Big banks entrusted money to GardaWorld. It secretly lost track of millions.
Brian Newell had been a manager at one of GardaWorld’s armored truck branches for about a year when a high-ranking supervisor called in 2018 with a bizarre order: Load all the coins stored at his branch in Connecticut onto a truck bound for Massachusetts.
Auditors from Bank of America were coming to Garda’s Dedham, Mass., branch to count money that Garda was being paid to protect.
And some of it was missing.
Newell’s Stratford, Conn., branch was relatively small. It held about $20,000 in coins belonging to Bank of America and two other banks, Newell said in an interview. He sent it all.
A few days later, Newell said, he learned it hadn’t been enough.
https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2020/investigations/garda-world/vaults/
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In 2017 and 2018, employees in St. Louis repeatedly stalled bank auditors in a conference room while workers scrambled to move boxes of quarters and dimes — each containing hundreds of dollars — from one bank’s account to another, according to Jammie Bolton, the branch’s manager at the time.
Auditors were then shown the amount they expected. But they were unknowingly looking at another bank’s money, he said.
“They would pretty much bamboozle the auditors, when in fact they have no clue where the money is,” said Newell, who ran the Stratford branch. He said Garda terminated him in 2019 after he complained about safety problems.
“I don’t know how they have not gotten caught,” he added.
A March Times investigation found that Garda’s armored trucks crashed at a higher rate than its competitors’. In 2018, a Garda truck in New Jersey lost control and slammed into a tree. BOYD A. LOVING
Good thing the internet age has made it harder for companies and institutions to get away with crimes.
