$180k Blown Away in Windy City

As if its problems with the state’s governor (col 1) were not enough the Illinois Tollway has announced it can’t account for $180k between August 99 and the end of the year. Police were called in and are conducting a crime investigation. The problem is in the Money Room on the first floor of the Tollway’s building at Downers Grove where some 3 million coins a day are counted, sorted and bagged for dispatch to the bank. $180k less was deposited in the bank than was counted by the money room’s counting machines late last year.

Early on the suspicion was that a bunch of insiders had been skimming money. It is coins that have gone missing. One theory was that someone was hitting on the surplus from 40c tolls. (Patrons who don’t have or can’t bother with nickels and dimes often throw in two quarters.) But it turns out all the coin machines give a reading of coins collected, and of course the lane loops and treadles count tolls due. And they tell us they get a pretty good tally of coinage thrown in baskets. So that theory of surplus skimming is probably wrong.

In any case $180k in coins is a lot of weight to move out of the money room. Our mail scale says quarters are 0.2oz, nickels 0.16oz and dimes 0.08oz. So if the $180k loot constituted 500k quarters, 270k dimes and 540k nickels, by our calculation it would weigh 6300pd of quarters, 1350pd of dimes and 5400 pds of nickels for a total of 13k pds or 6.5tons. Now that’s a serious heist even in the home of Al Capone. A decent armored car load. Even if the money trickled away over 25 weeks or so, that is an average of 75 pds/day. A couple of brief cases every darned day. Pretty tough to get out to your car in your clothing, or to secrete and retrieve?

Workers there are not allowed to carry any bag or case in there. They have clothes without pockets and are under constant TV surveillance. Unless there was some rather elaborate collusion involving the surveillance staff. In those cases someone usually sings or is found dead. No bodies, no singers, so far.

One theory we’ve heard is that maybe the $180k was never there in the money room in the first place and that they over-counted coins. During that period the coin counting machines had a lot of breakdowns, it is said. They were getting very old and were due to be replaced with new ones. Breakdowns of the machines could have led to backups in counting. And backups in counting – leaving bags from one shift around for the next – can lead to screwups in the handling of bags. Maybe bags of coins were getting counted twice.

In which case there wasn’t any thievery after all, just poor counting. And the Tollway set off a false alarm. What an anti-climax!

But for now the ‘missing’ $180k of coins remains a mystery, which the cops have to unravel.