To paraphrase Pogo: We has met the enemy, and sometimes they is us.

Jack

--
Learn from the mistakes of others. Trust me, you can't live long enough to
make them all yourself. I've tried!!
"Tom Watson" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 27 Feb 2005 20:18:00 GMT, "Edwin Pawlowski"
wrote:


"Tom Watson" wrote in message
.. .
Reprinted from The Philadelphia Inquirer



Nailed by tool thieves

At construction sites, what isn't bolted down often disappears. The
costs to contractors and consumers are substantial.

By Alan J. Heavens

Inquirer Real Estate Writer


Each year, $1 billion worth of tools and building materials are stolen
from construction sites.


Many years ago, when I lived in Philadelphia, we were visiting a friend
who's house was right across from a construction site. As the houses wee
nearing completion, the appliances were stored in one of the basements.
Two
policemen in a wagon decided they needed new dishwasher and loaded them
into
the police wagon. then they got stuck in the mud.

Busted, you may think. No, they called the police tow truck. The driver
came, hooked them up and pulled them out. then they went back in and go
him
a dishwasher too! Nice tip for his help. Did any of the neighbors turn
them
in? Of course not. Where do you think most of them got the materials to
finish their basements?




It hasn't changed.



Posted on Sun, Feb. 27, 2005



He blew the whistle, and paid a heavy price

By Joseph Tanfani and Leonard N. Fleming
Inquirer Staff Writers

John McFarlane Jr. says his father taught him to stand up for himself,
to never steal or tell a lie. He learned the plumbing trade at his
dad's side, too, just as John Sr. had learned it from his father
before him.

But when McFarlane followed in his father's footsteps to become a
Philadelphia plumbing inspector, there were things he had to learn on
his own.

He had joined a fraternity with a tradition of penny-ante corruption
going back generations, in which $10 and $20 "tips" from plumbers were
accepted, even expected. "The green handshake," they called it.

He was taught to take cash in his first day on the job - just after
his ethics training.

McFarlane said no. But plumbers kept jamming bills in his pockets on
the street, mailing him cash in Christmas cards. Pressure came from
other inspectors, he says, even from members of the city plumbing
board.

In 2002, McFarlane testified about the payoffs. In his bland,
matter-of-fact voice, he helped prosecutors convict nine of his
colleagues of extortion; four others pleaded guilty.

In some places, that might make him a hero: the man who stood up and
told the truth. Not in McFarlane's East Falls neighborhood, though.
Not in Philadelphia.

Now, for the first time, he's willing to describe what he went
through.

His windows were broken, his tires flattened, he says. In an East
Falls grocery, he heard someone yell "Rat! Rat!" - and looked around
the floor before he realized the "rat" was him.

Even now, he says, some coworkers shun him. He contends he deserved a
promotion, or at least a commendation.

Worst of all, his own father turned against him. They didn't speak for
two years.

"It's illegal," McFarlane said of the payoffs. "I don't know why my
father didn't understand that."

Little by little, McFarlane's wife got them talking again. But last
fall, his father died of a heart attack, stricken at age 70 while
trying to unload drywall from a truck by himself.

For more than a year, McFarlane turned away reporters, but the dam
broke with his father's death. Angry at what he sees as poor treatment
by the city, haunted by his struggles with his father, he sat in his
dining room last week and, with his parents' portrait behind him,
described the isolation of a whistle-blower in a place where petty
payoffs were a way of life.

It was the first time he has spoken out since he left the witness
stand in 2002. His account is largely corroborated by FBI
investigative reports obtained by The Inquirer.

Sometimes, McFarlane sounds as if he is still arguing with his
father's ghost, still trying to convince him that he did the right
thing.

"I couldn't ever figure him out," McFarlane said. "We were talking. I
don't know if either one of us forgave the other."

Tradition of graft

The 2002 plumber prosecutions are all but forgotten now, overshadowed
by the FBI's bugging of the mayor's office and the subsequent
revelations of officials dealing million-dollar contracts like playing
cards to big campaign donors.

But as that case's marquee trial unfolds and city leaders talk of
cleaning up a rotten municipal culture, McFarlane's story is a
reminder of just how hard that task may be.

The plumber cases revealed a tradition of graft that is embedded under
the city's asphalt streets, in countless pipes and sewer connections
that didn't get inspected because a plumber clipped a $20 bill to a
permit application.

Plumbing jobs big and small were greased at each step: from the
examiners who checked blueprints and the Water Department clerks who
typed the permits to the inspectors who checked the work and the
drillers who used jackhammers to open up the streets. Even supervisors
took cash.

A Plumbing Advisory Board member, plumber John Bee, admitted in 2001
that he had "tipped" inspectors, FBI records show. Bee is still on the
board, which tests plumbers for licensing and interprets the plumbing
code.

In an interview last week, Bee said he didn't recall telling the FBI
he had given money. Questioned in 2001, Bee said he had "paid his
dues" and now only "tipped" rarely; say, if an inspector muddied his
shoes and needed $10 for a cleaning. He said it was like tipping the
mailman.

The acting commissioner of the Department of Licenses and Inspections,
Robert Solvibile, said he is unaware that any plumbing board members
admitted giving cash, and he wants to know more. "It's wrong for
inspectors to take it and wrong for contractors to give it," Solvibile
said.

Bee told the FBI that, one Christmas, he gave $20 each to three city
plans examiners, whose approvals are needed before plumbers can start
jobs. He said one examiner sent the $20 back - John McFarlane Jr.

A change of heart

McFarlane, 46, was a plumber before he was an inspector, and he, too,
gave cash to inspectors - just twice, he says, when he was in his 20s.
He says it made him so nervous that he botched the handoffs, handling
the money in plain sight, and he quit doing it. He says he took
nothing as an inspector.

Ask him why, and McFarlane talks about his father.

He thinks back to when he was 7, the oldest of five kids growing up in
an East Falls rowhouse. His brother had been caught stealing at a
store. His father asked McFarlane if he had done it, too. He said yes
- and was made to scrub the kitchen floor with a toothbrush. "I kept
thinking I was going to have to brush my teeth with it."

McFarlane dropped out of college after a semester and worked on a beer
truck. "You need a trade," his father said. McFarlane passed the
plumber's test and ended up at the same firm as his father. Even then,
they clashed. "He and I used to have fistfights," McFarlane said.

His father became a city inspector, and later, so did McFarlane Jr. He
says he took the city job assuming that payoffs were a bygone thing -
till he and a friend took the inspector's exam. The friend asked what
they would earn. McFarlane said the job paid about $37,000.

No, no, his friend said. "How much do you think we'll make in tips?"

Why now?

When the FBI busted them, inspectors were incredulous: Why now? Cash
had been passed for generations. "Since pipe was invented," former
inspector Richard Zabinski told the FBI.

Inspectors were former plumbers themselves, blue-collar guys who
raised families on $40,000 a year. "Tipping" was part of their world:
Fathers brought sons to the union hall, then taught them how to pass
bills to inspectors so they wouldn't be seen.

Plumbers seemed to like it, too. By "tipping" inspectors, they said,
they could often fill in holes with no inspections and use pipe not
allowed by code. "It pays off to pay off," one plumber told FBI
agents.

Another told them he had tried to "tip" an inspector in Yeadon,
Delaware County - and almost got arrested. "This isn't Philly," the
inspector said.

When hidden FBI cameras caught the city inspectors, they argued that
the cash was harmless "tips" for prompt service; they never approved
substandard work, so it wasn't bribery. Jurors were unmoved.

Back in 1998, on his first day on the job, McFarlane went to ethics
training. Inspectors had to recite the city's policy against taking
gifts. Then he rode the elevator down to his new cubicle and in five
minutes was pulled aside by Zabinski, then his acting boss.

He says Zabinski asked, "Did anyone ever tell you how things work?" -
and proceeded to coach him to leave a desk drawer open and walk away,
so plumbers could drop in tips.

McFarlane thought it might be a test, or a joke. "I thought Allen Funt
was going to pop out at any minute."

Later, he opened up a Christmas card and found cash. He went straight
to Zabinski.

"I went into Rich's office and said, 'Yo, I can't take this. What am I
supposed to do with this?' While I'm saying this, he's opening a card
and shoving money in his pocket."

In FBI documents, more than a dozen plumbers told of regularly tipping
Zabinski and another plans examiner, and Zabinski, in turn, admitted
getting up to $70 weekly in tips as an inspector. He said he stopped
when he became a boss, and never approved bad plumbing.

Zabinski retired in 2001 and was not charged with wrongdoing. He
declined to be interviewed last week.

When McFarlane realized what he had fallen into, he asked his father
why he hadn't warned him.

"He kind of said to me, 'Wake up. Where you been?' "

McFarlane allows that his father accepted a cake or case of beer at
the holidays. Once, he said, to avoid an argument at Thanksgiving, he
took a case of Yuengling Black & Tan from his father that a plumber
had dropped off. McFarlane sent the plumber $20 for the beer.

Other inspectors said his father took cash, but McFarlane Jr. says he
never knew for sure.

"He told me he never asked for anything," McFarlane said. "That was as
far as he would go."

McFarlane got assigned to inspect plumbing jobs in South Philadelphia
with a veteran inspector, Fred Tursi.

Plumbers told the FBI that Tursi sought cash and complained when it
didn't meet his expectations. McFarlane says Tursi introduced himself
to contractors by saying, "Don't you have anything for me?"

Tursi, interviewed Thursday, called McFarlane "a liar" but admitted he
had taken money. He defended his inspection work.

"I don't care if a guy gave me a tip. It was like lunch money," said
Tursi, who along with the other inspectors is appealing his extortion
conviction. "I used to put it right in my wallet... . If I had known
this was a federal crime, I would have never taken a tip. None of us
would have."

'Good guys' and 'zeroes'

Plumbers who paid were known as "good guys," McFarlane says. The rest
were "zeroes," whose work got inspected last. That might mean waiting
by an open hole in a street for hours. "Good guys" could turn in stick
drawings instead of blueprints, or use cheap iron bands to hold up
pipe instead of code-approved connectors.

FBI cameras revealed that many inspections weren't done.

When an inspector vacationed, the man covering his work was supposed
to save him half of the "tips." Once, McFarlane says, Tursi returned
from vacation to find no cash waiting. He got the list of inspections
McFarlane had made in his absence - and began calling plumbers on it.

"Right there in the office," McFarlane remembers. "He says, 'McFarlane
says you didn't leave anything for me.' "

McFarlane had figured the plumbers would be relieved he wasn't picking
their pockets. Instead it made them crazy.

Plumbers he had known for years seemed to think he was holding out for
more.

During the interview, McFarlane pantomimed the ways they tried to
"tip": the friendly arm around the shoulder that ends with a bill
slipped into a chest pocket; the chummy hand on the back that slides
down and jams money into a hip pocket.

A plumber once ran after McFarlane's truck and threw a bill in the
cab. Money would come folded inside a permit, McFarlane says - so for
fun, he would snap it open and watch the cash sail down the street.
"They'd say, 'What are you doing?!' " Plumbing board members,
including Bee, urged him to take money, McFarlane told the FBI.

This week, Bee said: "I don't recall that." He said he had merely
chided McFarlane for working "late at night without pay... . He's not
going to be paid or appreciated for doing that."

The commissioner of L&I at the time, Edward McLaughlin, says he was
having a drink in a taproom when a contractor approached and said,
"You know your plumbing inspectors are taking money?"

McLaughlin, a former police officer, pushed ethics but could not crack
the fraternity. "They were untouchable," he says. "The victim was a
somewhat willing victim... . They laughed at us because they were
drinking at the union hall and they were regulating their buddies."

Soon, McLaughlin was helping FBI agents Kathleen McAfee and Vicki
Humphreys sneak cameras into inspectors' cars.

When the probe surfaced, coworkers wrongly suspected McFarlane was the
original snitch. Court documents show a landlord first told the FBI of
the payoffs back in 1998.

But McFarlane had been confiding to an L&I deputy about payoffs, and
one day that deputy took him to see the FBI.

McFarlane was relieved. "At that point I wanted to get it all out in
the open."

His problems were just beginning.

McFarlane says a coworker took to stopping by his office to say that
if the probe cost him his pension, he'd hunt down the snitch and blow
him away.

Once, Tursi told him in the middle of the office: "Even your own dad
thinks you're an a-." McFarlane almost slugged him.

He couldn't bring himself to tell his father he had been to the FBI.
He was drinking heavily. One day he got a pretty good load on and
called his father, but couldn't get the words out. "I did tell him not
to form any alliances with these guys," McFarlane said.

After one all-night drinking session, McFarlane blew off work and at
6:30 a.m. stumbled to his parents' house, a block and a half from his
own.

He told his mother he had talked to the FBI. Scared that his father
could be in trouble, he begged her to get him to cooperate, too. They
cried.

The next day at work, his father stopped by his cubicle. There were no
tears. He said that "if the feds wanted him, they can come and get
him," McFarlane recalled. "But as far as he was concerned, he didn't
know s-."

For a time, McFarlane was the only inspector working. The rest had
been arrested or, like his father, allowed to retire.

No happy endings

In the end, no one walked away happy. After the "rat" episode in East
Falls, McFarlane moved with his wife to a house with a white picket
fence in the Northeast. Now, he says, some coworkers won't be seen
talking to him, and since his promotion fell through, he worries that
he can't pay the mortgage.

His bosses insist he's respected. L&I's Solvibile says the promotion
was never promised and that it went to a candidate who scored first on
the test; McFarlane scored second.

"My impression is he did what he did because he felt it was right,"
Solvibile said. "I admire him for having the courage to go against his
father."

Solvibile said he has tried for months to get raises for McFarlane and
other plans examiners. He says the city wanted to honor him but
McFarlane declined.

L&I officials say there's no practical way to know if "tips" led to
shoddy work below the streets. They have faith in the plumbers'
professionalism.

Has the inspectors' unit been cleaned up?

"I hope to God it has," Solvibile said.

McFarlane isn't sure. Recently, he was training a new inspector when
the new man asked about accepting cash: "Isn't it human nature to take
something that's given to you?"

Now, with his father gone, McFarlane sits in his new house and keeps
trying to unravel that tangled legacy, to reconcile the generous man
who taught him not to lie with the man who froze him out when he told
the truth.

McFarlane even asked the FBI's Humphreys what the agents had learned
about his old man. She didn't have much to say.

"She said, 'John, your dad was a good guy.' "



Thomas J. Watson - WoodDorker

tjwatson1ATcomcastDOTnet (real email)
http://home.comcast.net/~tjwatson1 (webpage)