Neither Miguel Tejada or Aaron Rowand were in uniform for San Francisco versus the Cubs this afternoon, and they’re not the only AT&T Park fixtures unavailable today. The SF Chronicle’s Rachel Gordon reports the team’s payroll manager, Robin O’Connor, has been arrested on federal wire fraud and embezzlement charges.
Giants management became suspicious of O’Connor on July 5, when the human resources manager was contacted by a Bank of America home-loan representative, according to an affidavit filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco by FBI Special Agent Jason Richards, an investigator on the case. In the loan file was a letter on Giants letterhead allegedly signed by the head of human resources explaining two large deposits into O’Connor’s bank account.
The letter stated, in part: “Robin is an employee in good standing with the San Francisco Giants Baseball Organization. Because of her outstanding contributions to our Major League Baseball team and Front Office during the 2010 season that assisted us in accomplishing our goal of winning the 2010 World Series, she was given two additional payments of compensation in May 2011.”
The Giants then conducted further reviews and found additional suspicious deposits into O’Connor’s accounts – money that allegedly was intended for nine different Giants employees, according to the affidavit. In all, the amount that had been misdirected to O’Connor’s accounts totaled $1,513,836.28, the affidavit stated. She sometimes worked on a team-issued laptop from her home in American Canyon.
Quizzed about the front office turmoil last night, P Barry Zito said, “”I just know how much integrity the organization has…I’m sure that whoever’s in charge of making this right is going to handle it as well as it can be handled.” Which is a very diplomatic way of saying, “my checks always clear, what’s the problem?”