the substantial amount? At first count, half a million dollars. But that was just what auditors found siphoned into one account that was only six years old. It turned out that Sister Mary Margaret had been depositing some tuition checks into the school's legitimate accounts, but funneling others into her own secret accounts.

21:50Lana Chang:She saw an opportunity to use her position to enrich her life and live lavishly, and she took it.

21:58Mary Margaret Kreuper:As they were reviewing the checks that they had sent to the school from previous years, notice in the back that it wasn't endorsed by the school, it was handwritten. And they were presumably thinking that this might have been going to a different account once this all unfolded.

22:18Lana Chang:So for at least six years, the nuns had been taking school money and depositing it in secret private accounts. And Mary Margaret had been running the school for 19 years before that, so there was no telling how much more she had robbed from Peter to pay Paul. And of course, there was no accounting for all of the cash from decades of school fundraisers.

22:47Mary Margaret Kreuper:So they were, and parents at that time were still sifting through their checks and their paperwork, trying to figure out how much of their money even made it to the school or didn't make it to the school. So they, with that ballpark number of that$500 ,000, I think for parents, it was the thought process of, wow, this could be in the millions. This could be a lot more. And we don't even know yet.

23:12Lana Chang:The final official estimate of stolen funds rose to a staggering$835 ,000. But despite this clearly illegal behavior, the pastor notified the community that the church would not be pressing charges. Instead, they decided to handle the situation internally.

23:38Mary Margaret Kreuper:Immediately the next morning, I called the school and I wanted to speak to the vice principal and I called the parish and tried to take the priest. And they all kept telling me, oh, no, no, this it's all been. They literally said, you don't go here. Doesn't pertain to you. We're handling it. There's nothing we can comment on. I'll leave a message. I literally drove down. My office is like three blocks. So it was like I just jumped in my car, went over there, knocked on the parish door. He said, oh, well, it's been handled. you know, the archdiocese is on, like, they basically did everything humanly possible.

24:10Mary Margaret Kreuper:They gave it to the kids in an envelope in their backpacks. They never sent an email. They never had a phone treat. They tried to say, here it is. It's gone. Don't worry about it. The next day when I called the school, I basically said, I want to know what's going to happen. And nobody called me back. And I kind of knew where this was headed just from my gut feel. Like, you know, people don't like to air their dirty laundry. And I basically said, who at the archdiocese is aware? And they said, we don't know. So I just started calling the archdiocese and got to their legal counsel. And they said the same thing.

24:39Mary Margaret Kreuper:It's been handled. It's under investigation. It's an internal matter. We'll take care of it. And they said they're going to get back to me with more details. Of course, nobody ever called me back. And that's when I was like, if somebody doesn't call me and tell me exactly the whole scope of this and when it started and this and that, I'll just call a friend of mine. I went to high school with a guy who's one of the editors, one of the sections at the LA Times.

25:06Lana Chang:They called his bluff. And Jack called. He called a friend.

25:13Mary Margaret Kreuper:And I just dropped them a text. I said, hey, do you think this would be an interesting story? And yeah. And then after that, they sent an inquiry to the archdiocese, which forced the parish to do the, when Monsignor spoke in the church, they're going to publicly address it for the first time. and they brought some people down from the archdiocese and we got to talk to the investigators and neither one of them had ever been an investigator and they weren't even gonna ask for credit card it was the biggest bs and i remember monsignor mike told me that i wasn't allowed to ask questions and nobody from the media could be invited it only could be saint james people and that's when i just literally picked up the other phone and called somebody i knew from another local paper and said hey why don't you guys come with me and i came into the thing with a couple different newspaper guys and they sat there and just did the audio recording of the whole thing.

26:03Mary Margaret Kreuper:And that's when it took off.

26:09Lana Chang:Up next, the St. James community grapples with how to solve a problem like Mary Margaret. Now, back to the story. In 2018, it came out that sisters Mary Margaret Crooper and Lana Chang had taken advantage of their positions as principal and vice principal of St. James School to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars. Once the news broke, families connected to the school had a lot of emotions to process.

26:41Mary Margaret Kreuper:Parents I spoke to were shocked. They were trying to get as many documents as they could of receipts, copies of checks, bank records to turn into the Torrance Police Department. I think there were so many parents at that moment trying to figure out how much was misappropriated, where that money was going. But it also seemed that some parents had their suspicions prior to the investigation of, you know, as I described earlier, they mentioned that these nuns had a lavish lifestyle. So things were starting not to add up for them.

27:16Lana Chang:The community's response was mixed. Some saw it coming, while others were totally caught off guard. Some wrote letters of support for the nuns, but others wanted them to face severe consequences. Some people thought it was an innocent oversight, while others thought it was a wanton breaking of the Eighth Commandment, thou shalt not steal. Now I should note that Jack Alexander has been very vocal about his frustration with both St. James and the Diocese of Los Angeles. Many other parents have been equally as frustrated, but have been reluctant to express their concerns publicly. But we have heard from them privately.

28:00Lana Chang:Others, as I said earlier, have sided with the nuns believing unintentional mistakes were made.

28:09Mary Margaret Kreuper:People want to believe the nuns. People believed in their hearts that this was a mistake. You'd hear a lot of that, well, she's an older lady. She's a nun. What does she know about banking? It's just a mistake. It was probably for the building fund versus school. You got a lot of people immediately saying like, oh no, she wouldn't do that. She's a nun. I trust her. She's been great to my children. And then you had another side that's like, oh, hell no. This lady's been stealing. This lady's beating us at cards. This lady's talking about gambling. This lady doesn't share the numbers. We don't have any money.

28:40Mary Margaret Kreuper:Every other school seems to have money, including the less fortunate neighborhoods. don't talk the way we talk about us being broke. So it really split the people down the middle.

28:50Lana Chang:But no matter which side families fell on, they had to agree that the incident caused a lot of damage, both financial and emotional.

29:01Mary Margaret Kreuper:I think more than that, a lot of people were just flat. Honestly, they were freaking embarrassed and they were hurt and they hurt their kids. So the first thing you do is, you know, you can't really fight it. People got out. People started yanking their kids, and I mean in droves. I mean, it was pretty, I would say a year later, they had less than half the kids.

29:21Lana Chang:The fallout also had spiritual implications. Seeing respected figures in the church, people charged with the religious education of young, impressionable minds and hearts, caught stealing red-handed, shook some people's faith. A judge in the case said, None should realize that just by living their lives and living the way they do and treating people the way they do, they affect children for the rest of their lives.

29:52Mary Margaret Kreuper:Society understands that when a nun is literally scolding the children, thou shalt not steal, and she's robbing people, and then she doesn't ever confess the sins or publicly apologize and they just sweep it under the rug. It basically means the church doesn't give a shit about that entire generation.

30:09Lana Chang:One former St. James student said, you can almost hear the anguish. To know that she had been taking money from my parents and my peers' parents the whole time I was there is extremely shocking. And it sways me away from the Catholic Church. Trust shouldn't be broken like that.

30:30Mary Margaret Kreuper:So I know people don't trust anybody associated with St. James, and I think they've done everything they can to try to bury their past and move forward. But the school's not the same. The community is not the same. We don't go to St. James Church. Many of the people that we used to see go to other parishes or they just stop going to church. My son still goes to mass. My daughters do not. You know, you can believe in God, the people that are trying to teach his word or spread his gospel. You realize they're not only not pious and, you know, trying to do the right thing. They're just people and they're just like everybody else.

31:10Mary Margaret Kreuper:And unfortunately, they're all pretty much full of shit because they've never stepped up and made anything right or tried to do anything but buried under the rug. So it damages the community.

31:20Lana Chang:As far as efforts to repair that damage, the church first tried to handle things on its own. The nun's religious order would make restitutions, and the sisters would face canonical sanctions.

31:34Mary Margaret Kreuper:So what we're told is, and Monsignor says this, and then a lady from their actual convent, which is in Brentwood, so it's not a bad place to go. It's on the top of the hill, Mount St. Mary's, right off sunset. that they are, and I forget the term, but basically their house arrest, they were supposed to basically be on house arrest up there where they couldn't leave and they didn't have their privileges.

31:59Lana Chang:As much as the church wanted to keep things private, since bank fraud is a federal crime, eventually Torrance police and the FBI were brought in. And once a criminal investigation was up and running, upset parents were more than willing to provide as much evidence as possible to make sure the nuns faced justice.

32:20Mary Margaret Kreuper:The church is now cooperating with police, and parents are bringing as many tuition and other checks written to the school, to the police department, to see how much was taken.

32:30Lana Chang:During the trial, Mary Margaret's lawyers did their best to portray their client as a remorseful woman who didn't even realize she had a gambling problem. They said, During the time period this was happening, she had no idea what was happening. Um, she had no idea she was endorsing checks into her own coffers? No idea she was using school funds to pay for trips to Vegas? Did her hand just slip and accidentally deposit almost a million dollars into her secret bank accounts? Her attorney went on to say that, quote, As soon as she was confronted, she accepted full responsibility for what she had done, and she has cooperated completely with law enforcement and the archdiocese.

33:22Lana Chang:Okay, so she owned up to her lies once she was caught? That doesn't exactly scream moral fiber.

33:37Lana Chang:In the end, Sister Lana was not charged, while Mary Margaret pled guilty to one count each of wire fraud and money laundering. At her sentencing, Sister Mary Margaret said, I have sinned, I've broken the law, and I have no excuses. My actions were in violation of my vows, my commandments, the law, and above all, the sacred trust that so many had placed in me. I was wrong, and I'm profoundly sorry for the pain and suffering I've caused so many people. The judge was left with a tricky situation. How to sentence an 80-year-old Catholic nun guilty of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from the kids she was meant to educate and nurture.

34:27Lana Chang:Do you throw the good book at her? Give her a penance? A slap on the wrist? Prosecutors asked for a prison sentence of two years. In the end, the judge settled for one year and a day. Plus, she was required to pay back the$835 ,000 she stole. She served her sentence and was released in February 2023. She is still under judicial supervision until February 2025. In the aftermath, St. James School was left to pick up the pieces and move on, which they did by basically cleaning house, sweeping everything under the rug and pretending nothing ever happened. which was what the school and diocese tried to do from the beginning.

35:16Lana Chang:On the St. James website, the history of the school section has no mention at all about the scandal.

35:24Mary Margaret Kreuper:The priest, Monsignor, won't even discuss how they just laid off the last teacher. So everyone there, I believe, is pretty much wasn't there to the St. James. They've just tried to wipe that chapter. And now Monsignor is kind of in charge and the Harvest Festival isn't there anymore.

35:40Lana Chang:After it was tainted with decades of mismanagement and theft, St. James reimagined their infamous Harvest Festival. In 2024, they had a February festival instead. The theme? Mardi Gras. Also known as Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras marks the day before the beginning of Lent, a season of fasting, prayer, and penance. Historically, it's a night of revelry and debauchery when people rack up more sins before they start repenting. So what could go wrong? But the attempt at rebranding doesn't change what happened all those years ago. And it doesn't restore the trust that the sisters broke by stealing from the school.

36:23Lana Chang:And so the families of St. James that were affected by this scandal can either choose to forgive the nuns their trespasses, or maybe more realistically, just find some way to move on.

36:38Mary Margaret Kreuper:We have to live with it and it's over for the church. They don't have to deal with it. They keep ignoring it. Time passes and something worse comes along.

36:52Lana Chang:Thank you for tuning in to The Opportunist. Among the many sources we use for our research, we found the Spectrum News reporting by Zarina Hirozada, extremely helpful. This episode was written by Nani Okwulagu and executive produced by Connor Powell. We'll be back in a few weeks with new stories about people seeing an opportunity to get ahead and taking it. Until next time.

37:31Thank you.