Jan. 4 | Shocker! I Helped Adam Kidan Defraud Foodtown of Tongue
AS REPUBLICAN superlobbyist Jack Abramoff pleaded guilty to bribing something like a fifth of the United States Senate, I recalled another incident involving petty fraud and my former high schoolmate and later rival, Adam R. Kidan.
Kidan was the first Neoconservative I ever met, even at the tender age of 16. He recently pleaded guilty to fraud charges as part of the same federal investigation that snagged Abramoff, who has turned state's evidence and will now testify against the members of Congress he helped bribe. (As my old boss Joel used to say, "You can't buy a Congressman but you can always rent one.")
Kidan and I attended John Dewey High School together in Brooklyn, NY. I was one year ahead of him, but we were the same age. When I graduated, he succeeded me as editor of Gadfly, the school's official social science journal, giving the magazine a somewhat different political spin than I had.
Last year, I told the story of Kidan's clever plot to steal 10 cents worth of gas from each of 100 to 200 cars he filled up each time he worked as a gas station attendant, later in the night filling his own car for free. He would be paid cash, in advance, for $10 worth of gas by each customer, but only pump $9.90. Nobody would notice, or they would not care, and he would gradually accumulate an entire tank full of fuel for himself. All that mattered was that the cash and the amount of gas sold added up at the end of the night.
Kidan told me about it personally.
Now another memory from that era has surfaced: that of assisting Kidan in obtaining a package of reduced-rate tongue from Foodtown supermarket in Brooklyn. This happened once only. I am not generally given to fraud schemes, though years later, I developed a complex, successful plot to steal my criminology textbook from the bookstore at the University of Buffalo.
In the coldcut scenario in high school, Kidan would occasionally visit me while I was working my shift at the appetizer counter at Foodtown, near where we both lived. At some point, I mentioned to him that once a package of hand-sliced coldcuts was wrapped and marked by the appi counter employee, it was never opened at the register, and therefore nobody had a way of knowing what was inside or whether the price was correct. The appi counter employee, in this case myself, could mark any price he wanted.
It never occurred to me to actually do it; it just seemed interesting, so I mentioned it to him. But then he proposed a scheme.
Bologna cost 99 cents per half pound. Tongue cost about four times that amount. Could I do it? Could I sell him tongue, but charge him for bologna? I agreed.
The next time I worked, he showed up and asked for some tongue. There were no witnesses. It was a quiet afternoon, and for some reason that day I was the only one working the counter. I proceeded to the far right-hand side of the deli case, and removed the tongue from the area of the display refrigerator where obscure delicacies like head cheese and bloodwurst were kept. I sliced the slimy meat on the worn out old machine down at that end of the counter. The thing about this particular product was, people did not buy it so very frequently. I can see now why I didn't find the affair ethically troubling.
Also, there was not very much; when you think of tongue for personal consumption, it's not usually by the ton.
I wrapped it up and weighed it, and entered .99, the price of bologna. Trying to look normal and nonchalant, I wrote the final price in grease crayon on the wax paper package (this was in the days before barcodes). It must have come out to about 50 cents, the price of four ounces of bologna. I handed it to him.
I didn't see him till a couple of days later at school. "How was the tongue?" I asked.
"It gave me indigestion," he said.
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PS, in my earlier article, I said that the Bricklin sportscar owned by Kidan's family was an American made product. Several readers wrote in to correct me that it's a Canadian made car.
http://bricklin.org/
Jan. 3 | Tolkien's Birthday and Some Iraq News
TODAY IS J.R.R. Tolkien's birthday, and also the birthday of Steve Bergstein and my PCB-era girlfriend Hilary, who helped me unravel the most sinister parts of the plot. People born on this day seem to have complex, penetrating minds and some very interesting connections to the past. I'll be back later with a tribute to J.R.R., just for fun -- much later though [note: much later may turn out to be a few days]. I'm needing to break into my work on Parallel Worlds and write a couple of weekly horoscopes [but horoscopes written and annual resumed...]
However, Pod in the UK has sent the article below, on the US withdrawing reconstruction funds from Iraq. This is really twisted because the United States bombed Iraq in 1991 and then between Bush War I and Bush War II (with Clinton in charge, and the UK cooperating) continuously bombed Iraq, killing some 500,000 children from diseases like cholera due to destroyed water infrastructure and other loss of civic services. Does anyone not profiting from it really think this is acceptable? Has anyone seen the Madelyn Albright interview in which she says that half a million Iraqi children was an acceptable price to pay, for what, I am not sure?
There is a Tolkien connection. Dyed-in-the-hemp fans of his work are familiar with The Silmarillion, his history of the world up to the end of the Third Age (when Lord of the Rings takes place). In many respects, The Silmarillion is the story of endless war, and the accounting of how the elves of Middle Earth effectively extinguished themselves based almost entirely on their own hubris, drive for revenge, and greed for power. The few elves we meet in LOTR, such as Galadriel and Elrond, are the ones who have grown old and wise, and have survived the insanity of millennia of war, and were doing their small part to hold the world together.
When will we have had enough? When will you?
White House to withdraw funding for rebuilding Iraq
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article336300.ece
By Andrew Gumbel
The Independent
Published: 03 January 2006
The US government is not planning to continue funding reconstruction projects in Iraq, in what appears to be a major climbdown from the White House's one-time pledge to build the best infrastructure in the region.
According to officials cited in yesterday's Washington Post, the Bush administration will not be adding construction funds to the $18.4bn (£10.7bn) it has allocated since the 2003 invasion.
In future it will be up to other foreign donors and the Iraqi government to do what it can to complete even basic tasks such as supplying reliable electricity and water to the country's 26 million people.
It is a badly kept secret that reconstruction has gone badly. Essential services have been very slow in coming back on line and roughly half the money earmarked for reconstruction has been diverted into the military effort against the insurgency. The newspaper quoted Brigadier General William McCoy, the commander overseeing construction projects, saying the US funding was never meant to be more than a "jump-start ... The US never intended to completely rebuild Iraq," he said.