In 2018, the Hannibal Fire Company named a truck bay after its two longest-serving members: Jim Travis and George Parry Jr.
Parry, then 77, had been putting out fires in the rural community since he was a teen.
He’d been a volunteer for 60 years. For 50 of those of them, he was also the department’s treasurer, handling an annual budget that grew to more than $400,000 that included taxpayer money.
But at the same time the plaque honoring Parry’s service was hung on the wall, he was quietly bilking the department out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, a state audit found.
A state comptroller’s report released this week detailed how Parry’s unilateral control of the department’s books, accounts and multimillion-dollar investments enabled him to steal at least $850,000 between 2016 and 2022. But because Parry controlled the department’s money for decades, it’s possible his theft went on for much longer.
It was a scheme that ended with a department devastated and one man dead.
Parry wrote himself 823 checks totaling $451,537 over an eight-and-a-half-year period, the audit found. In just one year, 2019, Parry signed 123 checks to himself totaling more than $90,000.
Parry also made hundreds of cash advances to himself using a secret fire department credit card. Between 2017 and May 2022, Parry used the credit card for 794 cash advances, averaging about $400 each time, according to the report.
In one year, he made nearly 200 cash advances to himself totaling about $82,660.
In all, Parry put a total of $400,000 in charges on the fire department credit card, which he then paid off using the department’s general fund and investment accounts.
Almost all of the money Parry took was in checks or cash payments to himself, so it’s hard to know what he spent it on.
Parry’s thefts went on for years, according to the report. They even continued after the department elected a new treasurer in March 2022.
Then fire department officials discovered the credit card.
The…
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