by Josh Levin
The damage to the Tribune was no less acute. Clayton Kirkpatrick, who’d become the newspaper’s editor in 1969, knew his paper had lost black Chicago. Young readers, too, preferred the politics of the Daily News and Sun-Times to those of the stolidly conservative Tribune. Kirkpatrick used the botched Black Panther story as the impetus to modernize the paper’s viewpoints and workforce. He urged his reporters to take a more adversarial stance toward Chicago’s leading institutions, and he began to diversify the newsroom, bringing in more women and more black journalists. He also extended a job offer to the city’s best investigative reporter. In October 1971, after three years away, George Bliss agreed to return to the Tribune.
Kirkpatrick’s splashy hire paid immediate dividends. Bliss spent all of 1972 directing an investigation of vote fraud in citywide elections, a series that won journalism’s top prize the following year. The Tribune won three Pulitzer Prizes between 1962 and 1973. George Bliss had a hand in all three.
* * *
Bliss sat in front of the Tribune’s wire room, where the teletypes clacked and dinged, clacked and dinged as stories poured in from around the world. The clamor at Bliss’s desk was just as incessant. His sources called all day: politicians who wanted help launching a career-boosting investigation, government employees blowing the whistle, cops telling their buddy George what they’d just seen on the job. When Bliss heard something he liked, he’d hang up the receiver, yank his coat off the back of his chair, and head out to find his next page one story.
In a resolutely corrupt city, and coming off an unprecedented run of professional success, Bliss could pick his next target. In 1974, his byline appeared in the Tribune 129 times, above pieces on medical swindles, a judge’s shady land deal, and a rigged horse race. But he spent most of his time reporting on a single government agency.
In Bliss’s telling, the Illinois Department of Public Aid was an unguarded bank vault, and thieves, charlatans, and layabouts were making off with as much as they could carry. He reported on doctors getting rich off Medicaid and drugstores that bilked the state by writing unneeded prescriptions for welfare recipients, in one instance supplying support pantyhose for a six-year-old girl.
Greedy doctors and pharmacists weren’t the only ones with their hands in the till. Twenty-five unnamed welfare cheats were awaiting prosecution, Bliss wrote in a June 21 story headlined “High-salary workers collecting public aid,” adding that investigators had “found public aid recipients driving expensive cars and owning other luxury items.” Bliss subsequently reported that incompetence and sloth in the Public Aid Department cost the state up to $20 million a year. It was open season, he wrote, and “word has spread among aid recipients that they have little to fear in Cook County if they violate the welfare eligibility rules.”
In September 1974, Bliss got tipped off about a new welfare scandal. Wally McWilliams, a policeman he knew from the South Side, told him about a public aid case that defied belief.
Cops and reporters didn’t get along as they had in the old days. The rules of both professions had become more formalized—in the 1970s, Bliss couldn’t get away with flashing a sheriff’s badge at crime scenes—and their once-symbiotic relationship had grown strained after the 1968 Democratic convention. Younger journalists steeped in the anti-war movement saw Chicago officers as out-of-control reactionaries, while the police saw the press as a bunch of pointy-headed intellectuals who’d never understand the dangers cops faced on the street. But McWilliams didn’t consider Bliss a typical reporter. He was a friend from the neighborhood and a friend of the Chicago Police Department. George Bliss could always see things from an officer’s point of view.
McWilliams would meet Bliss at a coffee shop near Evergreen Park. They’d talk about sports and their families, and sometimes the cop would give the reporter a tidbit he could use. McWilliams got a kick out of seeing his tips—his stories—get delivered to homes across the city. He told Bliss about all kinds of investigations, those he’d worked on and those he hadn’t.
This time, McWilliams knew he had something really explosive: reports showing that public aid employees had been told about a flagrant welfare cheat—by the police—and done nothing. His pals in Area 2 burglary, Jack Sherwin and Jerry Kush, had been stymied by the Department of Public Aid and the Cook County state’s attorneys, and they didn’t know what to do. If Bliss made a little noise, the detectives might find a way around those roadblocks—or could maybe smash right through them.
* * *
Linda Taylor drove a Cadillac. That car was impossible to miss, parked in the middle of the first sentence of the first article that ever mentioned her name. Bliss’s piece ran on page three on September 29, 1974, flanked by items on Jews for Jesus and Donald Rumsfeld’s new gig at the White House. The story splashed across four columns in the Sunday Tribune, but that opening sentence had most of the essential facts.
Linda Taylor received Illinois welfare checks and food stamps, even tho she was driving three 1974 autos—a Cadillac, a Lincoln, and a Chevrolet station wagon—claimed to own four South Side buildings, and was about to leave for a vacation in Hawaii.*
Taylor, Bliss wrote, had made a false report alleging that jewelry and furs had been stolen from her apartment. A subsequent investigation by a pair of Chicago detectives had uncovered a series of “false identities that seemed calculated to confuse our computerized, credit-oriented society.” Bliss dropped in a bulleted list culled from Sherwin’s case file, a set of data points that illuminated Taylor’s “highly unusual way of life.”
Goes under at least 27 different names.
Uses 31 different addresses, all but a few in Chicago.
Has 25 different phone numbers.
Has three social security cards.
Owned stocks and bonds under a variety of names.
Claims to have had several other husbands who died.
Was married, under one of her aliases, last month to a sailor at Great Lakes Naval Training Center who is 26 years her junior.
But Bliss’s article wasn’t really about Linda Taylor. Using the information McWilliams had passed along, Bliss assembled a tale of valiant police officers fighting against an indifferent system. “If trailing Miss Taylor was like putting together pieces in a puzzle,” he wrote, “trying to interest county, state, and federal authorities in her case was a study in frustration and burocratic buckpassing.” Bliss highlighted excerpts from a fourteen-page report Sherwin had written to his bosses, a diary of his interactions with unsympathetic bureaucrats. The Illinois attorney general had told the detective “he would take up the matter with superiors and be in touch.” A U.S. attorney had said “it was a matter of several federal agencies that would be involved but not something that they handled.”
On and on it went, a “virtual shopping expedition” in which everyone had claimed that Linda Taylor was somebody else’s problem. The story’s seven-word headline captured Bliss’s thesis: “Cops find deceit—but no one cares.”
* * *
By the next day, the Linda Taylor problem had gotten a whole lot bigger—and Bliss had another page one story. The state legislature, he wrote, had launched an investigation into whether “Miss Taylor may be involved in a widespread scheme that may include a well-organized group of persons who have been cheating the welfare system.” It wasn’t unreasonable to suggest that Taylor may have had help on the inside. Three years earlier, the Tribune had written that a group of “at least 16 county public aid employes” had contrived to forge hundreds upon hundreds of welfare checks. Now, Bliss wrote, this latest alleged plot could involve “key Public Aid employes, [who,] either by direct assistance or thru negligence, have helped Miss Taylor obtain aid under numerous names.”
Bliss’s follow-up didn’t just call attention to a new probe of the Illinois welfare system. It also added details to Taylor’s biography. She “reportedly drives four expensive automobiles,” Bliss wrote, up from the three he’d listed the day before. He noted that Sherwin an
d Kush “have learned that she posed as a nurse and as a doctor,” and that Taylor “allegedly has posed as a Filipino, white, and a black to obtain welfare aid.”
It took less than a week for the Linda Taylor story to become a national outrage. Shortly after Bliss’s first piece ran in the Tribune, United Press International distributed its own version of events to more than eleven hundred newspapers across the United States. The UPI’s unbylined article mentioned the purported wide-ranging conspiracy to defraud the Illinois government, a “well-organized scheme…involving welfare cheaters and state public aid employees.” But that scheme was an afterthought, an aside in the final sentence. In many newspapers, that sentence got cut for space. In the UPI’s telling, this wasn’t some kind of bureaucratic failure. The scandal here was Taylor’s very existence.
“For Linda Taylor, welfare checks are a way of life,” the story began, before listing her fleet of vehicles: the Lincoln, the Chevy station wagon, the 1974 Cadillac. The UPI, unlike Bliss and the Tribune, directly quoted one of the Chicago detectives. “She is a small person with nondescript features,” said Jerry Kush. “Her skin is sallow—like a medium yellow—and she has no features that make her peculiar to any racial background. So she passes as a Filipino. She puts on a black wig and becomes a Negro, and with other makeup and wigs, she passes for white.”
The papers that printed the UPI’s item wrote their own headlines, coming up with dozens of variations on the same theme. The Seattle Times: “She makes business of cheating welfare.” The Charleston, South Carolina, News and Courier: “She Used Welfare To Pay for 3 Cars.” Illinois’s Harrisburg Daily Register: “She had a pretty good thing going.” One newspaper, the Democrat and Chronicle of Rochester, New York, gave Taylor a nickname. The headline ran inside the paper, halfway down page two: “Welfare queen arrested.”
* * *
Linda Taylor wasn’t the first well-clothed welfare cheat in American history. In 1947, the New York papers worked themselves into a froth over a “lady in mink,” an unidentified woman—the New York Times called her “Madame X”—who cadged relief payments while living rent-free in a city-funded hotel room. In an essay titled “Horsefeathers Swathed in Mink,” press critic A. J. Liebling wrote that the “theme of the undeserving poor recurs as often as Groundhog Sees His Shadow.” Indeed, in June 1933—one year after the Illinois Emergency Relief Commission was established to aid those suffering during the Great Depression—the Tribune railed against the “unscrupulous parasites” who’d been working the relief system. By November, a special court had been set up to prosecute cheaters. That same month, a Chicago woman who’d “collected some $50 in cash and grocery orders” was sentenced to thirty days in jail for claiming falsely on her relief application that her husband was unemployed.
From its creation in 1935 as part of Franklin Roosevelt’s Social Security Act, the federally mandated and partially state-funded Aid to Dependent Children program was beset by allegations that the poor single mothers who benefitted from its largesse were neither poor nor single. The Tribune published a long investigation of “women relief cheaters” in 1951, showcasing ADC recipients who’d stayed on the rolls by hiding their marriages, their husbands’ incomes, and their sexual relationships. In the early 1960s, Reader’s Digest and Look did stories on the “shocking truth” and “scandal” of Aid to Dependent Children, pieces that focused on a series of salacious anecdotes: “A mother of seven [who] made a practice of sending her children out begging while she spent the ADC checks to feed steaks to her paramour,” another who “hit the $61,500 relief jackpot by producing 14 illegitimate children,” and a family that “picked up four cartons of free relief food…and drove off—in a 1958 air-conditioned Cadillac.” In 1973, Reader’s Digest called out a new group of outrageous rip-off artists, including “able-bodied hippies…financing communes with welfare checks” and a “onetime topless dancer…collecting $15,000 a year under five different names.”**
These extraordinary individual claims stood for something bigger: widespread bureaucratic waste, moral decay, and the triumph of the indolent over the industrious. Four years before the Tribune found Linda Taylor behind the wheel of a luxury car, former undertaker’s assistant Guy Drake hit the Billboard charts with a novelty song called “Welfare Cadilac.”*** “I get a check the first of every month, from this here federal government,” the Kentuckian drawled. “Every Wednesday I get commodities, why, sometimes four or five sacks / Pick ’em up down at the welfare office, driving that new Cadilac.” President Richard Nixon liked the song so much he asked Johnny Cash to play it at the White House. Cash declined.
In 1974, an estimated 24.3 million people—12 percent of the U.S. population—lived below the poverty line of $5,038 for a family of four. That same year, roughly fourteen million Americans per month received federally funded food stamps, while 10.8 million—7.8 million children and three million adults—got assistance via Aid to Families with Dependent Children. (The Aid to Dependent Children program had been renamed as part of 1962’s Public Welfare Amendments to illustrate a “new emphasis on family services.”) Drake’s song reflected a pervasive anxiety about who was collecting all these benefits, and how they spent them. In a syndicated column headlined “The Welfare Cadillac,” Paul Harvey wrote that the “Department of Agriculture is receiving an increasing number of complaints that poor people are using food stamps to buy steak.” Those grievances didn’t reflect the reality of people on public assistance. In 1973, a Cook County official acknowledged that lower-income women couldn’t afford to buy any kind of meat—not even neck bones. Instead, the Tribune wrote, “welfare mothers are being urged to use the new soybean additives in the preparation of hamburger dishes.”
The hardships faced by struggling American families didn’t generate massive public outrage. The astonishing details of Taylor’s parasitic life did. “‘Welfare Cadillac’ Reality for Woman in Chicago; Also Lincoln, Buildings,” read a headline on the front page of Texas’s Lubbock Avalanche-Journal. Cadillacs were chariots for celebrities. Elvis Presley collected them, and Ronald Reagan had driven one back in his movie star days—he’d once described his California ranch as a “hop, skip, and a Cadillac” from Hollywood. Most Americans didn’t have luxury cars on their shopping lists. The inflation rate hit 11 percent in 1974, the highest in three decades. Those lucky enough to have jobs saw their paychecks bring home less and less each week. The median household income in the United States, $11,101, was less when adjusted for inflation than it had been two years prior. The sticker price of a 1974 Cadillac Eldorado convertible was $9,437. When Linda Taylor bought a new Caddy, she was spending the better part of a typical American family’s annual earnings.
Taylor was the lady in mink, and the mother who sent her children out to beg while she fed steaks to her lover, and the woman with the fourteen illegitimate kids. But two things set Taylor apart: She had a nicer car, and she had a name. Taylor was a real person, not some anonymous, maybe even fictional character in a newspaper or magazine. She could be found, and she could be punished for what she’d done.
On September 30, 1974, the day Bliss put her on page one of the Tribune, Taylor was scheduled to appear in court to face an extradition warrant. The State of Michigan was ready to take her back into custody on those felony welfare fraud charges from 1972—the case in which Taylor had lied about being the mother of twins and triplets. Taylor’s name was called three times in Cook County felony court, but she never answered. The most notorious woman in Chicago had vanished again.
* * *
At the end of September, Jack Sherwin took a few days off to clear his head and forget about Linda Taylor for at least a little while. He had no idea what would be waiting for him when he got back to work. Bliss’s first two stories were published while Sherwin was out of the office, as was the item written by the UPI. The detective didn’t see those articles, and nobody called to warn him that he’d made the papers.
Sherwin got berated by his boss and his b
oss’s boss as soon as he walked into Area 2 headquarters. It was bad enough that he’d continued working on the case after he’d been told to let it go. Now George Bliss was casting Sherwin as some kind of hero, a steadfast detective with “bloodhound instincts.” The Tribune praised Sherwin and his partner and made police higher-ups, prosecutors, and public aid workers look dumb, incompetent, and crooked. Sherwin had wanted to gift wrap a case and drop it on his lieutenant’s desk. Instead, he’d embarrassed everyone who had a hand in whether he’d rise or fall in the department. Bliss’s stories, Sherwin thought, were obituaries for his career as a police officer.
He didn’t know how George Bliss had gotten his personal files; he didn’t suspect that Wally McWilliams had been the one to leak them. Sherwin identified another possible culprit. After Bliss and the Tribune got the scoop on Linda Taylor, Sherwin’s partner Jerry Kush had talked to the UPI, describing Taylor’s sallow skin and penchant for wearing makeup and wigs. Sherwin was certain that Kush had blabbed to Bliss, too. They’d work together for years after that, but Sherwin would never confront Kush, and he’d never learn that he’d been wrong about who’d passed his case file to a reporter. Before the leak, Sherwin believed he still had a few friends in the Chicago Police Department. Afterward, he felt completely alone.