Weird spot with friend and possible jailtime

[ceczar]

there's no way i would help out a friend that wasn't one of my best/oldest friends, but i do think if certain conditions were met i would be willing to help.

i have a friend that i've known for >20 yrs (since kindergarten). we're very close, though over the last couple of years we've seen each other less and less, mostly because he lives at home and i live several hours away. he's a bit of a screwup and also a klepto. not so much of the grand larceny kind, but he's admitted to stealing money from people's rooms when he was in college. obviously i disapprove of some of the stuff that he's done, and yes i have told him that i feel that way, but i'm also not going to de-friend him.

he's unemployed and lives with his parents. if he had a job that provided him the opportunity to take money with a chance of not getting caught, i wouldn't be surprised if he got himself into a situation like this.

if there was an amount i could lend him that would allow him to avoid 6months in prison and a permanent felony record i would for sure do it if i knew there was a good chance he'd eventually pay me back (obviously it would probably take a long time). it would be a much harder decision if loaning out that money would affect my life in any way.

[MuresanForMVP]

yea, when I say "close friend" I mean one of my best ones....Man I did a real crap job getting my point across in this thread.

[tuq]

Although this is kind of an aside, I do think there is a difference between theft from corporations and individuals, and that many will draw a line in the sand between the two. I once had a roommate and co-worker who was fired for stealing money from the register. For a few months after that we continued to be roommates and it never dawned on me to lock stuff up or otherwise be concerned that he would take stuff from me. Maybe he did but I doubt it.

That's only marginally addressing the OP. Of course he shouldn't do it because it's a friend of a friend. By the way how exactly do you steal $6K from a company before you get caught? They balance the tills every night, this should have been noticed far sooner. But I suspect that some people have a much easier time justifying theft from "the man" and that many of those wouldn't think to take money from a friend.

Not sure where I am going with that. Also, that roommate had a super cute girlfriend who was way out of his league and that pissed me off at the time. She was studying to be a nurse and a few years later I ran into her somewhere and got her digits and tried to get my mack on but she didn't call me back. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img]

[MC Chris]

the problem is i want to murder people who steal [censored] from college dorm rooms, so obviously one of my best friends wouldn't be one of those people.

[miajag]

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by the way how exactly do you steal $6K from a company before you get caught? They balance the tills every night, this should have been noticed far sooner.


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I don't get this either - one of the clients at a law firm where I used to work went to jail for embezzling like $30k over 2 years from a small sporting goods store - it took him that long to get caught. I guess some places just don't even bother to do even the most basic accounting practices.

[ceczar]

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the problem is i want to murder people who steal [censored] from college dorm rooms, so obviously one of my best friends wouldn't be one of those people.

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i don't know how old you are, but let's assume you are 25, and you just find out that one of your close friends that you've known forever/grown up with stole a couple hundred bucks from some people in his dorm 7 years ago when he was a freshman. do you really cut ties?

or are you claiming that you were such an impeccable judge of character that when you were 5 you would never have been friends with someone capable of such a heinous crime.

[MC Chris]

nah i wouldn't cut ties but i would think to myself "wow what scumbag." and it would definitely change the way i look at the guy.

of course i have no way of knowing the past of people i am currently friends with, and i don't know if any of them are closet kleptos or thieves, but it's a low percentage chance. and if i found out it would definitely change how i looked at them.

[MicroBob]

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It's still a felony, but if I had the chance to actually help my friend out a great deal, provided I believed this was truly isolated, I would definitely do it.

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How are you going to have any idea whether this is 'truly isolated' or not?
He can be all whiny and apologetic and "it was really stupid I know. I super-duper promise to never do it again because I've learned my lesson. blah blah blah" but when somebody steals 6-freaking-K regardless of whatever it was that led him to do it then I think one has to assume the chances of doing something similar again are somewhat high even if he himself believes that he is giving it up for good.


Do you see the point here?
It's not like he 'accidentally' messed up and created this situation.
If he had a lapse in judgement and just one day took $100 out of the till for himself then that's a pretty lousy thing to do but it's hardly the end of the world....especially if it was more of a temptation spur-of-the-moment type thing as opposed to something pre-planned imo.

But I'm guessing that his stealing $6k was a few different incidents over time. It wasn't even a one-time thing.
He did it over and over until he finally got caught.
So even this specific situation itself wasn't an isolated incident most likely.

[MuresanForMVP]

It's true I wouldnt have any guarantees, thats why this is a judgment call, and that's why it's my opinion. If this actually was one of my best friends I'd take the chance that this was an isolated event, as opposed to seeing him go to prison and be screwed for the rest of his adult life with a felony charge on his record. I can't explain it anymore other than I simply would for a best friend,like I would a family member. In the op, the "friend of a friend" or mutual friend thing is pretty weak, so in his specific case I prob. wouldnt. But one of my best friends definitely gets a pass here. If I get [censored] then I'm gonna kick his ass personally, but if I don't it really helps him out.

[MuresanForMVP]

Bob, if you were my best friend I'd give you 6k!