By: Sam Hudzik
Federal law enforcement officials arrested the former head of a troubled Cook County jobs program on Friday. Forty-two-year-old Chicago resident Brendolyn Hart-Glover is accused of scheming to falsify documents.
The county’s President’s Office of Employment Training, or POET, had such a scarred past that the name was scrapped after Toni Preckwinkle took over as board president. Before then, Hart-Glover was among its top staff members.
diploma fraud
According to the criminal complaint, the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (DCEO) demanded documents in 2009 and 2010 related to a summer jobs program for kids – documents that POET didn’t have.
The complaint said Hart-Glover knew more than a million dollars were at stake, as well as her job and others’ jobs.
The feds said in one meeting, Hart-Glover told a staff member to close the door and ordered employees to “recreate” or “reproduce” the missing files. In another conversation, according to the complaint, she told staff where to find blank birth certificates on her desk.
Prosecutors said she lied to DCEO, and later lied to federal investigators.
Last year, Hart-Glover told the Chicago Sun-Times that she didn’t do anything wrong.
In 2009, her sister-in-law, Shirley Glover, a former fiscal manager of the same office, pleaded guilty to embezzling over a hundred thousand dollars.
Source : wbez
