A former chief financial officer is charged with embezzling close to $200,000 from a long-standing, family-owned St. Paul business.
Ramsey County prosecutors recently charged Ryan Charles Gordon, 28, of St. Paul, with three counts of felony theft by swindle.
Schneider Carpet One Floor & Home, started in 1935 by the current owner’s grandfather, reported an employee theft to St. Paul police. The business on West Seventh Street and Armstrong Avenue said they hired Gordon to serve as chief financial officer in August 2022. The former CFO, who worked for the company for about 38 years, trained Gordon before he retired.
This August, an accountant for Schneider Carpet One called the owner to report that Gordon wasn’t providing the documents necessary to prepare state and federal tax returns and to make the associated payments for the business, and raised the possibility that Gordon was stealing funds from the company, according to a criminal complaint.
The owner looked into Gordon’s work and “found questionable payments from the business to unknown credit card accounts along with unauthorized payroll increases and missing funds,” the complaint said. He found Gordon appeared to have opened four credit cards; transaction records “pointed to Gordon making payments from the business bank account to credit cards in his name along with payments on his student loan, another loan in his name, and for his property taxes, amongst other payments and transactions,” the complaint continued.
The company terminated Gordon’s employment and hired an independent financial comptroller and an IT company to analyze the hard drive of Gordon’s business computer.
A deleted file was recovered, which was a purported promissory note created on Aug. 26, within a few days of the accountant alerting the owner. It included statements about Gordon making payments of $200 per week from his payroll check to begin on July 18, 2024, and continue until a balance of $187,317.83 was paid.
Schneider Carpet One asked Gordon whether he could bring in a check to cover the business funds that he used to pay his personal expenses. “Gordon responded by stating that he did not have anything near the amount of money required,” the complaint said; investigations showed he held more than $135,000 in a brokerage account and another $12,000 in a different account.
Investigators found Gordon was in the process of buying a home in Neillsville, Wis., about 140 miles east of his St. Paul address. The purchase price was $269,900 and the closing date “was fast-approaching when it was uncovered as part of the investigations,” the complaint said. Gordon was planning to bring $120,000 to the closing and finance the rest.
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Police interviewed Gordon in October. He said he took more than $187,000 from Schneider Carpet One and said the owner agreed to loan him “as much money as needed to allow Gordon to buy a house, pay off bills, and to otherwise spend the money as he would choose,” the complaint said.
Gordon told police he hadn’t informed Schneider Carpet One about the circumstances of his termination from a previous job at Carpet King. That business reported to police that they terminated Gordon in June 2022 “due to an inability to properly manage business finances,” the complaint said.
Gordon is summoned to court and scheduled to make his first court appearance next month. An attorney was not listed for him in the court file and Gordon couldn’t be reached for comment Thursday.
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