The Wall Street Journal & the Case of the Stolen Gift Card

If you want to know what’s happening in the world, read The New York Times. But if you really want to know what’s happening in the world, read The Wall Street Journal. 

I don’t know who first said that, but I’ve heard it again and again. And I’m here to tell you it’s true. The WSJ posts every crumb. Every tidbit. And no tern is left unstoned.     

For example, one day last week, the Journal published one article about an $81 trillion transfer at a bank and another, in Amagansett, about a $25 gift certificate. Both are interesting.    

Citibank had accidentally ordered this $81 trillion posted to a customer in Brazil. This is an amount greater than the annual gross domestic product of any country on Earth, including the United States. (Our GDP is a measly $25 trillion.) And the Brazilians were expecting $280.00

Citibank has made lots of errors like this in recent years. So many, in fact that they’ve had to pay $400 million in fines to regulators who learned of these errors. The year before last there were 13 such errors, last year 10.

Another accidental Citibank transgression, in 2020, paid off a $894 million loan owed by Revlon. The amount transferred was supposed to be just a $7.8 million monthly interest payment. The lenders cheered when the $894 million came through. And U.S. District Court Judge Jesse Furman said they could keep the money so it really scared everybody. (A higher court later reversed that decision.)   

The president of Citibank, Sunil Gary, handed in his resignation at that time.   

Looked at another way, open an account at Citi and cross your fingers. Bang. Millions show up. Like winning the lottery. Good to know. 

On the same day, another story featured an itty-bitty $25 Amazon gift card that went awry. It happened in the Amagansett School. Parents give these red gift cards to treasured teachers around Christmas time.   

Here’s what’s happened. At exactly 8:37 a.m. on Dec. 15, 2023, the principal of the elementary school, Maria Dorr, exited the mailroom carrying a red envelope believed to contain a $25 Amazon Gift Card intended for somebody else. She’s been accused of stealing it from the other person’s mail cubby. There are 38 surveillance cameras at the school, and there she is, carrying out the red envelope. The exact time and date are stamped on the video. None show which cubby she got it from though.

“The Missing $25 Gift Card That’s Rocking the Hamptons,” the Journal headlined. Well, no it isn’t, as far as I know. It’s been over a year. The Journal’s account is the first I’d heard of it.    

The thing is that an arbitrator and several lawyers are now involved in a disciplinary hearing. And during the last 14 months they’ve billed Amagansett over $25,000 to argue back and forth about this. It’s paid by Amagansett taxpayers.   

Dorr, at one of these hearings, testified that she was carrying a gift card from the family that owns the nearby Shell gas station. She’d received a $50 gift certificate in a red envelope the year before. Lots of red envelopes were being handed out.   

She even found this red envelope in her household trash and brought it in. But because it was unmarked, it could not be entered as evidence.    

Since this allegedly despicable and heinous act happened in December 2023, dozens of witnesses have appeared before the arbitrator. Is Dorr guilty? Fourteen-hundred pages of testimony have been recorded. The lawyer bills are going into the stratosphere.      

Dorr, it turns out, is a highly rated and much-loved principal. So say her superiors. She’d been principal for 10 years. On the other hand, the school receptionist who delivered the red envelopes to the mailroom 13 minutes before Dorr got there and then learned Dorr had come out with one, said she accosted Dorr about it and Dorr told her to please keep this quiet and don’t make a big deal out of it. Dorr in rebuttal — she makes a six-figure income — said she thought that if a fuss were made and she later showed the Shell station family’s envelope, it would have been a bad thing to put the kids through. So leave it alone.

“Lots of things get stolen,” she told the arbitrator. “It’s a school.”

Dorr is now on administrative leave.  

And yes, the police are involved. They filed a report. But as it’s only $25, they’ve gone no further. Also, the victim in this supposed crime, occupational therapist Chrissy McElroy minus her $25, asked the police not to press charges.     

Well, the arbitrator had made a promise to have a decision in the matter by this February. But now it’s March and there’s nothing.

It’s also true that the school last year was awarded a blue ribbon by the federal government for overall all-around excellence. Only two other schools in the state were awarded this high honor. So they must be excellent at something.    

Well. Wanna hear a bit more about the Citibank trillions? Thought so.   

As I said, the $81 trillion transfer to Brazil was supposed to be $280.00, the monthly interest payment on a loan. To make this transfer, the clerk needed to fill out a form and on a certain line type in the amount to be transferred. This line already had an amount in it. The amount was 000,000,000,000. The clerk was supposed to swipe the zero entries away, then type in the $280. Instead, the clerk simply typed in the amount at the front and allowed all the zeroes to trail behind.  

Amazingly, a second clerk looked directly at this, stamped it approved, then sent it off to a third and final clerk who was also supposed to sign off on it. Meanwhile, it got credited to the account, making Brazil the richest country in the world. Party time in Rio?    

Well, the final clerk stopped it. 

“No money was actually transferred,” a Citibank official noted cheerfully.

Between $25.00 and $99 trillion there are a whole lot of other things the Journal writes about. Their opinions are sometimes aligned with the Democrats, but more than sometimes with the Republicans.   

I recommend it for daily reading.

To read more of Dan’s columns, go to any search engine and type “Dan Rattiner’s Stories.” Since 1960 he’s written 20,000 of them.