Rita Crundwell is a Turd!

All The Queen's Horses
2017 | Color | 1 Hr 10 Min | Documentary | PG-13 | Kartemquin Films

Director: Kelly Richmond Pope

Rita Crundwell stole more than $53 million of public funds across two decades in office as the City Comptroller and Treasurer for Dixon, Illinois, a town with a population of just 16,000. She used the funds to build one of the nation’s leading quarter horse breeding empires and threw lavish parties for community leaders at her home, all while the town endured cuts to public staff, emergency services budgets, and work on maintaining public infrastructure. In 2012 after a close colleague turned whistleblower finally uncovered her scheme and alerted the Mayor, the FBI arrested Crundwell as the largest municipal fraud perpetrator in American history.

How did Rita Crundwell steal an average of over $220,000 a month from a town with an annual budget of around $6 million? How could such embezzlement go undetected in annual audits by two independent accounting firms and in annual audit reviews by state regulators? How did local residents not become suspicious of Crundwell’s extravagant wealth and frivolous spending? 

All The Queens Horses sheds lite on how a member of the community could so callously execute a scam of such magnitude. This film reveals how she did it and got away with it for so long, how she was caught, how the city is attempting to rebuild and recover, and how if it happened in Dixon, it could happen anywhere.

I'm pretty sure my jaw was on the ground the whole time watching, living in a small town where everybody knows your business this baffles me to no end. And being only 35 miles from Dixion I can not help but wonder how this lady built here empire and nobody put two and two together. I mean come on if she did not make a mistake so could have gone on to be a billionaire while Dixon went bankrupt. This doc gave we the whirlwind of emotions from hate to empathy to just plain disgust. All the Queens Horses is truly worth your time.

4 Stars out of 5