Word to the wise -- if you're skimming some company money off the top for personal expenses, spread some of the love around. If not, well, it's going to come back and bite you in the ass.

That's exactly what happened with former American University president Ben Ladner, who was fired from his $875,000-a-year job last October after news emerged that he had been too liberally spending university funds on personal expenses and opulent parties for his family and friends. His spending habits eventually caught up to him in the form of an anonymous letter to the university's Board of Trustees, a letter that sparked the investigation into almost $500,000 in questionable spending and spawned rumor after rumor as to who may have spilled the beans.

Yesterday the Examiner revealed the identity of the letter's author -- Ladner's personal chaffeur, Reginald Green. According to the article, Ladner wasn't the boss Green loved to have:

“For the first couple weeks he liked to show me off a little,” he said. “Then they started treating me like a servant. He treated me like his slave.” Green said he regularly hauled “expensive cases of booze and wine” and “huge trays” of food made by the Ladners’ personal chef, Rodney Scruggs, from their AU residence to their personal home on tony Gibson Island on the Chesapeake Bay. Nancy Ladner asked Green to purchase birthday gifts for her husband, including a rowing machine, using Green’s university-issued American Express credit card, he said.

Green was fired a day after he told Ladner he had to use the restroom on a return trip from Philadelphia on the evening of Dec. 2, 2004. According to a two-page memo given to Green after he was hired, Ladner wanted to “minimize bathroom stops on long trips … one is acceptable — zero is preferable.”