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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

Free Money! Then the Lawsuit

BOISE (CN) - Owners of the Crescent "No Lawyers" Bar & Grill say a negligent bookkeeper allowed someone to embezzle $130,000 from the bar's ATM machine. When the owners became aware of the embezzlements, after 6 years, they say the bookkeeper told them he had known about it all along, but he assumed they had been taking the money.

The bar owners say that was not the case. They sued James P. Warr and Wilson Harris & Co. in Ada County Court, saying if they had been notified, they could have stopped the thefts years ago.

Plaintiffs Butch and Jody Morrison say they caught an employee embezzling money from a state lottery machine inside the bar. As they cooperated "with investigators from the Idaho State Lottery to determine the nature and extent of the embezzlement, they decided to investigate the possibility that additional money had been taken from the Crescent Bar's ATM," the Morrisons say.

So they asked Warr for records reconciling cash deposits into the ATM with withdrawals.

"The Morrisons were shocked and offended when Warr, upon being contacted about the issue, admitted that he was aware of the discrepancy for the whole time, but that he had assumed that the Morrisons themselves were taking the cash," the complaint states.

They say Warr "produced a printout created from his accounting records showing ongoing and consistent discrepancies between the cash that should have been in the machine and cash that was actually in the machine starting in 2004 and continuing through March of 2010."

The complaint continues: "Warr had not previously provided this information in any form to the Morrisons, evidently because he assumed the Morrisons themselves had been taking cash from the ATM."

The Morrisons say Warr's reports showed that $118,700 had gone missing from 2004 to 2010. due to an "unexplained change in balance from year end to the beginning of the next year" and because the Morrisons are "reasonably sure they have had more than $1,500 cash in the ATM machine," they think the actual loss is $131,960.

The Morrisons seek damages for negligence, breach of agreement, negligent misrepresentation, breach of fiduciary duty, constructive fraud, and costs. They are represented by Thomas Dvorak with Givens Pursley.

The complaint gives no indication why the Morrisons call their bar "No Lawyers."

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