My father was a very honest man. Absolutely, utterly honest. Once, he found a wallet in the street with a few hundred dollars in it. He took it home, looked up the number of the person it belonged to and arranged to return it to them…with every buck still in it. He did things like that all the time. All the time.
In his role as an officer for the Internal Revenue Service, he was occasionally — very occasionally — offered bribes. The offerers of those bribes were foolish to try this. My father was not the kind of guy to go along with something like that…and even if he had been, there was very little he could do to "help" the offerer. He didn't have the power to tear up your tax bill or waive penalties or anything. About all he could do was to try extra-hard to not have his supervisors be too rough on you…and he did that anyway for most people.
There were, he heard, other I.R.S. agents who occasionally took bribes anyway. They'd grab the cash or, more often, some item of considerable value and tell the briber, "No promises but I'll see what I can do." And then they wouldn't do anything because, at least for those at or around my father's level in the operation, they couldn't do anything.
Once, a fellow who owed the Internal Revenue a few hundred thousand bucks offered my father a new car. It was not stated overtly as a quid pro quo. My father didn't have to do anything to get this new car but accept. Then, if he wanted to, (ahem!) he could maybe do whatever seemed appropriate to aid the fellow with his tax dilemma. Nudge, nudge.
My father said no. Even if there were no strings attached, he could not and would not accept anything of value from someone he had a case against. When the man tried to force the gift on him, my father reported it to his superiors and they took the appropriate action. This kind of thing happened three or four times in his career with the I.R.S. and he was not unique. No one in his office had ever been accused of accepting a bribe. Until one day, he was.
It came out of nowhere. He'd had a case against some guy who'd swindled the government out of millions. My father took it as far as he could, then it was reassigned to lawyers (my father was not a lawyer) higher-up in the I.R.S. to handle. At some point, the deadbeat began throwing out allegations that several I.R.S. agents, my father among them, had accepted large sums of cash or merchandise. I guess the premise here was that he'd drag the department through the mud until they agreed to drop the charges against him…or something.
My father was shocked, angered and even a bit worried. He knew he'd done no such thing but until it could be verified, he didn't sleep too well.
Vindication took about two months. A special investigator was appointed and he went through all my father's finances — checking account, bank account, etc. It was a much more thorough audit than the I.R.S. ever performed on a civilian and it even extended to me. To make sure that no bribe money had been paid to him via his spouse or son, they had us turn over all of our records, as well. A forensic accountant (I think that's what he called himself) at an outside agency received the data, then phoned me up several times to ask questions like, "What was this $300 you earned the first week of August for?" I told him in that instance, "That was for an issue I wrote of the Daffy Duck comic book." He was amused by my sources of income but it all checked out.
All of the accused Internal Revenue employees were cleared and their accuser wound up doing hard time. The matter was over but my father had a hard time letting it be over.
A few weeks later, he was talking about having some work done on his car and he said, "Guess I'll have to postpone it until I have the dough." Making a joke I immediately wished I could take back, I said, "Hey, why don't you use some of that bribe money you have stashed away?" He gave me a look that clearly indicated he didn't find that funny. I apologized and never made reference to it again.
But he'd bring the matter up every so often. He had been totally cleared but somehow, that wasn't enough. I think he wanted the investigators to do more than say, "There is no evidence that Bernard Evanier ever accepted cash or any item of value from his accuser." He wanted them to issue a statement that said something like, "Not only didn't Bernie Evanier take a bribe but our investigation has determined he is the most honest I.R.S. agent ever and anyone who thinks he'd do something like that is out of their friggin' mind!" I'm not sure even that would have gotten him to stop talking about it.
I don't mean he spoke of it all the time but it had a way of coming up, even after he retired from the agency. He'd be discussing the Lakers and what a lousy season they were having and suddenly, out of nowhere, he'd make some odd connection like, "People keep accusing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar of not doing more on defense. That's as ridiculous as that guy accusing me of taking a bribe."
My father's best friend in that I.R.S. office was a fellow named Howard…a real nice man, I thought. They had lunch almost every day when my father worked in the office and they switched to every Wednesday after he retired. Howard, who still worked there, would come by and pick him up and off they'd go to some deli or sometimes for Chinese. Howard would report on the latest doings in the office and my father would mutter something about that crook who'd accused several of them. Howard, who had not been among those accused, would tell him to drop it, forget it, get over it. This went on through years and years of Wednesday lunches.
Then one Wednesday, Howard didn't show up for their usual date: No Howard. No call. No nothing. I had moved out of the family home by then but I happened to be there visiting. I asked him, "Are you sure he didn't tell you he had to skip this week for some reason?"
"No, no," my father said. "Last Wednesday when he dropped me off, I distinctly remember him saying, 'See you next week!'" I suggested he call the office and he did. He called and reached a secretary there he knew very well, then asked if Howard had come into work that morning.
"Didn't he tell you?" she asked. "Didn't anyone tell you?"
"Tell me what?"
She said, "Howard was fired after he was convicted last year of taking a bribe. We heard he surrendered on Monday and began serving his prison sentence."
"Stunned" does not begin to describe my father's reaction. He practically went into a sensory coma. Howard had been indicted almost two years before and placed on suspension. He'd been through a trial where he was found guilty, then been through a few unsuccessful appeals before giving up and telling people, "Yeah, I did it."
For the last few months, he'd been well aware of the date when he would be tossed in the slammer for two-to-five years. And still, every Wednesday, he came by, took my father to lunch and told him what was up with the folks at the office where he actually hadn't worked in over a year. Not a word about being on trial, being convicted, being sentenced to prison…any of it. They just sat at Nate n' Al's Delicatessen and talked about the Lakers.
We found out Howard was doing his stretch in the California Institute for Men in Chino. That's about an hour's drive east of Los Angeles. I told my father that if he wanted to go visit Howard, I'd drive him out there some day, maybe even a Wednesday. He thought about it for a second and then said, "No…I'm not sure I could look him in the face. And with my luck, he's probably sharing a cell with that prick who accused me of taking a bribe!"