GALA Hispanic Director Harnesses Dramatic Talents to Help Recover Looted Funds
By • January 25, 2024 0 850
In a dramatic law-and-order turn Monday Jan. 22, over $250,000 of looted funds from a phony wire transfer have been returned to GALA Hispanic Theatre (Grupo de Artistas LatinoAmericanos) at 3333 14th St. NW.
For Washington’s premier hub of Hispanic and Latino theater arts, the online quarter-million dollar heist might have led the nearly half-century-old theater to shut down operations permanently. Fortunately, the theater’s Co-Founder and Executive Director Rebecca Medrano, knew how to focus dramatic public pressure on federal investigators to expedite the return of the theater house’s critical operating funds.
The Georgetowner spoke with Medrano about the harrowing “odyssey,“ – a “perfect word to describe it,” she said – GALA Hispanic’s critical cultural role in the nation’s capital, and how it feels to have the funds returned.
GALA Hispanic Theatre’s Executive Director Rebecca Medrano. Courtesy GALA Hispanic Theatre.
Why is GALA Hispanic Theatre so important as a cultural hub of the nation’s capital? “GALA is really the only bi-lingual, Latino theater in the region and it’s been serving a wide public for 48 years. So, we’re sort of the cultural home for Latinos from all over Latin America, from the Caribbean, from Spain. It’s a place of gathering, where we’re celebrating heritage. A family-centered [theater] with services for kids, for adolescents, and for the general public, with a wide range of programs,” Medrano said. “So, it’s a lot for everyone. And the community is growing so quickly since the 70s when we founded it with the political exiles and then the wave of Central American immigrants and now immigrants from all over. It is essential to the fabric of the city that we provide those services.”
Employing around 150 artists and technical workers every year, GALA is one of the most vibrant theaters in the region. Over the years, the theater has employed “hundreds of thousands of Latino artists,” according to Medrano, and given them opportunities, including youth training and education in the theater’s Paso Nuevo program.
The Theft
But everything came to a halt when a theater employee was shut out of GALA’s Citibank account on Jan. 17. “Gala Theatre was hacked… and our bank account was emptied,” GALA posted alarmingly to X that day. “We have not been able to pay the artists & crew working to bring audiences the world premier of ‘The Palacios Sisters,’ scheduled to open Feb 1st. DONATE HERE https://ow.ly/FWRx50QrUa2…” In an update later that day, GALA announced that the “bank [Citibank] tells us the process to recover the over $250,000 withdrawn from our account may take up to 8 months. By then, GALA will be dead. We need your support now to pay our artists & open our production. Please consider donating to our Emergency Fund….”
Such appeals were only part of the dramatic arsenal Medrano deployed to help win the return of GALA’s funds. She also resorted to daily, tearful sit-ins at Citibank, a letter-writing campaign, and providing multiple lengthy interviews to local and national media, both to help generate public donations and to pressure the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the U.S. Secret Service in charge primarily with tracking down the perpetrator(s) and, secondarily (it turns out) with returning the funds. Hence the need for pressure.
“It was definitely an odyssey and a learning experience for me with financial institutions. And also, really, about the power of the press – the power of the words of the press to move enormous bureaucratic institutions,” Medrano told The Georgetowner. “And I just feel really sorry for people to whom this has happened. There are many, many people who’ve been had and who’ve had to wait months and years [to recover their funds]…. But, we had the community behind us.”
“We had you all in the press behind us, Channel 4 [News4] and the Washington Post, WAMU, NPR. I think it was on NPR again this morning. So the proof is in the pudding,” Medrano said. “That’s what happened. [Federal investigators] listened to what the media had to say and decided to put aside their normal regulations because for the first week, I was doing sit-ins and literally crying and they told me, ‘This is going to take eight months’ because it takes that long in a federal investigation. I totally understand they want to catch the criminal and that’s fine. But that investigation had to be separated from my need to get my operating funds back…. But, I think with all the pressure of the media, they realized they had to make us whole – as they continue the investigation.”
And they did.
The Investigation
So, how did the investigation go down?
“It was the FBI and the Secret Service,” Medrano said. “The Secret Service actually identified where the funds are. And they’ve frozen that account. And they froze the last account we had. We have a new one with new security systems. But, it’s just very scary. For doing one wire transfer! And one [transfer even] went through. One went through legitimately to a properties designer who was waiting for the funds. And the other is when the pop-up [on the bank account website] said ‘You’re being kicked out.’ Somebody had hacked the Citibank online system. So, being very careful going forward, we won’t do wire transfers unless they’re done from the bank…. So, we’re delighted there was such an outpouring from the community, from our supporters, from the press. I think it’s really important to understand how fragile our systems are.”
Medrano wanted to thank all of GALA Hispanic’s supporters who responded to the theater’s Go Fund Me page, raising “between $65-70,000” in just the last few days. That sum was “thanks to all of our wonderful supporters,” Medrano said. “We’ll use those funds to replenish what we had to borrow for emergency funds, because if we borrowed it, we have to return it in the same fiscal year. So, those funds will help us be debt free and to move forward and to do everything we plan to do.”
Medrano described how resilient GALA Hispanic has been over the years, recalling that they “never closed during the pandemic.” But, she said, “this certainly was a hurdle to overcome.” But, she said, mindful of the theater’s responsibilities to the community, “artists need to eat and they usually get paid every week.”
“So, it was stressful,” she said. “But, we’re delighted and we’re encouraging everyone to see our upcoming show ‘Los Hermanos Palacios.’ It opens on February 1. So, we have a special offer going up – we’d like to thank our patrons with a 2-for-1 [sale] on tickets, available through the end of the month. So, spread the word to all your Georgetowners. We love you!”
We thank GALA Hispanic Theatre for all the creative productions they continue to bring to the community!
For more on Medrano, see our April 2022, interview with her as part of our profile series on Women Cultural Leaders in Washington.
For more information on GALA Hispanic Theatre go here.
