Troy step over here, please. >> Excuse me, what is this about? >> The pension fund money you've been pulling out in casino cash advances from the retirements of your own firefighters. >> I have been >> Troy Mac Hauenberger operated as fire chief in Argyle, Texas for years. While no one checked what was happening to the money his own firefighters were counting on for retirement. Every single one of those men and women trusted him with their futures. And not one person checked. >> Fire chief of this department for years. I would never do that to my people. >> This is >> He would not get the chance to explain. Within 90 days federal investigators would trace every cash advance, every casino marker, every wire pulled from an account that did not belong to him. $509,807.50 stolen from the pension fund of the firefighters who served under him. The men who slept in the bunks at his station. The men who ran into burning houses on his command. He had gambled their retirements away one cash advance at a time. And the casino floor cameras had recorded every single transaction. Before we go any further, I have to ask you something. Would you trust the man who signs your pension paperwork to never look at that account as his personal slot machine? Drop your answer in the comments. And if you're new here, hit subscribe. We cover stories like this every single week. The ones the local news mentions once and forgets about. Stick around for this one. It gets so much worse. Troy Mac Hauenberger was born in 1969 in Lewisville, Texas. The second of three sons in a family where service to the community was not a sentiment. It was a rule. His father was a journeyman electrician who had wired half the volunteer fire stations in southern Denton County during the 1960s building boom. His mother worked the front office at the Lewisville Independent School District for 26 years. The family attended church on Sunday mornings, ate barbecue on Sunday afternoons, and watched the Cowboys on Sunday nights. Troy grew up watching his father pull a beeper off his belt at the dinner table and walk out the door without finishing his plate. He grew up knowing that the truck in the driveway might not be there in the morning. He grew up wanting the same beeper. He graduated from Lewisville High School in 1987 with grades that his guidance counselor described as adequate. He was never going to be a college man, and he never pretended he was. He took a job at a transmission shop on Main Street, made $4.85 an hour, and put his name on the volunteer roster at the Argyle Fire Department 4 months later. He was 18 years old. He showed up to his first house fire in borrowed turnout gear two sizes too big and a helmet that kept sliding over his eyes. And he stayed on scene for 9 hours rolling hose and chasing hot spots. His captain at the time wrote in his probationary review that Troy showed natural physical aptitude, quiet leadership, and an instinct for the work. That review still sits in a personnel file at the Denton County Emergency Services District. He married Brenda K. Wilkerson in the summer of 1991 at a wedding chapel in Gainesville, Texas. The reception was held in the metal building behind her father's tractor dealership decorated with white Christmas lights and folding chairs borrowed from the Methodist Church. Their first son, Cole, arrived in 1993. Their second son, Brody, arrived in 1996. Brenda worked as a dental hygienist at a practice off FM 407. And Troy worked his way up the volunteer ladder at Argyle Fire while pulling overtime at the transmission shop to keep the bills paid. He earned his EMT certification through a community college program in Carrollton in 1994. He earned his firefighter two certification through TX in College Station in 1996. He bought his first pickup truck, a used Ford F-150 with 117,000 miles on the odometer in 1997. His name was on the mortgage of a three-bedroom ranch on a one-acre lot off Crawford Road by 1999. The Denton County Emergency Services District was formally organized in 2003 under the new Texas Health and Safety Code provisions that allowed unincorporated areas to fund their own emergency response. Argyle, Bartonville, and the surrounding ranches were exploding with new construction. Subdivisions were rising on what had been hay pasture six months earlier. The volunteer system that had served the county for 50 years could no longer keep up with the call volume. The ESD board began hiring paid firefighters in 2005, and Troy McOmberger was hired as a full-time engineer that same year. He was 36 years old. He was making $41,000 a year, and he thought he had won the lottery. He made captain by 2009. He made battalion chief by 2013. He completed the Texas Fire Chiefs Academy in Austin in 2015, scoring in the upper third of his class. Senior officers who worked alongside him during those years described him in their annual evaluations as steady under pressure, technically proficient, and respected by the men below him. One assistant chief wrote that Troy had the rare ability to be the calmest person on a scene without being the quietest. And on a Tuesday morning in March 2017, the ESD Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to appoint Troy McOmberger the fire chief of Denton County Emergency Services District number one. He was 47 years old. He had spent three decades of his life inside that station house. The board chairman shook his hand in front of the entire department and said the job belonged to him because no one in the county had earned it more. To understand what Troy Mac Burger did, you have to understand what an emergency services district actually is in the state of Texas. An ESD is a political subdivision of the state. It has the authority to levy property taxes within its boundaries, to issue bonds, and to operate as an independent governmental entity. Denton County ESD number one covered approximately 112 square miles of territory across Argyle, Bartonville, Copper Canyon, and surrounding unincorporated land. By 2017, it employed 43 full-time firefighters and paramedics, operated three stations around the clock, and ran an annual operating budget of roughly $9 million in tax revenue. The fire chief in this structure is not a ceremonial figure. He is the chief executive officer of the district. He signs the checks. He approves the purchase orders. He sets the budget the board votes on. He hires and fires. And critically, he serves as the administrator of the firefighters supplemental retirement fund. The pension fund itself was structured as a supplemental retirement account, separate from the Texas Emergency Services Retirement System that all district employees participated in. The supplemental fund was designed to give the district's full-time firefighters an additional cushion when they retired. Each firefighter contributed a portion of every paycheck, automatically deducted, into a pooled account managed at a regional bank in Lewisville. The district matched a percentage out of operating revenue. Over the years, the pool had grown to nearly $700,000. For most of the men contributing to it, that fund was the difference between retiring at 60 with enough to pay off a house and retiring at 60 with nothing but a social security check and an aching back. The fund's bylaws required two signatures on every withdrawal. The chief's signature and the signature of the board treasurer. The board treasurer was a 68-year-old retired bank vice president named Walter Trumble, who had served on the ESD board for 11 years. Walter trusted Troy. Walter had watched Troy come up through the department from a kid in oversized turnout gear to the man wearing the gold bugles. Walter signed what the chief put in front of him because in 11 years on the board, Troy Mac Hauenberger had never once given him a reason not to. The audit cycle for the supplemental fund was scheduled every 3 years. The next full audit, when Troy took the chief's job in March of 2017, was set for the autumn of 2020. That gave him a window. He did not have to plan to use it. He just had to look at it and recognize what it was. The first cash advance posted to the supplemental retirement account on a Friday night in October 2017. It was for $4,000. The transaction was processed at the cashier's cage of the WinStar World Casino in Thackerville, Oklahoma, approximately 73 mi north of Troy Hauenberger's home on Crawford Road. The casino floor was busy that night. The cashier did not look twice at the federal employer identification number tied to the account or at the name printed on the debit card or at the ESD badge clipped to the man's belt that read Denton County Emergency Services. Troy had been to WinStar before. He had been going for nearly a decade. He played blackjack mostly. The low-stakes tables, where a $20 bet was the standard and a $100 bet was a swing for a man on a firefighter's salary. Brenda did not love that he went, but it was not a secret. He went two or three times a year with a couple of guys from the station. He lost more than he won. Everyone did. That was the deal. The $4,000 he advanced that first Friday night was gone by Sunday morning. He drove home down Interstate 35 in his pickup truck with the air conditioning blasting and a knot in his stomach that he could not quite identify. He told himself he was going to put the money back. He had the next paycheck coming. He had a tax refund coming. He had a hundred ways to fix it before anyone noticed because no one was going to notice for 3 years. He did not put the money back. In November 2017, he advanced $6,000. In December, 8,000. By the spring of 2018, the cash advances had become a system. He would drive to Winstar on a Friday night, advance a four or $5,000 block from the supplemental fund account, play through it across a weekend at the blackjack tables, and return to the station on Monday morning in his pressed chief's uniform with bags under his eyes that the crew chalked up to a long weekend. By the end of 2018, he had taken $63,000 from the fund. The pattern escalated through 2019. He moved from blackjack to higher limit tables. He added the Choctaw Casino in Durant, Oklahoma, to his rotation. He began making weeknight runs when the floor was quieter and the cashiers worked alone, and a man in a fire department windbreaker did not attract a second glance. He told Brenda he was at the station covering a shift. He told the men at the station he was at home with Brenda. He learned to keep the cash advance receipts in his glove box until he could shred them in the office paper destroyer behind a closed door. The accounting was the problem he had to solve. The supplemental fund issued monthly paper statements. The treasurer received those statements by mail at his home in Bartonville. Troy began intercepting them. The mailing address on the account was the ESD administrative office, where Troy controlled the mailbox and the receiving log. He stopped forwarding statements to Walter Trumbull in February 2018. When Walter eventually asked about it months later, Troy told him the bank had switched to electronic statements and he would forward the PDFs by email. He did not forward the PDFs. He fabricated a one-page summary spreadsheet, plugged in numbers that approximated the previous quarter's balance with a steady growth rate, and emailed that summary to Walter every 3 months. Walter glanced at it, replied with a thumbs-up, and filed it in a folder on his desktop. By the end of 2019, the cash advances totaled $192,000. By the end of 2020, they totaled 340,000. The scheduled 2020 audit was deferred at the chief's recommendation because of the pandemic and the strain it had placed on the district's administrative staff. The board voted to push the audit to 2022 without objection. By the spring of 2022, the supplemental retirement account that had once held nearly $700,000 was within $180 of zero. The men sleeping in the bunks at stations 1, 2, and 3 did not know. The board did not know. Walter Trumbull did not know. The chief signed the paychecks every 2 weeks and watched the contributions come off the top, and he knew exactly where every dollar was going. The unraveling started with a question from a firefighter named Mike Cassias. Mike was 44 years old, a 17-year veteran of the department, and the father of three girls. He had been quietly putting in for early retirement paperwork that summer of 2022, and his wife had pushed him to request a current balance statement on the supplemental fund. He filed the written request through the administrative office on a Tuesday morning in July. Troy fielded it personally. Troy told Mike he would have to follow up with the bank directly, that the chief's office did not generate the statements, that there was a processing window of two to three weeks before the bank could pull a historical report on a supplemental account. Mike took the answer and went home. But Mike's brother-in-law worked at a community bank in Flower Mound, and the brother-in-law made a phone call that Wednesday morning as a courtesy. By that afternoon, Mike Cassias was sitting at his kitchen table looking at a screenshot a banker friend should not have sent him, showing a supplemental fund account balance of $179.42. Mike did not call the chief. He did not call the board. He called the treasurer directly. Walter Trumble was in his garage rebuilding a carburetor on a 1968 Chevelle when his phone rang on a Wednesday evening in July 2022. He set down a wrench, wiped his hands on a rag, and listened to a firefighter he had known for 15 years tell him that the supplemental retirement fund had been emptied. Walter walked into his house, sat down at his kitchen table, and pulled up the bank's online portal for the first time in 4 and 1/2 years. He had to call customer service to reset the password. The screen loaded. The number on the screen matched the number Mike had given him. Walter Trumble did not sleep that night. The next morning at 6:45 a.m. he was on the phone with the ESD board chairman. By 9:00 a.m. the board chairman had retained an outside forensic accountant out of Dallas. By the end of the week, the FBI's Dallas field office had been formally notified and a preliminary review of the account's transaction history had been printed and bound into a 3-in binder that landed on a federal agent's desk in Dallas on a Friday afternoon. The agent opened the binder, turned to the first page of transactions, and saw a column titled merchant that read line after line after line WinStar Casino Hotel Thackerville. Okay. The investigation was assigned to a special agent in the FBI's public corruption squad named Daniel Reeves. Reeves was a former forensic accountant who had transitioned to the bureau in his late 30s. He worked the case alongside an assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of Texas named Karen Brockman. The case was straightforward in mechanism and brutal in scope. The first subpoena went to the supplemental funds bank, which returned 4 and 1/2 years of statements and transaction records on a single encrypted thumb drive. The second subpoena went to WinStar World Casino, which returned its complete cash advance history tied to the account along with every player loyalty card transaction associated with the account holder. The third subpoena went to the Choctaw Casino in Durant. The records came back stacked. Investigators counted 462 separate cash advance transactions across a roughly 5-year period. The largest single advance was $22,000 processed at WinStar on a Saturday night in October 2021. The smallest was 800. Across all transactions, the gross removal from the supplemental fund totaled $509,807.50. An additional $28,048.34 was identified in a personal account that investigators traced back to commingled gambling winnings, which became the subject of a separate forfeiture order. Casino surveillance footage was pulled for the largest sessions. The footage showed a heavy-set white man in his early 50s with a graying mustache and a Denton County Fire windbreaker sitting at Blackjack tables at 3:00 in the morning sliding stacks of black chips across the felt with the board fatigue of a man who had been there many times before. He tipped the dealers in green. He drank black coffee. He did not appear to be enjoying himself. Agents executed a search warrant on the chief's office at the ESD administrative building on a Tuesday morning in September 2022. They found a desk drawer containing 73 shredded statement envelopes from the supplemental funds bank, each of them addressed to Walter Trumbull. They found a folder of fabricated quarterly summary spreadsheets saved as PDFs on the office computer with file metadata showing they had been created on the same workstation as the legitimate ESD payroll exports. They found a yellow legal pad in the bottom drawer of the desk in Troy Hohenberger's handwriting on which he had recorded a tally of cash advances against intended repayments. The repayment column was blank from the first page to the last. The advance column was full. Agents also recovered a series of text messages between Troy and a former colleague at the casino. One exchange dated April of 2021 read as follows. Hohenberger April 14th, 2021 Need to take a swing this weekend. Down for 2 months. Need to make it back. You sure, brother? You said the same thing in February. Different now. I know what I'm doing. Just need one good night. A federal grand jury was convened in October 2022. The indictment came down on November the 14th. Troy Hohenberger was charged with one count of wire fraud, one count of theft from an employee benefit plan, and one count of money laundering. The Board of Commissioners voted that same week to place him on unpaid administrative leave and to begin formal termination proceedings. We're about to head into the courtroom. If you've made it this far, you already know this channel covers the cases the local news skips past. Subscribe so you don't miss the next one. The sentencing in this one will tell you everything about how the federal system handles a man in uniform who steals from the men who served under him. The confrontation itself happened on a Thursday morning in September 2022, 3 weeks before the indictment was unsealed, in the parking lot of the ESD administrative building on Crawford Road in Argyle. Two FBI agents and a Texas Ranger were waiting in an unmarked black Tahoe when Troy Hohenberger pulled in at 6:43 a.m. in his department-issued Chevy Suburban. He was in full Class B duty uniform. He had a coffee in his hand. Special Agent Daniel Reeves walked across the lot before Troy reached the building door. Chief Hohenberger, I need a few minutes of your time inside. Who are you? Special Agent Daniel Reeves, FBI Dallas. This is Agent Linwood and Texas Ranger Caudle. We're here about the supplemental retirement fund. There was a pause that the agents would later describe in their report as approximately 11 seconds. Troy Hohenberger looked at the coffee cup in his hand. He looked at the building. He looked at the black Tahoe. "Are you arresting me right now?" "Not at this moment. We have a search warrant for your office and we need to speak with you. You're not required to speak with us. You have the right to an attorney." "Then I want an attorney. I'm not saying anything else." He set the coffee cup down on the hood of the Tahoe. He took a step back. His hands began to shake in a way that Agent Linwood later noted was not the tremor of fear, but the tremor of a man whose body had already absorbed information his mouth had not yet caught up to. He did not ask what they had found. He did not ask why they were there. He did not deny anything. He stood in the parking lot for another 40 minutes while agents executed the search warrant inside. Two firefighters arriving for the morning shift saw him standing there and did not understand what they were looking at. They waved. He did not wave back. He never went back to that building as the fire chief of Denton County ESD number one. The federal grand jury returned a sealed indictment on November the 14th, 2022, charging Troy Mac Hohenberger with one count of wire fraud under 18 U.S.C. section 1343, one count of theft from an employee benefit plan under 18 U.S.C. section 664, and one count of money laundering under 18 U.S.C. section 1957. He was arraigned in the Sherman division of the Eastern District of Texas. He was released on a personal recognizance bond. He was represented by a private attorney out of Denton named Philip Castaneda, a former county prosecutor who had taken the case on a retainer drawn from the equity in the Hohenberger home on Crawford Road. Castaneda negotiated a plea agreement over the course of 7 months. The defense did not contest the underlying facts. The casino transaction records were not arguable. The shredded envelopes were not arguable. The handwritten ledger in the desk drawer was not arguable. The defense argument, when sentencing arrived, was a narrative one. Castaneda submitted a sentencing memorandum that argued his client had spent 35 years in service to his community. That the conduct had been driven by a gambling addiction that had spiraled outside of any rational decision-making. That the defendant had cooperated fully once confronted. And that the supplemental fund had subsequently been made partially whole through a combination of court-ordered restitution, the district's fidelity bond insurance, and a settlement with the bank. The government's sentencing memorandum was a different document. It quoted at length from victim impact statements submitted by 26 firefighters whose retirement accounts had been emptied. It quoted from Mike Cassias, who wrote that he had unrolled hose with Troy at 3:00 in the morning on countless calls, and that he had never imagined the chief was going to gamble away the only retirement he had. It quoted from a 31-year-old paramedic named Eduardo Salinas, who wrote that he had two children under five, and that the supplemental fund had been the savings cushion he had counted on for 20 years of future service. It quoted from Walter Trumble, who wrote a single sentence. He had trusted Troy Hollenbaugher more than he had trusted his own brother, and he would not make that mistake again in this lifetime. The sentencing hearing was held in March 2024 before senior United States District Judge Marlena Hardfield. Judge Hardfield had been on the federal bench for 21 years. She read the victim impact statements aloud from the bench. She read for nearly 40 minutes. When she finished, she set the binder down and addressed Troy McOmberger directly. You did not steal from a bank, Mr. McOmberger. You did not steal from a corporation. You stole from the men who slept in your station house. You stole from the men who ran into burning buildings on your command. You wore the uniform of a public servant for 35 years, and you used that uniform as cover for what you did at a casino cage at 3:00 in the morning. The court finds that the conduct here was not the impulsive act of an addict. It was a sustained, deliberate, and methodical fraud carried out over more than 5 years against the very people who trusted you most. The men in your department gave you the privilege of leading them. You gave them an empty account. The court sentenced Troy McOmberger to 50 months in federal prison, to be followed by 3 years of supervised release. The court ordered restitution in the amount of 509,807.50. The court entered a separate forfeiture order in the amount of 28,048.34 tied to the commingled gambling winnings recovered from his personal account. He surrendered to the federal correctional institution at Seagoville, Texas in May of 2024. His projected release date is in early 2028. The Denton County Emergency Services District has since restructured its supplemental retirement fund oversight. The fund now requires quarterly board review, dual independent audits, and statement delivery directly to every contributing firefighter at the home address on file. Walter Trumble resigned from the board in April of 2024 and has not held any public position since. Mike Cassilas retired in October of that same year. He used the recovered restitution funds to pay off the mortgage on his house, the same mortgage the supplemental fund had been quietly intended to cover for nearly two decades. The men still wearing the navy duty uniform at stations 1, 2, and 3 in Argyle do not say the name out loud anymore. There is a framed photograph in the apparatus bay of station 1 that used to hang above the door. The frame is still there. The photograph has been removed. This case was hard to hear. But the next case on the right-hand side is even harder. Click it now.