by Josh Levin
George Bliss’s stories made Sherwin an outcast. They also gave him an opportunity he hadn’t anticipated. A few days after the Tribune published Bliss’s first article on Linda Taylor, an Illinois state senator named Don Moore wrote a letter to the Chicago police, praising Sherwin and Kush for their “perseverance and dedication.” Moore, the chair of the Legislative Advisory Committee on Public Aid, believed that welfare cheats were systematically depleting the state’s coffers. Now, thanks to Sherwin, he had the evidence he needed to confirm that thievery.
Moore followed up a week after he sent that letter to the police, asking that the Area 2 burglary detectives be made his temporary employees. The state senator’s request was granted. Jack Sherwin and Jerry Kush were no longer Chicago police officers. They worked for Don Moore now.
* Why tho instead of though? Until 1975, the Tribune used a “simplified spelling” system favored by former publisher Robert McCormick. Other Trib-isms included burocrat, clew, employe, and kidnaped.
** Though it was far rarer for men to be branded public aid cheats, in 1946 the Detroit Free Press labeled John O’Connor the city’s “Welfare King.” O’Connor, who allegedly stole nearly $70,000 in relief funds, did get a mention in the Saturday Evening Post in 1949, but his exploits and nickname didn’t draw much national attention.
*** Drake spelled the eponymous Cadillac with just a single l.
Chapter 4
Obtained by Deception
Lamar Jones had thought he was going to be with Linda Taylor for the rest of his life. He’d fallen for her the minute she walked into the dental clinic at Great Lakes Naval Training Center. She was sophisticated and smart, flirty and beautiful. Her bizarre, unpredictable behavior—the tales of dead husbands and the frightening temper tantrums—hadn’t quite broken that initial spell, and neither had her arrest. Jones had bailed her out, just as he’d been told to. He wanted to make things work.
That got a lot harder after Taylor came back from the Cook County jail. One weekend, Jones threw a party at Great Lakes, then chose to stay near the base overnight rather than drive the sixty miles back to Chicago. Not long after, he checked in with his mother. She was stunned to hear his voice. When Jones hadn’t come home, Taylor had called her mother-in-law to report that he’d been killed in a car accident.
After he got off duty, Jones drove straight to his mother’s house on the South Side. She was crying, shaken, and confused. He got back in his car, picked up Taylor, and put the two women in a room together. Jones’s mother pleaded with Taylor to explain herself. What possible reason could she have had for telling a woman her son was dead? Taylor said it was very simple: She was mad because Jones had stayed out instead of coming home to her. This is what happened when you disrespected her. She hoped he’d learned his lesson.
Jones couldn’t believe his wife could be so callous. He told her he’d kill her if she ever treated his mother that way again. That didn’t scare Taylor, or deter her from trying to drive a wedge between her husband and his family. At one point, she put him on the phone with a man in London, England, someone who claimed his name was also Lamar Jones. This other, older Lamar professed to be the young sailor’s real father. When Jones started asking this English guy questions—What was his grandmother’s name? His grandfather’s?—the man didn’t have any answers. The whole thing was very strange.
Jones’s mother didn’t trust Taylor, and his dog didn’t either: Whenever she drove up, the Doberman-boxer mix tried to claw through the window of her car. It was past time, he realized, to extricate himself from this relationship. But that wouldn’t be his decision to make. In late September 1974, Taylor skipped out on her bond. On her way out of town, she stole Jones’s color TV set. Their marriage was over. It had lasted a month.
* * *
To stay safe, Linda Taylor had to get as far away from Illinois as possible. In a new place, in front of a new audience, she could become a new set of people. But this time she’d have more than a single detective on her trail.
Jack Sherwin had tried and failed to get anyone at any level of government to pay attention to an obvious fraudster. When Linda Taylor’s name appeared in the Chicago Tribune, however, the FBI launched an investigation into whether she’d stolen Social Security benefits and the U.S. Department of Agriculture began to ask questions about her cache of food stamps. And in Illinois, the Legislative Advisory Committee on Public Aid tried to figure out exactly how much Taylor had stolen, and why nobody had stopped her.
Officially, the Legislative Advisory Committee was supposed to counsel the Illinois Department of Public Aid on statutory changes and budget requests. In practice, the twelve-person, bipartisan group attacked the department from all sides. In 1969, a welfare recipient told the committee that she was allotted only 26 cents per person per meal; one sympathetic legislator asserted that Illinois’s food allowances were “hardly enough for a grown, healthy pigeon.” Other Illinois politicians saw aid recipients as leeches and spendthrifts. In 1964, some committee members claimed that the allegedly needy were gambling away their welfare checks. The year before, a Republican state representative had proposed the total abolition of public aid, writing, “Consider for example the Negro race.…Substantial segments of their group do not understand or appreciate their responsibilities.”
By 1960, the poor widows who’d originally made up the bulk of Aid to Dependent Children beneficiaries had mostly been moved into the Social Security system. Those who remained in the ADC program—unwed mothers and the partners of men who’d absented themselves for one reason or another—were largely seen as unsympathetic figures, women whose dissolute behavior needed to be policed.
“Suitable home” and “man in the house” provisions—typically enforced via midnight raids of welfare recipients’ homes—allowed states to cut off funding to women who had illegitimate children, lived or had relationships with men who weren’t their husbands, or engaged in any manner of conduct that an aid worker might view as immoral. Some states targeted black women on public aid for compulsory sterilization. (The practice didn’t end in North Carolina until 1973.) In 1962, Illinois public aid authorities considered warning women on welfare that they could be jailed for having a child out of wedlock. That idea fizzled out when the federal government threatened to withhold matching funds for Aid to Dependent Children.
While these sorts of proposals placed the blame for rising welfare spending on debaucherous aid recipients, an exhaustive examination of ADC in Cook County showed that was a gross mischaracterization. That report, produced in 1960, concluded that the program’s biggest problem was public “hostility to this most disadvantaged segment of our population.” In contrast to the “false image…of a mother who is shiftless and lazy, unwilling to work, promiscuous and neglectful of her children,” the vast majority of women on welfare “give their children good care, and they deny themselves in order to give the children nourishing food.” Self-denial could stretch a minuscule check only so far. “There is a good probability that the [typical Cook County ADC] family is in debt for food and clothing, and that the school age children were kept home from school at some time last winter due to lack of warm clothing and suitable shoes,” the report said.
Such deprivations weren’t unique to Illinois. As of 1970, the Associated Press reported, thirty-nine states were “illegally denying the poor either due process or deserved relief benefits.” By then, the states were supposed to have less freedom to refuse aid to those who needed it. Thanks to changes at the federal level, welfare had shifted from a privilege for the “deserving poor” to an entitlement for all those living below the poverty line. In 1968, the Supreme Court deemed “man in the house” laws unconstitutional; two years later, the justices ruled that welfare benefits couldn’t be taken away without an evidentiary hearing. The federal government also began encouraging states to move to a simplified “declaration” system for determining eligibility for the rechristened Aid to Families with Dependent Children, one in which a
gencies trusted clients to fill out a basic, unverified application. All the while, neighborhood legal aid clinics and leaders of the burgeoning welfare rights movement were fighting to ensure that people who’d historically been excluded from social services—primarily poor black women—received their entitled benefits.
The liberalization of welfare rules coincided with President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, a suite of initiatives that included the Food Stamp Act of 1964; the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which funded those neighborhood legal aid clinics; and 1965’s Social Security Act Amendments, which birthed Medicaid and Medicare. These programs, along with a booming economy, improved the lots of millions of the nation’s poorest citizens. In 1959, 22.4 percent of Americans overall and 55.1 percent of black Americans lived below the poverty line. By 1974, those numbers had dropped to 11.2 percent overall and 30.3 percent for blacks.
It cost money to make people less poor. Medicaid and AFDC, though paid for with the help of federal dollars, placed a significant strain on state budgets. Between 1963 and 1973, the number of Illinois residents on the AFDC rolls grew from 265,000 to 774,000. During that same period, the state’s annual public aid outlays increased more than sevenfold, rising to $1.5 billion. This state-level spending crisis, the Washington Post explained in 1971, “is really the reform—namely that poor people are finally getting some money.”
In Illinois, state senator Don Moore warned of “fiscal chaos, and perhaps bankruptcy” if the state didn’t make drastic cuts. In 1972, he called for a federal takeover of the welfare system, claiming that such a handoff would save Illinois $750 million per year, which the state could then spend on education.
The Republican, a former assistant state’s attorney, wore his hair slicked back, and in photos the corners of his mouth drooped down into a glower. He looked like a man who was easy to disappoint. Moore represented Midlothian, a village south of Chicago proper. When whites fled the city, they ended up in places like Midlothian, a tree-lined town with a country club and homes that middle-class families could afford to buy. In 1973, Moore shepherded an antibusing bill through the legislature, explaining that “both black and white people in my district want to maintain their neighborhood schools.” In reality, he protected the interests of white suburbanites—by 1970, Moore had 186 black constituents and 15,697 white ones. The people of Midlothian felt particularly aggrieved by welfare fraud. In the early 1970s, the senator got a letter from a man who complained “that some of these people using food stamps are often dressed in fine clothing and purchasing items considered for expensive taste.”
Moore, who was eager to bolster his own reputation as a welfare reform crusader, looked west for guidance. In 1971, Ronald Reagan had termed public aid a “cancer eating at our vitals,” and as governor of California he’d devoted himself to ridding the state of this so-called disease. Reagan worked with legislators to tighten eligibility rules, reduce the size of grants for those with outside income, and implement work requirements for some able-bodied public aid recipients. The state’s welfare rolls shrank in the aftermath of these policy changes, thanks in part to a simultaneous, unrelated reduction in unemployment. Nevertheless, the governor was celebrated as a conservative hero: National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. termed California’s welfare reforms the “Reagan Revolution.”
In 1973, Moore and seven other members of Illinois’s Legislative Advisory Committee flew to California to study what Reagan had done. After his trip, Moore introduced a bill mimicking the Reagan regime’s flat grants, eliminating the extra stipends for rent, food, and clothing that had gone to some recipients with special needs. Though welfare rights organizations threatened to sue, Illinois’s governor, Democrat Dan Walker, approved the legislation without any public hearings.
* * *
Don Moore knew that plenty of Illinois residents truly needed government assistance, and he believed it was his mission to do right by them. In the fall of 1974, the state senator from Midlothian succeeded in lobbying to override the governor’s veto of a cost-of-living increase for all public aid households. “When you start paying 61, 62, 63 cents for a loaf of bread and a buck-15 for a pound of hamburger, you can get an idea of how far money does not go today,” Moore said.
At the same time, Moore rarely declined the opportunity to assert that the state’s taxpayers were being victimized by fraudsters. On June 21, 1974, George Bliss wrote that investigators had found welfare cheaters who were “earning nearly $30,000 a year in their jobs,” as well as people “receiving aid payments for children they never had or members of the family who were dead.” In that article, tagged a Tribune exclusive, Bliss cited Moore’s estimate that “millions of dollars a month can be saved by continuing probes of cheaters in the Chicago area.” A day after that, Bliss reported the politician’s declaration “that cheating amounts to more than $100 million a year.”
Bliss’s stories blended provable fact and reckless conjecture. While there was ample evidence that at least some people on public aid shouldn’t have been eligible to get checks, Moore’s statistics had no clear basis in reality. When it came to documenting the scope of welfare fraud in Illinois, the state senator preferred to work backward, making wild claims in the press and then looking for the proof to back them up.
Moore was convinced that the Illinois Department of Public Aid hadn’t done nearly enough to clamp down on welfare fraud. The director of the Illinois Department of Public Aid agreed with him. In August 1974, Joel Edelman stepped down as the leader of that agency, telling the Tribune that his staff couldn’t handle the “mounting problem of fraud in welfare programs.” The next month, Edelman officially signed on as the executive director of the Legislative Advisory Committee on Public Aid. The two men immediately got to work building a miniature police force.
The legislative committee’s initial two hires were Neal Caauwe, a white detective from Midlothian, and Fred Pennix, a black policeman from the Cook County suburb of Robbins. On their first day, the cops took an orientation course on fraud detection designed by one of Reagan’s top welfare fraud experts.
Less than a week later, on September 29, 1974, the Tribune published Bliss’s article on Jack Sherwin and Linda Taylor. Moore and Edelman’s fraud fighters had the subject of their first big investigation. Within days, they also had two new colleagues, thanks to the Chicago Police Department’s willingness to loan out Sherwin and his partner, Jerry Kush. Their mission: Find Linda Taylor.
* * *
Even after she left Chicago, Taylor would call Lamar Jones at Great Lakes Naval Training Center. On the phone, she didn’t act as though she was on the lam—she was happy to tell him where she’d settled down. Maybe she was taunting him, or maybe she assumed he wouldn’t turn her in. But Jones could take only so much. His wife had abused his trust, and now he would abuse hers. After Taylor called him one day in October, two months after their hasty wedding, Jones went to the police.
Jones told Jack Sherwin he’d been an innocent bystander. He said he’d had nothing to do with Taylor’s various schemes—that he hadn’t known who his wife really was. Sherwin believed him. How could he not? Taylor had duped him, too. Sherwin was less certain about some of the other things Taylor had told Lamar Jones—that she’d been married eight times, and that she’d shot and killed her first husband. But all of that could wait. He now knew where Taylor was hiding. He needed to tell the Tucson Police Department to be on the lookout for a fugitive from Chicago.
* * *
Taylor’s new home had been listed in the Tucson Daily Citizen classifieds as “large, tastefully & newly furnished.” It was a two-bedroom place in a quiet building, with a small courtyard and a spot where she could park her 1974 Chevrolet Impala station wagon. When she rented the apartment, she told the landlord her name was Dr. Velma Weshmare.
In Arizona, Taylor had everything she needed to make a series of new impressions. She carried Illinois driver’s licenses with two different names. Her car title and vehicle stic
ker had a third and fourth alias, and she addressed envelopes with a fifth and sixth. She set up a doctor’s office inside her apartment, filling it with certificates that attested to her educational bona fides. One identified her as Dr. Linda Bennett, MD, ESP, PhD, Doctor of Occult Science. Another said she was Dr. Constance Womack, who belonged to the Sigma chapter of Epsilon Delta Chi, a fraternal organization for members of the clergy. That document included the Latin inscription Nosce te ipsum: “Know thyself.”
Thanks to Lamar Jones’s tip, it took detectives from the Tucson Police Department less than a week to find their woman. Though they had to wait for fingerprint cards to come in the mail from Michigan, the officers identified Linda Taylor—a.k.a. Constance Green, a.k.a. Dr. Velma Weshmare—based on the name tattooed on her upper left arm: Joe Fick. None of the police officers in Illinois or Michigan or Arizona had any idea who Joe Fick was, but that hardly mattered. All they cared about was grabbing Taylor before she got away again.
On October 9, 1974, the Tucson detectives found Taylor driving her Chevy station wagon and placed her under arrest. A photo published in the Daily Citizen showed her in a striped tank top, with pursed lips and her hair rolled up in giant curlers. The caption related the story of her capture in the shortest possible form: “Husband ‘told.’”
The cops impounded Taylor’s driver’s licenses and diplomas, as well as ads she’d clipped from newspaper classifieds and the magazine Fate: True Stories of the Strange and Unknown. The police discovered that Taylor had planned to purchase a sixty-day supply of E-Longe Lotion, a “newly developed amino extract” that promised longer, thicker hair in a week’s time. She’d also wanted to buy a $10 guide to making $2,000 per day; a tip sheet that touted a system for “cashing big” by betting on horse races; and the books How to Tell Fortunes with Cards and Psychic Perception: The Magic of Extrasensory Powers, the latter of which promised to unlock “avalanches of abundance, and discoveries of hidden treasure.” Dr. Joseph Murphy, a minister in the Church of Divine Science, told his followers they could earn immense sums by using “the miraculous mental instrument of the mind.” One of Dr. Murphy’s testimonials came from a woman who had once been a secretary: “If someone had told me a year ago that I would be driving a Lincoln, wearing a mink coat, expensive diamonds and sapphires, living in my own home and married to a wonderful man, I would have laughed out loud.”