Nabbing crooks in a bureaucratic maze
Commentary by PAT MURPHY
It isn’t meant to be this way, but a criminal’s best friend
sometimes can be layers of bureaucracy and turf boundaries in the criminal justice system.
Consider a scam worked through the U.S. Postal System—and that
targeted me twice this year.
Postmarked in the Northern California community of San Leandro,
I’ve received a "bill" from Reader’s Digest. As a Digest subscriber of
well over 30 years, I spotted these as phonies.
They’re nothing more than inexpensive forms with the Digest’s
name, renewal rates, payment address and contrived account numbers. It could’ve been
filled out with any magazine name. The outrageously high renewal rates were another
tip-off to a scam.
So, good citizen I am, I asked the Ketchum post office for the phone
number of the Postal Inspector. The toll-free number turned out to be a general number for
the U.S. Postal Service, whereupon I was given another number (not toll-free) in New
Jersey, where in turn I was given a regional postal inspector number (not toll-free) in
Chicago.
There, a mechanical voice instructed me to leave my name and address
and I’d be sent a form to fill out with my complaint.
Jeepers!
By the time I received a complaint form, mailed it back to Chicago and
someone checked out the payment address, the cons would’ve sacked all their sucker
payments and skipped.
Since the return address on the "bill" was in Denver, and
appeared to be a private mailbox in a strip mall shipping store, I phoned the FBI office
in Denver in desperation, wondering if maybe someone ought to put a surveillance on the
mailbox and make an arrest before the scam artists made off with an armload of payments by
careless Reader’s Digest subscribers.
"That’s not our jurisdiction," an FBI agent told me.
Fast forward to last week.
Another "bill" arrived in the mail—the same California
postmark, but the return address to a private mailbox at a Phoenix strip mall with which
I’m familiar. Undeterred by earlier futility, I mailed the "bill" to the
Phoenix FBI office, hoping someone there would rustle the Postal Inspector in Phoenix into
action without having to deal with answering machines.
Sure, the criminal justice system is overloaded with work for police,
prosecutors, courts, prisons.
But it seems obvious that the way to avoid expensive after-the-crime
investigations is to nab suspects in the act—whether a bank robbery in progress or
con artists using the mails to defraud with phony magazine bills, especially in small
communities where people may be more vulnerable.
When citizens who want to aid law enforcement are discouraged by
bureaucratic obstacles, and mysterious jurisdictional boundaries, they’re apt to turn
a blind eye to criminal activity in the future.
The Postal Service prides itself in its new age of efficiency. Now it
needs to bring Postal Inspection into the same new age of service to come down quicker on
mail scams.
Pat Murphy is the retired publisher of the Arizona Republic and a
former radio commentator.
