THE ONE UNDISPUTED FACT is that $76,000 in cash went through Millie Padua’s private bank accounts in three years. Prosecutors say it was stolen from the Pike Place Market. Padua says it’s all hers and, furthermore, no one knows if Market money is even missing. In King County Superior Court next week, both sides will try to solve that long-running mystery as the 73-year-old Padua goes on trial for felony theft.
The fired Market master—she collected cash rental fees from day-stall vendors—was charged in November 2000 with taking $171,000 between 1996 and late 1998, allegedly pocketing an average of $1,200 a week for 35 months.
Padua, who turned down several plea bargain offers, insists she’s not guilty. The case, which divided the politically balkanized Market even further (into pro-Millie and anti-Millie camps), dates to 1998 when an audit of the Market’s old, mostly hand-kept records indicated that a total of $300,000 was missing from a six-year period.
But Padua’s attorney, armed with a new accounting of the Market’s challenging books, says he’ll tell the jury it’s impossible to determine if any money is gone, much less prove Padua took it.
“We have 110 boxes of documents,” says attorney Michael Schwartz. “Our accountant spent 300 hours going through them. The state of the records is such that you really don’t know what is going on. You cannot tell what money was deposited or where it came from. So many people could have had access to it, and the records are impossible to reconstruct.”
Prosecutors believe they can establish a persuasive money trail that leads to Padua, a widow who worked at the Market for 25 years. With no other obvious income, they say, she made $64,000 in cash deposits and paid an additional $12,000 cash on her credit cards during the years in question.
“But,” counters Schwartz, “had they done even a rudimentary investigation of her financial background, the $76,000 is easily explainable. She had cash from a variety of sources, including people paying her rent.”
Schwartz contends that not even the prosecutor can account for the remaining $95,000 said to be missing. “If, theoretically, Millie took that, too,” says Schwartz, “then she spent an additional $3,000 a month in cash. Look at her lifestyle, her debts—she didn’t have that kind of money.”
The attorney thinks prosecutors focused wrongly on Padua from the beginning. “There were more likely suspects,” Schwartz says. “I’m a former prosecutor and I don’t believe in conspiracies, but I wonder why they shined the light on Millie to the exclusion of others who handled the same money.”
Rick Anderson
