High-living Lexington man who embezzled $1 million from dumpster firm gets prison

A high-living Lexington embezzler who used computers and a phony company to siphon more than $1 million from a Columbia company received a prison sentence Thursday of four years and three months.

William Tye Grisel, 40, would have gotten about three years, but U.S. Judge Joe Anderson noted how Grisel had violated his promise while out on bond not to leave the state without permission and gone to North Carolina on various occasions where he bar-hopped at craft beer establishments, played golf, went river rafting and rented a luxurious mountain house and posted photos of his activities on Instagram and Facebook.

Anderson told the court he usually gives white collar embezzlers such as Grisel, who have no prior criminal record, a light sentence.

“This case is not the usual case,” Anderson said.

After all, the judge told the courtroom, Grisel is not the ordinary embezzler pressured by circumstances who steals money in a one-time theft from an employer — he had concocted a complex, long-running scheme to drain money from his employer, Big Red Box, a scheme that created severe financial hardship for the company.

The $1 million in stolen money over nearly three years led to a severe erosion in Big Red Box’s customer base, adding to the company’s financial woes, co-owner Coley Brown told Judge Anderson at the sentencing hearing at the federal courthouse in Columbia.

“We were laying off employees left and right,” said Brown, who was in court Thursday with his partner Chris Dorsey. “Three years later Big Red Box has not completely recovered.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Brook Andrews said the government has not been able to recover any money from the $1 million Grisel stole. The thefts took place from 2014 to the spring of 2017, he said.

“The reason there is no money is because Mr. Grisel has spent it ‘living high on the hog’ on trips, on expensive cars and a down payment on an airplane,” Andrews said. Evidence in the case said the down payment on the airplane was $70,000.

Moreover, Andrews told the judge, Grisel likely didn’t pay any taxes on the money he stole.

In a statement to the court, delivered rapidly and in a monotone, Grisel said he took full responsibility for his actions, apologized to the company and to his family and said, “I did not mean to cause financial or other harm to anyone.”

Big Red Box, a family-owned business which rents dumpsters for construction debris and other waste, was founded as a start-up in Columbia in 2005 and has offices around South Carolina as well as being an integral part of a national dumpster rental network.

Brown’s and Dorsey’s lawyer, Debbie Barbier of Columbia, brought Grisel’s Instagram and Facebook posts to the judge’s attention. She pulled out her cell phone and displayed them. Judge Anderson asked they be made part of the court record.

Only this past weekend, Barbier told the judge, Grisel had been bar-hopping at craft beer establishments in Asheville to celebrate his 40th birthday. Meanwhile, “he hasn’t paid them (Big Red Box) back one dollar,” Barbier said.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrews told the judge that not only was the scheme long-running, but Grisel tried to cover up his crime by hacking into Big Red Box co-owner Dorsey’s email and deleting an email from Google warning of possible fraud.

The scheme began in 2014 after Grisel tried but failed to get a pay raise, and his resentment over that denial led him to launch his scheme, Andrews said.

“The fraud would surely be continuing had he not been caught,” Andrews told the judge. Ironically, said Andrews, it was Grisel’s “lack of a criminal history when he was hired that enabled him to build trust with his employers.”

According to records in the case, Big Red Box hired Grisel as a salesman in 2013 and shortly afterwards promoted him to IT (information technology) manager. In that position, he oversaw the company’s email, phone systems and hardware and software.

Grisel was also responsible for hiring, managing and paying companies used by Big Red Box called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies. These SEO companies use the internet to find and route prospective customers to clients such as Big Red Box. The companies were so important to Big Red Box’s efforts to get customers that the company paid about 10 of them collectively more than $1 million a year to find customers.

According to the evidence, Grisel created a fake SEO company called LocalList, with a mailing address at his father’s house in Texas, and began paying LocalList thousands of dollars each month. Grisel started small, paying it $1,336 using a Big Red Box credit his first month in May 2014, and eventually began paying it more than $40,000 in stolen money every month. In one month, October 2016, Grisel paid his sham firm more than $71,000 from Big Red Box.

In return for that money, LocalList did nothing, Andrews said.

Speaking after Andrews, Big Red Box co-owner Brown told the judge everyone trusted Grisel at first.

“Tye convinced us he was a 100% company guy. He always wanted to learn more,” Brown said.

Brown asked the judge to give Grisel as much prison time as he could. “There is no doubt in my mind he will do this again. He is a very charismatic sociopath.”

Columbia lawyer Jack Swerling, who represented Grisel, said his client “has a negative net worth.”

Technically, the charge for which Grisel was sentenced is wire fraud.

Columbia lawyer Swerling told the judge that Grisel has many good qualities that include a “good work ethic” and being a “great father, great husband.” Moreover, Grisel is devoted to his two preschool children, a step daughter and three adult children from a prior marriage. Swerling presented a dozen letters from family and friends testifying to Grisel’s good character.

Swerling said Grisel is not a violent person and does not possess any guns. Swerling asked for a minimal sentence because for Grisel to be away from his children “is severe punishment.”

Andrews agreed that it is too bad that Grisel has to go off to prison, but “It is a tragedy of his own making. Surely he knew when he hatched his plan that prison would lie ahead.”

Peter McCoy, the U.S. Attorney for South Carolina, said, “The defendant’s lies and fabrications bilked his employer out of more than $1 million and caused substantial damage to this small company doing business here in South Carolina ... This office takes these types of crimes seriously.”

The United States Secret Service, Lexington County Sheriff’s Department and Richland County Sheriff’s Department investigated. Assistant United States Attorney Winston Holliday was also involved in the case.