Chapter 6 - THE PRICE OF MAKING CHILDREN QUIT
By New Year’s Eve, investigators identified eleven questionable instrument transactions.
Not all criminal.
Three were legitimate sales authorized by donors.
Eight were not.
Total documented value:
approximately $31,000.
Not enormous enough to make national news.
More than enough to destroy lives around a small nonprofit.
Grant had a financial reason.
Two years earlier, he developed a sports-betting habit.
Not glamorous casino addiction.
Phone betting.
Quiet.
Easy.
A hundred dollars on a game.
Then five hundred.
Then chasing losses.
Credit-card debt followed.
Then a second problem.
He had been laid off from medical-device sales and hid it from Rachel for almost four months.
Every morning he left the house dressed for work.
Instead he spent days in coworking spaces sending applications and trying to recover losses through increasingly desperate bets.
Second Movement’s instruments became liquid assets no one watched closely.
Grant convinced himself he was borrowing against them.
Sell.
Bet.
Win.
Replace.
Except the wins never arrived.
So he bought cheaper instruments online and substituted them.
A $5,000 violin became a $350 copy.
A $2,500 cello became a $600 student model.
Children noticed.
Adults believed Grant.
May you like
Because Grant was the expert.
That was the ugliest advantage of all.
