If the FBI found 500 ghost officers, you can bet that NOPD "hired" them under those Washington DC grants. Remember Bill Clinton kept bragging about hiring 100,000 police officers. I bet NOPD just created fake officers, then took the federal money and split it among themselves.
NOPD created ghost officers.
And they would've gotten away with it, if it wasn't for those meddling kids.
Hey, lets be fair here, not all the missing officers were ghosts: