Essential English
Page 22
Hertz Frankel, an Hasidic Rabbi, was very busy as the devoted principal of Beth Rachel, his girls’ school in Williamsburg.
He was responsible for 4,000 students and their teachers, and also for hiring and overseeing 30 security guards for the school vacation camp and another 51 paraprofessionals. He was so conscientious about these extra staff that he delivered their signed time sheets to the district office himself, picked up the checks, and distributed them himself – for twenty years.
But in all those years there never was a vacation camp.
And there never were jobs for paraprofessionals or security guards. The fake workers –Hasidic housewives and Beth Rachel teachers – were paid salaries from $5,000 to $144,000 a year, but gave the money straight back to Rabbi Frankel. And he, in turn, spent it on Beth Rachel.
Rabbi Frankel, 68, and his ‘no-shows’ were all part of a conspiracy that siphoned off $6 million of public money – $4.3 million in salaries and $1.9 million in medical benefits. But they could not have managed the scam without the help of two District 14 Superintendents, William Rogers and Mario DeStefano, both now deceased. They believed that helping Rabbi Frankel would keep them sweet with three Satmar Hasidic members on the nine-member district board. So they certified the fake employees, even taking them to the central board office for fingerprinting formalities.
The two-decade scam was exposed after a two-year joint investigation by Special Schools Investigator Ed Stancik and the U.S. attorney’s office. On Friday, Frankel, pleading guilty to a felony charge to commit mail fraud, was given three years’ probation and ordered to repay $1 million.
Stancik, calling it ‘a conspiracy of staggering proportions,’ said none of the people involved ever set foot in a public school. About half the cash was still missing. Frankel said the money went to legitimate, secular remedial programs at Beth Rachel and he was unaware of ‘anything illegal’. ‘At no time did I personally make a single penny from this arrangement.’
Beth Rachel has returned $1 million and Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew said he would press for more. He would discipline any staff involved.
Yesterday Stancik demanded that Crew dismiss Acting Superintendent John Musico, whom he accused of destroying evidence. Musico did not return calls.
Hertz Frankel, a prominent Hasidic Rabbi, cared deeply about religious teaching at the Beth Rachel Jewish Girls’ School in Williamsburg where he was principal. William Rogers and Mario DeStefano cared deeply about keeping their jobs as District 14 Superintendents, which they thought depended on the support of three Satmar Hasidics on a nine-member board.
The interests of the three men led them into a conspiracy that has only now been exposed after 20 years.
In the late seventies, Rogers and DeStefano invented fake jobs for 51 paraprofessionals and also for 30 security guards at a non-existent vacation camp, Frankel provided the names of people who would pretend to be workers – Hasidic housewives and Beth Rachel teachers. Then the superintendents took the fictitious employees to the central board office for fingerprinting formalities.
Once they were enrolled – at salaries ranging from $5,000 to $144,000 a year – they never did any work, but Frankel would deliver signed time sheets to the district office, collect the checks, and give them to his fake workers.
And the no-shows would give Frankel the salary money, which he put into Beth Rachel school.
The no-shows used the medical benefits to the tune of $1.9 million. Some $4.3 million in salaries went into school funds. ‘At no time did I personally make a single penny from this arrangement,’ said Frankel yesterday. ‘All funds received were used for secular programs at the school.’
He had pleaded guilty to a felony charge to commit mail fraud – Rogers and DeStefano are dead. Judge Eugene H. Nickerson put Frankel, 68, on probation for three years and ordered him to repay $1 million.
The two-decade scam was exposed after a two-year joint investigation by Special Schools Investigator Ed Stancik and the U.S. attorney’s office.
Stancik, calling it ‘a conspiracy of staggering proportions’, said none of the people involved ever set foot in a public school. About half the cash was still missing.
Beth Rachel has returned $1 million and Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew has said he would try to recover more. Staff involved would be disciplined.
Yesterday Stancik demanded that Crew dismiss Acting Superintendent John Musico, whom he accused of destroying evidence. Musico did not return calls.
Both of these examples are subject to the criticism that the news point has been unduly delayed. What now follows is a modified narrative where the news point has been pithily encapsulated in the first sentence, and the narrative develops with explanation. This hybrid narrative-news style has much to commend it. But of course it’s essential to have a first sentence in the intro that really epitomises the news without getting bogged down in sources and detail.
Rabbi Hertz Frankel was a thief – for a good cause. He siphoned off $6m of public school money but did not keep a cent for himself. He put it all into his private Jewish girls’ school, Beth Rachel in Williamsburg.
The 20-year conspiracy, which involved two district officials, was exposed yesterday when Frankel, 68, was put on probation for three years and ordered to pay $1m back.
Topical hard news point.
It began in the seventies. Frankel, a prominent Hasidic rabbi, cared deeply about religious teaching at his school. William Rogers and Mario DeStefano cared deeply about keeping their jobs as District 14 Superintendents, which they thought depended on the support of three Satmar Hasidics on a nine-member board.
Narrative recapitulation.
Rogers and DeStefano invented fake jobs for 51 paraprofessionals and also for 30 security guards at a non-existent vacation camp. Frankel provided the people who would pretend to be workers – Hasidic housewives and Beth Rachel teachers. Then the superintendents took the fictitious employees to the central board office for fingerprinting formalities.
Once they were enrolled – at salaries ranging from $5,000 to $144,000 a year – they never did any work, but Frankel would deliver signed time sheets to the district office, collect the checks, and give them to the no-shows.
And the no-shows would give Frankel the salary money, which he put into Beth Rachel school.
The no-shows used the medical benefits to the tune of $1.9 million. Some $4.3 million in salaries went into school funds. ‘At no time did I personally make a single penny from this arrangement,’ said Frankel yesterday. ‘All funds received were used for secular programs at the school.’
The scam was exposed after a two-year joint investigation by Special Schools Investigator Ed Stancik and the U.S. attorney’s office.
Stancik, calling it ‘a conspiracy of staggering proportions’, said none of the people involved ever set foot in a public school. About half the cash was still missing. Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew said the staff involved would be disciplined and the board would try to recover more money.
Follow-up news points.
Yesterday Stancik demanded that Crew dismiss Acting Superintendent John Musico, whom he accused of destroying evidence. Musico did not return calls.
News-features Editing
These last snippets are really in the no man’s land between news and features, the writer making the most of flimsy material. But the story-telling technique is not simply a gimmick the text editor should learn from popular papers. Here is an example from a serious feature where the delayed intro is well used to contrast the start and the pinnacle of a man’s career.
When he was growing up in Stoughton, Wis., during the early 1920s, H.I. Romnes used to think of himself as a ‘lucky fellow’. As the oldest of five children, Mr. Romnes was what he calls the ‘front man’ and did the selling in his father’s bakery shop while the others stoked the fires and kneaded the dough.
Last week, after two years as president, Mr. Romnes once again became the man up front when he was named chairman and chief
executive of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company.
News magazines and serious weekly newspapers have to use delayed intros and story-telling techniques to do justice to assessments and complicated investigative reports. If the subject has not been running in the news but comes from the paper’s own inquiries, it may be essential for the writer to put the conclusions into context. In this article the delayed intro does just that – and it effectively contrasts promise and performance two years on:
In July, 1964, Peter Thorneycroft, then Minister of Defence, rose to answer an awkward Parliamentary question about the size of the Ministry’s senior staff. ‘I have been able to take certain actions,’ he told Labour MP James Boyden, ‘which ensure that Professor Parkinson is removed from the establishment.’
Three months earlier Thorneycroft had proudly introduced his ‘revolutionary’ streamlined Ministry, designed to impose greater central control on defence policy. Two and a half years after the revolution, an Insight inquiry has found that the Ministry, under Thorneycroft’s successor, Denis Healey, is not the streamlined instrument it should be. Parkinsonism, far from being uprooted, is spreading.
Instead of fewer senior officials there are more. Instead of a controlled system of decision-making on a tri-service basis, decisions are made tortuously by an elaborate and inefficient committee system. Instead of the service cutting their inflated strengths, they cling stubbornly to an archaic career structure.
This article is neither straight news nor feature; it is a mixture of news and opinion. A straight news intro would have said ‘There are more officials in the Ministry of Defence instead of fewer promised by Mr Peter Thorneycroft in July 1964.’ That would have been all right as far as it went, but it would have been thin and flat by comparison with the story-telling style. The writer properly preferred to use the jaunty scene in Parliament two years earlier as an overture for the repetitive discordant notes in the third paragraph. The three separate sentences there, as well as adding emphasis by the use of ‘instead of …’ also come to grips with a rather more complicated set of conclusions than could comfortably be housed in a straight news sentence.
This third paragraph is what is often called a ‘taster’ – a taste for the reader of things to come. It is a kind of trailer, a come-on to the reader confronted with a lot of words. Where you are editing a very long feature report, say 2,000 words or more, you should see that the structure accommodates early appetisers of some of the good things developed later in the narrative:
At 9.30 a.m. on his last day in England, May 25, 1951, Donald Maclean was walking decorously from Charing Cross station to his room in the Foreign Office. Guy Burgess, never a devotee of early rising, had only just got out of bed in his New Bond Street flat by Aspreys. He was reading The Times and drinking tea made by his friend Jack Hewit. Everything was relaxed and unhurried.
Opening with a dramatic human highlight. It is out of sequence in the article but essential to capture interest.
By 10.30 everything had changed irrevocably. Burgess, warned through Kim Philby in Washington that Donald Maclean was about to be interrogated, made a vital decision. By that evening Maclean had gone, in a cloud of mystery – and Burgess had gone with him.
But for Burgess’s excited and unnecessary flight, things might have been very different for Kim Philby. Conceivably, the most remarkable Soviet spy ever to penetrate the Western intelligence community might have remained undetected for another ten years. Certainly it is now clear that it was only his fortuitous double link – with both Burgess and Maclean – which turned suspicion on him.
Recapitulation. Early presentation of an important conclusion.
Had the cool, untrusting Philby been finally betrayed in 1951 by the bonds of Burgess’s impulsive friendship, it would have been an ironic finale. But the damage Burgess did to him was more than compensated by the inflexible loyalty of his friends in the Secret Intelligence Service. Insight’s inquiries have now established in detail that Philby, publicly sacked from the Foreign Service in 1951, was in fact secretly employed by the SIS – even during the shadowy period before he became an Observer foreign correspondent at the request of the Foreign Office.
Feelings about Kim Philby vary sharply among his old colleagues in the British Secret Intelligence Service. Some preserve a degree of affection and ruminate upon the ‘misplaced idealism’ which led him to work for the Russians. Some see his career largely as a technical feat. ‘He was an agent who really lived his cover’, they say.
Others take a more impassioned view, like the man who said to us: ‘Philby was a copper-bottomed bastard, and he killed a lot of people.’
Espionage and counter-espionage can seem so much like civilised office games that the blood can get forgotten. But in this account of Philby’s career from 1945 to 1951 there are two crucial episodes which luridly illuminate the realities of the game.
The first case is a man alone: a Soviet intelligence officer caught in the act of trying to defect to the West. That story ends with a bandaged figure being hustled aboard a Russian plane in Istanbul.
Taster No. 1. Will be told in detail later.
In the second case, there are some 300 men in armed parties, slipping across the Iron Curtain border from Greece into Albania. This was a scheme designed to test the feasibility of breaking Communist control of Eastern Europe by subversion: the story ends in a crackle of small-arms fire on bleak hillsides, and the total discrediting of a policy which might have caused the Soviet Government a lot of trouble.
Taster No. 2. Will be told later.
Behind each case is the shadow of Kim Philby – the Soviet penetration-agent at the heart of the Secret Intelligence Service whose loyalty went unquestioned for so long. Indeed, it might never have been questioned, but for the fact that Philby was caught up in the complex aftermath of Donald Maclean’s espionage for the Russians.
Recapitulation, to remind readers of the essence of the story. New development indicated.
Most good news and feature leads have one thing in common: they are specific and human. Indeed, the way the news magazine or weekly copes with beginning a story that has been running in the daily papers is to be more specific and detailed about some element in it. The news stories had already said, for instance, that King Constantine of Greece had tried to overthrow the military government and had flown to Rome after his failure. A later news-feature report begins on the most vivid sequence in the whole chronology of the story. The magazine began its report of the king’s revolt like this:
To the astonishment of a handful of passengers waiting at Rome’s Ciampino Airport at 4 a.m. squads of Italian police suddenly materialized and took up positions around the field. Moments later, a white turbo-prop jet taxied to a stop on the apron. In the plane’s doorway appeared a young man in the red-trimmed uniform of a field marshal. Limping slightly from fatigue, his face ashen and heavily bearded, King Constantine of Greece, 27, walked down a ramp on to Italian soil. Behind him, glum and red-eyed, came his Danish wife, Queen Anne-Marie, 25, her mink coat still smelling of the mothballs from which she had hastily removed it.
With them were their two infant children, Queen Mother Frederika, the King’s 25-year-old sister Irene, and several loyal followers.
Thus last week, after an abortive royal countercoup that may go down as one of the most inept conspiracies in history, the King of the Hellenes fled his country, leaving in control more firmly than ever the military junta that had seized power last April in a lightning coup.
Where the news result is familiar to readers, detail is the only answer. A Sunday paper reconstruction of the Rhodesian talks between Harold Wilson and Ian Smith on board HMS Tiger began like this, with new detail of a dramatic moment in the talks:
The first intimation that the Tiger talks might be a flop came just three hours before the end of the seaborne confrontation. Mr Ian Smith, the Rhodesian Premier, was showing extreme reluctance to put his signature to the working document that he had perso
nally elaborated with the British negotiators in the previous day. ‘If you won’t sign,’ said Mr Wilson, settling for half a loaf, ‘you will of course commend it to your Government colleagues in Salisbury.’ ‘I’ll have to commend it to myself first, won’t I?’, said Smith.
Detail, not chronology, must be the master in feature leads. The detail can even be a development since the hard news was first told. This was the beginning of a feature telling how commercial television companies had competed for new franchises in Britain:
Every morning on a private line between the commercial television companies there is a grandly-styled Red Telephone Conversation: the network planning officers of the 14 companies use it to synchronise their complicated programme swaps. Last Thursday the exchanges were somewhat chilled.
Rediffusion, in the chair, was attempting to explain how the night before it had managed to help perpetrate one of the network’s biggest programme muddles. Bewildered viewers outside London had been treated to a discussion of the documentary ‘Famine’, which they were told they had just seen – but, which, in fact, had gone out only to London viewers.
The ‘Famine’ mix-up seems to have been the first unlooked for product of last Sunday’s announcement by the Independent Television Authority of the new franchise deal for 1968 – bringing three new companies into the business; deposing Television West and Wales and cutting Rediffusion’s programme days effectively from five days to two. Rediffusion just has not been the same since.