DC Tax Ladies

Nothing happened in the way of progress on the house this day. I don’t believe I even went in the place. I’ve been preoccupied with the DC tax ladies—two fiftyish women who decided they would treat the tax coffers of the DC government as their own personal piggy bank. Thirty million dollars later, they got caught. Didn’t really see it coming, by all accounts. Here’s how it worked:

The ringleader, the one who decided to embark on this enterprise, has a good deal of tenure in the tax office. Twenty-five years she’s been there, through several administrations, different mayors. Earning a little over eighty-thousand dollars a year, she was doing all right. Not only that, she had a generous retirement to look forward to—a comfortable and worry-free end run that would allow her the freedom to pursue whatever she wanted to do. She’d talked of this, of wanting to leave her position, of finishing up her career and entering retirement in her mid-fifties.

During the last seven years or so, she’d methodically written tax refund checks to phony companies that would then launder the money for her, take a cut for themselves, and generally spread the green around, put it into different accounts and use it to buy property and luxury items. She drove a Mercedes Benz convertible, a car that would easily cost more than the homes that many of her subordinates (and possibly her supervisors) lived in. She told everyone that her father had done well for himself, had been a banker.
“He took good care of me,” she said. “When he passed, I inherited a lot of money.”
“Okay,” her colleagues said.
She had to personally approve these checks—bogus or otherwise—and knew how to streamline the process, especially when one of her special checks needed to get through the system with little scrutiny. She’d been there for twenty-five years, after all.

She needed help, so she called on family members to get in on the action. I imagine it went something like this: After church one Sunday, she gathered her brothers and sisters together.

“Listen, everyone—I plan to be rich like you wouldn’t believe. I can do it alone, or you can help me. If you help me, you’re going to be rich, too—and you really don’t have to do that much. It isn’t like real work, see.” Then she went on to explain to her assembled guests: “I can write checks like crazy, because the amount of money in the DC tax account is probably more money than in the whole wide world—if that makes any sense. You know what I mean.” Everyone nodded; they knew what she meant. She added, “In any case, I heard someone who knows how much should be in there say that it is enough to buy a battleship or a lagoon.” When some of her guests asked what a lagoon was, she responded, “You know, a place where there’s palm trees and little huts. It’s kind of tropical-like. People wear hats and sandals.” She’d seen a movie once with a lagoon, and had been taken with the idea of having one. Her guests nodded; they agreed that, even though they still didn’t know exactly what a lagoon was, it might not be bad to have one—just in case.

So she roped them in, and they were caught, too. No one had anticipated this. If one of them, ANYONE at all, had picked up the newspaper every once in awhile, plugged thirty-five cents into the corner machine and glanced at the stories, they would have learned quickly.

“Look here,” one of them would say, “This woman who was stealing the teacher’s union money got caught. Now she’s in jail.”

“And look at this one: It says here that this person was stealing from his company, and then took a DC job and stole some more from the government. He was caught and it says he’s in jail.”

“Here’s two more where people were stealing from their employers and got caught. Look—they’re both on the same page, even though it’s two different people. I wonder if they knew each other.”

Politicians, white-collar crooks, financial finaglers, doers of misdeeds, and the once lofty and highly-regarded are regularly chronicled in the daily paper, their fall from grace into the ranks of criminals thoroughly documented. They should have taken a dollar or two of the first million bucks or so and bought some newspapers. By all accounts, if they’d stopped early enough, it’s likely they would have never been caught. Or—if they eventually were found out—it would be too late. They’d all have their own lagoons by then, would be wearing sandals and hats and living in a tropical paradise.

So this has been a source of constant entertainment for me, the stories—one after the other—of what the fiftyish women and their cohorts bought, the houses, the clothes and shopping sprees, every angle studied to extract the maximum human interest and sell another thirty-five cent paper. This has kept me quite busy.

The other day I had an actual job downtown. I worked the equipment, got the stuff recorded, and then broke for lunch. All this time my car was parked illegally, saving me twenty bucks in parking. I put the car in the most obvious place in the city, where everyone could see it, and it was not ticketed. I don’t know why, but I do know that if I push it, I will eventually be ticketed and probably towed. For now I’ll be judicious in my extended parking stays there. For lunch I wandered over to the Five Guys burger place and had one of their good hamburgers and greasy fries. The fries were way too much for me, but I wanted them anyway, tried to give some to one of my colleagues on the job. She’d wisely brought her own lunch.

Today I had a similar job, this time with free parking out in front of the office building in a town nearby. It didn’t last too long, and I used my new camera for the first time. It is easier to carry around and I was able to put everything into the little convertible. During the job I listened to some of the happenings in a southern man’s life--the man who was the subject of the litigation. He’d had an accident, had fallen off a piece of heavy equipment that he was cleaning, and was left hanging in an awkward position for a little while until a co-worker could extract him. After that he seemed all right. As I recorded the doctor’s testimony, I learned in passing that he’d also been injured by a shotgun blast when he was younger. After his accident with the heavy equipment, he was involved in a car wreck. Then, at some earlier point in his life, he’d been “run over by a tractor-trailer,” according to the doctor. At his examination the doctor reported that the man was animated, in good spirits, happy to be examined for the lawsuit.

An hour after the deposition started, we ended the proceedings and packed up to go. My camera had done a magnificent job. There was talk of another attorney, someone I’d worked with before—an unpleasant, wild-eyed woman who made life difficult for everyone around her. This particular witness said he would not work with her again, wouldn’t tolerate her antics. There was a good deal of discussion about her behavior, and I listened with half an ear to the things I already knew about her. She’d borrowed my cell phone once, needed to make a call because she said her law office was “too cheap” to give her a phone. When the call was concluded, she leaped into the air and yelped a high-pitched “YES!!” that scared the crap out of me. I didn’t see it coming. She’s rather a heavyset woman, and her acrobatics surprised me almost as much as her vocal outburst.

Afterwards I stopped at the trendy chain store that got its start in California, gradually swept the country and is in many places on both coasts. The employees are almost universally youngsters with an alternative air about them, making me feel like I am stuck fifty years in the past, can’t possibly keep up with their hip, avant-garde outlook. They almost all wear black. They do quite a bit of running around, stocking up the refried beans and cans of alternative cat food, yelling things to each other, making announcements. Sometimes, the loudspeaker will come on:
“Hello, crew members! We need all available help at the checkout lines! All available crew members to the checkout lines!” Then they will run through the store in a mad dash to the front. God help you if you are in their way.

Out front I found an electronic gizmo on the walkway. It was a palm-pilot, its parts scattered about the cold pavement. I picked up its battery, inserted it into its slot, and watched as the little communicator powered up. I’d never held one in my hand, and it felt expensive. Its screen started saying things, making me feel like I was intruding into someone’s living room or their private office, and I quickly looked away, wanting to be rid of the awful gadget. I took it up to the store’s front desk, where a man wearing a flowered shirt and possibly sandals stood behind the high counter. I handed it to him.
“I found this out front,” I said. “Someone will probably be looking for it.”
He took the device from me, said he would try to find the person’s number in it. I’d assumed that he would simply pick up the store’s public address microphone and yell something into it about a lost palm pilot, tell his crew members to round up all the customers until they found the one with no cell phone or other electronics.
“We found him!” they would yell. “This one has nothing—it must be him!” They would force the lost thing on him, push him out the front door with lots of shouting and yelling and words of encouragement.

Tomorrow I may go to the big-box store to buy some wood for the shed’s floor. With the floor in place, I can start moving things into the little storage space. I’ll have to fire up the old pickup truck, sitting idle for a few weeks now. I’ll also pick up my car, now repaired and waiting for me. Someone who saw it in the shop wanted to buy it, but I called him today to tell him no. After cramming all of my equipment into the little convertible, I decided that selling the station wagon would amount to an act of insanity. For the little bit of money that it would fetch, it makes more sense to keep it for the moment. I may change my mind, but I hope not.