In a whimsical caper that will probably wind up fictionalized by...Wes Anderson or maybe Roman Coppola if Anderson is busy, a Staten Island woman has been charged with stealing one million dollars worth of amusement park tickets from her company and hoarding them herself.
According to the Brooklyn DA's office, 51-year-old Rosemarie Bader of Staten Island was arrested and charged with grand larceny and criminal possession of stolen property after allegedly running a two-year scheme in which she used her company credit card to buy tickets to Six Flags Great Adventure and Dorney Park.
Bader was an employee of the Best Trails and Travel Corporation, a Red Hook-based travel company that sold trip packages to places like the amusement parks Bader is alleged to have bought the admission tickets for. In her role as sales director, prosecutors allege that Bader used the BTTC company credit card to place orders for 36,000 tickets to the parks between January 2014 and November 2016.
She then allegedly took the delivery of the tickets herself, stashed them in a safe under her desk only she had access to, and, according to prosecutors, used the tickets for her own, ahem, amusement. Given the enormous amount of tickets that were redeemed in the two-year period, it's unclear how many of the tickets Bader used for herself, nor is it clear if she sold any of them for personal profit.
Another employee of the company discovered the alleged theft in 2016 after noticing that the huge amount of tickets Bader had been ordering didn't match up at all to the amount of bus seats available for trips through the company, a discovery that led to her getting fired from BTTC.
In total, the 23,136 tickets to Dorney Park and 13,102 tickets to Six Flags Great Adventure that Bader is alleged to have stolen and used came out to a total value of $1,000,533. If convicted of the top charge against her, Bader faces between 8 1/3 and 25 years in prison. Prosecutors did not say whether or how many times Bader rode the terrifying Kingda Ka at Six Flags.
