This Difficult Task

Sponsor message

This episode is sponsored by Q2 Fraud Intelligence. One connected system to fight fraud. Detect it, act on it, resolve it. To see how Q2 can help your financial institution, visit q2.com/fraudintelligence.

Previously, on Overdrawn

My name is Andy Janning, and this is Overdrawn, Episode 3: This Difficult Task.

Those charges likely didn't come as a surprise to Stacey Shaw. Three days before prosecutors filed the Information, her attorney had already received a letter from the Department of Justice setting out an agreement under which Shaw would plead guilty.

Although the Information was filed on March 15, 2021, Stacey Shaw's defense attorney had received a letter from the Department of Justice dated three days earlier, the first line of which reads: "This letter sets forth the agreement by which your client, Stacey Shaw, will enter a plea of guilty in the above-captioned case."

That defense attorney is Samir Sarna.

This interview marks the first time he has spoken directly to the media about the investigation.

Samir Sarna never contests that his client committed the crimes. A month after the Information was filed, Shaw waived the right to have a grand jury review the case and consented instead to the prosecutor bringing charges directly. This happens most frequently when the defendant and the prosecutor have reached an agreement to a guilty plea, which Shaw had.

There's no argument over her paying back the full amount of what she stole, either. The Court orders her to do so under the Mandatory Victims Restitution Act.

As mentioned in the previous episode, she owes just over $2.6 million, split among the National Credit Union Administration, CUMIS Insurance Society (an affiliate of TruStage), and the Internal Revenue Service.

The Court ordered her to sell property to satisfy the restitution order. The property she agrees to sell is her home in New Brighton, a small borough about four miles north of the town of Beaver.

According to property records, Stacey Shaw (then known by her married name of Stacey Ann Benetti), purchased the home in New Brighton in December of 2013, with a mortgage she obtained through the 712 credit union in the amount of $27,000.

The Court's restitution order regarding the sale of her home is filed on January 25, 2022. The order stipulates that she has just 15 days from that date to vacate her home permanently.

Stacey Shaw declined to participate in this documentary, so I can't say where she lived immediately after leaving the New Brighton property.

Exactly one year after the restitution order was filed, the sale of the house was recorded with Beaver County for $48,000. The net proceeds, by order of the Court, went directly to the National Credit Union Administration.

According to the Amended Judgment against her, "the defendant shall pay restitution that is imposed by this judgment… at a rate of not less than 10 percent of her gross monthly earnings."

The main argument her attorney makes is for leniency from the court in terms of where and how she should serve her time.

Samir Sarna asked Judge Horan to allow Shaw to serve five years in home confinement rather than in federal prison, invoking the expanded use of home confinement during the COVID pandemic.

To that end, four statements arrive with the defense filings.

The first two are from Stacey Shaw's daughters. They ask the court for leniency for their mother.

That's all I'll say about those letters because her daughters didn't choose to participate in this podcast. The fact that they wrote to the judge is part of the record of this case. Everything else belongs to them.

The third letter comes from a young man close to the family. His letter also asks the court for leniency as well.

The fourth statement is from Stacey Shaw herself. It is the longest of the four, typed and single-spaced, filling one full page then extending almost halfway into a second, signed in the looping hand of her full maiden name, Stacey Ann Shaw, writing to the federal judge who will decide her sentence. Excerpts read here by a voice actor.

In 2013, Shaw attended the first year of a three-year management school run by the national trade association for credit unions. By her own account, she nearly failed it. She writes that she tested out at a D, almost an F, and that if those grades had stood she would not have been allowed back the following year. The class was recalculated and she finished with what she calls a very low C. She was permitted to return.

According to her, she couldn't finish the final two years because

In full disclosure: Since 2016, I've been a faculty member of the management school to which Stacey Shaw refers. The national credit union trade association that runs it is called America's Credit Unions.

At the time Shaw attended the school, ACU was known as the Credit Union National Association.

The session I teach is a half-day workshop for the third-year students on management and leadership. Stacey Shaw was never in my session.

She's referring to family challenges at home, including

On January 19, 2022, Judge Marilyn J. Horan handed down the sentence: Stacey Shaw must serve 51 months for the embezzlement and 12 months for willful failure to file a federal tax return. She will serve that time concurrently, but she must serve it in federal prison.

The requests for leniency from those who love and care about her, and Stacey Shaw's own respectful plea to serve her sentence at home aren't enough to keep her from behind bars.

For the press, the story ends there.

Within days of the sentencing, the Beaver County Times, the local CBS TV affiliate, various financial industry publications, and the Department of Justice all have versions of the story with terms like "embezzlement," "multiple years in prison," "credit union closure," and "over two million dollars" in their headlines.

Newsweek's article is bannered by "Credit Union CEO Bought Pig Farm with Stolen Millions" and features a stock photo of several pigs, captured at snout-level and peering into the lens like an alt-rock album cover, not once but twice in their piece.

The FBI's own news story, published a month after the sentence was handed down, is one of the most complete, not surprising considering they were, as they themselves state, the ones who were contacted after 712 was audited.

The FBI draws the same general shape of the allegations against Shaw, and what she confessed to: 6 unauthorized cards, $2.1 million spent over three years, none of it authorized or allowed, 51 months in federal prison.

But while the prosecution's filings listed where she spent the embezzled funds, the FBI's story gives more about what she bought:

'A lot of money spent' implies there would be something substantial to recoup. But,

That tracks with what Samir Sarna, Shaw's defense attorney, remembers.

Here are the final two paragraphs of the FBI article about Stacey Shaw. And because the FBI declined to participate in this documentary, these may be the final two paragraphs they may ever say about Stacey Shaw:

By the time the FBI tells the world why and how they put Stacey Shaw behind bars, she's preparing to surrender herself to Federal Medical Center Lexington, a prison in Kentucky nearly 400 miles away which its website says is an "administrative security federal medical center with an adjacent minimum security satellite camp."

Crime, justice, punishment. Sunrise, sunset. Write the report, close the case, open the next one. It happens a lot, apparently.

The nebula of facts that has swirled around the closure of 712 and the crimes of Stacey Shaw for nearly two years is collapsing into a star around which the public's final understanding of the case will spin:

To Samir Sarna, she didn't have the credentials:

And in Stacey Shaw's own words:

But back at West Penn, for Helen and her board of directors, it doesn't end that neatly.

Shaw brought up the examiners herself, in her letter to the judge. She writes that 712's board of directors…

In May 2026, I asked the NCUA for those records through a request made under the Freedom of Information Act. I asked for examination reports for this credit union during the time Stacey Shaw led it, for the supervisory letters the agency sent to the board of 712, for communications and records associated with the liquidation. Six weeks later the agency sent me two hundred fifty-four pages of charter and liquidation records, and withheld the examinations and the letters to the board entirely.

Not even one page, not even in redacted form.

Among the reasons NCUA gave was Exemption 8, the provision of the Freedom of Information Act that shields bank examination records from release.

The agency said disclosure would cause foreseeable harm, because liquidation matters were still ongoing. That letter is dated June of 2026. The credit union was liquidated over six years earlier, in May of 2020. The letter doesn't say to what liquidation matters it refers.

One week before this episode was recorded, the agency's Inspector General, the office that reviews NCUA's own work, released part of its file on 712's failure in response to another Freedom of Information Act request.

It describes Stacey Shaw when she took over as President and CEO of 712. At that time, the file says, she had "limited knowledge of loans, investments, and accounting." Whether the board was ever written up over her training, the pages released to me don't say.

What the record does show is who held Stacey Shaw's job before she did, which brings us to an unexplained anomaly in her letter to Judge Horan.

It likely slips by on a casual or quick reading, done maybe in the same sitting as the other letters in the file. Shaw's one-and-a-half typewritten pages are her version of the story of a young woman with a part-time job at the local credit union, earning money here and there for a few years until part-time becomes full-time. She wants to do her best during those now-full weekdays, so she starts Credit Union Management School, but (her words again, in a voice actor's reading):

Then, in 2016,

and Stacey Shaw steps into the role.

The board tells the outgoing manager to stay on long enough to train Stacey Shaw. The outgoing manager agrees, but

The manager has left Stacey Shaw with

weighing down a woman who was already dealing with

A plain reading of Stacey Shaw's letter is that her manager and her mother are two different people. But they're not.

Before Stacey Shaw was promoted to CEO of the 712 credit union, her manager was her mother.

The sick mom in one sentence and the manager putting up road blocks in another are the same woman: Jill Shaw, the previous CEO of the 712 credit union.

A couple days before the statements filed with the court, her defense attorney Samir Sarna submitted the Defendant's Sentencing Memorandum. In it, the distinction is clear: "prior to Ms. Shaw's term as President and CEO, her mother held the position."

Knowing the manager was her mother changes the way the letter reads. But it doesn't tell us why Stacey Shaw left that relationship unnamed.

There is a financial element to that relationship, visible in Beaver County's own property records.

The manager who, by her daughter's account, would not teach her to balance a ledger is the same woman whose notary seal sits on her daughter's mortgages from the 712 credit union in 2004 and 2006. By December of 2013, when Stacey Shaw signs a twenty-seven-thousand-dollar note for the house in New Brighton, her mother Jill Shaw signs three times on the same sheet of paper: as a witness, as the notary, and as president and CEO of the lender.

Maybe Jill Shaw was doing her job the way she was trained. Her daughter's letter suggests so; near the end of the first page there's another line that goes by fast, where Stacey says her boss told her that she needed to learn the CEO job on her own…

According to Stacey Shaw's account, her mother Jill had also been expected to learn the manager's job largely on her own. But who had managed 712 before Jill?

That answer is in another document, this one from 1964 and obtained from the NCUA through the same Freedom of Information Act request mentioned earlier.

The document in question is an application filed by 7 men living in and around Beaver. They joined together to ask the federal government to let them operate together as a federal credit union. The common bond for their federal credit union was the members of IBEW Local 712, employees of that local union and the new credit union, and their immediate families.

The Bureau of Federal Credit Unions approved the men's request on March 5th, 1964, and the IBEW Local Union 712 Federal Credit Union was born.

The first man to lead it is one of the 7 who signed the application. His name was Russell Bowser. He was Stacey Shaw's grandfather, and was Jill Shaw's father.

But he wasn't who Jill took over for.

That would be Russell's wife, Betty Ann Bowser. She ran the 712 credit union after her husband Russell. Then Jill. Then Stacey.

Four successive managers and CEOs from one family. Inside a cooperative owned by local members of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

I asked Lee Karl, the former Assistant US Attorney who prosecuted Stacey Shaw, from whom you heard in the previous episode, about this anomaly in her letter:

I asked Samir Sarna about his client's explanation of the scheme, and about the anomaly in her letter to the judge.

Sarna tells me about a client in an unrelated case, a scheme targeting senior citizens. The client said he believed he'd been making legitimate cryptocurrency investments, and Sarna had no reason to doubt him until he sat down with the government.

Did that happen here? Next episode starts the search for that answer, when I hand 712's financials to a former NCUA examiner without telling him how 712 collapsed, and ask him what he would have seen. And once he gets the full story:

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.