Golfing greed

Delivering and sorting mail in Washington, D.C. proved to be a very lucrative job for a migrant from Zambia.

United States Postal Service worker Hachikosela Muchimba, 44, was able to afford a lavish lifestyle working for the USPS from 2020 to 2023. He traveled abroad, stayed at luxury hotels, and purchased items at gentlemen’s clubs, New York Post (NYP) reports.

Muchimba’s funds, it turned out, came from US Treasury and private checks that he stole from the mail, based on court documents of his fraud and theft case. He either altered the checks to encash them or falsely endorsed them to his different bank accounts, according to the US Department of Justice.

The theft and fraud were eventually discovered and he was arrested in September 2023 trying to fly to Zambia. The US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia said Muchimba was tried by a federal grand jury and convicted earlier this month for mail theft and bank fraud amounting to $1.6 million.

The court has scheduled his sentencing for 8 August. He faces up to 30 years in prison for the bank fraud charge and five years for the mail theft charge, according to NYP.

Meanwhile, a warehouse assistant at the Augusta National Golf Club (ANGC) in Georgia, USA beat the thieving mailman in living beyond one’s means.

Richard Brendan Globensky, 40, bought five vehicles and a motorboat worth $370,000, spent more than $160,000 for Walt Disney-themed vacations and related activities, spent nearly $600,000 on the construction of a house, and bought $32,000 worth of goods at luxury retailer Louis Vuitton.

The money came from proceeds of his sale of the club’s merchandise and memorabilia from 2009 to 2022, the US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois (USANDI) said.

Globensky sold to a broker in Florida $5.3 million worth of Masters golf tournament shirts, hats, flags, watches, and other goods, as well as $300,000 worth of Green Jackets awarded to tournament winners Arnold Palmer, Gene Sarazen and Ben Hogan, according to USANDI.

After getting caught, he pled guilty last year in the US District Court in Chicago to a federal charge of transporting and transferring stolen goods in interstate commerce.

On 19 March, US District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman sentenced Globensky to one year imprisonment and ordered him to pay $3.4 million in restitution to ANGC.

WJG @tribunephl_wjg