by Josh Levin
The national press corps didn’t agree. A week after Reagan’s disquisition in Daytona Beach, the New York Times reprinted a shorter version of the Fialka article under the headline “‘Welfare Queen’ Becomes Issue in Reagan Campaign.” The Times’ imprimatur solidified the perception that Reagan didn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. The Philadelphia Daily News’s Chuck Stone called the welfare queen Reagan’s “latest con job.” John Osborne wrote in the New Republic that Reagan’s “stories are peopled by misty characters whose identities and adventures tend to go unverified.”
But while Fialka had proved that Reagan was a serial exaggerator, the journalist’s gloss on the welfare queen story was misleading in its own way. Yes, it was true that just four aliases had been deemed relevant in Taylor’s welfare fraud trial. But that didn’t constitute any kind of proof that she’d restricted herself to four identities. Likewise, the Cook County prosecutors’ decision to charge Taylor with stealing $8,865.67 worth of welfare checks didn’t mean that was the extent of what she’d taken. The Illinois Department of Public Aid, which had an interest in suppressing the true extent of Taylor’s crimes, had estimated privately that she’d stolen something on the order of $40,000.
Fialka’s version of the truth didn’t go unchallenged. Reagan’s favorite publication, the magazine Human Events—he once said it “helped me stop being a liberal Democrat”—reported that the former California governor actually “may have understated the facts concerning Chicago’s welfare queen.” Joel Edelman, the executive director of Illinois’s Legislative Advisory Committee on Public Aid, told Human Events that Reagan had been right about everything. Linda Taylor had used eighty names and thirty addresses, Edelman said, and $150,000 was a fair approximation of what she’d stolen. The Illinois official continued at great length, revealing more details of the sordid welfare queen saga.
You know, there’re some interesting sidelights to this. You know it’s kind of humorous, but it’s tragic. This woman, after the whole exposé and after she was indicted, befriends a woman already on public aid who had gone into the hospital for some medical care and returned home to be confined for a couple of weeks, so our friend, the welfare queen, poses as a homemaker because the Department of Public Aid will pay private individuals to go into the homes of recipients who are recovering from a serious illness, and who need to have their house cleaned and shopping done for them and that kind of thing.
She went in there—talk about gall, she’s under indictment, remember—and used a new alias. We’d never seen this one before, and the Department of Public Aid was issuing a check to her for a couple of weeks running as a homemaker. She gave up her cars—she was driving two Lincoln Continental Mark IVs, but a couple of weeks later she’s got another one. She has also taken trips out of the country.
The woman Taylor had befriended, the one “who had gone into the hospital for some medical care,” was Patricia Parks. Although the Tribune had reported in 1975 that Taylor hadn’t succeeded in securing any payments from the state during her stint as Parks’s housekeeper, it’s possible Edelman was correct that she had been paid “for a couple of weeks.” Regardless, Edelman, Human Events, the Washington Star, and the New York Times hadn’t seen fit to mention a pair of more salient facts: Patricia Parks was dead, and Linda Taylor had been suspected of killing her.
George Bliss and the Chicago Tribune introduced Taylor to the world as the ne plus ultra of welfare fraudsters. In his presentations on the stump, Reagan both cemented Bliss’s depiction of the welfare queen and streamlined what had been a complicated narrative. Taylor changed identities by changing wigs. She could be white, black, or Latina. She lived with children who may or may not have been hers. Later, the Tribune had floated the idea that Taylor might be a kidnapper and a murderer. Reagan’s version of the Taylor story was mind-boggling but simple. A woman in Chicago had used eighty names to steal $150,000 a year of welfare money. The wigs and the kids and the murder allegation—those were extraneous details. Welfare cheats were bad. Linda Taylor was the worst of them all.
Just as Reagan had defined Linda Taylor, this woman in Chicago came to define him. More than anyone or anything else Reagan talked about during the 1976 campaign, Taylor represented the forces preventing the United States and its citizens from achieving the greatness that was their birthright. Reagan’s supporters understood that. So did his detractors. When Reagan said that Linda Taylor epitomized America’s decline, she became a hammer that competing political factions could use to bash the other side. If she’d used four aliases and stolen less than $10,000, that meant Reagan was a liar. If she’d used eighty aliases and stolen $150,000, that meant he was divulging the secrets liberals were too squeamish to reveal.
On February 24, Reagan lost the New Hampshire primary by fewer than sixteen hundred votes. “I feel what’s happened tonight is a victory,” the runner-up told reporters. “That is a lot of baloney,” replied President Ford’s state campaign director. As the two Republican candidates made dueling claims on reality, newspapers in Chicago and elsewhere were printing up another series of welfare queen headlines. The day after the New Hampshire results were tallied, Linda Taylor was taken into custody once again. The arresting officer was Jack Sherwin.
* Women weren’t allowed to serve on juries in Alabama until 1966.
** Harold Washington, the future mayor of Chicago, was one year behind Pincham at Northwestern; Washington was also the only black student in his class. Dan Walker, the future governor, was one year ahead of Pincham.
Chapter 7
Concerned Neighbors
When Linda Taylor walked out of Judge Mark Jones’s courtroom, camera operators from all the local stations scrambled to capture her image. The moment she reached the lobby of the Chicago Civic Center, a guy from the city’s NBC affiliate jumped in the elevator, grabbed some quick footage of her backside, then sprinted through a set of double doors to shoot her from the front. As Taylor strolled across the plaza outside the rust-colored skyscraper, she was bracketed by lights and lenses.
Taylor had gone downtown on February 25, 1976, for a hearing in her long-delayed welfare fraud case. Her lawyer, R. Eugene Pincham, had filed a motion alleging that Jack Sherwin had confiscated his client’s public aid ID cards without a warrant. That search was unreasonable and invalid, Pincham said, a “fishing expedition” that violated the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. He argued that every piece of evidence seized from Taylor’s apartment should be tossed out. Pincham, though, wasn’t quite ready to immolate the prosecution’s case. He asked Jones for a continuance, and the hearing got pushed back to April 1. Taylor came striding out of the Civic Center just a few minutes after she’d strode in.
The defendant had arrayed herself for criminal court in a full-length black fur coat, a look she accessorized with a black-and-white-striped scarf and a sun-shaped rhinestone brooch. Taylor, whose left arm was tucked beneath the elbow of a male companion, bowed her head to protect herself from the howling wind, then threaded the fingers of her right hand through the bangs of her wavy black wig. She didn’t look at the cameras.
“Would you talk to us?” a reporter shouted. “How’d you do, Linda?”
Taylor kept moving forward. A few moments later, she spat back an answer.
“Well, compared to some of you white people, I think I done pretty damn good to be black.”
“Thattagirl,” the reporter said. It was a great soundbite.
Taylor’s daughter, Sandra Brownlee, told her mother to cut it out. “Don’t say nothing,” she said. “Just smile. Do another pose so they can get a different picture of you. I’m getting sick of that old one.”
Taylor giggled, baring her gold teeth.
“Throw your hair back,” Sandra said, encouraging her mother to show her face.
“Aw, shit,” Taylor replied, again riffling her bangs. After that, she closed her mouth, crossed the street, and unlocked the door of a 1975 Buick
Electra. The cameras hadn’t noticed Jack Sherwin trailing behind the crowd, watching Taylor climb into her car and drive away.
* * *
Although the hearing on his search of Taylor’s apartment had been postponed, Sherwin had another reason to be at the Civic Center on February 25. The day before, he’d met with state’s attorney Jim Piper, and the two men had agreed on a course of action. As soon as Taylor exited the building, Sherwin and a couple of his fellow officers would arrest her on a new set of charges. The month before, Sherwin and Piper believed, Taylor had burglarized a house. Among the items she’d allegedly stolen was a fur coat. Burglary was Sherwin’s area of expertise. This time, his bosses at the Chicago Police Department couldn’t tell him to leave Linda Taylor alone.
Sherwin knew that the Chicago press loved to chronicle Taylor’s every sashay, but he still hadn’t expected a phalanx of cameras. The chaos outside the Civic Center—the lights, the shouting, Taylor declaring “I done pretty damn good to be black”—forced Sherwin to change his plan. Rather than arrest the fur-clad Taylor in full view of every major news outfit in the city, he decided to wait for a less conspicuous moment. When Taylor drove off in that 1975 Electra, Sherwin put a tail on the car.
She parked in front of a two-story brick house on South Normal Avenue, four miles from where Sherwin had arrested her in 1974. By midafternoon, Piper, three investigators from the state’s attorney’s office, and five additional Chicago police officers had assembled at 7450 South Normal. At 3:30 p.m., Sherwin and his nine-man crew entered Taylor’s South Side apartment and told her she had the right to remain silent. In the kitchen, the detective spotted a Van Wyck electric can opener. In the bedroom, he found a GE portable color television with a brown wood finish. Both items had been reported stolen.
A year and a half earlier, Sherwin had been struck by the tidiness of Taylor’s apartment at 8221 South Clyde Avenue. This place was filthy. Taylor had two children living with her on South Normal, just as she had on South Clyde. The two boys—seven-year-old Duke, who was white, and five-year-old Hosa, who was black—didn’t appear to have anywhere to sleep. There was just a single cot in the apartment, and Taylor had been the one using it. The children looked downcast and dirty, and they were dressed in tattered clothes. Sherwin called for an evidence technician and a pair of youth officers to come to the scene, to take pictures of the house and the two boys, and to transport the seven-year-old and the five-year-old to the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.
Taylor already hated Sherwin. Eighteen months earlier, to the day, he’d found incriminating evidence in her cardboard suitcase. He’d hassled her and arrested her and confiscated a bunch of her belongings. She’d called Sherwin’s division to complain, and a sergeant had told her Sherwin would back off. But now he was hassling and arresting her again. On the afternoon of February 25, Taylor waited, handcuffs around her wrists, for two policewomen to come to her apartment and take away the two children. Taylor didn’t want to remain silent—there were a few things she needed to say. She didn’t yell and scream. She didn’t raise her voice. “No matter how much money it takes,” she told Sherwin, “I’m going to get your badge.” She explained, flatly and calmly, that he wouldn’t be able to have children when she was done with him. She said she’d find his wife and tell her about all the “black ass” he’d been fooling around with. She also threatened Sherwin’s life. From now on, Taylor said, the detective needed to be more careful. There was a bullet in the streets of Chicago with his name on it.
* * *
The day after George Bliss’s first Linda Taylor story appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Don Moore declared that he’d be leading an investigation into the alleged infiltration of the Illinois Department of Public Aid by a cadre of welfare cheaters. The state senator never found those supposed villains, and he didn’t uncover any evidence that Taylor’s thievery had been an inside job. His failures, though, were quickly forgotten. Moore’s legislative committee credited itself with corralling Taylor, noting in a self-congratulatory press release that it had “sought to publicize various of its more dramatic activities” as a means to “create an awareness among Illinois residents of the scope of welfare fraud in our state.”
For Moore’s committee, the welfare queen was good for business. On account of the group’s work on the Taylor case, the superintendent of the Chicago police instructed the city’s cops to bypass other state agencies and send the names of possible welfare swindlers directly to Moore’s investigators, a move that effectively placed the legislative committee in charge of determining who was a cheater and who wasn’t. In 1975, the state legislature also increased the committee’s annual budget from $100,000 to $188,000, a bump that Moore and Joel Edelman used to hire more welfare detectives. By the following year, Moore was telling reporters that the Legislative Advisory Committee had saved taxpayers more than $1 million. In an interview, the state senator said his group could potentially save the state even more money. He just needed an even bigger budget, and still more investigators.
Moore knew that public aid fraud could take many different forms. In his keynote address at the National Welfare Fraud Association convention in October 1975, he acknowledged that “the greater crimes are being committed by the white-collar cheaters who are hustling the Medicaid program through financial manipulations.” But in speeches and interviews, he spent just as much time discussing how the state might prevent individual welfare recipients from gaming the system. At the end of that same keynote address, Moore rhapsodized about a “developing technology”—“an odorless, tasteless, inkless substance” that could grab a fresh fingerprint “each time the recipient cashes his or her check.” A “highly sophisticated computer” would then match that print against one in the Department of Public Aid’s master file, eliminating the possibility of identity-based fraud.
Don Moore didn’t always get what he wanted. Compulsory fingerprinting for welfare recipients never came to pass in Illinois. Neither did Moore’s proposal to set up an entirely new agency, the Office of Welfare Fraud Investigation, to deal with public aid swindlers. The Legislative Advisory Committee did, however, succeed in lobbying for legislation mandating that welfare cheats pay restitution money directly to the state’s attorney’s office that convicted them. That kind of financial inducement, Moore hoped, would convince reluctant prosecutors to start treating public aid fraud as a serious criminal act. A few months before, Republican state senator Karl Berning had tried and failed to push through a more expansive piece of legislation, one that would’ve paid a “finder’s fee” of up to $2,500 to anyone who turned in a welfare scammer. “Hopefully,” Berning had said, “this bill will eliminate the normal public reluctance toward reporting cases of welfare cheating, and stimulate involvement in the fight against fraud.”
Contrary to Berning’s claim, much of the general public was eager to throw haymakers in this particular fight. In a survey conducted by a state representative who, like Don Moore, hailed from Chicago’s mostly white south suburbs, 96 percent of respondents said that “too many people on welfare are receiving benefits to which they are not entitled.” Moore urged those aggrieved citizens to call the committee’s office or to drop in personally whenever they spotted untoward welfare-related activity. They did so with great alacrity, no cash payments necessary.
These volunteer guardians of the state treasury also sent a steady supply of angry, anonymous letters to the Illinois Department of Public Aid—notes signed by “Concerned Neighbors,” “An Irate Taxpayer,” “A U.S. Citizen,” and “An Interested Party.” These missives listed the names, addresses, and license plate numbers of supposedly suspicious persons. One letter, sent in 1976, carried the header “Re: MEXICAN WELFARE QUEENS” and featured a map of the alleged queens’ neighborhood.
In May 1975, the Department of Public Aid made calling out a welfare cheater as easy as picking up a phone, launching a 24-hour, toll-free welfare fraud hotline. Although California and Massachusetts had
preceded Illinois in creating inform-by-phone systems, Linda Taylor’s home state was the first to grant callers anonymity.
At 9:07 a.m. on August 14, 1975, an unidentified whistle-blower lodged a complaint about a woman named Kathy.
The reason I think she is cheating [is] because she has a baby that her boyfriend paid for and they are living together and she’s getting state aid which she don’t need and he’s always bragging about going out and buying a bunch of stuff with the money he is making off of it.
Another accusation came in at 9:47 a.m., this one about a woman in Chicago who’d just purchased a blue Chevrolet.
She is a recipient of the aid and she is running and chasing around with other men and she works for a gas station to help a former boyfriend.…I don’t care about her personal life but this woman is definitely wrong in receiving aid.
At 9:54 a.m.:
Now, you said this is confidential. I don’t want you to play this tape because you would really mess me up. She is now at Sara Lee’s. She works there.…I tried to get on aid myself. You refused to let me on, so why should she?
At 11:32 a.m.:
She came into this apartment with two children and now she has four and [she’s] driving a big Chrysler. It’s a black four-door, vinyl top. She has asked public aid for a stove and a refrigerator and she tells me that she is working part-time for the street department in Saint Louis. I just don’t understand these big black Cadillacs…
The phone rang all day with news of cheaters. In the first twelve months after the agency plugged its fraud phone into the wall, the hotline received more than five thousand tips. Two-thirds of those callers chose to keep their identities to themselves. As of June 1976, just 0.7 percent of those calls—37 out of 5,133—instigated legitimate fraud investigations, with those three dozen or so cases adding up to $325,044.97 in losses for the Department of Public Aid.