Part 3 — The Bonded Officer
The false floor lifted like a lid, and Ken Stroud shined his flashlight into the bottom of the cabinet.
In a gallon freezer bag lay a green spiral notebook and a thick bank envelope held with a rubber band.
Pete rolled his oxygen cart so close to the drawer that the tube brushed my elbow. “Open it, Dewitt,” he said, wheezing. “Please.”
I peeled the bag open and handed the notebook to Ken. He read the first page and looked at Gordon over the top of his glasses.
It was a private ledger, in Gordons own handwriting. Every date, every withdrawal, every dollar. Fifty-eight thousand, in forty-one entries, with a column for “paid back” that held only zeros.
The bank envelope held twenty-one thousand three hundred and fifty dollars in cash, untouched. Gordon had not spent it. He had been too afraid to carry it back.
A man who bribed a welder with a six-pack to build him a false floor had in the end built a drawer that told on him in his own words.
Gordon sat down in the chair beside the cabinet. He no longer argued. He said that he had started with a hundred dollars for a car repair, and it had never felt like stealing until the day it was too big to put back.
Nobody shouted. Forty-one men looked at him, and what they felt was closer to grief.
Ken called the union international office that afternoon. The Department of Labor, which oversees union finances, would conduct an audit, as the law requires. And because every union officer who handles money must be bonded, the bonding company would cover the rest of the missing amount once the claim was filed.
In April, the local received a check from the bonding company for the balance, thirty-six thousand six hundred and fifty dollars. Together with the cash from the drawer, it made the fund whole.
Gordon resigned that Thursday and cooperated fully. He agreed to a repayment plan to the bond company and entered a gambling program in Indianapolis. Ken wrote a letter to the judge asking for leniency, and forty members signed it.
Pete received his three thousand four hundred dollars in a sealed envelope marked “Funeral,” and he cried in the middle of the hall.
The supplement came back at two hundred twelve dollars a month. The Christmas hams were ordered in October, forty-one of them.
On the first Saturday of the new year, Pete brought a dozen glazed donuts. He set the sprinkle one aside for Mr. Haynes, who mopped the floor.