Gone

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I've heard all of these, and plenty more variations, when I talk to people about Stacey Shaw's crimes, conviction, and prison sentence.

I can't blame them. I said some of the same things when I first began digging up 712 to see what else had been buried with it.

But were those assessments fair and accurate?

This episode is an attempt to answer that question by laying out what happened to Stacey Shaw after she stopped coming to work at 712 at the end of February 2020, so you can come to your own conclusion.

This subject matters on a show about the costs and consequences of financial crime. Up until this point, those consequences have, justifiably, focused on the people who cleaned up the mess after 712 was shuttered, and on those who witnessed scenes and acts in this drama. But none of them saw the whole thing, from beginning to end. Only one person did, and that's Stacey Shaw. And as I've said more than once, she declined to take part in any of this.

It should be noted that her refusal wasn't mean, defensive, or disrespectful. Quite the opposite. I got her email address from Samir Sarna, her defense attorney, and in May 2026 I sent her a message explaining who I was and why I was doing this. I told her I recognized how hard a subject this might be to talk about, and that it was a chance for her to tell her story in her own words, so others could understand it and learn from it.

It was, like most of the outreach in this project, a Hail Mary for me and a very easy block-and-delete for her.

But to my surprise, she replied twenty minutes later. "Hi Andy, you can call me Stacey," were her first two lines, correcting the more formal "Ms. Shaw" salutation I chose in my email.

She said she'd take a little time to put together some questions of her own, so we could be on the same page.

If I'm being really transparent, I was thrilled about the huge scoop I was convinced I'd landed.

Twenty-four days after Ms. Shaw became Stacey, her email arrived, the opposite of what I'd hoped. She was respectfully declining, after deep thought and prayer. That's as close as I've ever gotten to a reason. Not that she owes me one, or anyone else for that matter.

I haven't heard from her since.

So everything you're about to hear comes from court records, federal agencies, and public reporting.

My name is Andy Janning, and this is Overdrawn, Episode 6: Gone.

Waiting

Stacey Shaw's last day at 712 was February 28th, 2020. The sentencing memorandum her defense filed included two details about the work she did after leaving the credit union.

In between starting at DoorDash and Instacart, on May 29, 2020, the credit union she led and stole from was shut down by the federal government.

The rest of 2020 has no other public records about her activities. That changed in 2021. Beginning in January of that year, the following incidents took place, and it's important to present them in their proper order and context.

On January 7, 2021, she signed the Paradise Road property over to her neighbor, Jonathan Bernard. You heard that story in the previous episode.

12 days later, on January 19th 2021, she was charged with first-degree misdemeanor theft in another town.

That charge is public record, which is why it's included here. So is her plea of not guilty. The case stayed open through the summer of 2021.

A different attorney represented her in the theft case. When I asked Samir Sarna, her federal defense attorney, about it, he told me he was aware of it but didn't recall whether it played any part in his work on the federal case.

Eight weeks after the misdemeanor theft charge, on March 15th, 2021, federal prosecutors charged her with the embezzlement from 712 and failure to file a federal tax return.

A month after that, on April 16th, she pleaded guilty in the federal case. The same day, the court released her on an unsecured bond of fifty thousand dollars. Unsecured means she didn't have to put up any money to go home. She would owe it only if she failed to appear in court or broke the conditions of her release. The theft charge was filed three months before those conditions existed, and the public federal docket shows no violation of those conditions. When she was sentenced, the judge left them in place.

For the next eleven months, Stacey Shaw was a woman who had admitted to a federal crime, living at home and waiting to learn what would happen to her. According to her attorney, she was still driving.

In August 2021, two separate matters ended one day apart. Nothing in the record connects them.

On August 26th, a motion was made to dismiss the misdemeanor theft charge, and that motion was granted. She was never convicted of that offense. The presumption of innocence that applies to anyone charged with a crime applies to Stacey Shaw too, and under the law she is innocent of that charge.

The next day, August 27th, the National Credit Union Administration issued an Administrative Order that bars Shaw from taking part in the affairs of any federally insured credit union or bank, and the affairs of the federal agencies that oversee them. The order has no end date. The only exception is with prior written consent from both the NCUA board and the regulator of the specific institution involved. By signing, Stacey gave up her right to a hearing and to challenge the order in court.

When Samir Sarna asked the court for a sentence, he asked for five years of house arrest followed by six years of supervised release. Part of his argument was that she could pay more toward restitution if she stayed free to work.

Judge Marilyn Horan sentenced Stacey Shaw on January 19th, 2022, to 51 months in federal prison. She didn't go into custody that day. The court left her on the same release conditions until the U.S. Marshals told her where and when to report.

Lexington

That instruction came less than a month later.

Stacey Shaw was to report to FMC Lexington, in Kentucky, before 2 p.m. on March 16th, 2022. The notice calls it a voluntary surrender. She was told to go directly to the prison, and to call the institution for directions.

FMC stands for Federal Medical Center. The Bureau of Prisons runs it as a prison for men and women who need medical or mental health care, and alongside it sits a separate minimum-security camp for women. The records I have don't say which part of the complex she was held in, or what her days looked like there. I asked the Bureau of Prisons for access to those records, and to the facility itself to record audio and take photos. They didn't respond to my records access request, and denied my separate petition to visit the facility in person.

So I can't tell you what FMC Lexington was like for Stacey Shaw specifically. What I can tell you is what the public record says about FMC Lexington. And I need to be very clear before I do. None of what follows is about her. Nothing in any record I've seen places her in any of these cases as a victim, a witness, or anything else. This is FMC Lexington as Congress, federal prosecutors, the Justice Department's own inspector general, and a former female inmate have described it.

Nine months after Stacey arrived at FMC Lexington, in December of 2022, a United States Senate subcommittee held a hearing on sexual abuse of women in federal prisons. It came out of an eight-month bipartisan investigation. The chairman, Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia, opened with what his staff had found.

The ranking member to whom Senator Ossoff yields is Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who framed the stakes in terms that go directly to the question this episode started with.

Three women who had been abused in federal custody testified that morning. All of their abusers had since been convicted. One of the women, Linda De La Rosa, had been held at FMC Lexington.

She told the senators that in 2019, a correctional officer there sexually attacked her and three other women. For context, this is three years before Stacey Shaw arrived at the facility.

Her attacker was sentenced to more than eleven years in prison.

In written testimony for the same hearing, the Justice Department's inspector general, Michael Horowitz, described another case at Lexington. A drug treatment specialist was sentenced to eighty months for sexually assaulting four women enrolled in his drug treatment classes. Both Lexington prosecutions the subcommittee listed were filed in federal court in 2021, before Stacey Shaw arrived.

Brenda Smith, a law professor at American University who had spent a decade on the national commission created under the Prison Rape Elimination Act, was asked to put the survivors' testimony in a broader context.

Two weeks after the hearing, on December 27th, 2022, the Prison Camera Reform Act was signed into law. It requires the Bureau of Prisons to evaluate the security camera systems at its facilities and fix their deficiencies.

And in February of 2026, a federal judge in Kentucky sentenced two more former Lexington employees.

One, a correctional officer who became a materials handler, admitted taking more than $18,000 to smuggle cigarettes and paper laced with synthetic marijuana to an inmate, between 2023 and October 2024.

The other, a recreation specialist, admitted sexual contact with an inmate and taking payments to keep quiet about contraband, from December 2023 to February 2024. Both stretches of misconduct fall inside the years Stacey Shaw was serving her sentence.

There's one more document worth knowing about.

In December 2024, an outside auditor spent three days at FMC Lexington checking it against the federal standards meant to prevent sexual abuse in prisons. The final report marked every applicable standard as met, and called for no corrective action.

But that's the same kind of audit the Senate subcommittee had questioned two years earlier. At that hearing, Ossoff pointed out that two other federal prisons where multiple employees had been abusing multiple women, one in California and the other in Florida, had passed theirs.

On July 1st of 2026, the Bureau of Prisons announced it would permanently close the women's camp at Lexington, as one of six closures nationwide. The Bureau gave its reasons as staffing shortages and a maintenance backlog of more than $4 billion. It did not name any other reasons.

So was it a country club? According to the public record, it was a federal prison that Congress, federal prosecutors, and the inspector general all had serious reasons to look at closely during the years that Shaw was there. What it was like for her, I don't know. She's the only one who could tell me, and she's chosen not to.

31 1/2

After she reported to Lexington, the court record goes quiet for two and a half years.

In August of 2023, seventeen months into Stacey's sentence, her grandmother, Betty Ann Bowser, died at ninety-six. You heard about her in Episode 4.

The record picks back up on October 28th, 2024. That's the day, according to a later court filing, that Stacey Shaw's supervised release began. In other words, the day she left federal custody.

If you're doing the math, you've calculated that from March 16th, 2022 to October 28th, 2024 is about 31 1/2 months on a 51-month sentence. For anyone who already thinks Stacey got off easy, that looks like proof.

So here is how a federal sentence can get shorter, because the rules are written down, and they apply to everyone who qualifies.

There's good conduct time. Under federal law, a prisoner who follows the rules can earn up to 54 days off for every year of the sentence the judge imposed. On 51 months, that's about seven and a half months.

Then there's the First Step Act, a federal law signed in 2018. Prisoners who aren't excluded by the type of crime they committed, and who take part in programs the Bureau of Prisons approves, can earn credits. Up to twelve months of those credits can move the start of supervised release earlier. Other earned credits can move someone into a halfway house or home confinement sooner. Stacey Shaw's federal embezzlement conviction was not, by itself, a disqualifying offense.

51 months, minus the seven and a half months of good conduct time, minus a full 12 months of First Step Act credit, comes to about 31 1/2 months. That's pretty close to October 28th, 2024.

I want to be very careful here. That's my math, not her file. The Bureau of Prisons hasn't told me which credits she earned, or whether she spent any of that time in a halfway house or on home confinement before her release.

Whether those rules are too generous or not is an argument about federal law. That's a subject for another show, another time, and not evidence that Stacey Shaw was treated differently from anyone else.

Four Hours a Week

Leaving prison didn't mean going free. When Judge Horan sentenced Stacey, she ordered that the first twelve months of supervised release be served on home detention.

On December 5th, 2024, about five weeks after her release, her probation officer filed a two-page form with the court. Most of it is routine. Three hundred sixty-five days of home detention. Location monitoring, by radio frequency, GPS, or voice recognition, at the officer's discretion. She could leave home for work, for church, for medical care, for her attorney, for court. Then comes one more line, in bold type: visits to her mother's residence, once a week, for a period of four hours.

The form gives the reason in two sentences:

The U.S. Attorney's Office was told about the request and raised no objection. A week later, on December 12th, Judge Horan agreed with the modifications and signed an order putting them into place.

I've mentioned Stacey's mother before. Jill Shaw ran the 712 credit union before Stacey did. Stacey's own attorney put it plainly in his sentencing memo: before Stacey became president and CEO, her mother held the position.

But Stacey's letter to the judge asking for leniency was less plain. As you heard in Episode 3, she wrote that her previous manager never gave her the training or guidance she needed to succeed in the CEO role into which she'd been promoted. She also wrote that she was struggling with her mother falling "life changingly ill."

Nowhere in that letter does Stacey Shaw say her manager and her mother were the same person. Her defense attorney told me he couldn't give a direct answer on why, and it's a question Stacey herself has never publicly answered.

A little over a year after the judge agreed to let Stacey visit her mom for up to four hours a week, Jill Shaw died on December 16th, 2025.

Court records have no additional details about those visits, no information about how many there were, or what a mother and daughter did during their time together.

Stacey Shaw stole millions from the credit union her family had run for generations. She served her time and came home. The judge who put her behind bars later agreed to let Stacey spend four hours a week helping the elderly mother who was also Stacey's former manager. All of these things are true at once. The record doesn't reconcile them, and I won't try to.

Stacey's supervised release runs until October 27th, 2027.

The restitution order of over $2.6 million still stands.

The camp at Lexington is scheduled to close.

That's what the public records say about where she went, and when.

They don't say exactly why she did what she did, or who she is now.

---

For six episodes, we've followed the money and the woman who took it. But 712 was a federally insured credit union. Someone besides its own board was supposed to be examining its books, and checking what it reported.

Next time, we read what the NCUA's own records say about 712, starting with two lines on a report that changed this entire story for me.

Overdrawn is reported and produced by me, Andy Janning. Music by Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Special thanks to Sarah Cooke at The Credit Union Connection, and to Friends of the Podcast LaCorp and TwoScore.

Please rate, review, and share Overdrawn wherever you get your podcasts.

If you or someone you know has been affected by sexual violence, the National Sexual Assault Hotline offers free, confidential support 24 hours a day, in English and Spanish. Call 800-656-HOPE (4673) or chat online at rainn.org/hotline. The hotline is operated by RAINN.