Embezzlement

EMBEZZLEMENT IS A wide-ranging offense that involves the misappropriation or destruction of money or property with which a person has been entrusted. Virtually any property, including animals and trade secrets, can be embezzled. Its etymological origin has been traced to the French embeiseller, which means to destroy or to make away with. The offense runs a gamut from willful failure to return a rented DVD movie to a multimillion dollar theft by[Page 281] an employee of a large corporation. Under most circumstances, embezzlement should be one of the simplest crimes to commit because there are very few easier ways to obtain money without working for it than retaining someone else's property, which is already in one's possession or control.

The crime we now know as embezzlement originated in England as a common law offense in 1473 based on the Carrier's Case, which involved the theft of bales of wool by an agent while transporting them to the coast. This was the first time that an agent who stole goods placed in his care could be criminally prosecuted. Prior to the Carrier's Case, no “trespass” or usurpation of the goods (the essential element of larceny at the time) could be shown in a theft-after-trust because the goods were considered to be in the legal possession of the thief.

Carrier's Case may be seen as an example of “structural Marxism”—when laws are enacted in order to promote the viability of a capitalistic economic system. If the precedent in Carrier's Case had not been created at the time that it was, the establishment of English and other European trade routes of the 15th and 16th centuries would have been severely retarded; there would be no recourse for theft-after-trust by transportation agents. Carrier's Case was absolutely necessary to promote the growth of those economies.

The first statute outlawing embezzlement was not enacted until 1529. Embezzlement statutes originally specified trust theft from specific victims (the military, banks, post office, a servant's employer), and then evolved into the modern general definition of wrongful conversion of entrusted property.