She embezzled school fees: 80-year-old nun gambles away more than $800,000 in casino

An 80-year-old nun has been sentenced to a year in prison in the United States for stealing more than $800,000 from a school cash register and gambling in a casino. "I have sinned, I have broken the law and I have no excuse," Sister Mary Margeret Kreuper, 80, said in court, the Los Angeles Times reported on Monday.

The nun was the principal of a Catholic private school in the US state of California. When she entered the order of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet over 60 years ago, she took a vow of poverty. Yet for years she embezzled money to fund her love of luxury vacations and gambling.

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The fraud was uncovered during an audit. The director of the Catholic school then tried to cover up her crime by instructing her subordinates to destroy incriminating documents. Twitter users saw parallels to the "Sister Act" series. There, too, the adventurous nuns end up in the casino.

When the Archdiocese of Los Angeles demanded an account of Sister Kreuper, she replied, according to the newspaper report, that priests were paid better than nuns and that she felt she deserved a raise. The nun's lawyer argued in his plea with a gambling addiction and demanded that his client be allowed to serve her sentence in the convent where she has been living since the fraud was exposed in 2018.

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Gambling addiction can affect anyone. A widowed pensioner in southern Germany recently gambled away 330,000 euros. Against this background, the legalization of online casinos last year was controversial. The gambling industry also pays a strong lobby for its purposes. (AFP)