One way to view Benjamin Louis King's situation is that it could be worse. That's because his total theft may have been good deal higher than the amount for which he was prosecuted. King, for three decades the chief of finance for the Maryland Legal Aid Bureau, along with an accomplice, Wendell Jackson, was sentenced in Baltimore federal court on December 14 for embezzling over $1 million from the bureau. U.S. District Judge Catherine Blake gave King 30 months in prison, to be followed by three years of supervised release; she gave Jackson 15 months in prison. Each also must make restitution. "Bennie King abused his position of trust for over a decade and stole more than $1 million through a longstanding fraud scheme," said U.S. Attorney Rod Rosenstein. "What makes the case even more offensive is that the $1 million would have paid for legal services for the poor.
Misuse of Legal Services Corporation funds is nothing new. The most publicized cases typically involve lawsuits by affiliated nonprofit legal groups that run contrary to the LSC charter. Recent months, however, have witnessed a different kind of problem: use of public money for private pleasure. New reports by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and the LSC Office of Inspector General, plus 
