by Josh Levin
Although Reagan cited the chief investigative reporter of the Chicago Tribune, his source material hadn’t appeared in the Tribune itself. In September 1976, George Bliss had published a twenty-five-hundred-word essay titled “The Unbelievable Case of Chicago’s ‘Welfare Queen’”—the most expansive article he’d ever written on Linda Taylor. That story ran in Reagan’s favorite magazine, Human Events.
Bliss’s two-page feature wasn’t going to win any journalism awards. It was littered with misspelled names and inflated numbers, including the assertion “that the trail of frauds left by Linda amounted to more than a million dollars”—an estimate Bliss had never made in any of his stories for the Tribune. As Reagan noted in his commentary, the piece declared that Taylor was building up “her defense fund” with a secret stash of public aid checks, though no prosecutor or public official had alleged such a thing. The story said that Jack Sherwin had arrested Taylor for calling in a fake burglary after finding a “mass of public aid checks” in her apartment, and that Sherwin had then reported that arrest to the Tribune. Though none of that was true, nobody at Human Events was going to second-guess a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner.
The article that ran under Bliss’s name read too smoothly, his Tribune colleagues believed, for him to have written it himself. Most likely, Bliss provided a set of facts and his good name, and Human Events wrote up the story, printing the text in its September 18 issue alongside a pitch to potential advertisers. (“The new Human Events readership study is filled with decision-making information for businessmen,” the ad boasted, “statistics which reveal, for example, that over 2,000 millionaires read Human Events every week.”) Reagan left out some of the most salacious details from the Human Events piece, such as the claim that Taylor might have been involved in the theft of a newborn baby, a child who was “snatched from his mother’s arms in 1964 in…Michael Reese Hospital by a woman dressed in white.” Reagan had a specific story to tell, and it didn’t have anything to do with kidnapping.
Bliss didn’t have any interest in furthering Reagan’s career or propping up the conservative movement. He didn’t care about national politics, and he didn’t subscribe to a particular ideology. Two years earlier, he’d done a piece on police brutality for the Nation, a magazine as revered on the Left as Human Events was on the Right. For Bliss, freelance writing was less a passion project than a paid gig. He needed to provide for his blended family—seven biological children and three stepchildren, ranging in age from fourteen to thirty-five. If Human Events wanted to pay him for an item on Chicago’s welfare queen, he was more than willing to cash the check.
At age fifty-eight, Bliss was still in peak physical condition. He’d challenge young writers to a dash up the stairs of the St. Clair Hotel, with the finish line at the Chicago Press Club on the twenty-second floor. He never lost a race. But by 1976, people at the Tribune had started to notice a change in his disposition. Bliss was susceptible to depressive moods, and they’d gotten worse since his first wife had died in childbirth in 1959. His second marriage wasn’t a happy one, and he was rarely satisfied by his accomplishments at work. Bliss drank heavily; although he’d duck out of the office for Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, he couldn’t always stop himself from slamming down martinis at lunch. Some of his friends believed all that drinking was going to wreck his life. Others thought Bliss needed those drinks to dull his anguish.
In the latter part of 1975, Bliss had checked into a Chicago hospital to get psychiatric treatment. During that stint, he called the Tribune’s Chuck Neubauer to share a tip about a friend of Mayor Richard J. Daley who’d scored a break on his personal property taxes. They worked on the piece together, and it landed on the front page with both men’s bylines. That was George Bliss—obsessed with getting his name in the paper, no matter the obstacles. The George Bliss who Neubauer saw in the newsroom a short while later seemed like an impostor. He was staring at the Saturday Tribune, pausing over the ads for what felt like hours. Bliss would sit at his desk and talk on the phone, but he couldn’t manage to put out a story. In the first three months of 1976, he had forty-four bylines in the Tribune. In the last three months of the year, he had ten. Jim Strong, who’d succeeded Bliss as the Tribune’s labor editor, started to get calls from his predecessor at three in the morning. “I need a story for tomorrow,” Bliss would whisper into the receiver. “You got anything?”
* * *
Jack Sherwin and Linda Taylor had it down to a routine. He’d arrest her, she’d make bail, and he’d find her and arrest her again for something else. On the morning of July 8, 1976, Sherwin drove to a community just on the Chicago side of the city limits, closer to Don Moore’s suburban district in Midlothian than the Civic Center downtown. Three months earlier, Taylor had signed her name to a salmon-colored piece of paper, promising that she’d keep the clerk of the circuit court apprised of her whereabouts or risk having her bond revoked. She’d broken that agreement, and Sherwin had been tasked with bringing her back in.
Taylor hadn’t improved her circumstances since she’d moved out of the dirty apartment on South Normal Avenue, the place where Sherwin had arrested her for stealing a fur coat. Her new neighborhood, West Pullman, had been exclusively white until the 1960s, when predatory lenders ushered in black residents just as the South Side’s factories started shutting down. In the 1970s, the number of people living below the poverty line in West Pullman grew by 151 percent. Taylor professed to be one of them. Her only income during this period, she claimed, came from her Vietnam veteran husband Sherman Ray’s unemployment checks.
In his police report, Sherwin didn’t document any confrontations or death threats. He arrested Taylor for bond forfeiture, and some other officers transported her to police headquarters at 1121 South State Street. There was no dramatic bond hearing, no debate over whether Taylor was a victim or a victimizer. A new judge set her bail for $10,000, just a bit more than the amount she’d run out on. Again, Taylor paid up and got out of jail. The only thing that could break this pattern, it seemed, would be the start of Taylor’s perpetually postponed welfare fraud trial. By the summer of 1976, that proceeding had been on the verge of getting under way for almost two years.
The docket sheet for People of the State of Illinois v. Linda Taylor listed more than thirty court dates as of the fall of 1976, very few of which included anything of substance. Taylor’s February 25 evidentiary hearing had been continued to April 1, then to May 6, June 2, August 9, September 7, and October 25. These sorts of holdups weren’t unusual in Chicago. The Cook County state’s attorney’s office was one of the largest in the nation and one of the most overburdened, with more than eight thousand felony indictments on the books in 1975 alone. The county’s twenty-two criminal judges had backlogs of their own—one told the Tribune in 1976 that he had 350 pending cases—which meant that scheduling a trial could be a challenge even when all parties were ready to move forward. But in the Taylor case, as in most criminal matters, the bulk of the postponements came at the request of the defense attorney. In 1976, Taylor’s lawyers were granted seven separate continuances, with most of those delaying the proceedings by at least a month.
A mere thirty defense attorneys handled the bulk of Chicago’s criminal cases, and R. Eugene Pincham spread himself thinner than most. Pincham and his partners had so much business they couldn’t have gotten it all done even in a fifty-day workweek. They also knew that delay, delay, delay could be a winning strategy. “Right after an incident emotions may run high,” Pincham told the Tribune in 1971. “Time works in favor of justice.” Time didn’t always work in Pincham’s favor. In November 1976, his associate lawyer Skip Gant was found in contempt of court after he asked to postpone a case that had already been delayed seventy times. The perturbed judge told the Tribune that Pincham “can’t try every criminal case in Cook County”—that he owed it to his clients and the courts to parcel out some of that work to other lawyers.
By the end of 1976, Pincham had acceded to that sug
gestion. After twenty-five years as an attorney, the Chicago civil rights icon had been elected to a circuit court judgeship. As a consequence, Pincham needed to off-load his clients. People of the State of Illinois v. Linda Taylor got passed along to his younger colleagues, Gant and T. Lee Boyd. A change in counsel meant another continuance, to allow the defendant’s new lawyers to get acquainted with her case. When Taylor’s legal odyssey began, Illinois governor Dan Walker was announcing that “welfare abuse cannot be ignored” and Mayor Daley was celebrating his twentieth year in office. As of January 1977, Walker had been voted out, Daley was dead of a heart attack, and Taylor was still awaiting trial.
While Taylor’s defense team deserved most of the credit or blame for the long interregnum between her arrest and trial, prosecutors hadn’t been eager to rush things either. Given Taylor’s notoriety, state’s attorney Jim Piper felt an obligation to put her in prison for a very long time. The state’s public aid code, though, stipulated that the theft of any amount of welfare money—even, hypothetically, $1 million—should be considered a misdemeanor. It would probably be easier, then, to lock up Taylor for stealing Everleana Brame’s fur coat than for stealing thousands of dollars from the Illinois treasury. But that didn’t seem like a fitting conclusion to the welfare queen story. If Piper couldn’t score a heftier sentence, it would look as though Cook County had gone soft on America’s least favorite welfare cheat.
Two years into the state’s prosecution of Linda Taylor, Piper decided that his best move was to do nothing at all. The FBI, the Veterans Administration, and the Social Security Administration were all still investigating whether she’d committed federal crimes. In November 1976, Piper told U.S. attorneys from the Northern District of Illinois that he didn’t want to go ahead with his case—the feds, he thought, would be more likely to deliver the punishment Taylor deserved. After more than a year of digging, representatives from various U.S. agencies suspected that Taylor had indeed filched federal money. The amount she’d allegedly stolen—$3,250 from the Veterans Administration and $3,757.40 via Social Security—was sizable but not staggering, less in total than what she’d been charged with taking from the State of Illinois. An FBI memorandum from July of that year indicated that at least one assistant U.S. attorney wanted Taylor prosecuted for those thefts. Federal lawyers also discussed charging her with mail fraud. Ultimately, though, the Northern District’s indictment committee decided to let Illinois clean up its own mess. In the words of one U.S. attorney, “Any federal prosecution would only serve as saving face for the locals.” Another FBI memo quoted a prosecutor as saying, “It was the state that blew this matter way out of proportion in the newspapers.”
With the U.S. attorneys unwilling to help, it would be up to Jim Piper to finish what Jack Sherwin, George Bliss, and Don Moore had started. Piper got the break he needed in December 1976, when the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that welfare fraud could be prosecuted under the state criminal code rather than the public aid code. So long as you could prove intent, stealing a public aid check worth in excess of $150 would be considered a felony, just like stealing a fur coat. If Taylor was found guilty of numerous counts of theft and perjury, she could go to prison for up to twenty years. That would be long enough to set an example for all the other welfare cheaters, and to win Piper acclaim as the man who brought Linda Taylor to justice.
Given that favorable ruling by the state supreme court, Piper pressed to take the case to trial as soon as possible. Judge Mark Jones sympathized with the prosecutor’s new sense of urgency. On February 22, 1977, in a building that had been rechristened the Richard J. Daley Center in honor of the recently deceased mayor, Jones told Taylor’s attorneys that “this case has been on the docket too long.” He demanded that all parties be ready to go to trial in two days. In a brief interview with the Chicago Defender, Taylor accused Piper of breaking into her apartment and stealing her ring, television, and dishes. The charges against her, she said, were “all lies, all lies.”
“When this is over,” she said in a manner the Defender described as “spritely,” “I plan on suing all of them.”
* Reagan would say “welfare queen” at least one more time in a public setting. In 1981, during his first year as president, he’d argue that his cuts to social services had been “aimed at the abuses in the program,” as exemplified by “the welfare queen” who was “collecting welfare under a hundred and twenty-three different names” and “also had fifty-five Social Security cards.”
Chapter 8
The Fashionably Dressed Mrs. Taylor
Before he walked inside the Daley Center on February 24, 1977, Skip Gant stopped by a downtown flower shop to pick up a fresh carnation for his boutonniere. A few years earlier, Gant had rescued a blossom that a colleague had deemed unsuitable for his own lapel. It took less than twenty-four hours for that flower to become Gant’s calling card. When he wore it to court the next day, a potential client flagged down the young lawyer. The building’s shoeshine man had told him that if he needed a good attorney, he should look for the guy with the “beau-kwet.”
Gant didn’t feel particularly at ease at the Daley Center. Although his law degree came from Chicago’s Loyola University, he’d gotten his education at the Cook County Criminal Courts Building, where the old folks in the gallery were happy to tell him if he’d flubbed a cross-examination. The neoclassical courthouse at West Twenty-Sixth Street and South California Avenue hadn’t changed much since Al Capone had been convicted of tax evasion there in 1931. The air-conditioning didn’t work and the overhead lights didn’t illuminate much at all. Rodents and roaches sometimes scurried across the floors. The Daley Center was a whole lot fancier, a sleek modernist tower with a Picasso sculpture standing in the plaza outside. When the skyscraper opened for business in 1965, court personnel had a hard time keeping cases moving—all the lawyers were busy gawking at the spectacular skyline views. The Daley Center’s courtrooms, with their private washrooms and glass-and-wood doors, had been built to handle civil cases. But within a couple of years, overcrowding at Twenty-Sixth and Cal had bumped a bunch of criminal matters into these less grubby municipal quarters. A South Side lawyer with a South Side client, Gant would need to figure out how to win a case in the Loop.
Gant’s mentor, R. Eugene Pincham, had told the National Black Law Journal in 1973 that “trying a criminal case is basically a situation of selling a product.” Linda Taylor was a tough product to sell in any courtroom. Gant found her to be a reasonably cooperative client but not a trustworthy or deferential one. Some days she looked and acted like a schoolmarm, others like a central-casting caricature of a flamboyant Louisiana lady of the night. Everything she said and did felt like an act, and not one that would help Gant build a credible defense.
In her public appearances, Taylor did not dress like someone heeding the advice of counsel. On November 27, 1974, the date of her original indictment, she wore a thigh-length leather coat with shearling trim around the sleeves and collar. When a gust of wind threatened to blow off her black hat, she secured it to her head with her right hand, which was encased in a leather glove. A few months later, Taylor dressed for a hearing in a white blouse with a cleavage-baring cutout, a different leather coat with fur-trimmed cuffs and collar, white satin slacks, and a white tam-o’-shanter. In February 1976, Pincham—wearing a black pin-striped three-piece suit—stood beside a client who’d swaddled her body in black fur. Gant had no more luck getting Taylor to adopt a conservative look. During the trial, the Associated Press took note of her “brightly colored mod outfits with sparkling rings and bracelets.” Among those outfits was a blue denim pantsuit, which Taylor had paired with a ginger Afro wig. Her husband, Sherman Ray, sported faux crocodile shoes with little goldfish embedded in the plastic heels—a gift from Taylor. Gant assumed the fish were as fake as the crocodile, but he never got close enough to know for sure.
When Taylor first got indicted, Gant hadn’t yet passed the bar exam. As a law student in the early 1970s,
he’d hounded Pincham in the hallway of the Criminal Courts building, looking for a chance to slip his résumé into the legendary lawyer’s pocket. When that ploy didn’t work, he camped out at Pincham’s office at Eighty-Seventh and South Cottage Grove. He’d sit in the waiting room from 3:30 p.m. until after midnight, one of many young black men hoping that the city’s best black attorney might give him a minute of his time. Pincham eventually rewarded Gant’s persistence, offering him $100 a week to go from courtroom to courtroom, asking for continuances in all the cases Pincham couldn’t fit into his schedule. Gant spent his days as a jurisprudential punching bag, getting held in contempt of court and sometimes even sent to jail. As soon as he got out of his cell, he’d head to a different courtroom to ask for another postponement.
After Gant got his law license in 1975, he found his clients in a four-drawer, stand-up cabinet—the final resting place for small-time gambling and drug cases, and ones in which the defendants owed money the firm hadn’t been able to collect. When Pincham became a circuit court judge in 1976, the Taylor case got shoved into that cabinet. The welfare queen hadn’t been important enough to hand off to one of the other partners at Evins, Pincham, Fowlkes, and Cooper. It would be up to Gant and T. Lee Boyd to win at trial, and to get Taylor to pay her bill.
Gant knew that the evidence against Taylor was overwhelming. There was little doubt that she’d signed up for public aid as both Connie Walker and Linda Bennett, that she’d received checks under both names—under Illinois law, that was considered both “theft by deception” and “exerting unauthorized control” over state money—and that she’d perjured herself on her welfare applications and in front of a Cook County grand jury. Gant’s best hope, then, was to make all that evidence go away. One year and ten continuances after Pincham had first sought to invalidate Jack Sherwin’s search of Taylor’s apartment, Gant called Taylor to the stand. When he asked the defendant to state her name, she didn’t identify herself as Linda Taylor, and she didn’t use any of the other aliases—Connie Walker, Linda Bennett, Sandra Brownlee—that Judge Mark Jones had deemed admissible. On this day, she said her name was Linda Wakefield. She said it again a few seconds later, speaking loudly enough this time that everyone in the room could hear her. Linda Wakefield was the name she’d signed on Patricia Parks’s death certificate.