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City of Sin, a place bursting at the seams with garish flashing lights, backroom deals, sexual indiscretion, rowdy bachelor partiers, and general drunken debauchery. A city where people go to make bad decisions and pray the consequences don't follow them home. With such a seedy reputation, it might be the last place you'd expect to find two kind-faced older ladies like Lana Chang and Mary Margaret Kruper.
But these ladies were regulars, just as comfortable in a darkened room choked with cigarette smoke as they were at a church fundraiser. They spent money like someone else was footing the bill. And somebody else was. Rather, several somebodies. They just didn't know it… yet. Unlike other visitors to the gambling capital of the world, Chang and Kruper weren't just betting on cards and sports.
they were risking a lot more than cash. Chang and Krupa rolled the dice every time they stepped out on the gaming floor. They were betting they wouldn't get caught. You see, Chang and Krupa were meant to be two humble employees of an elementary school, but they were living large, driving late model Volvos and taking frequent luxurious trips to Vegas and Tahoe. Not bad for two women who had taken a vow of poverty.
This is Opportunist, an original podcast from Podcast One. You're listening to a story told in one episode called Sister Mary Margaret Kruper, Unholy Roller. I'm Sarah James McLaughlin. In this episode, we'll do a deep dive on Sisters Lana Chang and Mary Margaret Kruper, who ran a Catholic school but used their power to fund a dark addiction. ♪
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Code "Opportunist" for 10% off your first order. Thorn.fit/opportunist. Code "Opportunist." These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Established in 1918, St. James Catholic School consists of several low-lying buildings in sunny Redondo Beach in Torrance, California, less than an hour from the City of Angels.
depending on the traffic, of course. The school's stated mission is to, quote, "facilitate the development of confident, competent, and caring Catholic citizens," unquote. To accomplish that goal, the school's employees are expected to lead by example and embody characteristics of charity, honesty, and justice. We spoke with Jack Alexander, whose kids attended St. James between 2004 and 2013.
St. James is actually like the oldest Catholic church in Redondo Beach. So they were pretty prominent church for many, many years. All the other churches kind of pale in size of just the offerings. They have multiple campuses. They've got multiple properties.
It's located right next to City Hall, downtown Redondo Beach, right off Pacific Coast Highways, the main church. It's quite large and nice. Directly across the street is a campus with a couple office buildings and a preschool. And then down about a mile in the city of Torrance, they've got another school building with theater and fields and things like that. So it was a very popular place. The school draws students from the local Catholic community.
If you start off by getting married and getting married at the local parish, and oh, now you're having a baby, we have a preschool. So immediately, from the time your children are definitely pre-K, two, three, four years old, you start to meet other Catholic families. And then the natural progression is they send Sister Lana, Sister Mary Margaret over with the literature and the priests recommend it. And so before you know it, you're getting interviewed by both of them in her office. And
You know, you get into the school and it was quite a big deal. Sisters Lana Chang and Mary Margaret, who Mr. Alexander just mentioned, were the two most powerful nuns at St. James. And as vice principal and principal respectively, they were in charge of everything that went on at the school. Both sisters were consecrated into the religious order of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet,
a process which involved taking vows to live like Jesus, embodying chastity, obedience, and poverty. A brief note on that: the vow of poverty means something different to every nun who takes it on, and sisters Lana and Mary Margaret seem to have a very loose interpretation. Here's LA-based journalist Zarina Carrizada:
Yeah, so as nuns, they took a vow to live in poverty. This would be a life with very humble means, but that wasn't the case. Parents at the time said they were seeing the nuns driving newer looking Volvos. From what they were telling me, that just didn't seem to match what their perspective of what a nun would be driving. They were expecting more of an older station wagon. So for them to see the newer looking Volvo, it was a moment to point out.
Sister Mary Margaret arrived at St. James in 1988 before rising to principal just five years later. Soon after that, she brought on Sister Lana as her number two, the vice principal and eighth grade teacher. Basically, it was their way or the highway, and they were the longest tenured people there except for a couple volunteers. And it was certainly Sister Mary Margaret's show, and Sister Lana could pretty much do whatever they want. They were the queen bees.
The two didn't just work together, they also shared a house owned by the local diocese. And of course, they made their regular trips to Vegas and Tahoe. So it seems they had a close relationship. But at the end of the day, the buck stopped with Principal Mary Margaret, and she ran a tight ship. Students were not allowed to talk out of turn or have anything on their desk other than one pencil and one eraser.
Some rule breakers were even made to "walk the line," which meant pacing around a painted square on the asphalt and pondering their sins, which is a slight improvement from the days of nuns slapping students on the hand with a ruler. But even this "walk the line" approach seems a little over the top. Like a public display of power and authority by a nun and principal intent on keeping everyone in line,
She let you know from day one, it was her school. It was her way. I don't think she was unfair. I did hear of some parents complaining that she was too rough to deal with and gruff and she wasn't the loving nun you would think, but you know, having grown up and gone to some CCD Sunday school, I'd been unfortunately whacked a few times with the ruler and things like that. So I didn't find it terrible. She was
difficult to get to know only because she ran the school very tightly. She was always in her office in meetings. Mary Margaret was very busy. She had fingers in a lot of pies. Perhaps most importantly, she controlled the school's purse strings, managing all of the school's many bank accounts. This gave her all the opportunity in the world to mismanage funds.
But there was no reason to question this arrangement. After all, who better to trust with your money than a nun? As nuns go though, Sister Mary Margaret was a bit of a character. Parents, particularly the fathers at the school, couldn't help but notice that she seemed to enjoy talking about sports and gambling. I don't know if she broadcast it to the community at large. She didn't come up onto the loudspeaker and announce that, you know, this or that.
In my relationship with her and other people that I talked to that knew her better, and she knew that I like to play cards and gamble and I go to Vegas and all that kind of stuff.
I still remember it was after the Giants beat the Patriots when the guy caught the football in the helmet. I remember seeing her like, then when we dropped the kids for the morning assembly, you know, a lot of parents would stick around and we'd always catch up and she'd come out and speak. After the show, she walked right by me and Randy, who was one of my good buddy dads, who was a big golfer, card player. She goes, can you believe that catch? She just shook her head. She's like, that just crushed my bet.
And I just remember laughing. I'm like, yeah, I mean, and I just said, I was like, me too. I mean, it killed us. Like, you know, Patriots should have smoked them, but the Giants won. And there was times like that. She would be, and Sister Lana, you know, you would comment if the Dodgers didn't get to the World Series or if the Lakers didn't do well. They were very in tune with sports and I think gambling on sports. The relationship between nuns and sports isn't new.
talk to anyone who went to Catholic schools, and they likely have a story about some nun who loves the local NFL or college football team. In Chicago, Sister Jean Delora Schmidt was famous for being the beloved chaplain for the Loyola University men's basketball team. The Ramblers out of Loyola, Chicago, the new darlings of March Madness. America's fallen in love with Sister Jean, the 98-year-old nun that leads Loyola, Chicago in pregame prayer.
In 2018, she rocketed to fame nationally after the Ramblers' incredible run in the NCAA Final Four tournament. But back in California, there were hints, however, that Sister Mary Margaret and Sister Lana's interest in sports went beyond the typical fandom, and even well beyond betting on the odd sports game.
One time I was in Vegas and I was talking to a couple of my friends and the one guy's like, nuns don't come to, there are no nuns in Vegas. He's like, I'm from Vegas. We've never seen a nun in the casinos. If you do, they're retired. He's like, they go to the bingo hall. Like that's as much as nuns do. And I'm like, no, they're here all the time. He's like, and he just looked at me, he goes, yeah, if they're coming here to these big casinos, they're, they're obviously, you know, really into gambling. I mean, they're making pilgrimage out there.
While the sisters apparently had money to burn on trips to Vegas, the school they ran, well, always seemed to be strapped for cash. The textbooks were years out of date, field trips were out of the budget, and it was even impossible to install an awning over the outdoor dining area to protect students from the California sun. But it was always like the kids never sat inside to eat. They sat on benches.
Outside on benches. It could be 90 degrees on asphalt, and they sat on benches every single day. Whenever parents petitioned for upgrades or improvements, Sister Mary Margaret answered the same way by responding, How do you expect to pay for it? Financial resources were always in short supply, at least according to the nuns. The school's money woes were always extensive.
At least, that's what the nuns told parents. And it affected everything from construction projects to sports teams.
you know, as a coach, you coach little league, you show up and somebody with the board hands you a big bag and new helmets and balls and uniforms. And I expected the exact same thing when I went and said, okay, I'm going to coach the boys see football team. And she's like, okay, go ahead. And I was like, well, where's the equipment? She literally gave me one rubber football from PE. Wasn't a real football. That's the one you play with. And I was like,
Where is this? And then, of course, the uniforms were completely old and destroyed. And I said, well, why don't we do a fundraiser for uniforms? Well, we don't do fundraisers for uniforms. And so it was one of those things as a coach, I was like, this doesn't make sense. She's charging the kids to play for a sport. And then you find out from CYO, they're not charging the school. They're charging school like 90 bucks for the team. Yet these kids paying 50 bucks, they don't get a uniform. They don't give me a stipend. I wouldn't have taken one. But you start to wonder, what are we actually paying for?
It's understandable that parents like Alexander wondered where all their money was going. Tuition was about $6,000 per year per student, with enrollment of about $300. That amounted to nearly $2 million coming in every year. And on top of that, the school also demanded mandatory participation in school fundraisers.
We had all these additional fees. You had to do the jog-a-thon. You had to do the Big Red Raffle. You had to do the Hannon Foundation. You had to do the St. James Educational Fund. So there was always more fees. And then there would always be sell the newspaper, sell magazine subscriptions, do the penny wars. Kids would bring in the most change. They win like a popsicle. It was just a never-ending in your pocket. So none of it made sense. Everybody would question it.
No matter how much money poured into the school, there was never enough to make ends meet. It was a mystery where all the money was going. None of the numbers added up, and there was a good reason for that. Coming up, the school's shoestring budget starts to unravel.
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A true crime podcast. It got me upset because this is someone's kid and someone knows she's gone. That takes a different approach. It was shocking for something like this to happen in our little town. Focusing on the communities affected by life-shattering crimes. It made news throughout the entire region that these two people had been shot while they slept in such a safe community. To give a new perspective on the devastation crimes can cause.
It was shocking for something like this to happen in our little town. Featuring cases from quiet towns to bustling cities and interviewing the people closest to the case.
My first thought was that it's an unusual location for us to have a homicide. Listen to the true crime podcast, City Confidential, and step beyond the yellow tape to learn just how far a crime can reach. There are certain cases in the history of Boston that I think sort of define the city. I think this is one of them. New episodes of the City Confidential podcast are available every Thursday, available wherever you get your podcasts. Now, back to the story.
Between 1998 and 2018, sisters Mary Margaret Kruper and Lana Chang oversell St. James Catholic School, including keeping tight control of the school's spending. Yet somehow, there was never enough money to go around. It seemed to just vanish into thin air. One example of how the budget turned into a bottomless pit was the school's annual Harvest Festival.
I was one of the probably second or third most important person for the Harvest Festival, which was our largest fundraiser. I had developed a very strong sense that there was a lot more going on from seeing them pull in. I mean, I would say for at least seven to eight years, I questioned damn near everything in the Harvest Festival. All the numbers were shrouded in secrecy. When I turned in numbers, they would be changed.
So I had a lot of reasons and I felt very strongly that there was a lot of things under the table that we weren't on to because they just didn't make sense. I wasn't the only one saying this. I mean, there was a lot of people that run this harvest festival and everybody on the board or the main people would always sit there and look at each other and be like, she won't share the numbers from last year. Playing things so close to the chest made many parents frustrated.
Without unofficial accounting from the nuns, parents started to make their own calculations. You know, you started to have the lady at the taco stand.
who did it for like five years. She literally went back and counted all the food they cooked from three years ago. And then for two years, she documented every ticket sale. So they had their own numbers. And then of course we would all meet after she would say, well, congratulations to this booth, the candy booth, they sold the most. And then you talk to the person at the candy booth. They're like, yeah, we did four or 5,000 this week in the taco beer. Like we did 20,000. What the hell is she talking? Like you would catch them, but you couldn't really confront them.
They would say, "No, you're wrong. You don't know what you're talking about." The math, as the kids say, was not mathing. But even with such blatant discrepancies, people hesitated to say anything to the leaders of the school. They figured they must be missing something. And they were. It wasn't until the summer of 2018 that the truth finally came out. After 25 years of service as St. James principal, the time came for Sister Mary Margaret to retire.
As part of the transition process, the diocese that oversell the school called for an audit to make sure the books were in order for the next administration. It was a routine procedure, just due diligence. But Mary Margaret was nervous, squirrely even. She directed two school employees to destroy documents and not tell the auditors they were missing. The employees reported this to the pastor.
And then, it just so happened that while this routine audit was happening, a St. James parent made a standard request. They needed a copy of an old tuition check. But when they got it, they noticed something strange on the back. It wasn't deposited into the school's account. Instead, it had been signed over to a mystery account with no ties to official school business whatsoever. After these alarming discoveries,
The administration brought in the big guns, and the routine audit became a more intense deep dive that lasted for months. And the auditors uncovered something shocking. In November 2018, the school community received an innocuous, understated letter breaking the news.
Parents received a letter from Monsignor Michael Myers, the school's pastor, stating that the archdiocese did not wish to pursue criminal proceedings against the sisters, that they prefer to address the situation internally with the school and the sisters' order. In the letter, they told parents that there would be new procedures and oversight policies for the school's finances to prevent this from happening again, and that they would be figuring out a plan for restitution.
But parents I spoke with said they were outraged by the decision. It had been a while. None of my children were still at the school. I came home one night. My wife had received a text from a friend. And she goes, you're not going to believe it. And I said, what? And she goes, maybe you were right after all. I said, what? She goes, there's an investigation into embezzlement of funds at St. James. And I just said, send me that letter. In the letter, the church's pastor wrote,
"It is with much sadness that I am informing families of St. James School that an internal investigation has revealed that, over a period of years, Sister Mary Margaret Cooper and Sister Lana Chang have been involved in the personal use of a substantial amount of school funds. The 'personal use,' Cooper later admitted, was to gamble at casinos and pay the nuns' credit card bills. And the substantial amount, at first count,
half a million dollars. But that was just what auditors found siphoned into one account that was only six years old. It turned out that Sister Mary Margaret had been depositing some tuition checks into the school's legitimate accounts, but funneling others into her own secret accounts. She saw an opportunity to use her position to enrich her life and live lavishly, and she took it.
As they were reviewing the checks that they had sent to the school from previous years, noticed in the back that it wasn't endorsed by the school. It was like handwritten. And they were presumably thinking that this might have been going to a different account once this all unfolded.
So for at least six years, the nuns had been taking school money and depositing it in secret private accounts. And Mary Margaret had been running the school for 19 years before that, so there was no telling how much more she had robbed from Peter to pay Paul. And of course, there was no accounting for all of the cash from decades of school fundraisers.
So they were and parents at that time were still sifting through their checks and their paperwork, trying to figure out how much of their money even made it to the school or didn't make it to the school. So they with that ballpark number of that five hundred thousand dollars, I think for parents, it was the thought process of, wow, this could be in the millions. This could be a lot more. And we don't even know yet.
The final official estimate of stolen funds rose to a staggering $835,000. But despite this clearly illegal behavior, the pastor notified the community that the church would not be pressing charges. Instead, they decided to handle the situation internally. Immediately the next morning, I called the school and I wanted to speak to the vice principal and I called the
the parish and tried to take the priest. And they all kept telling me, oh, no, no, this it's all been, they literally said, you don't go here. Doesn't pertain to you. We're handling it. There's nothing we can comment on. I'll leave a message. I literally drove down. My office is like three blocks. So it was like, I just jumped in my car, went over there, knocked on the parish door. He said, oh, well, it's been handled. You know, the archdiocese is on like, they basically,
Did everything humanly possible. They gave it to the kids in an envelope in their backpacks. They never sent an email. They never had a phone tree. They tried to say, here it is. It's gone. Don't worry about it. The next day when I called the school, I basically said, I want to know what's going to happen. And nobody called me back. And I kind of knew where this was headed just from my gut feel. Like, you know, people don't like to air their dirty laundry. And I basically said, who at the archdiocese is aware? And they said, we don't know. So I saw, I just started calling the archdiocese and got to their legal counsel and
They said the same thing. It's been handled. It's under investigation. It's an internal matter. We'll take care of it. They said they're going to get back to me with more details. Of course, nobody ever called me back. And that's when I was like, if somebody doesn't call me and tell me exactly the whole scope of this and when it started and this and that, I'll just call a friend of mine. I went to high school with the guy who's one of the editors of one of the sections of the LA Times. They called his bluff. And Jack called. He called a friend.
And I just dropped them a text and said, "Hey, do you think this would be an interesting story?"
Yeah. And then after that, they sent an inquiry to the archdiocese, which forced the parish to do the, um, when Monsignor spoke in the church, they're going to publicly address it for the first time. And they brought some people down from the archdiocese and we got to talk to the investigators and neither one of them had ever been an investigator and they weren't even gonna ask for a credit card. It was the biggest BS. And I remember Monsignor Mike told me that I wasn't allowed to ask questions and
and nobody from the media could be invited. It only could be St. James people. And that's when I just literally picked up the other phone and called somebody I knew from another local paper and said, hey, why don't you guys come with me? And I came into the thing with a couple of different newspaper guys, and they sat there and just did the audio recording of the whole thing. And that's when it took off. Up next, the St. James community grapples with how to solve a problem like Mary Margaret.
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In 2018, it came out that sisters Mary Margaret Kruper and Lana Chang had taken advantage of their positions as principal and vice principal of St. James School to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars. Once the news broke, families connected to the school had a lot of emotions to process.
Parents I spoke to were shocked. They were trying to get as many documents as they could of receipts, copies of checks, bank records to turn into the Torrance Police Department. I think there were so many parents at that moment trying to figure out how much was
misappropriated where that money was going. But it also seemed that some parents had their suspicions prior to the investigation of, you know, as I described earlier, they mentioned that these nuns had a lavish lifestyle. So things were starting not to add up for them. The community's response was mixed. Some saw it coming while others were totally caught off guard.
Some wrote letters of support for the nuns, but others wanted them to face severe consequences. Some people thought it was an innocent oversight, while others thought it was a wanton breaking of the Eighth Commandment: "Thou shalt not steal." Now I should note that Jack Alexander has been very vocal about his frustration with both St. James and the Diocese of Los Angeles.
Many other parents have been equally as frustrated, but have been reluctant to express their concerns publicly. But we have heard from them privately. Others, as I said earlier, have sided with the nuns believing unintentional mistakes were made. People want to believe the nuns.
People believed in their hearts that this was a mistake. You'd hear a lot of that, "Well, she's an older lady. She's a nun. What does she know about banking? It's just a mistake. It was probably for the building fund versus school." You got a lot of people immediately saying like, "Oh no, she wouldn't do that. She's a nun. I trust her. She's been great to my children." And then you had another side that's like, "Oh, hell no."
This lady's been stealing. This lady's beaten us at cards. This lady's talking about gambling. This lady doesn't share the numbers. We don't have any money. Every other school seems to have money, including the less fortunate neighborhoods don't talk the way we talk about us being broke. So it really split the people down the middle. But no matter which side families fell on, they had to agree that the incident caused a lot of damage, both financial and emotional.
I think more than that, a lot of people were just flat. Honestly, they were freaking embarrassed and they were hurt and they hurt their kids. So the first thing you do is you know you can't really fight it. People got out. People started yanking their kids and I mean in droves. I mean, it was pretty, I would say a year later, they had less than half the kids. The fallout also had spiritual implications. Seeing respected figures in the church
people charged with the religious education of young impressionable minds and hearts caught stealing red-handed shook some people's faith. A judge in the case said, "None should realize that just by living their lives and living the way they do and treating people the way they do, they affect children for the rest of their lives."
Society understands that when a nun is literally scolding the children, thou shalt not steal, and she's robbing people, and then she doesn't ever confess the sins or publicly apologize, and they just sweep it under the rug. It basically means the church doesn't give a shit about that entire generation. One former St. James student said, you can almost hear the anguish.
To know that she had been taking money from my parents and my peers' parents the whole time I was there is extremely shocking, and it sways me away from the Catholic Church. Trust shouldn't be broken like that. So I know people don't trust anybody associated with St. James, and I think they've done everything they can to try to bury their past and move forward. But the school's not the same, the community's not the same.
We don't go to St. James Church. Many of the people that we used to see go to other parishes or they just stopped going to church. My son still goes to Mass. My daughters do not. You know, you can believe in God. The people that are trying to teach His Word or spread His gospel, you realize they're not only not pious and, you know, trying to do the right thing. They're just people and they're just like everybody else. And unfortunately, they're all pretty much full of shit.
because they've never stepped up and made anything right or tried to do anything but bury it under the rug. So it damages the community. As far as efforts to repair that damage, the church first tried to handle things on its own. The nuns' religious order would make restitutions, and the sisters would face canonical sanctions.
So what we're told is, and Monsignor says this, and then a lady from their actual convent, which is in Brentwood, so it's not a bad place to go. It's on the top of the hill, Mount St. Mary's, right off Sunset. They are, and I forget the term, but basically they're house arrest. They were supposed to basically be on house arrest up there where they couldn't leave and they didn't have their privileges.
As much as the church wanted to keep things private, since bank fraud is a federal crime, eventually Torrance police and the FBI were brought in. And once a criminal investigation was up and running, upset parents were more than willing to provide as much evidence as possible to make sure the nuns faced justice. The church is now cooperating with police and parents are bringing as many tuition and other checks written to the school to the police department to see how much was taken.
During the trial, Mary Margaret's lawyers did their best to portray their client as a remorseful woman who didn't even realize she had a gambling problem. They said, "During the time period this was happening, she had no idea what was happening." Um, she had no idea she was endorsing checks into her own coffers? No idea she was using school funds to pay for trips to Vegas?
Did her hand just slip and accidentally deposit almost a million dollars into her secret bank accounts? Her attorney went on to say that, quote, "As soon as she was confronted, she accepted full responsibility for what she had done, and she has cooperated completely with law enforcement and the Archdiocese," unquote. Okay, so she owned up to her lies once she was caught?
That doesn't exactly scream moral fiber. In the end, Sister Lana was not charged, while Mary Margaret pled guilty to one count each of wire fraud and money laundering. At her sentencing, Sister Mary Margaret said,
The judge was left with a tricky situation.
How to sentence an 80-year-old Catholic nun guilty of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from the kids she was meant to educate and nurture. Do you throw the good book at her? Give her a penance? A slap on the wrist? Prosecutors asked for a prison sentence of two years. In the end, the judge settled for one year and a day. Plus, she was required to pay back the $835,000 she stole.
She served her sentence and was released in February 2023. She is still under judicial supervision until February 2025. In the aftermath, St. James School was left to pick up the pieces and move on, which they did by basically cleaning house, sweeping everything under the rug and pretending nothing ever happened, which was what the school and diocese tried to do from the beginning.
On the St. James website, the history of the school section has no mention at all about the scandal. The priest, Monsignor, won't even discuss how they just laid off the last teacher. So everyone there, I believe, is pretty much wasn't there to do the same thing. They've just tried to wipe that chapter. And now Monsignor is kind of in charge and the Harvest Festival isn't there anymore.
After it was tainted with decades of mismanagement and theft, St. James reimagined their infamous Harvest Festival. In 2024, they had a February festival instead. The theme? Mardi Gras. Also known as Fat Tuesday, Mardi Gras marks the day before the beginning of Lent, a season of fasting, prayer, and penance.
Historically, it's a night of revelry and debauchery when people rack up more sins before they start repenting. So what could go wrong? But the attempt at rebranding doesn't change what happened all those years ago. And it doesn't restore the trust that the sisters broke by stealing from the school.
And so the families of St. James that were affected by this scandal can either choose to forgive the nuns their trespasses, or maybe more realistically, just find some way to move on. We have to live with it and it's over for the church. They don't have to deal with it. They keep ignoring it. Time passes and something worse comes along.
Thank you for tuning in to The Opportunist. Among the many sources we use for our research, we found the Spectrum News reporting by Zarina Hirazada extremely helpful. This episode was written by Nani Okwulagu and executive produced by Connor Powell. We'll be back in a few weeks with new stories about people seeing an opportunity to get ahead and taking it. Until next time.
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