It’s a wages of sin, slippery slope, oh what a tangled web we weave story: Sandy Jenkins, the main accountant for a fruitcake company in Corsicana, Texas, had dreams he couldn’t afford. He started small with the petty cash but after a while . . . As the story in the Texas Monthly describes it:

Sandy considered himself a moral person. But somehow, as he sat at his desk that December day in 2004, the action he was tempted to take didn’t seem wrong. He felt he was working the equivalent of three jobs at the bakery, and was he really compensated for all of it? How long was he supposed to wait to achieve his dreams?

He decided to dip into the bakery’s petty cash. It wasn’t much money in the grand scheme of things. But it kept him on edge. Every time someone stepped into his office, he’d brace himself for the words “Sandy, do you know what happened with this money?” He never planned a response. He didn’t want to think about getting caught. But no one ever asked about it. Everybody went about their business, and soon the petty cash wasn’t enough.

He went to the dealer and bought a new Lexus. When he had to pay his credit card bill,

he set his fingers on his keyboard and typed a $20,000 check payable to CitiCard. The software automatically signed the check “Bob McNutt” [his boss]. Sandy printed that check, voided it in the system, but mailed it. Then, to cover his tracks, he typed the next check payable to a legitimate bakery vendor for the same amount but never mailed it.

Jenkins didn’t stop there. He and his wife got used to the lifestyle of the wealthy, buying $52,000 worth of Rolex watches one day and a $40,000 horsehair mattress on another, and a $58,000 piano on a third, getting a new Mercedes or Lexus every few months, and paying off all their purchases with checks to the credit card company of up to $98,000 a month. They even picked up a vacation home for almost $600,000.

And they got away with it. For years. His bosses wondered why the company wasn’t doing better, but never imagined they were being robbed. Must be the economy, they thought. But eventually . . .

For the rest of the story, see Just Desserts.