A man who owns a Long Beach book-selling business is charged with allegedly initiating and leading a textbook theft ring that led to more than 7000 books allegedly being pilfered from four of the region’s struggling school districts.
The grand jury indictment unsealed last week accuses 43 year-old Corey Frederick, owner of Doorkeeper Textz, of paying out more than $200,000 in bribes to employees of Los Angeles, Inglewood, Bellflower and Lynwood school districts in exchange for used and new textbooks that he would then re-sell, oftentimes back to the very district from which it was stolen.
Frederick pleaded not guilty last week to 12 counts of embezzlement and 13 counts of offering a bribe. A dozen district workers– including librarians, office managers and a warehouse supervisor–were also named in the indictment and have been charged with one felony count each of embezzlement and accepting a bribe for the scheme, which ran from 2008 until December 2010.
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“Taking books out of the hands of public school students is intolerable–especially when school employees sell them for their own personal profit,” said Los Angeles District Attorney Jackie Lacey.
During the two-years that Frederick allegedly handed out bribes, the employees stole both new and used textbooks in literature and language arts, economics, physics, anatomy and physiology that Doorkeeper Textz sold to various textbook distributors, including Amazon, Bookbyte and Follett Educational Services.
An investigation was launched after Inglewood Unified School District police uncovered the alleged embezzlement in their own district and notified County prosecutors, who say that the districts lacked any tracking system for the books and were unable to say exactly how many had been stolen.
“We are outraged by the alleged behavior of these employees, which is the equivalent of stealing directly from our students,” Los Angeles Unified School District said in a statement. “We are taking immediate action to suspend any accused employee currently working for LAUSD. If the allegations are true, we will do everything within our legal power to recoup from the parties involved the resources stolen through these reprehensible acts.”