That money is long goooooone
At least a lot of it. That's why he didn't reply in the first couple days with "look, here's the bank statement, the money's still there and we're working overtime on making sure this ends up in the right place. I'm sorry that I didn't notice this for so long [what he claims happened] and that I've let it go on this long. The money is going to charity ASAP, and hopefully I'll have the good news in a month. I'm sorry again, this was entirely my fault."
He still would have been in deep shit, but then at least... well, people could take him in good faith.
I dunno if they need to take a loan out or what. I wouldn't think that's wise, because at that point, you're just covering up the crime. It's probably just them dealing with lawyers in figuring out how to be up-front with the IRS and avoid prison.
Don't trust any charity drive that seems to be collecting donations
for a separate charity that isn't telling you something like "this money isn't going into our hands, it's going directly into a trust account controlled by our attorney who's making sure the donations get properly disbursed." Because at least in that occasion you can
expect that they aren't going to be misusing funds.
Considering this charity did absolutely nothing with the money other than host new events, and Girard was dumb enough to say "no at most we used $2k out of that fund toward this or that event", and a couple of the years listed a few hundred dollars in accounting fees... the other average of $12k/yr in just unexplained "expenses" you can expect was used on hookers.
And even if it was his family who did this and he
truly believed that the money had already been sent to charity, he claimed to Mutahar/Karl that he first found out it was unspent a year and a half ago, and said nothing. Hosted another similar event, and nothing changed. I think all of his stories are bullshit, but even taken at face value there just isn't an excuse. Maybe it'll turn out someone else was really the guilty party, and he was trying to cover for his brother or something, but... there ain't anything else there.
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Give money only to charities you ensure are good, and are well-documented on how well they use the money! For example, while Red Cross spends about a third of its budget on salaries and advertising, Doctors Without Borders only spends ~4% on administration and the rest is funding putting those doctors where they should be. There are such vast differences between charities, and no one should ever be giving anything to people like Red Cross to waste. (And btw the 1/3 for Red Cross is an underestimation, when you consider scandals of theirs like their relief efforts after the Haiti earthquake, when it turns out the majority of money was just getting embezzled into shady housing projects and the like. Straight-up scam. My personal opinion is 0% of money sent to "cure this disease!" charities ever actually increases the rate at which the given disease is cured. Great, some doctor on a board of doctors writing advisory opinions or something just got a $500k/yr salary because of the charity, wooo~)
