8/18/2023 0 Comments Rita crundwell familyMost of the story was told with rich and luscious paintings and engravings that illustrated her fall so beautifully.Īfter the beauty of the Marie Antoinette movies, I found myself suffering through the 1990 Leona Helmsley: Queen of Mean movie based on a book by the same name only by sipping Queen of Hearts pinot noir. There were very few actors, which I have come to dread in these historical documentaries. It was well done and since I knew nothing about the French Revolution, fascinating. My favorite was Marie Antoinette, The Last Queen of France made by David Grubin. The next three courses of my feast were spent devouring two documentaries about Marie Antoinette and the historical drama starring Kirsten Dunst. “I told the kids they may have to go to college and get jobs,” Jackie says to the camera. The family is impacted by the 2008 stock market crash and the documentary ends up focusing not on the stalled house construction but follows their struggles both personal and financial. “I would never have had this many kids,” Jackie says, “if I didn’t have all of these nannies to care for them.” At the time the filming began they had eight domestics working for them. Siegel, of Westgate Timeshares, and his wife and eight children led a life of such excess you are practically choking while watching the film. My bacchanalian feast of films began with The Queen of Versailles, which follows David and Jackie Siegel’s mission to build their 90,000 square feet dream palace. So in the week before I went to see a screening of All The Queens Horses, I overindulged on documentaries and movies about greedy “queens.” At my daughter’s suggestion, I added films about Marie Antoinette aka Madame Deficit to my list. When pursuing entertainment, I like to follow a theme and the notion of gluttonous “queens” intrigued me. It is about one family’s quest to build the biggest single-family home in America. The title of her film reminded me of another documentary that I’d been meaning to watch, The Queen of Versailles, made in 2012 by Lauren Greenfield. Pope still needs to raise about $100,000 to finish her film. DePaul professor Kelly Richmond Pope, a forensic accountant, an expert in fraud and documentary moviemaker has been working on the film for a couple of years. While this sounds like fodder for a made-for-TV movie, it is actually material for a documentary being made right now, entitled All The Queens Horses. I followed the story with incredulity as it appeared in The Chicago Tribune over the years, dumbfounded that a city comptroller/treasurer could embezzle such a huge sum of money with no one the wiser. No one thought she was stealing the town blind. Some in the town wondered where she got all of her money but they just figured it was owing to her success as a horse breeder. She stole $53 million dollars over twenty years to fund her lavish lifestyle and horse-breeding empire. This was the same with Rita Crundwell, the treasurer and comptroller of Dixon, Illinois who committed the biggest municipal fraud in United States history. Something seemed fishy and it turned out that it was according to several articles about him in The Commercial Appeal. When I lived in Germantown, Tennessee eight years ago, there was such a guy who live around the corner, just shy of thirty, speeding by the bus stop in his Bentley. Did you ever live near someone who seems to have endless amounts of money and wonder where they get it? Is their job that lucrative? Are they a trust fund baby? Good investments? Are they selling drugs? Or are they stealing from somewhere? You’ll never know because social mores preclude you from asking.
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