Jail Time
“To tell you the truth,” I said, “I’m sick of thinking about it. You have guys in California who got sentenced to federal time for stealing a slice of pizza under the three strikes law. McGowan plays fast and loose with a million or so, and goes home in under two months?” My friend couldn’t believe I didn’t want to rant about it. I tried to change the subject. “Crime and punishment in this country is outrageous. Did you know you could be charged with felony shoplifting for stealing $150 worth of clothes from a store?” No surprise there, my friend said. So what? “So what? I’ll tell you so what. There are big retail chains that won’t even bother to press charges unless they can catch you in the act! Some of these places may as well just hang up signs that say ‘clothes FOR STEAL’. My friend wanted to know what all this had to do with McGowan. “Not a damn thing! I’m trying to change the subject. Using that guy’s example, I am convinced that the way to get away with ANYTHING in this country is to do it while wearing a suit and tie.” It’s true. Ever see that Christopher “Batman Begins” Nolan movie called “Following”? It features a very suave suit-and-tie guy who gets away with everything he tries to pull. He is caught in one scene having broken in to a couple’s apartment. When the surprised owner confronts him, he simply says, “Are you from the real estate office? I showed up early, sorry.” Or some such. The bottom line is that he gets away with it. Nixon wore a suit and tie, and got away with his brand of nonsense by resigning. Ken Lay managed to get himself into a whole heap of trouble; it’s true, in spite of the suit. Now he’s dead and the whole point is moot. Now that I think about it, Dillinger was probably wearing a suit and tie when he got wiped out by the cops outside that Chicago movie theatre. Maybe my theory has a few holes in it. By the time I got done explaining it all to my friend, there were big laughs coming from the other end of the phone. “Pal, you’re nuts. It doesn’t have anything to do with what you wear. All you need to do to commit the perfect crime is work alone.” What did my friend mean? I couldn’t figure it out. “Think about it. If you tell anybody else, or enlist their help, you have somebody that can rat you out to the cops. If you want to get away with it, you gotta get yourself into a position where you can be trusted with big sums of money or access to valuable materials and info, then just clean ‘em out one night after the cleaning woman goes home.” I asked my friend just how one goes about being so knowledgeable about committing crimes. “I read Sherlock Holmes stories. Have done for years. If McGowan had been a bit more of an avid reader, he might have gotten away with all that nonsense a lot longer than he did. You know what his problem was, man?” At this point, I had no clue, and didn’t even care, but I was sure I was going to get an earful anyway. “McGowan’s mistake was hanging around after he got his hands dirty. He should have gotten a big chunk of money, then sped off to Mexico, Iceland, Pago Pago, wherever. By getting crooked and sticking around, he deserved to get caught!” I told my friend it sounded pretty half-baked. Was my pal sure they had all the facts about this case? Didn’t sound like it. But it doesn’t really matter, now. The whole thing is over and done with. Well, except for the more than four hundred hours of community service McGowan is supposed to do as part of his sentence. If you ask me, it would be poetic justice if McGowan had to work in a Welfare office. My friend scoffed at that. “These old bozos never learn. They just mouth a bunch of platitudes about having learned their lesson, then they hook up with the Rotary Club somewhere and start figuring out ways to start the scams all over again. I bet he becomes a landlord in the end.” By that stage in the conversation, I had all I could take. I hung up, went to bed, and had bad dreams about living in an apartment with McGowan as the maintenance guy. The drains emptied into the street, and the fuse box caught fire when I turned on the TV and the air conditioner at the same time. I woke up thinking that the worst part of it all is that whoever replaces McGowan could actually be WORSE. I was thinking of the dream, of course, but after my morning coffee, I realized that the same could go for the Town Supervisor slot. It would be easy for McGowan’s replacement to fail the test of time and go right for the graft. I’m not suggesting that is any kind of reality, but the possibility is certainly there. After all, there had to be a reason McGowan was tempted, now, doesn’t there? Was he just the bad apple? Or were conditions ripe for ANYBODY to get sucked in? I guess we’ll have to give it a couple of years and see. Joe Wallace E-mail This Page | Follow Us | Return to My Column You can Bookmark & Share this article by clicking here:
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The phone rang, late Thursday night. It was one of my political gossip-hound friends, calling to dish about the impending release of former Islip Town Supervisor Pete McGowan’s pending release from jail. McGowan pleaded guilty to three felonies connected to his, ahem, use of a million-dollar campaign fund. I’d given McGowan plenty of raspberries in my LI Exchange column, so naturally my friend thought I’d be eager to go on a rant about McGowan’s puny 56-day jail term. 
