Chasing Pigeons

In Philadelphia, civic corruption is like the pigeons that swarm in City Hall courtyard. Both are nourishing, messy and endemic. Now & then someone gets exasperated, picks up a big stick and chases them. After a great clatter of wings, everything settles down again--the pigeons in the courtyard, the rascals in the hall.

In the seven years of grater-voiced Bernard Samuel's regime as mayor, things have been quiet. There were mutterings but no major scandals. Then last fall city employees raised a clamor for a wage boost.

In a deft gesture at passing the buck, the mayor and the city council set up a Committee of Fifteen (five councilmen, ten citizens) to look into the matter. Last March, the committee recommended a $5,000,000 increase, insisted that the money could be raised by more strenuous efforts to collect taxes and a more efficient municipal operation generally.

Then the committee discovered that one way, apparently, to collect taxes better was to keep city employees from stealing them. As committee investigators delved deeper & deeper, one William C. Foss, who headed the amusement tax division in the office of the Receiver of Taxes, hanged himself in the basement of his home. In addition to a tin box containing $16,400 in cash and Government bonds, there was unearthed a note headed succinctly: "How the shortage in the amusement tax office was divided." In it Foss named six of his fellow employees and an outsider.

The six were suspended; one was held for the grand jury. A day later one of the six dropped dead of a heart attack. In eight years, it was estimated, the boys had made off with anywhere from $250,000 to $2,000,000.

It looked last week as though the committee had found more evidence of graft. An inspector in the Department of Supplies & Purchases was accused of having collected some $16,000 on faked bills. Inspectors in the fire marshal's office were charged with shaking down householders and businessmen, charging them $5 to $10 for permission to install extra fuel tanks.

At week's end, the city council voted $100,000 to audit all municipal funds.

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