A former financial director of Kappa Alpha Psi who stole nearly $3 million from the organization pleaded guilty during the court hearing this week, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

Check Embezzlement Scheme

Former Kappa Alpha Psi financial director Curtis D. Anderson, who diligently worked his way up the ladder at one of the nation’s largest and most influential Black college fraternities, pleaded guilty on four counts of wire fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft.

59-year-old Anderson from Claymond, Delaware, who remained silent during the hearing before US District Judge Timothy J. Savage, previously admitted to investigators he had stolen the money to fund his gambling habit.

Curtis Anderson was fired from the fraternity in December 2018 after the organization found out money was missing and confronted him for an explanation. He told his bosses that he had stolen the money while struggling with gambling and alcohol addictions, and gambled it away at Harrah’s Casino. Anderson was formally charged in October 2020.

According to prosecutors, Curtis Anderson started siphoning money from the organization in June 2012 by writing checks to himself and to others whose signatures he had forged. He then went on to cash the checks at two banks, Santander Bank and Wells Fargo Bank, and managed to cash 118 fraudulent checks, 78 at Santander and 40 at Wells Fargo, before Santander Bank flagged his suspicious actions and alerted Kappa Alpha Psi in 2018.

Sentence in February

Following the hearing, US District Judge Savage set February 22 as the date to announce the sentence, while also letting Anderson free until then. The judge told Anderson that he could be sentenced to as many as 82 months in prison and a financial sanction of more than $1 million, regardless of him taking responsibility for his actions and helping with the investigation.

According to federal sentencing guidelines, such cases call for a sentence of between five and six years in prison, the judge said after the hearing, outlining Anderson had been placed in a “position of trust as the director of finance” by his former employer, a position from which he “reaped the benefit of” by embezzling millions over a long period of time.

Kappa Alpha Psi, which was founded in 1911 and has over 125,000 members with 700 undergraduate and alumni chapters in almost every state and countries like the UK, Germany, South Africa, Japan, South Korea, Nigeria and the West Indies, did not respond to the media’s request for comment.