by Evan Dara
These facts carry weight, and Scapes indicated that he knew, and was impressed by, them. Ultimately, though, he was more greatly moved by another concern. “We have to conserve water,” he said in a newspaper interview. “Common sense tells us that first, and that last. The world is simply running out – locally, globally, every which way – and, for me, that has become the priority. And by far the best way to promote the conservation of water, while remaining sensitive to folks’ needs, is to bring economic incentives to the process. It’s urgent that we use water more efficiently, so we need pressures to increase the perceived value of water – which means, there’s no getting around it, to push the price up. It sure is hard for me to say it, but it happens to be the case.”
In short order, Scapes started to live his switch. He launched a committee to promote adding a proposition to fund water privatization to the 2004 Chicago ballot, with first-year government outlays set at one-point-eight billion dollars. In an Op-Ed piece he published in the Chicago Sun-Times, he held that water privatization “serves the cause of” national security. At a pro-privatization rally, sponsored by Vechten and held in front of a sculpted granite panel about water supply that adorns Chicago City Hall, the opposition’s heckling turned aggressive, which led to Ezra Taylor’s leg injury. Scapes even campaigned – publicly, and successfully – for Vechten to convert its office buildings to new, “flushless” urinals, which use rushing air to do their business.
It was a startling turnabout. “Once again, the guy’s gone off the deep end,” wrote Michael Snade, a veteran Chicago social journalist. Perhaps inevitably, some of Scapes’ friends worried that he had been bought. “Yes, I am earning a salary that is commensurate with my responsibilities at Vechten,” he told The Tribune last February. “No shame in that. And no way that’s going to change me one bit.” Some remained unconvinced.
*
rasmus once wrote that the opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference. Passion is passion, no matter if a positive or a negative sign stands before it. Robert Scapes was seen, by many observers, as a passionate man who flipped polarities; it’s known to happen. Such observers may have had this view reinforced in March, when a standard VHS videocassette, bearing a label carrying the Vechten logo, turned up on a sound technician’s desk at WBBM. The videocassette turned out to show a series of eight, discontinuous, window-lit scenes of Vechten employee Robert Scapes, in a still-unidentified hotel room, handing short stacks of cash to city officials, all of whom would be directly or indirectly involved with decision-making about the privatization of Chicago’s water systems, or with determining which concerns would be awarded any contracts generated by such plans.
Even before the program’s opening credits, to an oracular voiceover, a montage culled from the hotel scenes led BBM’s 6 PM news that night. By the next day, there were leased segments on the other networks, and headlines everywhere. Outrage flared; accusations flew; editorialists flung ink; armored denials marched to battle from behind bouquets of microphones, and from underneath embossed letterheads.
In a matter of days, Scapes had surrendered himself to Cook County sheriffs, and was taken, in handcuffs, from his two-story North Lawndale home to the Department of Corrections. In a preliminary hearing, Scapes, standing beside his two lawyers, pleaded no contest – the evidence was pretty persuasive. He was swiftly sentenced to eight years in prison, for asserting undue influence over elected officials, influence peddling, deleterious manipulation of the public good, and other, lesser, infractions. According to court documents, the total amount of money dispensed by Scapes was estimated at twenty-two thousand eight hundred dollars.
Perhaps predictably, Chicago’s answer to a “clean hands” campaign lurched into being. Four city-government divisions launched four separate internal inquiries, and more than a dozen career politicians were either dismissed or placed under an unusual restraining order, known juridically as “close probation,” that is peculiar to Chicago. Probes, barbed words, and a massive civil suit were aimed at Vechten, and ten members of top management were called in to City Hall for questioning and, later, interrogation under oath. All this, and more, happened within three weeks of the Scapes videotape’s initial broadcast, and a clutch of politicians, as well as Chicago’s suddenly visible district attorney, promised more – much more – to come.
All along, headlines were plentiful; the two leading Chicago dailies reported circulation spikes of about eight percent during the controversy. Still, none of the headlines could rival in size those seen on April 11, when forensic studies, conducted by the investigative wing of the Chicago Police Department, revealed that the “ScapesGate” videotape – as, inescapably, it was by then known – had been made on Scapes’ own camera.
*
enton R. Shaugnessy, universally known as Mickey, is Vechten’s chief spokesman for corporate affairs. A linebacker-dimensioned man with wavy, brilliantined hair and a ready, face-reframing grin, he immediately falls somber when the subject turns to Robert Scapes. “From the first moment, unconditionally, Vechten declared that it had nothing whatsoever to do with those tapes,” Shaugnessy told a reporter. “We immediately pledged total transparency – an offer that was eagerly accepted by the CPD – and they found no paper trail of any kind, no traces of any discussions, no records of any payments made. After a few months, the office of the district attorney even sent us a note to commend us for our compliance with their efforts.”
Scapes said otherwise. Speaking through his attorneys, Scapes maintained that he was only implementing company policy, and now was being targeted as the fall guy. He said his videocamera had been used in place of another camera that had broken down, and that he believed “that this was all part of a larger plan.” “If you stop one second and think about the corporation’s interests,” he contended, “the tapes were clearly made as an insurance policy.” He called Vechten’s behavior “shameful.” In contrast, Vechten called Scapes’ behavior oral defamation, and announced that it would move forward “vigorously” to seek legal redress. Doubts were raised as to Vechten’s ability to file suit against an employee for actions taken on its behalf – one rake commented that, even for a corporation, it’s unbecoming to sue yourself – but, ultimately, no papers were served. On April 24, Scapes announced, at a press conference held in Dining Hall 2 at the Department of Corrections, that Vechten had played no part in the affair. Rather, Scapes said, he had bribed eight Chicago city officials on his own, using his own money, and that he accepted all responsibility for his actions and for their consequences.
Vechten countered with an almost audible sigh of relief, then, after it had regained breath, used it to announce that the company was considering legal action against Scapes anyway – for false representation, prejudicial business practices, and more. Scapes replied, again through his attorneys, that “at no time and in no way” had he indicated “to anyone” that he was making the payments on behalf of Vechten. “Never mentioned their name once,” he said. “Nothing I said implicated the company, and everything I said was on the level.”
It was, in short, a mishmash, and a confusing one. Even Vechten’s legal team seemed glad for the time it would take to prepare a response.
*
isery may love company, but not as much, it seems, as does controversy. In the days that followed, the Scapes affair attracted a plethora of opinions and explanations. A leading school held that Scapes had been working, covertly, for some other firm, one also in the running for the water contract. Another camp claimed that, after the ruse blew, Scapes was paid off by Vechten itself, to keep the company clean.
Neither position was correct. Scapes, as it turns out, was a free agent, working, he said, for his original goal. “All this nonsense was just done for show,” Scapes recently told a reporter. A small, wiry man with bright brown eyes almost permanently shadowed by a pensive brow, Scapes moves with the sinewy fluidity of a goalie, but showed no self-consciousness about wearing a prison’s loose, collarless,
greenish-grays. “It was unfortunate, but it was necessary,” he continued, speaking from the visitor’s gallery in the Department of Corrections. “I had to do something to move the position along. And I gotta tell you, it worked. Nobody, but nobody’s talking about giving our water to some corporation no more.”
Indeed, water privatization is now, in Chicago, an untouchable issue. But should this be so? Should the actions of one man, however extravagant, influence policy decisions? Should civic responsibility be decided in the court of public opinion? Does supply and demand best determine value in the marketplace of ideas?
These are questions that Scapes actively contemplates. “It’s kind of interesting,” he said. “When I was publicly against private water, the papers, and the TV, and Vechten – all that troupe – they just thought of me as a know-nothing whose opinion had no weight at all. Just zero. But when I – again, publicly – started playing on the home team, well, all of a sudden every word I said counted. Suddenly, I was an expert! For months they tried to deny me, to deprive me a platform – to pooh-pooh me. Then, quick as a flash, they were promoting me every way they could.”
There was also a change in Scapes’ sense of support. “With a few very, very nice exceptions, it was pulling teeth to get folks to help out against the water plan,” he said. “But the for-guys were all over me when I made my first approaches. Bought me lunch, and offered me tickets to ballgames, and got me this nice little gold bracelet. You’d think I was bringing them salvation or something.”
Ironically, Scapes said, Vechten directly underwrote the bribery, although the company wasn’t aware of its contributions. “Every cent I earned from Vechten was put into the greasing fund,” he said. “I didn’t want one penny of that, and I even chipped in part of my retirement set-aside, too.” Scapes said he waited only a matter of weeks before starting to sound out prospects. The response, he said, was both surprising and predictable. “Many refused; many accepted,” Scapes said. “That’s your human factor. And that’s exactly what we got to protect against. It was amazing how little it took. Some guys were willing to bend if I handed them two hundred dollars. Who knows what they’d agree to for real cash?”
Among legal scholars who have weighed in on the case, one set of questions predominates: What, precisely, is Robert Scapes guilty of? Is a bribe a bribe if the supposed recipient of the bribe’s benefits is not involved with what is being done, and, moreover, if its bag man does not stand to benefit? Is a bribe a bribe if the payment’s fundamental purpose is to bring about the opposite of what a good bribe should? And by making and leaking the tapes, Scapes only incriminated himself, at the same time as he ferreted out, perhaps, a few of the weaker links in the governmental chain of command.
Scapes has another take on his actions. “Whatever way you look at it, I was no more, and no less, than an individual making donations to a cause he supports,” Scapes said. “And, as such, if I read the papers correctly, what I did is a protected form of political speech.” In his prison greens, he looked across the visitor’s room, then across the table. “It was like I was a lobbyist,” he said. “Lobbying for the special interest known as the truth.”
*
erhaps understandably, many people, in Chicago, and elsewhere, do not buy what Scapes is now saying. With his second drastic turnaround, they see a man trying to save not Chicago’s water, but his own skin. Appeals are forthcoming; judges will again decide; altruism, however misguided, can’t hurt. But Scapes is sticking to his guns. “I don’t care what the other rulings say or don’t say,” he said. “Private water is off the map.”
David P. Leigh, a teacher of Social Studies in a north Chicago middle school, and a friend of Scapes’ since childhood, said that he spent an evening with Scapes soon after he had gone on the Vechten payroll. “Of course we spoke about his change of heart – I asked him about it right when I handed him his first beer,” Lee remarked. “He was very convincing that he had come to believe that conservation must come first. Yes, I was surprised, but the decision was also consistent with what I’ve known about the guy for decades. I closed the door after him that night with absolutely no doubt. And that was four beers later.”
Other explanations point to private matters. A few friends, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Scapes had been disappointed by not receiving a much-coveted promotion at work (at the fire fighter’s union) and that his behavior, thereafter, had grown “erratic.” There was talk of a nephew in North Carolina who needed expensive orthopedic surgery. One colleague said that Scapes had been upset by the loss of his half-sister, a diabetic who, last summer, fainted after not taking sufficient fluids, then was killed by a hit-and-run driver; maybe more readily available water would have saved her. Another colleague, Elyzabeth Sarloff, was more blunt. “He was always a hothead, and was always looking for attention,” she said. “Put the two of them together and you got what you got. I mean, for me, it’s just unbelievable what some people’ll do to clear their name.” Sarloff also said that she believes that Scapes, at one point, had political ambitions.
For the moment, though, whatever plans, political or otherwise, that Scapes may have are necessarily on hold. He said he has no regrets. “All this, for me, was easy as pie,” he said. “Someone said, I think it was that Mencken guy, that if you passively accept what the world wants to give you, then you deserve all the abuse that the world’s inevitably gonna dump on your head. I tell you I don’t care if I’m in here, because if Chicago’s water was privatized, I’d feel like it’s a prison outside. That world would no longer be mine.”
Scapes was feeling expansive. “If you want to, you can think of me as an economic kamikaze,” he said, smiling. “I could live with that. What I could not live with is the monstrousness, just letting it stand. I’m at peace with my moneywrenching, and I haven’t taken out no patents on it. I’ve also proved that people, and even corporations, acknowledge that some things are just so important that they must be kept under public control. Take me, for example. The government is controlling, and paying for, every single aspect of my living – my room, my board, my energy needs, my clothes. And remember, the human body is sixty-five percent water.”
*
ate on a recent Thursday afternoon, Ezra Taylor pulled his right leg, heavy and stiff and wrapped in napped plaster, down from his streetside table. It had been a long day, with few passersby, and, beyond that, he had run out of sunscreen. Taylor was wearing a hat, a floppy, broad-brimmed thing, but he was concerned that the tops of his toes had gotten burnt. He started to talk to a visitor about the red and the sting, then, suddenly, was talking about something else. “He had to hurt me, you know,” Taylor said. “It was all part of the cover story. Part of the plan.” He looked away.
“Learned me something, though,” Taylor continued, still facing the building. “So now, you see, I can return the favor. You know, give back. Complete the circle.”
In light of all that had come before, this seemed a considerable leap of faith. Did Taylor have full confidence in what he was saying? “Wrong question,” he said.
—9 August, 2002
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