Photo by: Jessica Ma
Local single father Robert “Bob” Barron, senior financial advisor at A/B Investments, confided to a friend last week over lunch that he was struggling to handle the strain of massive embezzlement and the needs of his growing son.
“They grow up so fast, you know?” Barron was overheard saying to close friend Danny Planvally. “You start at one checking account with only 3,500 dollars stolen from a crummy old asshole’s retirement account, and then all of a sudden it’s eight years and four 8,000,000 dollars offshore accounts later, and I’m missing Leland’s birthday party.
“Jesus, he’s already 14,” he went on. “Where am I going to find the time to take him to soccer practice, to make sure he’s doing his homework, and to meet his friends? I’m spending most days rerouting money from new clients through old clients’ accounts into my personal account, and I’m spending most nights figuring out how to dodge the SEC, for Christ’s sake.”
As a senior financial advisor, Barron has largely unrestricted control over most accounts at A/B Investments in the “Family Income Below 60,000” bracket; he has used this control to illegally siphon increasingly large sums of money into his own accounts.
“I just wanted to get more things done around this town,” said Barron on the usage of the thieved funds. “Helping to get the most qualified city council members elected, funding a program for healthier school lunches, pushing along the land rights to get that casino built — these things take money!”
However, Barron revealed that he had been harboring worries about the visibility of his high spending over the last couple years.
“And what if I get caught and convicted?” he asked, frantically taking a sip from his glass of Saint Vivant Grand Cru 2007 Pinot Noir to calm himself. “Who’s going to take care of Leland if I’m in jail? How could I burden my poor parents with this, after they’ve worked so hard all their lives to raise me and lead me to success? And Jane definitely isn’t coming back, not after the divorce.”
“Oh, it was just some mild infidelity, nothing crazy,” he responded when Planvally asked why Barron and his ex-wife separated. “What? No, not Fidelity Investments, but screw them too — those fuckers have poached four clients from me already this year.”
Barron’s son, Leland Barron, is a ninth grader at local Copley-Ivy High School.
“Yeah, it’s not like Dad’s been around too much, but that’s ‘cause he’s working so hard,” Leland Barron said during an academic counseling meeting. “I know he’s just trying to give me the privileged life that his immigrant parents fought so hard to give him.
“Sure, I wish he didn’t leave me stranded at school those three times. Sure, I wish we were actually close enough to talk, really talk: about school, about the cute kids in my grade, about my future career. But he’s trying his best — he really is.”
At the end of lunch, as Robert Barron absentmindedly chewed on his last bite of foie gras, he mused over whether to move away from large-scale embezzlement and into more manageable ventures in order to better accommodate his son’s “needs.”
“What if I go small-time instead, start taking coins from laundry machines at apartment complexes?” he mused. “Ten units per apartment, 2.50 dollars per load, one load per unit per week, that’s 13,000 dollars a year. I should only take half a week to avoid suspicion, so with three apartments every week, that’s… almost 20,000 dollars a year. Hey, I could get a college fund going for Leland with that.”
