When Your Sales Commission Isn't Enough

Publishers of educational materials will tell you that sales are down and they are struggling. It follows that the sales staff must be seeing a decline in revenue as well, if they can't sell as many copies as they once did.

What's a man to do if he finds his income isn't meeting his outflow any longer?

If you're Christopher Brock, you take a second job that very much resembles your usual occupation. He sold textbooks for Wiley, and he started to sell textbooks on the side.

Except that they were Wiley's textbooks he was selling for himself.

Wouldn't you know but his clever plan proved to be entirely illegal. He's been arrested in sunny Tampa, Florida, on charges of wire fraud. The legalese boils down to the operation of a shell game in which Mr. Brock shifted used textbooks around until his employer couldn't tell where they'd gone.

As a salesman, Mr. Brock was allowed to hand out free samples to potential clients, to show them what Wiley could do for them.

There is a limit, of course, to how many free samples a salesman can distribute before his bosses start asking questions. So Mr. Brock made up names of professors he claimed were potential clients, and then had the books shipped to him as if he had to deliver the thing personally. What a hands-on salesman he seemed.

Once he had the books in hand, he turned around and sold them, pocketing the cash.

At some point while the scheme was operating, someone at Wiley figured out that Mr. Brock's sales figures didn't line up with the quantity of free samples he was sending out. A quick check of staff listings at various universities and colleges would have been easy enough to conduct in this internet-connected age, and then there would be some explaining to do.

Wiley values the books at $2.8 million, although it's doubtful that Mr. Brock sold them for full price. Even so, he managed to pad his salary to a respectable degree, even at pennies on the dollar.

It is to be hoped that he saved a large portion of his ill-gotten gains, as he will be levied with a substantial fine. And he'll need something to retire on, after he gets out of prison. He's looking at twenty years, which would make him an old man of 64 when he gets out after serving his sentence. A gap like that in a resume isn't going to impress potential employers.