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Photo by Christi Thornton-Hranicky, CFE
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| Alani Mundie, CFE |
With her big blue eyes, bubbly personality and youthful appearance, you may underestimate Alani Mundie, CFE. But as head of the ACFE's Law Enforcement Partnership (LEP), she can hold her own in a roomful of law enforcement personnel. Alani also white-water rafts, speaks fluent Spanish (it was her first language), can out-salsa dance anyone on staff and is a veteran world traveler.
Alani was born in El Paso, Texas, on the border of Mexico. Her mother, Lilia, the oldest of eight siblings, met Alani's father, John, a plaintiff attorney, when she was tutoring him in Spanish after he had graduated from law school and moved to El Paso from Portland, Ore. Alani has an older sister, Liseli, who is a federal law enforcement agent with the U.S. State Department stationed in Santiago, Chile, with her husband and two daughters.
Alani was born athletic. She took dance classes starting at a young age — salsa, hip hop, anything Latin-infused. When she was a high-school student, she attended a silent yoga class every sunrise in an open-air studio that faced the desert mountains she passionately loved. Alani would mountain bike and hike with friends in those mountains, and she also swam competitively until an injury sidelined her. She started her high school ecology club and was a member of the National Honor Society.
Alani is always dressed up, no matter the occasion. She got that trait from her mother and both grandmothers, who dressed to the nines. "My dad's mom is 86 and gets dressed every day in full makeup and heels. In fact, I have a lot of her heels," laughed Alani. "My mom's great uncle was a film producer in Mexico. Producciones Calderon was a big production company my mom's family ran, and they owned a bunch of theaters in Mexico. My mom's mother ran in the Hollywood scene, which influenced her style and my mom's style."
As a child, Alani's family took a lot of outdoor trips: camping in Lincoln National Forest (her glamorous mother and aunts were less than thrilled with those trips), skiing in Ruidoso, N. M., and white-water rafting. Her father took her on her first rafting trip when she was 11, and she got her first boat, a 14-foot catamaran, when she was 20.
She takes rafting trips at least twice a year. Her favorite spots are the Salmon and Selway rivers in Idaho, the Taos Box in New Mexico and the Salt River in Arizona, which is an annual tradition. On one Salt River trip she realized that a river buddy with whom she traveled almost every year, Ken Hordyk, was one of the first CFEs. "It just goes to show that you can meet CFEs anywhere — in the middle of nowhere!" she exclaimed.