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The Queen

Page 7

by Josh Levin


  Forty-eight hours after Taylor’s arrest, Don Moore’s welfare fraud cops Neal Caauwe and Fred Pennix flew to Arizona to pick her up. Taylor’s daughter, Sandra, came down, too, to get the two children Tucson police had found living in Taylor’s apartment. When child protective services handed them over, Sandra complained that the kids didn’t have any shoes. Taylor sat beside Caauwe and Pennix on the flight back to Chicago. She didn’t say a word the entire trip; she just looked at the police officers and smiled. Taylor had chosen this destination, albeit from a limited set of options. On the advice of her Arizona public defender, she’d refused extradition to Michigan but consented to return to Illinois. Her fate would be decided in Cook County.

  When Taylor’s plane landed at O’Hare Airport, Jack Sherwin was there to greet her. He placed her under arrest for grand theft and bond forfeiture on behalf of the State of Illinois. Her bail was set at $100,000.

  * * *

  Though Taylor was now in custody, the basic details of her life remained elusive. On this latest arrest report, Sherwin listed her as fifty years old and unemployed. A month earlier, he’d described her as a thirty-nine-year-old nurse. The Tucson Daily Citizen reported one day that she was forty-seven, the next that she was thirty-nine. A short AP article said Taylor was forty.

  In his October 12 piece reporting the news of Taylor’s Arizona arrest, George Bliss repeated the long list of damning facts he’d first laid out two weeks prior: She drove a Cadillac, a Lincoln, and a Chevrolet, and had at least twenty-seven different names and thirty-one addresses. This time, though, he put a price tag on Taylor’s larceny, writing that “her alleged take might have run to $300,000 in welfare funds.” Bliss made it clear that his newspaper owned the Linda Taylor story. It had been the Tribune, he reported, that “first alerted authorities to her activities here,” highlighting the type of blatant graft the Illinois Department of Public Aid had been too incompetent to ferret out on its own. This story, Bliss’s third on the case, deployed an identifier that reflected the grandeur of her crime. She was “Linda Taylor, the 47-year-old ‘welfare queen.’”

  Although the moniker wasn’t in wide circulation before October 1974, it did occasionally show up in newsprint. Seven years earlier, a woman named Patty McGowan wrote a letter to the editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer complaining about a proposed federal “allowance” for children, writing, “I’m already a drone bee for the Social Security queen, the Medicare queen, and the welfare queen—to name a few.” And in 1969, Vermont’s Burlington Free Press noted that a public aid recipient named “Mary Black”—a pseudonym—“is known as the ‘Welfare Queen,’ and people in the area claim she runs the streets at night and frequents the beer gardens.”

  The movie Claudine, released in April 1974, pushed back against the welfare queen stereotype even as it was still emerging. “Haven’t you heard about us ignorant black bitches? Always got to be laying up with some dude, just grinding out them babies for the taxpayers to take care of,” said Diahann Carroll’s title character, a black single mother with six kids. “You know, I’m living like a queen on welfare.” The Tribune, by contrast, used the term uncritically and unrelentingly. Bliss’s piece on October 12, 1974, was the first of more than forty articles in the newspaper that referred to Taylor by that epithet. It was the Tribune that made the welfare queen a recognizable figure, and that helped spread the term nationwide.

  In the absence of confirmed facts, Taylor’s nickname was the one thing every publication could agree on. In December 1974, the Gannett News Service published a long story on the “woman who’s been dubbed the ‘Welfare Queen.’” According to unnamed investigators and agents, Taylor was “either black, white or Latin, a native of the U.S., Haiti, England or South Africa,” and had possibly plundered the state treasuries in New York, New Jersey, Ohio, and California. One of those anonymous agents added that the children who’d been with her during her Illinois arrest were “not hers.” Another said, “She can look as tacky as she wants and she can look as good as she wants. She is a very well-built woman.”

  A few days earlier, the UPI had done its own piece on the “welfare queen,” a woman who “turns from black to Latin to white with the change of a wig.” The wire service quoted Joel Edelman. “When the entire story is told,” the executive director of the Legislative Advisory Committee on Public Aid said, “I believe this will prove to be the most massive case of welfare fraud that has ever been perpetrated in the 50 states.”

  In California, a public relations man named Peter Hannaford filed that clip away. He thought his boss, Governor Ronald Reagan, might want to read it someday.

  * * *

  George Bliss’s reporting had proved that welfare cheaters existed. The Legislative Advisory Committee’s investigation of Linda Taylor promised to uncover how much one woman could steal. It would also reveal whether the Illinois Department of Public Aid had been complicit in Taylor’s crimes.

  Jack Sherwin took control of the operation, doling out assignments to the other investigators. Though Sherwin worked for the Legislative Advisory Committee on Public Aid, he didn’t see this as just a public aid case. He would go wherever the evidence led him and develop a comprehensive list of possible charges.

  Sherwin began by scrutinizing Taylor’s applications for public assistance. Though the information on those forms was mostly fictional, the names she wrote on the signature lines had some basis in reality. Connie Walker came from her husband Willie Walker, the Chicago cab driver. She got Linda Bennett from another husband, Aaron Bennett. She’d taken the name Sandra Brownlee from her own daughter.

  On October 24, 1974, the legislative committee brought the real Sandra Brownlee in to answer some questions. Taylor had told Lamar Jones that the twenty-three-year-old Brownlee was her sister, Constance. The family resemblance was clear—like her mother, Sandra had dark hair, dark eyes, and skin the color of milky coffee. In a series of interviews, she said she’d been born in Paris, France, and that she’d lost the hearing in her right ear due to injuries suffered in a 1958 fire at Chicago’s Our Lady of the Angels School. Brownlee admitted she’d cashed welfare checks on her mother’s behalf at a Chicago currency exchange. She also told state and federal investigators she knew that her mother had filed Social Security and Veterans Administration claims using the name Sandra Brownlee.

  There were some things Brownlee said she just didn’t know. An FBI agent wrote, “She is not sure of her origin. She recalled being with her mother, Linda Taylor, at various times during her life, but her mother really confused her at times by telling her she was not who she thought she was.” The FBI’s memo continued,

  Sandra stated her mother is a member of the black race. She could not explain how her mother presently had two children, one black [Hosa] and one white [Duke], with straight blond hair. She claimed that [Hosa] was her mother’s child by Willie Walker, who is now dead. Sandra displayed photographs of her brothers, [Johnnie] and Robin, who are also white males with sandy brown hair. She further advised that her mother has had several children over the years but she is not sure how she got them.

  Sherwin found one of those brothers in Joliet state prison. Johnnie Harbaugh had been arrested at least twelve times in the past decade, for offenses ranging from loitering to disorderly conduct to unlawful use of a weapon, though only a handful of those episodes had resulted in convictions. This time, he’d been locked up for theft. When Sherwin leafed through Harbaugh’s arrest reports, he found his own name and badge number. The detective, it turned out, had arrested both Linda Taylor and her son. Sherwin and Kush drove the forty miles to Joliet to talk to Harbaugh. He was twenty-four years old, and dark ink covered the white skin on his arms and hands. His tattoos—including a black panther, a symbol of the Blackstone Rangers—marked him as a South Side gang member.

  Sandra Brownlee had said she didn’t know where all of her mother’s children had come from. Her brother had an explanation: Taylor bought and sold kids on the black market. Sherwin knew Lind
a Taylor was a liar, and he knew she was a thief. He knew she’d been arrested for endangering the life and health of a child, and he knew she’d been charged with kidnapping. Buying and selling children was different. It was monstrous. Lamar Jones had told Sherwin that Taylor shot and killed her first husband. Now Taylor’s son was saying his mother was a child trafficker. Sherwin wasn’t sure if either of those claims was true, but he did understand one thing very clearly: The people closest to Linda Taylor believed she was capable of absolutely anything.

  * * *

  So long as Taylor was behind bars, Sherwin had the time and space to develop all these new leads, and he knew she couldn’t make any more trouble in the meantime. It was a comforting feeling. It lasted for two weeks.

  On October 24, the day her daughter, Sandra, talked to state and federal agents, Taylor appeared in Cook County Circuit Court for a bond hearing. The legislative committee’s investigators hadn’t been warned about this court date. As soon as they heard, they rushed over to 2600 South California Avenue to meet with the prosecuting attorney. The Taylor case had been assigned to the special criminal prosecutions division of the Cook County state’s attorney’s office, the group that handled the county’s most challenging and highest-profile fraud and corruption cases. The work could be politically risky: In 1975, the Tribune reported that the Chicago police had kept a secret file on Kenneth Gillis, the head of the bureau.

  Gillis liked to hire unschooled attorneys, ones he could teach and mold. Bridget Hutchen, the lawyer assigned to the Linda Taylor case, had just graduated from law school. She’d never even appeared in traffic court. Hutchen had been given a folder that enumerated Taylor’s Illinois arrests for bond skipping and theft but didn’t include her bond forfeiture and welfare fraud warrants from Michigan. She also didn’t present any of the new evidence that Sherwin and his team had uncovered. “Two members of the legislative committee were in court prepared to testify that she had collected up to $200,000 in payments, and at one time was collecting welfare under 14 separate aliases, driving late model luxury cars, and claiming ownership of several apartment buildings,” the Tribune reported two days later. “But the committee members never were asked about any of this by the prosecutor.”

  While the State of Illinois relied on a novice, Taylor had the best civil rights lawyer in Chicago by her side. R. Eugene Pincham told Judge Wayne Olson his client had never been convicted of a crime and had resided at 8221 South Clyde Avenue for twenty-five years. Olson gave Pincham and Taylor the benefit of the doubt. The judge reduced Taylor’s bond from $100,000 to $10,000, explaining that “no evidence of the seriousness of the crime was presented in court.” Olson said he’d read about the allegations against Taylor in the newspaper, “but I cannot decide a motion on the basis of a Chicago Tribune story.”

  Sherwin was incensed. So was state senator Don Moore. After the hearing, the head of the special prosecutions bureau told them he’d had more important things to worry about. Earlier in the week, a gang of thieves had busted into a vault owned by Purolator Security. They’d stolen $4.3 million—the largest cash heist in American history. The Tribune reported that three hundred local, state, and federal agents were working the Purolator theft. Gillis said his most experienced attorneys had been tied up with the vault break-in, too. That excuse wasn’t good enough for Moore. He told the Tribune he was demanding a “full-scale investigation” of the state’s attorney’s office.

  By the mid-1970s, the paper’s chief investigative reporter had essentially become an adjunct member of the Legislative Advisory Committee on Public Aid. Bliss was copied on the committee’s memos, and its chair and executive director fed him tips. The information flowed both ways. Bliss had called the legislative committee as soon as he heard about the Taylor case—he’d been the one to kick off the group’s investigation. He’d also passed along a rumor that Taylor might have contracts out on the investigators’ lives.

  It was a mutually beneficial relationship. Bliss provided Moore with evidence of the state government’s lassitude and perfidy, and Moore gave Bliss tangible proof that the Tribune’s exclusives had spurred at least one politician into action. On October 26, Bliss and Charles Mount wrote a piece that began, “Accused ‘Welfare Queen’ Linda Taylor could not have bilked Illinois of an estimated $200,000 in public aid payments without help from welfare workers, a state legislator charged.” Moore told the reporters he had “no doubt that there was connivance with public aid employes to cheat the state out of this much money.” Now prosecutors had made it possible for these connivances to continue. “With this low bond, she could skip again,” Moore said. “We found her only after a nationwide search.”

  Even George Bliss didn’t have the power to get Taylor’s bond increased. The newly crowned welfare queen scratched together $1,000—the requisite 10 percent of her bond—and won her release.

  * * *

  Don Moore’s play for publicity didn’t fail completely. His fuming about Taylor’s October hearing, delivered to Chicagoans’ doorsteps under Bliss’s byline, essentially forced the hand of Chicago’s top prosecutors. In a vacuum, the Cook County state’s attorney’s office might have deemed Taylor’s alleged theft of public aid money too insignificant to pursue. But with Moore and Bliss publicizing Illinois’s supposed welfare fraud crisis, the head of the special prosecutions division had no choice but to treat the Taylor case seriously. Kenneth Gillis encouraged the legislative committee to keep up its work, urging its investigators to go across state lines if necessary.

  On a trip to Michigan, Sherwin discovered that one of Taylor’s dead husbands was actually alive. Taylor had told Lamar Jones that a Greyhound bus had crushed her previous spouse. But Aaron Bennett was decidedly uncrushed, residing in Grand Rapids and employed by an industrial equipment firm. He told Sherwin that Taylor had been into voodoo, and that she’d gotten a bunch of checks in the mail that she hadn’t let him look at. She’d left their home in 1973, after they’d been married for a few months. He’d been happy to see her go.

  By early November, the state’s attorneys believed they had enough to take the case to a Cook County grand jury. Sherwin testified about the public aid cards he’d found in Taylor’s apartment, and welfare intake workers described what she’d written on her applications. Lamar Jones and Aaron Bennett shared a car to the courthouse—one of the investigators had introduced the two men, saying they had something in common. Jones told Taylor’s other husband he’d just seen a movie in which someone testified against a mobster, then got gunned down on the courthouse steps. They were both afraid to take the stand and were relieved to make it out of the courtroom alive. The welfare fraud investigator Neal Caauwe was scared, too. Caauwe had heard that Taylor might have a contract out on him. He carried a gun everywhere he went, even to take out the garbage.

  The grand jury indicted Taylor on November 13, charging her with stealing twenty-one public aid checks between January and September 1974. The indictment said those twenty-one checks—which she received simultaneously under two different names, Connie Walker and Linda Bennett—had been “knowingly obtained by deception.” The payments added up to $7,608.02, a figure the Tribune said “may be only a fraction of the amount of Illinois welfare money Miss Taylor received illegally.” Taylor was also indicted on seven counts of perjury, for telling a series of lies on the application she’d filled out as Sandra Brownlee, and on a single count of bigamy, for marrying Lamar Jones without divorcing Aaron Bennett.

  The legislative committee’s after-action report, written later in November, laid out how Don Moore’s men had brought down Linda Taylor. The twenty-two-page narrative included the following preamble, written under the heading “What brought about the founding of the Commission.”

  Everyone in the Nation is well aware of the abuses in the Public Aid Program. Exemplary is the State of Illinois with its swollen welfare roles and the ever ominous cloud of fraud hanging over it.

  An all too familiar example of this is the well dresse
d lady in the grocery line with her multiple food carts filled with choicest meats and top named products, most of which are regarded by the public as luxuries. Then having the frustration of waiting in line and seeing this person paying for those items with food stamps. Insult is added to injury when these items are loaded into a Cadillac.

  This was a political document, written for an audience of politicians and designed to lionize the state senator who’d commissioned it. The investigators had been “confronted with a lack of interest and only nominal participation in obtaining the information needed,” the report explained. “Only through the stern guiding hand of Senator Don A. Moore did the faucet of information start to trickle.”

  The Taylor case wasn’t finished. The state could still indict her on additional charges, and the feds were just getting started. But Don Moore wasn’t pressing the state’s attorneys to look into allegations of kidnapping or baby stealing, or anything aside from welfare fraud.

 

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