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That is Helen. She's the CEO of a small credit union in western Pennsylvania. And she's remembering a chapter of her professional life that she's never commented on publicly before.

What took a toll on Helen and her team was caused by a scandal that seemed simple at the time, and that grabbed only a few headlines before the world moved on. But it brought her to a breaking point, it caused most of her staff to quit, and it is still causing headaches for her to this day.

I've spent the last six months investigating what happened here. What I've discovered is far more complicated than what has been previously reported.

Those revelations affect more than just a tiny corner of Pennsylvania. They have significant implications for a $2.4 trillion industry that serves over 145 million Americans and was founded on the philosophy of "people helping people," that prides itself on trust, community, cooperation, and transparency.

The cost of those principles is the story you're about to hear, told for the first time on the record by those who lived it.

It starts just outside Helen's office window, on the wide and busy street that's the axis around which this town and this season turns.

My name is Andy Janning, and this is Overdrawn, Episode 1: Page B7.

Main Street

Third Street is the official name of the road that runs through Beaver, Pennsylvania, a borough (the state's term for a town) about 30 miles northwest of Pittsburgh. Many of its nearly 4,400 residents, though, just call it Main Street.

Cruise down it toward the rising sun, southwest to northeast, and you'll glide through cross streets with names that read like advice from a high school guidance counselor: College, Market, Commerce, Navigation, Insurance.

On the right are modest one- and two-story brick buildings, many of which look like someone's house. Some are still the roofs under which family memories are made, but many have raised and nourished their generations and found new lives as small businesses that keep Beaver residents paid and fed, entertained and educated, healed and healthy.

On the left is the Beaver Cemetery and Mausoleum, 46 acres of landscaped serenity, lined and filled with the limestone and granite markers under which residents have been laid to rest since 1865. Two certainties of life, forever regarding each other across a small town's spine.

The town square waits at the end, dominated by the 40-foot clock tower, a beige and forest green replica of the Victorian tower that capped the Beaver County Court House until it was destroyed by fire in 1932. The tower's electronic bells chime every half hour: tolls at the top, a song at the bottom.

We'll come back to this square at this season's end, because there's an important detail here that, as most things in this story will do, hides in plain sight.

For now, let's head back down Main Street, toward a particular two-story building, brick naturally, that could be mistaken for someone's home at first glance, until you read the sign by the sidewalk: the main, and only, office of the West Penn P&P Federal Credit Union. This is Helen's office.

Helen is thoughtful and poised, with long, jet-black hair and eyes that nearly disappear when she smiles, which she does easily when asked what's kept her here for over three decades.

Members. Not customers. The distinction is important to this story.

A bank is owned by shareholders. The people who keep their money there are customers.

A credit union is a not-for-profit financial cooperative that serves defined groups of people connected by a common bond, like where they live, work, or worship. Those people are called members, and every member of the credit union is a part owner of the institution. Every member gets to vote for the board of directors that runs the credit union, regardless of how much money the member has. Those aren't marketing slogans. These are rules built into federal credit union law.

For West Penn, their common bond is the P&P in its name. Plumbers and Pipefitters.

In the summer of 2020, the employees of West Penn suffered through some of the hardest days of their careers. Most of them didn't stay with West Penn as a result. It all began with one sheet of paper.

The Sign

It's taped to a door about a mile away, in an office building on Sassafras Lane, the headquarters of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local Union 712, IBEW Local 712 for short. It's one of the largest labor unions in North America, and this is its chapter for Beaver County and the counties running north along the Ohio and Pennsylvania line.

Behind that door was a credit union established decades earlier to serve these specific electrical workers: IBEW Local Union 712 Federal Credit Union. Their common bond was the 712 labor union. Their office was inside the union hall.

The sign stuck to the entrance is meant to get attention, the first line in heavy bold, all caps, centered:

NOTICE TO MEMBERS OF THE IBEW LOCAL UNION 712 FEDERAL CREDIT UNION.

Read the notice as text

NOTICE TO MEMBERS OF THE IBEW LOCAL UNION 712 FEDERAL CREDIT UNION

The National Credit Union Administration Board placed IBEW Local Union 712 Federal Credit Union into liquidation on May 29, 2020, and appointed the National Credit Union Administration as liquidating agent. Each member share account is insured up to $250,000 by the National Credit Union Share Insurance Fund.

To provide continued credit union services, member insured shares and loans were transferred to West Penn P&P Federal Credit Union. You are now a member of West Penn P&P Federal Credit Union with all rights and privileges.

Contact information is below: West Penn P&P Federal Credit Union, 1089 3rd Street, Beaver, PA 15009. Tel.: 724-774-9237

Any member share account holder who has not received a letter concerning their account within 30 days from liquidation from West Penn P&P Federal Credit Union should contact West Penn P&P Federal Credit Union immediately.

Please direct questions and other inquiries to: IBEW Local Union 712 Federal Credit Union, c/o National Credit Union Administration, 4807 Spicewood Springs Road, Suite 5100, Austin, Texas 78759. Tel.: 512-231-7940

Below that, the font drops a few points, the bold is shrugged away, and the paper gets down to business.

"The National Credit Union Administration Board placed IBEW Local Union 712 Federal Credit Union into liquidation on May 29, 2020."

That sentence is a mouthful of government-speak meant to say that the 712 credit union is gone. Out of business. Permanently.

The sign moves on quickly, and so will we, for now. It says the money in every account is insured, up to $250,000. It says the accounts and loans have already been moved, to West Penn P&P Federal Credit Union, and that anyone reading this is now a member there, with all its rights and privileges.

The sign shares West Penn's phone number and address. It's just a mile up the road, but it's unclear if West Penn is a credit union that most of the people reading this notice have heard of, let alone used.

There's one more instruction.

"Any member share account holder who has not received a letter concerning their account within 30 days of liquidation from West Penn P&P should contact West Penn P&P immediately."

Translation: if the letter you were supposed to get from the credit union you may have never used or heard of does not arrive, call that credit union you may have never used or heard of and ask them what happened to your money.

No information about what exactly happened, or why. It reads like a routine, albeit a very sudden closing of a business that's been serving this community since 1964.

When the 712 credit union was liquidated, quite literally overnight and with no advance warning to its members, its absence affected thousands of union electricians, their spouses and children. Official reports put the count at 2,935 people at the time of the liquidation. They are the ones the 712 credit union was built for. They're the members who owned it.

And all of them were now supposed to contact the West Penn P&P Federal Credit Union. With its one office. And five employees. At once.

Dirt

The sign on the door on Sassafras Lane may have surprised the former members of 712 now heading toward Helen's door, but it didn't surprise her. She reads financial statements for a living, and according to her, 712's did not read right.

NCUA is the National Credit Union Administration, the agency named at the top of the sign on Sassafras Lane. They are, in their own words, the independent federal agency created by the US Congress in 1970 that insures deposits at federally insured credit unions, protects the members who own credit unions, and charters and regulates federal credit unions.

In the most basic terms, the NCUA is to credit unions what the FDIC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, is to banks. When Helen says the NCUA was in 712 every three months, she means NCUA's examiners. The people who come and look at the books.

And in early 2020, the NCUA called Helen. Not about her shop, West Penn P&P. They were calling about 712, whose financial reports Helen says had already caught her attention. And they were asking for a favor, in the middle of a global pandemic, with the country shut down.

This would put her inside the 712 credit union. While running hers. At the same time.

Although there are several credit unions in and around Beaver, NCUA's request of Helen wasn't random. According to her:

712's electricians were already inside West Penn's field of membership, its network of common bonds, before any of this started.

And the capitalization to which Helen refers is, in simple terms, the cushion of extra money that protects a credit union from sudden losses. A 7 percent net-worth ratio is the basic federal threshold for being considered well capitalized. West Penn was financially strong when NCUA asked for Helen's help.

She took their request to her board of directors.

Three months inside the 712 credit union, inside their office on Sassafras Lane. Long enough to see what their books had only implied.

The first thing was the dirt.

The dirt you could see from the lobby. The rest of it lived in the accounts, and the accounts did not make sense.

Darrell Bradford chairs West Penn's supervisory committee, the volunteer group whose job is, among other things, to audit the credit union's books. He would spend the next several years going back through what 712 left behind.

A membership file with no signature in it. A car loan with no title behind it. Money out the door with nothing on file to prove it was ever owed back.

That's what Helen walked into. Then the sign went up.

On Friday, May 29, 2020, the IBEW Local Union 712 Federal Credit Union passed into history, its members and accounts and records, dirt and all, now part of West Penn P&P Federal Credit Union. Two days later, on the morning of Monday, June 1, Helen unlocked her credit union's front door.

The thing she remembers about the day she dreaded is the credit card paperwork. June 1 was two computer systems and a stack of card forms. It was survivable. What broke Helen and her staff came later.

712 had signed up a large number of transient workers, tradespeople who came into the county for construction work and left when the job did. And when those workers needed to be paid, they all needed it on the same day.

The Dairy Queen is nearly half a football field away.

The other thing working against the West Penn staff was that sign on Sassafras Lane. It told the people in that line their credit union was gone. It didn't tell them why. And the five employees they were about to yell at couldn't tell them either.

It wasn't once. It was the end of every month, again and again, and the anger came straight over the counter, at a staff of five who hadn't caused any of it.

These heated confrontations didn't have the comfort and privacy of closed doors. The West Penn lobby is compact, to say the least. Once through the member entrance, a heavy dark-stained wooden door framing clear glass, a few steps up the handicap-accessible ramp and a left turn takes you to the teller line, two windows only, with a member service desk off to the side.

Four or five members can line up in front of each teller window before personal space gets tight. Short tempers have nowhere to go but toward the teller line, and any voice above a whisper jumps off the stone tile floor.

Because there's no direct line of sight from the teller line to the member entrance, three large silver sleigh bells hang from a red cord looped around the door knob. Those bells jingle anytime anyone enters or leaves.

Sound: the bells on West Penn's door

Those bells didn't stop ringing. Neither did the phones.

Sound: the door bells, and a phone ringing

Helen has been at West Penn for more than three decades. She had absorbed another credit union the year before, a small, clean merger with none of this in it. So when she measures 712 against everything else in a very long career, there is no contest. It's what you first heard from her.

Her board of directors watched all of it back then. Six years later they are still angry and still cleaning up. One of them, a man who spent thirty years in the trades and asked that his name not be used, put it this way.

Darrell is Darrell Bradford, the West Penn Supervisory Committee member you heard from earlier. He had a shorter word for it.

Some of the ghosts came with a price tag.

Page B7

If you had been standing in that line in the summer of 2020, wondering what happened to your credit union, the explanation was close at hand. You'd heard the members complain about the dirt. Maybe you'd seen it yourself.

Dirty office plus sloppy books equals a business that will soon be out of business. That's easy math. Doesn't matter if it's a credit union or a convenience store. The free market punishes and prunes both.

And from the outside, in late spring of 2020, that is exactly what 712's liquidation looked like. Necessary. Inevitable. Sad for the members, an inconvenience for those involved, nobody's fault in particular.

Hold onto that.

None of what happened inside West Penn reached the collective consciousness. The endless phone messages, the angry members, Helen's stress, the absent staff, the filthy 712 office, the ghosts in their books, the line of the wanting and wondering snaking around and past Dairy Queen, sent there by a piece of paper on a door.

There are no headlines at the time to document that human cost, save for a press release from NCUA on the same day 712 closed, Friday, May 29, 2020, titled "IBEW Local Union 712 closes; West Penn P&P assumes loans, assets, shares."

Later in that same release, the NCUA stated "[t]he new West Penn P&P Federal Credit Union Members will experience no interruption of services."

Financial industry trade publications put out their own remixes of NCUA's press release in subsequent days. CU Today chose the obvious trade union association with their headline "NCUA Turns Out The Lights On CU Serving Electricians." American Banker's headline, "Small Pa. credit union is NCUA's first liquidation of 2020," is contextualized with "the closure… marks the first CU to shut its doors in the wake of the coronavirus."

The first mentions in the local news weren't on the front page, but rather in the Classifieds section of the Beaver County Times newspaper. Wedged in between ads for pets and apartments and motorcycles on page B7 is a public notice to any creditors of IBEW Local Union 712 Federal Credit Union to send a claim to an NCUA office in Austin, Texas, fourteen hundred miles away. The same public notice runs in the Times on June 4, July 6, and August 5, 2020.

And that's where public scrutiny of 712's closure ended for a while. A four-letter federal agency annexes a few column inches in the local paper to point the handful of 712's creditors to where they can extract their pound of a dead credit union's flesh.

For all intents and purposes, these notices, each buried on page B7 of the local paper, are the last embers from 712's funeral pyre.

It all looks routine. It's supposed to.

But there's a word in that notice in the classifieds that isn't anywhere else: the term involuntary.

The notice says 712 was placed into involuntary liquidation. In the NCUA's vocabulary, a liquidation is voluntary when the members vote to close their own credit union, and involuntary when the NCUA closes it for them.

Go back to the first sentence on the sign on Sassafras Lane, the one filled with government-speak. "The National Credit Union Administration Board placed IBEW Local Union 712 Federal Credit Union into liquidation." It was there the whole time. Most things in this story are.

They did not vote to close it. The decision was made for them, by the agency that had, by Helen's account, been inside 712 every three months for two years, and that had called her for a favor.

And the word for that decision, involuntary, appears in exactly one place in every NCUA communication about 712 I've been able to obtain: the notice to the creditors, on page B7, between the pets and the motorcycles. It isn't in the press release. It isn't in the letters that went out to everyone who used to own 712. It isn't on the sign.

That sign wasn't written by 712's board, or by West Penn.

According to Helen, she understood that she couldn't tell members more than what NCUA had authorized. I asked her directly whether she ever told members the real reason.

Nearly a year later, the real reason came out: the 712 Credit Union was gutted, from the inside, over a three-year period, by the credit union's own chief executive, the person who ran it from January 2017 until February 2020: Stacey Shaw.

In that time, by the government's own accounting, she stole over $2 million from an institution that held about $7 million in assets on its last day.

The dirt was real. The unbalanced accounts were real. But a dirty office and sloppy books don't take two million dollars out of a seven million dollar credit union.

The government later said the loss was so profound that the credit union had to be permanently closed and liquidated.

At the time of the liquidation, Stacey Shaw hadn't been charged with a crime. NCUA's notice did not name her or describe suspected criminal conduct. Whatever investigators or regulators knew in May 2020 wasn't disclosed on the sign on the door.

Details of what prosecutors accused Stacey Shaw of doing spread throughout local news outlets and the financial trades. When she later pleaded guilty and was sentenced, many of the same media outlets covered the case again. Newsweek magazine even covered the story.

It seemed simple: insider theft sinks a small credit union. NCUA ensures no member loses money, says there'll be no interruption of services when another local credit union takes over. The world moves on.

But the people who had to pick up the pieces didn't. They couldn't. Six years later they're still finding things, still wondering how it happened at all.

How does two million dollars leave a seven million dollar credit union over three years without anyone stopping it? Who was watching? What did they see? Why did Stacey Shaw do it? What do those answers mean to this town, these members, this industry?

This season looks for those answers along Main Street, up steep country roads, down long paper trails and into the spaces where truth still hides.

You'll hear from sources who've never talked about this publicly until now,

and from others who can't risk their real voices being used at all.

We'll dig into the mysteries at the center of this case,

Because the crime was only the beginning of the story.

Overdrawn is reported and produced by me, Andy Janning. Music by Epidemic Sound and Blue Dot Sessions. Special thanks to our sponsor Q2, 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.