The former CFO of a Florida media company was arrested earlier this month amid money laundering allegations.
Jeffery Crane, who had been working as finance chief of Bluewater Media in Clearwater, Florida, was arrested Feb. 5 and released the following day, court records show. In Jan. 16 affidavit, Lance Wagoner, a detective with the Largo Police Department, said his investigation showed that Crane “engaged in a scheme to defraud, criminal use of personal identification information, and money laundering while employed as the Chief Financial Officer … of Bluewater.”
Among the charges, Crane faces two felony counts of money laundering.
According to the affidavit, Crane is alleged to have stolen just over $820,000 from Bluewater between his hiring in March 2022 to August 2025, when he was fired from the job. The firing came after Crane “admitted to the fraudulent activity in front of numerous witnesses,” the affidavit stated.
Crane is alleged to have used the stolen funds on “restaurants, airfare, hotels, and other personal purchases,” according to the document.
The affidavit also said that Crane transferred over $1.2 million from a Bluewater bank account to an American Express account in the name of another company that he had also allegedly been stealing from. Crane is also alleged to have transferred another $300,000 to yet another bank account he controlled.
Wagoner noted that he “obtained numerous records by subpoena request from the multiple businesses that (Crane) made fraudulent purchases from and confirmed with these records that all of the accounts were linked to (Crane) either through his name, email address, phone number, or personal bank accounts.”
According to court documents, Crane had told Bluewater executives he had a “$10,000 a day narcotics habit, which was part of the reason he began to steal from Bluewater.”
In a statement to WTSP-TV in Tampa Bay, Bluewater CEO Andy Latimer said his company had identified a total of $2.4 million in stolen money.
“When we discovered this, it was a deep hurt,” Latimer told the news station. “It was a violation of trust. It was a true, deep betrayal.”
