Just Desserts

Hey. I’m Katy Vine, I’m an Executive Editor at Texas Monthly where I’ve been on staff since ’97. And back in 2015, I was looking for my next story when I came across a news item that showed enormous potential. It said that a guy named Sandy Jenkins, who was an Accountant at the Collin Street Bakery, just southeast of Dallas in Corsicana, had embezzled $17 million. And like a lot of you, I figured he must’ve been caught right away, and must’ve taken it all at once because $17 million is a lot of money. And it turns out that no, he’d stolen this over eight years before they caught him. If you’re unfamiliar with the Collin Street Bakery, this sounds insane, but if you’re familiar with the Collin Street Bakery, it might make sense that they’d lose track of the financial details because this was the empire that created the Deluxe Fruitcake.
So famous, I learned that a guy once wrote, “Fruitcakes Texas” on a letter and mailed it, and it made it to the Collin Street Bakery. You’re nodding, yeah. I wanted this story so bad. So I went to Sandy’s sentencing where he got 10 years, and then I wrote him a letter once he got to prison and asked him why he did it. And his answer was surprising. He said he’d always felt invisible. He said that he wanted to be part of the old money class in Corsicana. His wife wanted to be part of the Quintillion Book Club where all the ladies had read the books. He wanted to be part of the Supper Club crowd.
I thought this is insane that anybody would risk anything to really impress the upper tier of Corsicana, but when you think about it, everybody does this. There’s some hierarchy everybody’s trying to climb. It doesn’t matter if your town is 10 people in it or 10 million. And I think about this all the time now, it’s so funny. But Sandy was from Wortham, had 1,000 people in it. So, Corsicana was the metropolis that had 25,000 people. He needed to impress them. So he started stealing a little bit at first, back in 2004, and looking over his shoulder, seeing if anybody’s noticing, nobody called him on it. So, the next couple weeks, he goes up to Dallas. He goes to the Lexus dealership, drives home with a gold Lexus. Next thing you know, he’s buying lots of jewelry, handbags, wines. He bought this mink coat with a chinchilla trim. He bought this caviar dish, lots and lots of watches. He bought this $658,000 four-bedroom Adobe house in Santa Fe. And to get his friends to come visit, he chartered a plane.
And the next thing you know, he’s bringing groups of friends out to Santa Fe. But after a while, that’s not really fun enough either, they’ve got to go beyond Santa Fe. So they start going to Aspen, and he’d get a crew together to go to Napa or Martha’s Vineyard. And after a while they spent, I think, $500,000 on 40 private flights.
Now, this couldn’t go on forever, and it didn’t. A new hire was brought into the Accounting group and she brought a check discrepancy to Sandy. He lied about as well as a toddler before running out of the building. And then he gathered up a bunch of the watches, and jewelry, and gold bars and went on the run with Kay. They go to Santa Fe and hide out for a little while there. Then he brings some of these, they were like Whole Foods bags of all these things back, and sprinkled a bunch of them in Town Lake. I’m told they were all found, I think. Then he goes back to Corsicana where the FBI finally catches up to him, and it’s all over. This is the estate sale at his house. Of course, everybody in town showed up to see what kind of stuff was in there.
The whole time that I was interviewing Sandy, for the most part he struck a pose of contrition. He said he was very sorry and he just got a little carried away. But one time he did tell me he’d do it all again. He did die in prison in 2019, but his legend lives on. He told me that after the story ran in 2017, other prisoners would come up to him and be like, “$17 million, man. I could never have gotten away with that that long.” And so in the final twist, he actually got what he wanted, which was some earned respect. And for a while, at least, he was top dog again.