CRIME: Putting the Blame on Mame

To explain to their Detroit neighbors where all their money was coming from, retired Police Sergeant Glenn Averill and his wife Mamie worked out a simple, effective routine. Glenn would tell prying questioners that his wife had inherited a lot of money. Mamie would turn aside the inquisitive by hinting that her husband came from a wealthy family.

Some kind of explanation was needed. Mamie made $25,000 a year as head bookkeeper at the big Detroit architectural engineering firm of Giffels & Vallet (now Giffels & Rossetti). But the Averills lived far beyond the $25,000-a-year scale, with a chauffeured Cadillac, lavish wardrobes, a $300,000 estate in rural Michigan, a home in Florida and a $100,000 hunting lodge in Canada, built to resemble a British castle.

Last week Detroit police explained that the secret of the Averills' prosperity was not rich relatives but a breathtakingly simple moneymaking technique. They arrested plump Mamie Averill, 58, on a charge of embezzling $100,513 from Giffels & Vallet. Apparently she had scooped out a lot more than that: a partial audit of the records revealed shortages totaling $876,168 during 1950-55 alone.

Mamie had gone to work for Giffels & Vallet back in mid-1928. A few weeks later she slipped away from the office for a couple of hours to appear in court on a charge of embezzlement from a former employer, was put on five years' probation. Her new bosses were blissfully ignorant of her history.

Over the years, as the trusted and all-knowing head of the bookkeeping department, Mamie Averill created a sort of personal bank balance for herself, auditors discovered, by under-recording receipts in the company ledgers. Example: in 1952, after depositing in the firm's bank account a $94,891 check from a client, she altered the entry from $94,891 to $4,891. That gave her $90,000 to draw on. When she wanted some money she simply made out a company check to "cash," slipped it into a sheaf of legitimate checks for a company officer to sign.

In early 1957, with the firm's owners grumbling about lean profits despite fat fees (annual gross: up to $400 million), Mamie Averill sensed that an audit was on the way. She resigned to enjoy her clothes and cars and homes until the reckoning that, as a skilled bookkeeper, she knew was coming.