From her years of covering university and non-university fraud stories, UD has learned a few things.

1. Everyone steals. (No, no, no, I know that not EVERYONE steals. But if you take the long view, it sure as hell looks as though almost everyone, at some time or another, in some denomination or other, steals.)
2. When lusty lifelong larcenists get caught, they suddenly turn out to be harboring hundreds of one hundred percent debilitating physical and mental illnesses.

UD gets that this is a legal strategy – he was too crazy to know what he was doing while he spent twenty years stealing from institutions in the subtlest, most brilliantly devious and undetectable ways – ways that fooled even the best auditors. His lifelong depression and anxiety made it impossible for him to truly enjoy the robust beach vacations he took at the expensive condo he bought with purloined funds; he could barely turn the wheel of the Lexus SUV he got with his booty. He is a broken man, in short, and an hour in a lockup will bring on a fatal flare of his heart attack issues.

UD saw the most brazen use of he’s half dead and prison will kill him in the Greek university system, quite possibly the world’s most disgusting. From one of many such stories:

[In the matter of the] enormous, long-running theft of funds by the leadership of Panteion University:

The thieving rector, Emilios Metaxopoulous, is already out of prison, a few months into his 25-year sentence. No doubt a fine Greek surgeon (“A U.K. court on Wednesday jailed a former executive of medical-goods supplier DePuy International Ltd., a unit of Johnson & Johnson, for channeling £4.5 million ($7 million) in bribes to Greek surgeons…. [Greek surgeons’] demands for bribes have put operations out of reach for some Greeks. Stents for heart operations, for example, cost up to five times as much in Greece as in Germany…”) was found to attest to his deathly illness.

The vice-rector, serving a 16-year sentence, preceded the rector out of prison, for he also has a deathly illness. The vice-rector seems to have been in jail for twenty minutes or so.

More recently, a Florida man who spent decades stealing hundreds of thousands from the United Way looked like this in court:

[Guy Thompson] became emotional at times, such as when the mental health counselor who performed his forensic mental health evaluation, John Bingham, discussed how Thompson suffered from major depressive disorder stemming from family troubles in his childhood and a pressure to provide in adulthood for his family members, who were “big spenders.”

Bingham testified that Thompson was “very upset and remorseful of the whole situation” and “very upset with himself for having engaged in that behavior.” 

He also said Thompson had depression and anxiety for nearly his entire life, and had indicated he might have a mild neurological impairment. 

[Thompson’s attorney] told the court that since Thompson was arrested and charged, he has been diagnosed with early onset dementia, has had a pacemaker installed, has hypertension and has been seen by numerous doctors and specialists.

Sing it!

I am the very model of a medical catastrophe.

Inside of all my organs there’s a heightened state of atrophy…