Former Va. Girls Scouts CEO pleads guilty to embezzlement
 Linda Carne had been listed as the executive director of the Center for Personal and Career Development at Randolph-Macon College.
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Posted: Monday, April 21, 2014 12:43 pm | Updated: 8:23 am, Tue Apr 22, 2014.
BILL McKELWAY Richmond Times-Dispatch
It cost more money to track down the fraudulent financial dealings of Linda Carne than the money the former Girl Scout executive Monday admitted embezzling.
But it was somehow fitting that it took a forensic audit of Carne’s credit card expenses to prove that the Girl Scout CEO and onetime forensic science director had her hand in more than the cookie jar.
Carne, 62, pleaded guilty to a single count of embezzlement Monday in Hanover Circuit Court and faces up to 20 years in prison when she is sentenced in July.
Carne, sitting beside defense lawyer Craig Cooley and speaking in a steady voice, calmly admitted embezzlements that totaled $22,979.80 from the 12,000 strong Girl Scouts of the Commonwealth of Virginia, which covers 30 counties and six cities, including Richmond.
The Crozier resident was indicted in January by a multijurisdictional grand jury for personal expenses that she rang up on her Girl Scout-issued credit card.
Special prosecutor Matthew C. Ackley told Hanover Circuit Judge Patricia Kelly that it took Virginia State Police and a forensic audit by a private firm that cost $51,539.19 to nail down Carne’s fraud.
Annette Cousins, chair of the Scouts’ board of directors, said Monday that the losses attributed to Carne will be covered by insurance. And a spokesperson for the organization, based in Mechanicsville, said procedures regarding credit card use have been tightened.
“This is not a happy day for us,” Cousins said in a written statement. “Our mission is to build ‘girls of courage, confidence and character’ and this clearly was an issue of character that we could not over look.”
Ackley laid out a series of embezzlements that centered on bogus hotel costs, treatments at spas, meals, Amtrak and airline tickets, professional baseball games and other expenses around the country that were billed to Carne’s Scout-issued credit card.
Ackley said virtually all of the expenses were attributed to outreach efforts to Scout leaders in other communities but that investigators were able to show the meetings rarely took place. Many of the expenses were payments that benefitted her own family members, not other Scout leaders or the organization as a whole, Ackley said in court.
A stay at the Algonquin Hotel in Manhattan, for instance, rang up a $905.68 tab. There was Calphalon cookware that cost $350 and was supposedly used in the Scouts’ Mechanicville headquarters but could not be found there.
Attending an equestrian event in Lexington, Ky., cost $4,218. A trip to Boston rang up a $2,259.94 bill. A Philadelphia trip in the summer of 2011 cost $1,185.53. Many of the trips to big cities also coincided with professional baseball games there that Carne attended and charged to the Scouts.
Carne is no stranger to nonprofit organizational endeavors and community outreach programs.
On Monday, Randolph-Macon College in Ashland removed Carnes’ picture and biographical material from a website that listed her as head of the school’s Center for Personal and Career Development. A spokesperson declined to provide the dates of Carne’s employment or salary.
Carne was also close with author and former Richmond resident Patricia Cornwell. Fourteen years ago Carne was executive director of the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and Medicine, which was initially funded and partly created by Cornwell.
The institute, which trained forensic scientists, eventually folded for lack of public funding but not before assisting Cornwell in her nonfictional account of Jack the Ripper, the London killer.
The institute’s directors included former Va. Gov. James S. Gilmore III, University of Virginia professor Larry J. Sabato and Paul B. Ferrara, then the director of the state Division of Forensic Science.
Carne, who began work with the century-old Girl Scouts of the Commonwealth on April 30, 2010, was terminated as CEO on Dec. 22, 2011. She was replaced by former House of Delegates member Viola O. Baskerville, who has a lifelong history with Scouting, in January 2012. Baskerville was named permanent CEO in March last year.
Carne, one of the few salaried persons within the Scout hierarchy, was paid in excess of $100,000 a year, according to public financial disclosure documents. She will be sentenced July 7.
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