Through Slush & Mire

There had always been a few chiselers in the army of 1,500 clerks, handlers, and carriers milling around each night in Boston's South Postal Annex. With all the frantic bustle of sorting and dispatching the daily mail, no one would ever miss the man who slipped out for a few beers or a movie. Before long the word got around Boston's pool halls and political clubs that the long, grimy building down by South Station offered splendid opportunities for anyone with the urge to cheat the Government out of a paycheck.

Soon the racket began to snowball. Loyal young Democrats flocked in to see their politician pals, went away with notes assuring them of a spot on the Annex's roster of 3,000 temporary workers. All they had to do was punch in at 5:30 p.m., while away the evening hours and return to punch out again at 2 a.m. If anyone squawked, the whispered threat of a politician's name would fix it up.

Everyone wanted to get in on the deal.

Some of Boston's underpaid firemen, policemen, and schoolteachers arranged to have post-office time cards punched for them. One man stayed away for 75 days and collected every nickel of his pay. Others came in snarling drunk. Regular employees began goofing off worse than ever, formed "50-50 Clubs" with the "temps," to cover up and split their $1.42 hourly pay. During the two-week Christmas rush, a smart checker could make as much as $5,000 by forgetting to mark down the absentees.

Oddly enough, news of the wholesale frauds never got beyond the locker rooms until last December, when a group of indignant workers quietly laid the whole thing before postal authorities. Fortnight ago, Boston's Chief Post Office Inspector Tennyson Jefferson and 42 inspectors swooped down on the annex. Though they had picked a bad night (business was slack because of the railroad strike), they found 28 time cards punched for men who never showed up, and enough evidence to convince them that the Government had been bilked out of between $4 and $5,000,000 in the last four years.

Last week the housecleaning was still going on full blast, but the inspectors would have their hands full convicting the goldbricks and getting the money back. No one was telling on his friends. The politicos could be counted on to look after their own. And most of the "temps" seemed to agree with the worker who said: "The Government is sending ECA money to England--why shouldn't they take care of us?"

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