Scandal at the Zoo

High-ranking executives at the Columbus Zoo are caught in a wild fraud scheme and experience an epic fall from grace. Marissa Gibson, who investigated their crimes, is here to tell us this bizarre story. And it all starts with a most unlikely whistle-blower. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
The claims and opinions in this podcast are those of
the speaker and do not necessarily represent the Knife or
exactly right media.

Speaker 3 (00:14):
The announce spent on catering, additional concert tickets, suites, everything
all together. That was over a million dollars of zoo's
money just for these men and their personal entertainment.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
Welcome to the Knife. I'm Patia Eton.

Speaker 1 (00:43):
And I'm Hannah Smith, and today we have a really
interesting story involving a zoo.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
A scandal at the zoo. How wild.

Speaker 1 (00:52):
Yeah, you found this article that you then sent to me,
and maybe we should start with you kind of explaining what.

Speaker 4 (00:59):
Was in the art.

Speaker 2 (01:01):
Yeah. Well, I'm always looking for a scandal story, and
when I kind of saw that there was a fraud
unfolding at the Columbus Zoo, I was like, okay, I
need to know more. And so it was actually in
an article from a local newspaper in Ohio called the
Columbus Dispatch, and it was written back in twenty twenty one,

(01:22):
and in the article, essentially what was said was that
a tip had come into the paper where someone had
reported that these high ranking zoo executives were misusing houses
that were owned by the zoo.

Speaker 1 (01:36):
Which is just like, what are we talking about houses
owned by a zoo?

Speaker 4 (01:41):
I know?

Speaker 2 (01:42):
I was like, why does the zoo need all these houses?
What are they doing with them? What are they doing
with them? How does this work? I did a little
research and basically, zoos are you know, their nonprofit entities
and nonprofit organizations, and oftentimes if someone dies and wants
to leave their assets to the zoo, that might include

(02:02):
a property like a house, and the zoo can then
own those homes and use them to some way benefit
the zoo, whether it's like charging market rent to raise
funds for the zoo, or maybe housing a donor or
someone who's working on the zoo. But this article was
saying that a tip came in that these zoo executives

(02:23):
were actually just using the houses to like give the
people that they love free rent, which is right, not.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
Allowed, Yeah, not allowed. Not like the most scandalous accusation.
But spoiler alert, it doesn't end there.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
It doesn't end there. We would never do that.

Speaker 1 (02:39):
But it basically launches an investigation, a deeper investigation, because
there's like, first of all, We don't know who's sent
this tip in at this time, but it's like, Okay,
what's going on? Is there something to this?

Speaker 2 (02:52):
This local newspaper that reports on this, you know, they
published the article and the article ends up with the
Ohio Auditors. So the state of Ohio has its own
Auditor's office and investigations unit. And so we're talking to
Marissa Gibson today who works for the Auditor's office. She

(03:14):
is an investigator, a special Investigations Unit investigator, and she
was a part of unraveling the entirety of this fraud,
which you know includes a pretty epic fall from grace
for the people behind it. It gets bananas, wild, exotic, Untamed, Untamed,

(03:36):
And you know, Marissa gave us some stats that didn't
end up in the episode, but I want to just
mention them here because I think it's kind of good
context as we go through this interview. These are annual
salaries of other zoo staff at the Columbus Zoo from
like twenty fifteen to twenty twenty on average. So you know,
you have a lot of positions at the zoo. There's

(03:56):
also a lot of hourly workers. You think about, like
there's cafe, and there's delivery people, but animal nutrition assistants.
We're getting between forty four fifty one thousand a year
head zookeepers the ranges sixty three to sixty five thousand,
non head zookeepers approximately sixty k, and then warehouse workers
forty five K to forty seven K. Reasonable salaries for Columbus, Ohio.

(04:22):
But it's not like people are getting wealthy, right. They
are making, you know, a livable wage, but not much
more than that.

Speaker 1 (04:30):
Yeah, so let's get into the interview. As a note,
no animals were harmed in this story.

Speaker 2 (04:39):
Thank you Marisa for joining us today.

Speaker 4 (04:42):
Well, thanks for having me.

Speaker 2 (04:44):
So this article from the Columbus Dispatch makes its way
to your office. The zoo executives have been misusing properties
owned by the zoo, and Franklin County residents are interested
where does it go from there?

Speaker 3 (04:58):
So we start making because what we want to know
is whether or not any of these levee dollars were misappropriated.
So you know my partner on the case, who is Macleapique.
He was the forensic auditor assigned to this from my unit.
So he starts looking at all of the levee dollars,
and what we find is that, yes, the zoo is
receiving these payments, and the specific levee language says that

(05:22):
these funds are for animal care and for daily operation
of the zoo. So he's looking at those and everything
appears to be okay as far as how that particular
money is spent. But the problem is that the zoo
was commingling these funds into general accounts.

Speaker 4 (05:39):
So now all of the.

Speaker 3 (05:40):
Money of the zoo is now commingled your taxpayer dollars
and the rest of your revenue. So that opens up
everything as free reign for us to look into all
finances of the zoo.

Speaker 1 (05:51):
Okay, I see. So basically that initial look into their
finances showed that funds were being moved around, but in
ways that maybe didn't make a lot of sense. Money
was co mingling. At that point. You didn't know if
that was intentionally criminal or maybe like poor internal organization,

(06:11):
but regardless, it didn't matter because it allowed you legally
to have access to everything, all of the bank accounts
associated with the zoo.

Speaker 3 (06:20):
Yeah, so now we have access to everything, and the
zoo has many, many, many bank accounts, so it's not
as if they just have one and we're looking in
that one account. So if you think about everything that
goes into running a zoo, you have not only your payroll,
but then you have all of your vendors that the
zoo pays. You know, they have to pay for the
feed of the animal, so they have produce vendors. The

(06:41):
zoo has restaurants on site, they hold weddings there. It's
a big venue for big events, you know, corporate events.
There are so many different things that go into the
daily operating of the zoo.

Speaker 1 (06:53):
So as you start the investigation and you start going
through the accounts, who are the main people at the
zoo that you start to focus on.

Speaker 3 (07:02):
So what it had been determined by the zoos internal
investigation is that generally speaking, we were looking at four
executives here. So the four executives were people at the top,
so that would be the CEO, Tom Stall, the CFO
who was Great Bell, the director of marketing who is
Pete Fingerhut, and then the director of purchasing which is

(07:22):
Tracy Murnaine. Very soon they became aware that we were
investigating and that this was going to be criminal and
this was not going to just be a civil investigation
that was done by their employer, so very very quickly,
all of our suspects retained defense counsel. And not only
did they retain defense counsel, they retained like the premier

(07:44):
attorneys of Central Ohio. So the names that you see
in the news, like the ones that handled the big cases.
So to me, this is just a sign that we're
going to find something. There's something going on here.

Speaker 2 (07:57):
Yeah, you don't want to pay those big attorney fees
for nothing.

Speaker 3 (08:01):
It's just experienced talking in that case. But yes, that
was a pretty good clue to us that there is something.

Speaker 2 (08:08):
Here for sure, and until proof and guilty, but doesn't
look good.

Speaker 4 (08:13):
It did not look good.

Speaker 2 (08:14):
No.

Speaker 3 (08:14):
So what we like to do, and this is not
just our unit, but typically law enforcement in general, when
you're doing a criminal investigation that involves multiple suspects, is
that we like to start with who is perceived to be,
you know, the smallest fish, who looks like they have
the least amount of criminal liability here. And I like
to do that because that's almost always who is going

(08:37):
to talk to you. You know, they're going to give
you the most information on the others. So in this case,
that was determined to be Tracy Murnane, who was the
former director of Purchasing at the Zoo.

Speaker 4 (08:47):
So we're not looking now just at zoo expenses.

Speaker 3 (08:50):
You know, we we have an open criminal investigation now,
so we have as a law enforcement unit, we have
subpoena authority. So we start looking at his personal bank records,
and what we noted in his personal bank records. Of course,
we're expecting to see payroll from the Zoo, as we should,
but something else that we found.

Speaker 4 (09:08):
That far exceeded his payroll from the.

Speaker 3 (09:10):
Zoo were a series of checks from a local classic
car company called Arena Motor Sales. And I think altogether
we identified around four hundred and seventy five thousand dollars
of payments from this classic car dealership.

Speaker 4 (09:24):
And we're thinking, this is weird.

Speaker 3 (09:26):
You know, why is this classic car company paying the
Zoo's director of purchasing. And it was several checks a
month that were being deposited into his personal bank account.
And because this is a two year investigation that we're
trying to cram into a one hour podcast, I'm going
to just get to like the cliff's note version of
Tracy's story. Since he's not our big fish. But what

(09:46):
it turned out that he was doing is that he
was purchasing vehicles himself and he wanted to sell them
to the zoo. And he's solely in charge of you know,
as the director of purchasing, he's in charge of buying
everything for the zoo. But he wanted to a way
that he could make some extra money, so he was
buying these vehicles. He knows that he cannot sell vehicles
that are owned by him to the zoo because that's

(10:07):
violating his code of ethics. So what he did is
he had all of these vehicles quickly titled to Arena
Motor Sales, and then Arena Motor Sales would on paper
sell these vehicles to the zoo, so the zoo would
pay Arena Motor Sales, and then Arena would immediately cut
a check to Tracy Renaine. So Tracy is essentially selling
vehicles to the zoo, but not on paper. He's using

(10:29):
a straw man as the seller. They also had a
little side hustle going on that did involve classic cars
and the classic cars. It was a mix of those
vehicles and then the vehicles that he sold to the
zoo that totaled that five hundred and seventy six thousand
and some odd.

Speaker 2 (10:44):
Sense, And you know, what was his yearly salary? I
assume it changed a bit over the years, but what
was the ballpark salary for Tracy?

Speaker 3 (10:54):
So he was definitely the lowest paid of our executives
and he was making around one hundred and twenty thousand
a year at the time shortly.

Speaker 4 (11:04):
Before he separated from employment.

Speaker 3 (11:05):
Just for comparison, Tom Stoff was making just under five
hundred thousand a year as the CEO, and then Greg
bell our CFO, he was making just under four hundred
thousand per year.

Speaker 2 (11:15):
That's a lot of money, yes, and I think.

Speaker 3 (11:19):
That's really important for people to know because these are
not people who were financially strapped at all. These are
big salaries for the Midwest, for a medium cost of
living city.

Speaker 2 (11:32):
So, okay, does Tracy end up telling you anything about
the others or is he, you know, staying quiet?

Speaker 4 (11:40):
No, he did.

Speaker 3 (11:41):
He was very forthcoming with information about the others. He
was not as forthcoming with information that would implicate.

Speaker 4 (11:46):
Himself, because they never are.

Speaker 3 (11:48):
But he would say just enough, and then we would
have to push back and say, actually, that's.

Speaker 4 (11:52):
Not quite true. Let me show you this.

Speaker 2 (11:54):
What does he tell you?

Speaker 4 (11:55):
So he does give us some information.

Speaker 3 (11:57):
A lot of it was just him solidifying what we
are already believed and him confirming that this is indeed
the way it went. But he did get a lot
of good information that he was willing to share on
the other three and that would be our CEO, CFO
and our director of marketing. He wasn't in their click
by any means. The click was Pete Fingerhut, Greg Bell,

(12:19):
and Tom Stalf. As we started to interview current and
former employees from the zoo, I mean, for this case,
we interviewed over one hundred and twenty five people. As
I recall, and as Zoo employees had some choice nicknames
for these three individually. Tom Stalf was known by the
employees there as the King because he did what he
wanted and got what he wanted. And then Greg Bell,

(12:41):
our CFO, he was referred to as Big Daddy by
zoo employees.

Speaker 4 (12:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (12:48):
And then our director of marketing Pete Fingerhut, his nickname
was the ticket Master for reasons that will become clear
as we continue to go here.

Speaker 2 (12:57):
Wow, so we have got the King, Big Dad, and
the Ticketmaster.

Speaker 3 (13:01):
Yeah, so the Zoo employees collectively, we heard some different
names for them. It was the good old boys club
amongst the people under them. They were not held in
high esteem. Let's just say that.

Speaker 2 (13:14):
Like these Zoo employees, they're not shocked when you come
to them and say something's going on.

Speaker 3 (13:19):
The general consensus was that these men were very entitled
and they did what they want and they felt that
they were.

Speaker 4 (13:26):
Above the law. That turned out to not be the case.

Speaker 3 (13:28):
But yeah, and I know we're jumping ahead a little bit,
but I can say that the majority of people that
we talked to who are the former and current Zoom employees,
these are wonderful people who are there for the animals.
You know, they're there for the right reasons, and they
felt extremely betrayed by what happened by their leadership. They
were betrayed by this. They were angry.

Speaker 1 (13:51):
Yeah, I really want to get into what comes to
light that would make Zoo employees so angry, as you
just said. But also, you know, I think I want
to remind listeners here that you know, a lot of
the Zoo employees are making a very modest I mean
a good wage, but a modest wage, and there's also
a lot of hourly employees, not all of them, of course,

(14:12):
but there's this huge range of jobs at the zoo.

Speaker 2 (14:15):
Yeah, I mean, the Columbus Zoo is a nonprofit organization.
It's great for the Columbus economy and draws a ton
of visitors, but at the end of the day, the
goal of the zoo is not for profit. On their website,
it actually says that their mission is to become one
of the most impactful wildlife conservation institutions globally. They talk
about the importance of conservation and education, as you pointed out,

(14:39):
and that's, you know, I'm sure how most of these
zoo employees actually feel.

Speaker 1 (14:45):
So as you started to comb through the spending of
these three top dogs, you know, with these nicknames, King,
Big Daddy, and Ticketmaster, what did you find?

Speaker 3 (14:57):
All of the credit card purposes were a all the
credit cards that were held by these zoo executives to
see what they spent their money on. And what we
found there was just a series of personal purchases to
enhance their own lives and their own entertainment. I'll us
give you a sampling. So Tom Stall, for instance, he
spent money on World Series tickets for his family. I

(15:21):
think those tickets alone or maybe just hent or ten
thousand dollars. And then you know, they can't have just
the craft seats. They have to have the good seats.
They have to have private catering. Pete Fingerhutt, who is
our ticket master, he went on multiple personal trips that
he used the zoo's credit card to pay for anything

(15:41):
that he wanted.

Speaker 4 (15:42):
And of course you know what they were doing.

Speaker 3 (15:44):
You know, like any bureaucracy, Zoo has credit card forms
that you have to submit, you know, your receipt and
what it is that you were doing and why you
were doing it, and they would just falsify I mean period.
Pete Fingerhut. You know, he would manipulate invoices, and this
is something that he finally did admit to in an

(16:04):
interview where his council was present. But he would just
wipe things out on invoices, do a little photoshopping, make
it say something else, and submit it to the zoo's
finance office. But the way that they were able to
get away with this is that again we're talking about
the people at the very top, so they're just signing
each other's credit card slips and then nobody says anything.

Speaker 2 (16:24):
Right because it's like, oh, I'm going to go up
against the CEO on this credit card slip or I'm
just going to keep my job and that will be
someone else's problem, which is I mean that totally. I
think reasonable take if you're just making an honest living.

Speaker 3 (16:38):
Yeah, So the people that work in the Zoo's accounts
payable or accounts receivable office, like when a slip is
signed off on by the CFO of the Zoo, these
people are not going to question it because that is
their boss. That is the ultimate boss of everything financial
at the Zoo, who also had I'm going to call

(17:02):
this a barter account system. That's the best way to
really say it. Ohio has this, and these are maybe
nationwide as well. But there are these barter networks that
companies can join and essentially you have to put something
of value out onto this barter market and then other
businesses do the same. So the Zoo's item of value
were admission tickets for the zoo or for zoombz Bay,

(17:24):
which is their water park, and then also rounds of
golf at Safari Golf, which is the course that they
own and operate. So the Barter network is something that
our forensic auditors examined as well, and what we found
is that these executives were using those barn dollars again
just to enrich their own life. We had the CEO
who was using Barter dollars to purchase limousines.

Speaker 4 (17:46):
For his daughter's prom.

Speaker 3 (17:48):
We had Tracy Burnain who was using Barter dollars to
get a party bus for his son's wedding. We had
Tom Stuff, the CEO, who was using the Barter dollars
to take his family on spring break trips. Some of
these were really egregious. We had Tom stallf who was
buying luxury watches for himself with these dollars. Greg Bell

(18:10):
purchased an antique safe for his son. They got tickets
to Hamilton, tickets to Laynez, anything that you can imagine
that would make your life fun and interesting, that's what
they were doing.

Speaker 2 (18:22):
Wow. And I don't know if this would have come
up in your guys's investigation, but did you ever find
any correspondence between either this click of executives or them
and their families where it's like, ooh, we really shouldn't
be doing this. We're kind of alluding to like that
others knew what they were doing, or that they knew

(18:43):
how bad it was.

Speaker 3 (18:45):
Oh yeah, in fact that honestly, that is what made
this case so beautiful is that we were given full
access to the zoo executives' emails. Love that not only
their emails, but also you know, their outlook calendars and
all of their contacts. We were able to view all
of their communications between themselves and also yeah, between them

(19:07):
and their family members and them and other people. And
it became a blueprint of watching these people facilitate the
fraud and how they were going to cover it up.
I mean, they discuss everything over email as if nobody
would ever see it, So little did they know those
are going to be some of our best pieces of evidence.

Speaker 4 (19:27):
It was absolutely amazing.

Speaker 3 (19:29):
In fact, one of my favorite emails is and we'll
talk about this later when we talk about tickets that
they were purchasing, but one of my favorite emails in
this entire case is when our CFO, CEO and director
of Marketing, so the King, Big Daddy, and Ticketmaster, they're
all talking to each other over email, and they're talking
about suites that they have purchased at the Shatstein Center.

(19:51):
For an upcoming concert, which of course was totally paid
for by the zoo, and one of them says to
the other, we are so spoiled. Another chimes in as
a reply, yes.

Speaker 4 (20:02):
We are, like we are something to that effect.

Speaker 3 (20:06):
But it was just so egregious and awful and tone
deaf because you're, yes, you're committing fraud. You are using
the zoo's money to pay for something that no one
else at the zoo knows about, and that you are
fraudulently listing on invoices. The total loss associated with the
barter network was it was around seventy thousand dollars of

(20:27):
funds that were spent on this network that were supposed
to be spent to better the zoo and for the
zoo's day to day operations, but it ended up being
tickets and vacations, watches, you know, again, anything to make
their lives fun.

Speaker 2 (20:43):
Okay, so they've spent all his money on like concert
tickets and suites and catering and vacations. What else were
they buying?

Speaker 3 (20:53):
So going back to the self importance, I'll move on
to another scheme that they had, and that was that
involved memberships at some very prestigious country clubs here in
central Ohio. So these guys they got some memberships at
some country clubs that are here in Delaware County, which

(21:15):
is the suburb of Columbus, the suburban area where the
zoo itself.

Speaker 4 (21:19):
Is actually located.

Speaker 3 (21:21):
So they got these country club memberships. And what we
were able to do is we subpoenaed all of the
receipt details from these three different country.

Speaker 4 (21:30):
Clubs and we got to see what they bought.

Speaker 3 (21:32):
So the way that it works at the country club
is you have a membership and you don't pay cash
for anything.

Speaker 4 (21:38):
You charge it to your account and you get a
bill at the end of the month.

Speaker 3 (21:41):
Well that bill was associated with credit cards that belong
to the Columbus Zoo and not to our people here.
So every single month it was just being built back
to the zoo. The people in the zoo's finance office,
they don't know what's being purchased because they're not seeing
the individual receipt details.

Speaker 4 (21:56):
It's just a statement at the end of the month
that comes.

Speaker 2 (21:58):
Were they making any sort of attempt on these like
credit card statements like this lunch was to discuss animals
anything like.

Speaker 3 (22:06):
That, Yes, And it was all bs and all nonsense.
And this was one of the things that was really
great about having access to their emails and having access
to their outlook calendars that you know, they would put
on their credit card usage form that had to be
turned into finance. I'll just give you one example. So
this one particular, and this happened all the time. There
are a hundred examples, but I'm just going to choose one.

(22:29):
So this was a baseball game in a suite that
Greg Bell took his family to for his grandson's birthday.
And not only you know, did the zoo have to
pay for the suite, of course, but they also had
to pay for the private catering, the food and the
booze that was all used on the zoo's credit card.
But so Greg bell our CFO, he has to turn

(22:49):
in his usage form and he has to put what
was the purpose of this particular event and the one
that was for his grandson's birthday. He wrote, meeting with
Columbus Minority Business Council. So this is what it was,
over and over and over, fraudulently listing meetings with different

(23:10):
people that never occurred. A lot of the entertainment type
of things had meeting with board member, meeting with donor meeting,
and it was all wise. It was them taking their
friends and family out and spending the zoo's money. Like
I said, we were reviewing all of the individual receipts
and what we found is that it wasn't even just
our suspects. It was their spouses and their kids that

(23:32):
were going into the country clubs and just buying what
they wanted and billing it to their account. We saw
private boxing classes that were taken by Pete's wife, personal
training by Tom, Tom's wife and Pete's wife, just cocktail
hour at the country club and all of this was
going back to the zoo.

Speaker 2 (23:53):
As you were going through this like forensic accounting, did
you ever discover how this all started? I have to
imagine at some point the three of these guys, Tom,
Greg Pete, they make this decision to start committing fraud
as a team, since it was truly or at least
it sounds like a team effort.

Speaker 3 (24:10):
So Garth Brooks came to Columbus and I want to say,
this is like two thousand and I don't know, eleven.

Speaker 2 (24:17):
Or twelve, like the Garth Brooks.

Speaker 3 (24:20):
The Garth Brooks he came to Comb and these guys
decided they wanted to go.

Speaker 4 (24:25):
They were like, we got to go to this.

Speaker 2 (24:26):
I totally relate.

Speaker 3 (24:29):
Too. Yeah, and apparently, you know, the state of Ohio
related too, because Garth did three Knights in a row
and all three were sold out. So these guys, you know,
they consider themselves royalty at this point, so they're not
going to just get tickets, right, they want the best tickets.
So they start talking to a rep over at the
Shottenstein Center here in Columbus, one of the two big

(24:51):
concert event venues, and they're like, hmm, how much would
it be for a suite? So they're talking to the
rep and we uncover an email essentially where the conversation
is this between our three guys. They're like, huh, yeah,
let's get a sweet like let's do this, and as

(25:12):
I just explained, Garth was in.

Speaker 4 (25:13):
Town for three nights.

Speaker 3 (25:15):
We have an email where ticketmaster Pete Fingerhut reaches out
to Tom Staff and.

Speaker 4 (25:20):
Says, hey, do you want to go twice?

Speaker 3 (25:22):
Like you want to go two nights in a row,
and Tom says, yeah, I'd go again.

Speaker 4 (25:27):
So that's what they decide to do. So they decide that.

Speaker 3 (25:30):
They're going to rent a suite for the Garth concert,
and that was to the tune of eight thousand dollars
just for two nights in suite. Now, that's just for
the cost of the suite. That doesn't even include your catering, which,
of course, if you're going to go sit in the suite,
you know you're going to live it up.

Speaker 4 (25:47):
You're not bringing your own water bottle with you.

Speaker 2 (25:49):
You're not going to be like completely sober and like
bring your own snacks like my mom when I was
eight to the movie theater or something.

Speaker 4 (25:58):
You're going to go in a party, right, They didn't
bring in their own purses however, like that. No, so
they're getting private catering.

Speaker 3 (26:05):
This is expensive, right, So I mean of all of
the different concerts that we uncovered that they went to,
I mean, these catering bills are between like fifteen hundred
and two thousand dollars once you fill them with your
friends and family and you guys all are drinking alcohol
and ordering whatever you want.

Speaker 4 (26:20):
But anyway, so this is how it starts. So they're in.

Speaker 3 (26:29):
These suites at the Garth concert and they're like, okay,
we've had a taste of what true exclusivity is and
we want that.

Speaker 4 (26:36):
So we found an email.

Speaker 3 (26:38):
Pete emails Greg and what it is that he's emailing is,
essentially it's a packet of materials of how much it
costs to have a season suite at the Shawenstein Center,
how much will it cost for us to have a
suite for everything? Essentially, So it says, hey, how can

(26:58):
we convince Tom to do this?

Speaker 4 (27:00):
They're talking about it back and forth.

Speaker 3 (27:01):
Well, anyways, Tom agrees because he's like, heck yeah, I mean,
he's the King.

Speaker 4 (27:05):
He wants to be in on this. So they devised
this plan. And this is where this was.

Speaker 3 (27:10):
Step one of what was determined to be the biggest
fraud at the Zoo was these suite agreements not only
at the Shot and Steam Center, but also at niche
Wide Arena where the Blue Jackets play.

Speaker 4 (27:20):
So how it started was this. They originally just did
it at.

Speaker 3 (27:25):
The Shot and they got OSU season tickets and then
also all of these other concerts, and that alone, just
for use of the suite, that three year contract was
over two hundred thousand dollars. That's just for the suite
for the sporting events. If you want to go to
concerts that costs extra as well. And then if you

(27:45):
want your catering, that costs extra as well. So they
did that. However, how they filled out their credit card
usage form and their check requests formed for the Zoo
again was all just nonsense. Again, they had it say
advertisement of State University. So they were sending it to
the zoo's finance office as if they had entered into
a contract for the Zoo to be essentially one of

(28:08):
the sponsors at the shot Steam Center, that they were
going to have you know, banners and huge things on
the inside advertising.

Speaker 4 (28:15):
The Columbus Zuo.

Speaker 2 (28:16):
So they just were leaving out the fact that this
was a suite. They were just saying it's being paid
to this stadium.

Speaker 3 (28:23):
Yeah, because all of the payments were to the Ohio
State University. So no one in finance knew the difference.
And again, you know, you have your people at the
top signing off on these forums, there's never going to
be any questions.

Speaker 2 (28:34):
Yeah, and then you know.

Speaker 3 (28:35):
They continue to do this for the next eight nine years,
and they just bought bigger sweet packages every single year,
you know, at the Columbus Blue Jackets games, which are
played at nationwide arena. You know, they started small back
in twenty ten and started with just a small season
ticket package. Well, they got greedier and greedier as the
years went on, and then at the very end they

(28:57):
had a full season in the suite. They also had
full season in the loge, which is another premier seating area,
and then they also had glass seats, which are considered
the best seats at a hockey game, you know, right
behind the penalty box.

Speaker 4 (29:09):
The amount of.

Speaker 3 (29:09):
Fraud that was perpetuated with these was just unbelievable. For
every single night that you're there and you're getting this
private catering that's all being built to a credit card,
which again we're held by the Zoo. Every time you
have that expense, you have to fill it out on
your form of what it is, Why was I there?
And every single thing was a lie. It was all
a lie. Everything was entertaining this particular donor entertaining this

(29:34):
board member. And you know, we went and talked all
these people. None of them had ever been to any
suite with these people.

Speaker 2 (29:41):
Which is actually so surprising to me because it's like, well,
you've already paid for this suite, Like if you are
trying to make it look like a valid expense you've
already paid for it. Would it really kill you to
like invite some of your donors one night.

Speaker 3 (29:55):
But it was never for anyone else. It was it
was for them from the very beginning. It was for
them and their family and their friends. There was never
any type of legitimate zoo business being conducted in any
of these form after form, just nothing but lies. And
there were actually a couple of times where they almost
were caught. So one time, the Shottenstein Center delivered or

(30:18):
had shipped to the zoo like a month's worth of
parking passes for suiteholders, So the zoo got to have
all these special parking because when you have a suite,
you know you get the bus parking.

Speaker 4 (30:27):
Well, they delivered all the.

Speaker 3 (30:28):
Parking passes to the zoo, and the zoo's mail room
just assumed that these were for the zoo's philanthropy department,
because they figured if anyone was going to be doing
any type of entertaining at these venues, it's probably the
people whose job it is is to find owners for
the zoo. So all of these parking passes got routed
to the zoo's philanthropy department. Well, the philanthropy department was like,

(30:51):
I don't have any idea what these are. We don't
have tickets to any of these events, we're not aware
of any of this. So what they do is the
Zoo's philanthropy department emails Fingerhut and Greg Bell and said
does anybody know what these are for? So that we
find a series of emails where Pete immediately emails Greg
and says, go down there and get those parking and

(31:11):
say that they're for Tom. Say that they're for Tom.
So he freaks out. And then what we see next
is Pete emailing both concert venues and saying, you know,
just because the mailroom messes things up all the time,
from now on, I'm going to go ahead and just
request that you send all tickets and parking to this address.
And it was his home, so you know, he knew

(31:32):
that he was very close to being caught, very very close.

Speaker 2 (31:36):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (31:37):
Yeah, I wanted to give you some numbers of yeah,
all this shook out. So just for Ohio State University,
the money that they spent there on suites and also
for catering, that was around three hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
But that was nowhere close to the amount of money
that was spent at Nationwide.

Speaker 4 (31:52):
Arena with the close Blue Jackets. When we totaled that.

Speaker 3 (31:57):
The amount spent on catering at Nationwide Arena, additional concert tickets, suites,
everything all together, that was over a million dollars of
Zoo's money just for these men and their personal entertainment.

Speaker 2 (32:10):
A million dollars.

Speaker 3 (32:12):
No through business of any kind being conducted there none.

Speaker 2 (32:15):
Wow, that's so much money. I mean, they had to
know that once they got up into like the seven figures,
not that it's ever okay, but you don't want to
get caught like that's really really bad because a million
dollars that's newsworthy, which ends up being Yeah. So at
this point they all know they're under investigation. They've all

(32:35):
retained attorneys. We spoke about Tracy and your conversations with him.
Tell me about your conversations with the other three and
how things progressed once you were like, yeah, I have
a great case and I'm ready to talk to them.

Speaker 3 (32:48):
So the second attorney that we reached out to, after
speaking to Tracy, we were confident to go to the
CFO to Greg Bell next, and we did we sat
down with he and his attorney, I think a total
of four times were again we did the same thing.
We laid out our case and showed them what we
already knew, and you know, it went a lot like
it did with Tracy where Greg he was definitely eager

(33:11):
to say what he knew about Pete and Tom, who
we had not spoken with yet. He was very grateful
because you know, again, you know, people want the best
deal for themselves. Everybody knows that they're looking at prison
in this instance because of the amount of money and
because of the type of crimes here in Ohio that
they could be charged under, which is essentially a racketeering
type of situation. Engaging in a pattern of corrupt activity.

(33:33):
That's what it's called here at least, which is a
RICO case, which is a lot of times like what
gangs are charged under. Its organized crime is what it was. Yeah,
So they have the best defense counsel, so their clients
have been prepped for what they could be facing here.
So everybody wants a good deal.

Speaker 2 (33:49):
Which is what by the way, in decades in prison.

Speaker 3 (33:53):
Yeah, it can be most certainly, and the amount of theft,
you know, when this was all said and done. We
can talk about the numbers that were our final calcula.
But yeah, this was felony one theft in Ohio. It
doesn't get any more serious when it comes to a
financial crime.

Speaker 4 (34:06):
It was a big deal.

Speaker 3 (34:07):
So Greg, who we sat down with next, for the
most part, Yeah, he admitted to everything that we laid out.
There was not a whole lot of pushback. He knew
what was coming for him and he did. He gave
good information on Pete and also on Tom.

Speaker 4 (34:20):
So that's who we sat down with next.

Speaker 2 (34:23):
I guess I'm curious if Greg, because his son was
also to some a smaller extent involved, I'm just putting
myself in his shoes in this moment. I'm like, what
do I have to tell you to get my son
off the hook here?

Speaker 3 (34:37):
Yeah, and really not just his son, it was also
his daughter had also been an employee of the zoo,
and you know, back to those emails. But something that
was just really unbelievable in this case is that we
really got to see a lot about the family dynamics
of the Bells and the entitlement of his children. He
has three children, and we reviewed emails where children were

(35:01):
basically sending him their list of demands of this is
what we want. We want to go to this concert
I want and his daughter Jillian, who was a zoo
employee at one point, she would email him multiple times
and say, here's my wish list and it would honestly
be a long list of everything that she was expecting to.

Speaker 4 (35:21):
Have tickets too.

Speaker 2 (35:22):
So it seems like she knew that was coming from
the zoo. Yeah, not from her dad's bank account.

Speaker 3 (35:28):
You know, it's hard to say where she Yeah, I
don't know who she thought.

Speaker 4 (35:33):
Was paying for it.

Speaker 3 (35:34):
But I only bring that up because there was some
unbelievable entitlement coming from these children. And you know, they
said jump and he said how Hi? Like truly, if
they wanted it, they got it.

Speaker 2 (35:46):
Wow. Are they able to at this stage in the
process like negotiate like, Hey, I'm gonna tell you, but
you gotta let my kid off the hook here.

Speaker 3 (35:56):
There was a little bit of negotiation like that when
it came to the spout of hey, you know we're
going to do this if this doesn't happen, There was
a little bit of that. But his son, Grant, was
an employee of the zoo, so him not being charged
was never going to be an option because he was
an employee. He had that responsibility to the zoo as

(36:18):
his employer, and he chose to use the zoo's credit card.
I know we haven't talked about Grant a lot, but
you know, he used his credit card to take his
family on vacation and then he did the same thing
as everyone else, just falsified the invoice, falsified, made up
some nonsense reason of what he was doing there.

Speaker 4 (36:34):
And it was all lies.

Speaker 2 (36:36):
Yeah, and would it be fair? I mean, I'm speculating,
but like I'm assuming if my dad is a higher
up at the zoo. Was his dad like you can
kind of get away with this? Was there that conversation
happening that made Grant feel like he could do that?

Speaker 4 (36:49):
Absolutely?

Speaker 3 (36:50):
Okay, they discussed exactly what he was going to do
right over email. Wow, it was plain estet. His dad
absolutely facilitated the fraud.

Speaker 2 (36:57):
Communicating a fraud over the workplace email that you're defrauding
is unhinged to me. Never in my life.

Speaker 4 (37:06):
You would be shocked to what people do on devices.
You know, I'm sure it didn't start out this way.
I'm sure it started.

Speaker 3 (37:13):
Out with being very careful, but they were able to
perpetuate this fraud for a decade without being caught. We
see the same thing no matter what the investigation is.
People start careful and then they just get complacent because
they haven't been caught. They become greedier, their fraud becomes bigger,
they start stealing more money. That's just the way it goes.

(37:33):
They become untouchable. After a while, they feel untouchable.

Speaker 2 (37:37):
And so I guess, getting back into your conversations with Greg,
where did that sort of lead you.

Speaker 3 (37:43):
Greg, for the most part, confirmed what we already knew,
and he even admitted to some things that we didn't
know that were things that we would have had no
way of knowing. Because you know a lot of things
as well that involved fraud that there won't be any
records of whatsoever. There would be no way of us
to even know that it.

Speaker 2 (38:02):
Exists, Like what things that.

Speaker 4 (38:04):
Involved cash transactions which I can't really say a whole
lot about because he wasn't charged for these, because there
was no way of coming up with like a cumulative
number of things. But he knew where.

Speaker 3 (38:14):
He was going, He knew that prison was going to happen,
so he absolutely did a flip on his co conspirators. Yeah,
after Greg, it got a little bit trickier because neither
Pete nor Tom wanted to talk. I'm not sure exactly.
I think that they felt untouchable, I really do. I

(38:36):
think that they felt that nothing was actually going to
happen to them because nothing ever.

Speaker 4 (38:41):
Had actually happened to them. But it turns out they
were wrong.

Speaker 2 (38:45):
Well, because if you have the emails, I'm assuming their
defense attorneys have the emails. No, Oh, they don't. It
doesn't work like that.

Speaker 3 (38:52):
No, So if they don't get any of those things
until the case is actually charged in court and then
they receive them from discovery.

Speaker 4 (38:58):
Oh so they don't know what we know at that point.

Speaker 2 (39:02):
I see, Okay, So only if they decide to take
it to court is when they get that stuff.

Speaker 3 (39:08):
So we did have a session with Pete and his
attorney at the very beginning, where we sat down and
he lied the entire time. I mean, there wasn't a
single thing that came out of his mouth that was factual. He,
I think, quickly realized that that was a bad move.
He ended up getting a different defense attorney who is

(39:29):
absolutely top notch, and she made him realize that this
is not something that is disappearing, and it's time to
sit down and talk to us. And by the time
he did that, you know, he had realized and finally
come to the conclusion that he was very likely going
to prison. And then he finally did decide to come

(39:50):
clean on some things. He did lie to the end
about others, one of which involved some bribes. He was
charged with cash bribes by a vendor, a zoo vendor.
He lied and I absolutely am confident that he continued
to lie.

Speaker 2 (40:06):
Wow. Okay, And so he tells you a little bit
of the truth, a lot of stuff that's not true.
And then I assume you move on to Tom. Did
he ever agree to speak with you?

Speaker 3 (40:19):
No?

Speaker 4 (40:19):
Wow, never sat down with us.

Speaker 3 (40:22):
And that turned out to not That didn't end well
for him because he you know, if you want to
talk about we didn't talk about all the schemes, and
I don't know that we need to, but we can
talk about final dollar amounts of the theft and what
ended up happening to these people. But ultimately, you know, Tom,
he got the longest sentence, and that does sometimes happen
if you.

Speaker 4 (40:42):
Are if you're the last to fall.

Speaker 2 (40:46):
Do you know how many years he was facing and
how many he was sentenced to.

Speaker 4 (40:52):
Yeah, So the total fraud, the full theft.

Speaker 3 (40:54):
Amount combined for everyone was two point three million dollars
and some change. That's what it should out to be.
And just to give you an idea some numbers. We
had over one hundred and twenty five interviews that we conducted,
There were over one hundreds of poenas that were issued,
We reviewed thousands of emails, We conducted a total of
fifteen profit sessions, and it was a two plus year investigation.

(41:20):
So finally when we were done, there was a special
grand jury that was convened in Delaware County. It was
a three day grand jury where the grandeurs heard nothing
but testimony on the Columbus Zoo. So typically when a
grand jury is held, the grandeurs here multiple cases about
different things throughout their service time as grandeurs. Well, this
was different. This was three days of testimony only on

(41:42):
the zoo. So this returned a ninety count indictment against
everybody collectively. That was the number ninety counts and Tom
Staff was indicted on thirty six count. He ended up
pleading guilty to fifteen of those, you know, with the
negotiative plea, and he was sentenced to seven years in prison.
And he has a job in prison, and his prison

(42:05):
job is a porter, which is basically a janitor.

Speaker 4 (42:07):
He's a custodian in prison.

Speaker 2 (42:09):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (42:10):
And then we have Greg Bell. He was indicted on
fourteen counts and he pled guilty to all fourteen. He
was sentenced to three years in prison, and he's also
a jail custodian. So Pete Fingerhut he ended up being
by far the most egregious of all. I mean, they
were all terrible. Their conduct was all terrible, but his

(42:32):
was by far the most egregious, just with the amount
of fraud that he committed and the amount of invoices
that he photo shopped and manipulated, and just it was insane.
So he ended up leading guilty to seventeen of those counts.
He was sentenced to five years in prison. He's also
a custodian in jail. So these people have certainly fallen.

Speaker 2 (42:53):
Wow.

Speaker 4 (42:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (42:54):
And then the others, Tracy and Grant, it was just
county jail time because they weren't quite as involved.

Speaker 2 (43:00):
I know that there were some changes that this resulted
in with sort of the way the board oversees the zoo.
Can you speak to any of that.

Speaker 4 (43:09):
Yeah, So the zoo has a new CEO.

Speaker 3 (43:12):
His name is Tom Schmid, and everything that we have
learned is that, you know, he's an outstanding leader and
that the employees of the zoo are very happy to
have him there.

Speaker 4 (43:22):
I know that the board has been condensed.

Speaker 3 (43:25):
It was a huge board because again I mean the zoo,
the Columbus Zoological Association, which handles all four of the
businesses that we discussed, is a huge undertaking. So they
had a large board of directors and they've really scaled
down on that. And I think that the reason for
doing that is just so there could be better communication

(43:46):
and easier to have oversight and everyone talking amongst each
other more.

Speaker 4 (43:51):
So.

Speaker 3 (43:51):
I know that there have been really positive changes at
the zoo. And something that people ask us a lot
when we present on this case is you know, did
any of the an go without because of the amount
of money that was being embezzled. And the answer, I'm
happy to report the answer to that is no, Like
all of the animals were so well cared for because
they're being cared for by the people that matter and

(44:14):
the great employees of the Columbus Zoo. So nothing ever
happened to any of the animals. But what did happen
is that, you know, the zoo morale was they really
took a hit when these guys were in charge, and
everyone knew that something was going on, but nobody really
knew what it was, but they felt helpless to do anything.
But there's one thing that I think that you would

(44:35):
love to know about this case. This is always something
that people ask us. They always ask, well, who was
it that tipped off the Columbus Dispatch? Who gave them
this information? And you're not going to believe the answer
to this. So one of these zoo executives was actually
let go during covid on citing financial concerns. So he

(44:57):
was not even an employee at the time when this
investigation kicked off. He had already been gone for about
eight months. Well, this person was very, very upset and
very salty over the fact that they had been let go,
and that was Pete Fingerhut.

Speaker 4 (45:14):
No, Pete Fingerhut.

Speaker 2 (45:17):
Yes, Pete tipped off the financial crime that he was
a part of.

Speaker 4 (45:23):
Yes, okay, Yeah, so he actually is the tipster. We
found this out that he is the tipster to the.

Speaker 3 (45:29):
Columbus Dispatch, and he told the Dispatch about, you know,
all of these things that are going on at the
zoo that are being done by Tom Stalf and Greg Bell.

Speaker 4 (45:39):
I do not know what that man was thinking.

Speaker 2 (45:41):
He's like, no way this will get back to me. Impossible.

Speaker 3 (45:46):
Like I said, he ended up by far being the
most egregious. His conduct was my far the most egregious.
But again, I think that he was just so used
to being able to talk his way out of anything
that he didn't think that we were going to uncover
that he was a huge part of this scheme, in
this fraud. But anyways, Yeah, so he did admit during

(46:08):
one of our sessions that he indeed was the tipster,
and he certainly regrets doing that.

Speaker 4 (46:14):
I can tell you that much.

Speaker 2 (46:15):
Oh my gosh, because here's the thing.

Speaker 4 (46:17):
I don't know, but this ever would have come to
the surface had he not tipped off the Dispatch he
told on himself. Is what happened here?

Speaker 2 (46:25):
Wow, that is unbelievable. It's like, okay, yeah, I'm glad
he did that, but it is mind blowing because it's
like you think that they're going to go down without
bringing you down with them. There's no situation where that happens.

Speaker 3 (46:39):
I could not reconcile that in my own brain of
him thinking that he is going to launch an investigation
and somehow think that whoever is in charge of doing
the investigation is not going to learn that he was
a party to it.

Speaker 4 (46:56):
I just I don't know. I don't know what he
was in his brain.

Speaker 2 (47:00):
That's wild.

Speaker 1 (47:06):
What an episode. Never did I think that I would
hear such a story of fraud taking place at a zoo.

Speaker 2 (47:12):
Yeah, it's the most unlikely setting. But the way that
Marisa laid it all out, I thought was like so fascinating.
You know, to think that people could be getting away
with something for ten years, a decade years.

Speaker 1 (47:26):
And probably would have continued to get away with it
for who knows how long, if not for Pete. Can
you believe that that was such a shock to me
when she said he was the whistle flower?

Speaker 2 (47:38):
Oh my gosh. Same. And I'm also just thinking, like,
if I'm a fraudster, I'm not gonna piss off my
fellow fraudster that knows all about it. I would protect
that man's job.

Speaker 1 (47:51):
But you would think that. They would probably be like, Okay,
he might be upset, but there's no way he's going
to turn himself in for fraud. Yeah, he turned himself
in without even I think giving it much thought. I mean,
I have to imagine that's charitable of me. I hope
that he didn't give it much thought, and that's how
he reached that decision. You know, he ended up doing time. Yeah.

(48:15):
You think about what attracts someone to work at a zoo,
and it's usually like love of animals and a desire
to be part of conservation efforts. Yeah, it just sounds
like the people working at the zoo were pretty happy
when the good old Boys Club was kicked out.

Speaker 2 (48:30):
And honestly, like, if you've ever worked in a toxic
work environment or even just like an unpleasant work environment,
it's almost always you can attribute that to the people
at the top.

Speaker 1 (48:41):
Yeah, they set the tone.

Speaker 2 (48:42):
They set the tone. And if you're a full time employee,
you spend a lot of your life at work. And
it's no small thing when someone has to like go
in and do pretty serious labor for not a lot
of money and watch these like high flying, well paid
already executives just getting away with fraud and to know

(49:02):
that it had been happening for so long.

Speaker 1 (49:05):
Yeah, and acting like they're untouchable and as if the
zoo's money is their money. I mean, what a toxic environment.

Speaker 2 (49:12):
Yeah, I mean two point three million dollars is so
much like imagine if that had gone to bonuses, probably
would have been like changing for people.

Speaker 1 (49:19):
For sure. I'm glad that they were caught.

Speaker 2 (49:22):
Me too. And so Tom Stoff the King was his nickname,
He was the CEO. He was sentenced to seven years
in prison and ordered to pay over three hundred thousand
dollars in restitution. He was fined another ten thousand dollars.
He pleaded guilty to several counts of tampering with records

(49:44):
and theft by deception, corrupt activity, telecommunications fraud, I mean,
a pretty long list.

Speaker 1 (49:52):
And my favorite part of this press release that we're
referencing here from Ohio Auditor DOCOV. Under this part it
says their sentencing memorandum to the court, prosecutors wrote that
Stoff was a toxic leader who quote allowed the animal
house atmosphere to infect the Columbus Zoo.

Speaker 2 (50:11):
I also loved love that.

Speaker 1 (50:12):
I threw that pun in there.

Speaker 2 (50:13):
Yeah, in all of my research after this interview and
before I was on Reddit, and as someone had commented,
there was a little thread when the scandal broke, and
someone had commented that in the nineties their mom worked
in the office at the zoo, and this person had
memories of like the baby cheetahs or baby leopards. I

(50:34):
don't know, some baby big cats running around the office
just like playing. I mean, clearly a free for all
for a long time.

Speaker 1 (50:41):
That was the nineties. I mean it sounds pretty cute,
but probably not great for the animal I would imagine.

Speaker 2 (50:47):
Yeah, probably not. And so former director of Purchasing Tracy
Murnaine also pleaded guilty to felony counts of grand theft,
among other things. He was sentenced to sixty days in
jail five five thousand dollars and paid close to one
hundred thousand restitution. So then we have the CFO Greg Bell,

(51:07):
who went by the nickname that I can barely get
out of my mouth, Big Daddy. He was sentenced to
three years in prison in order to pay over five
hundred thousand dollars in restitution, and he played a guilty
to twelve counts, including tampering with records, conspiracy to engage
in a pattern of corrupt activity, and aggravated theft, which

(51:29):
are all felonies. Yeah, and his son, Grant, a former
purchasing agent, He committed the sort of the least of
the crimes, but you know, was still definitely a part
of this. He pleaded guilty to one count of theft
and had to pay close to ten thousand dollars in
restitution and audit costs, and had to complete forty hours

(51:51):
of community service. Yeah. And then there was our whistleblower.

Speaker 1 (51:56):
Pete the ticketmaster. Why was he called ticketmaster? Is that
because he was getting the tickets to the games? Yeah,
he was like the guy to go to for that. Yeah,
and so he the whistleblower, was sentenced to five years.
He pleaded guilty to aggravate a theft, felony, counts of

(52:18):
tampering with records, telecommunications fraud, conspiracy. I mean, I don't
know what he was thinking. He must have been so
mad that day that he called the newspaper. If you're
going to go after someone, you got to make sure
your closet is clean, Like if you've got some skeletons,
don't go pussing people off. I know, like I wonder
if it was worth it to him to get you know,

(52:42):
Tom and Greg in trouble, but himself as well, like
Wing that it was.

Speaker 2 (52:48):
She was like, I'll do five years to see these
guys go down, no problem. They all faced some serious
consequences and it was a great case for the prosecution
because of all of their faulty record keeping.

Speaker 1 (53:02):
And it sounds like the Columbus Zoo has made a
lot of changes since then and it is really attempting
to put some measures in place to avoid something like
that's happening in the future. So we can only hope
that that works and that the funds go to the
animals and to the hard working staff totally.

Speaker 2 (53:18):
And the prosecution also did consider charging some members of
the board that we're supposed to be overseeing these executives
more closely, but ultimately they decided that they hadn't done
anything criminal. And the board I think now has less
members and is far more involved in overseeing the zoo's

(53:39):
executive team. So that's a good thing. Yeah, yeah, So
glad Marissa was able to speak with us.

Speaker 1 (53:44):
Yeah, that was a really interesting episode.

Speaker 2 (53:46):
Thanks for listening.

Speaker 1 (53:47):
We'll be back next week.

Speaker 2 (53:50):
If you have a story for us, we would love
to hear it. Our email is The Knife at exactly
rightmedia dot com, or you can follow us on Instagram
at the Knife podcast or a Blue Sky Podcast.

Speaker 1 (54:00):
This has been an Exactly Right production hosted and produced
by me Hannah Smith and me Pasha Eeny.

Speaker 2 (54:06):
Our producers are Tom Bryfogel and Alexis Amorrosi.

Speaker 1 (54:10):
This episode was mixed by Tom Bryfogel.

Speaker 2 (54:12):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.

Speaker 1 (54:14):
Our theme music is by Birds in the Airport, artwork
by Vanessa Lilac. Executive produced by Karen Kilgareth Georgia Hardstark
and Danielle Kramer.