An unusual chain of events last week led to the arrest of Steve Banks, executive director of Canton Papertown Association, for three counts of embezzlement of $25 each. Here are the facts surrounding the incident:

The whirlwind started Friday, March 18, following a downtown celebration honoring the Pisgah Bears state basketball championship. Around 10 p.m., Banks walked into a downtown restaurant and bar, No. 81 Main Street, and asked an employee if he would cash a check for him. Banks said he had a flat tire and needed to get his car towed. The restaurant owner knew Banks and agreed to cash a check for him totaling $25.

“He said ‘Can you cash me a couple of checks and I’ll pay my bill?’” recounted Arun Krishnan, the restaurant owner. Banks endorsed two more $25 checks and received the cash.

“That night, when I was cashing out, I looked at the two checks I’d gotten that day and saw they were written to Papertown Association. I thought there was no way my bank is going to cash them,” Krishnan said. Two checks were donations for the Pisgah Bears event and another was a membership check.

“We thought the best thing we can do is go see Jim,” Krishnan said, referring to Jim Weatherman, chairman of the Papertown board and owner of the Great Southern Trading Company. So on Tuesday, Krishnan took the checks to Weatherman at his store and let Weatherman keep the checks.

“At that point, I called Steve Banks and asked him to explain those. I told him he needed to take that money to No. 81 Main Street and pay it back,” Weatherman said.

Krishnan said Banks came into No. 81 Main Street around on Wednesday and repaid $45, told him he’d made an “error in judgment,” and would pay the rest back later, which he did.

Meanwhile, the Canton Police Department had discovered outstanding driving violations for Banks. Banks driver’s license had been revoked several years ago when he was living in New York. He got a ticket in early 2004 for driving on a revoked license and failure to wear a seatbelt. Banks failed to appear in court and had an outstanding warrant against him.

One reason it could have taken several months for the warrant to surface in Canton is that Banks gave a Hot Springs address to the officer who stopped him in 2004. Nonetheless, officers became aware that Banks did not have a driver’s license. So when Lt. Bryan Whitner saw Banks driving around on Wednesday (March 23), he pulled him and charged him for driving without a license.

At that time, Weatherman showed up in the police station and told police Banks had taken $75 from Canton Papertown. An emergency meeting of the Canton Papertown Board was going to be held the next day to discuss the development, but Weatherman went ahead and told police about the checks before consulting the full board.

At the Papertown meeting the next day, the board voted to suspend Banks and turn the three checks over to the police. Board members reviewed the organization’s finances Friday to determine if anything else seemed suspicious.

“When the Papertown Board was comfortable that there was no other wrongdoing than those three checks, we charged him with three counts of embezzlement,” Whitner said. Embezzlement, no matter the amount, is a felony charge. Banks was arrested late Friday and had to post $5,000 bond to get out of jail.