Handler of firm’s books to go to jail

A Mammoth Spring man who stole more than $9 million during 21½ years as the accountant for a family-owned manufacturing business in Trumann was sentenced Tuesday to five years in federal prison.

Edward M. Cooper Jr. used his ill-gotten gains to travel extensively, shower his wife with jewelry and furs, and build a $2 million cabin on the Spring River in Fulton County, he admitted when he pleaded guilty to bank fraud in January before Chief U.S. District Judge D. Price Marshall Jr.

But even after he turned the cabin and other assets over to Roach Manufacturing Corp. to pay back some of the stolen funds, and even after the accounting firm he worked for settled a lawsuit for $500,000 to help cover the theft, the 71-year-old Cooper still owes more than $7.4 million in restitution.

It’s a figure the company doesn’t ever expect to recoup in full. But Mike Roach, whose father founded the company in 1969, said after court Tuesday that “we’re doing a lot better now,” with Cooper off the payroll.

Roach is vice president of manufacturing for the company, which makes and sells industrial conveyor belts. He said the company donated the river house to John 3:16 Ministries, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center for men in Independence County. The ministry plans to name the building Landon’s House, in memory of Katelyn Furnish’s 22-year-old son, Landon, who died last year in a car accident.

Furnish, who is Mike Roach’s niece, is a vice president of the company and discovered the embezzlement after becoming the company’s financial manager in October 2017. After discovering some irregularities, she asked Cooper for bank statements but didn’t get them. Then she reviewed the statements online and found an April 2016 check payable to Cooper for $39,947 on which the names of the company’s president and secretary/treasurer were forged.

A subsequent review of bank records indicated that the check was only one of 138 unauthorized checks of varying amounts that Cooper had written to himself on the company’s account over the years, according to federal prosecutors.

Cooper said in January that he provided summaries of the company’s bank statements, rather than the actual statements, to the company. Defense attorney Bill Stanley of Jonesboro has said that the statements themselves were mailed to the company, but no one ever opened them. He said the company instead “just put them in a box.”

Roach said Tuesday that the settlement with the insurance company for the accounting firm, Osborn & Osborn, was donated and shared with the company’s 350 “honest and hardworking employees.”

In fact, he and Furnish told a reporter, the company is thriving now that Cooper is no longer there — so much so that in May it shared $1 million with its employees.